Karl Marx, Das Kapital, and the Unsettled Question of Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith
Karl Marx’s London years were not a quiet scholarly interval between insight and publication. They were decades of illness, debt, pawn tickets, family grief, smoke, boils, manuscripts, and books borrowed under conditions that would alarm a modern librarian. Into this crowded household came Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith, a Capuchin monkey of considerable energy, uncertain manners, and a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism.
The degree was difficult to explain. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith could not read, write, speak, or file copy. Yet the certificate in a small leather tube attached to his collar testified to his advanced professional training. Marx at first dismissed the matter as bourgeois credentialism in its purest form. With time, he softened. The monkey, Marx often observed, had an advantage over other journalists: it did not pretend to understand political economy.
The Marx household was a scene of heroic compression. Jenny Marx managed poverty with dignity and exhaustion. The children moved through illness, play, worry, and mischief. Creditors hovered. Clothes went to the pawnshop but occasionally to return. Marx wrote endlessly: notebooks, extracts, drafts, letters, polemics, and economic analyses piled up on overworked chairs and tables.
Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith adapted immediately. He made a nest of old newspapers, and sat on whichever manuscript page was least replaceable. Marx would return from the British Museum with his satchel of notes on wages, machinery, factory legislation, surplus value, rent, and Ricardo, only to find the monkey arranging the household papers by scent and chewability. “Komm, mein kleiner Redakteur,” Marx would say, and the monkey, hearing German from Marx, would leap down, surrender its page, and accept a raisin.
This became one of the household’s standing mysteries. When Marx spoke German, Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith seemed to understand perfectly. “Bring mir das Buch,” and the monkey brought a book, though rarely the right one. “Lass Engels in Ruhe,” and he left Engels alone for several minutes. But when Engels used German, the monkey was as if deaf. Engels might command, “Gib das sofort zurück,” and the monkey would stare through him and then retire to the mantel.
Engels never warmed to the monkey. This was unwise, because Throttlebottom-Smith noticed. Engels was Marx’s indispensable friend: critic, correspondent, supplier of money, and opponent of preventable disorder. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith was almost pure preventable disorder. It once rearranged Engels’s banknotes into a pattern Marx described, with suspicious pleasure, as “primitive accumulation.”
At the British Museum, the monkey could not officially enter the Reading Room, but official rules had not anticipated a capuchin with press credentials. On several occasions he rode hidden under Marx’s coat, emerging when the smell of old bindings and intellectual desperation became irresistible. Marx, vast-bearded and intent; beside him, a tiny Columbia-trained primate examining the same page upside down.
The writing of Das Kapital became both harder and more theatrical. The monkey supplied a new form of interruption: living metaphor. When Marx wrote of commodities taking on the social class system, Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith stole a button and displayed it as a crown jewel. When Marx described the capitalist as capital personified, the monkey sat on a pile of coins, shrieking and throwing poo at anyone who approached. When Marx revised the chapter on the working day, the monkey fell asleep on the page, offering the briefest of commentary on proleteriat and overwork.
One evening Engels arrived with money, advice, and the air of someone who had balanced accounts before breakfast. Marx was ill, behind schedule, and surrounded by haphazard papers in a system intelligible only to himself. Engels began explaining, in German, that the manuscript must finally be brought into order. He soon found himself in a hail of cutlery unleashed by Throttlebottom-Smith. Marx later insisted this incident had no bearing on the theory of class struggle, but he began a new chapter that night.
In sum, Engels respected the book, loved the author, supported the family, and distrusted the monkey. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith, perceiving this with perfect clarity, stole Engels’ gloves on publication day.
