The Truth About the Correspondence Between Charles Darwin and Karl Marx

This is my first post on this Substack account, so it is highly unlikely that many people will see it, but this is where I will periodically publish drafts and thoughts from what I’ve been reading and researching.

I would like to begin by telling you about two men who never met—Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. They were contemporaries and quite nearly neighbors. Political exile brought the Prussian-born Marx to London in 1849. Darwin lived about twenty miles away. Although they never met, they did interact. In 1873, Marx mailed Darwin a copy of the second German edition of Capital Volume I, inscribed to “Mr. Charles Darwin/On the part of his sincere admirer/(signed) Karl Marx/London 16 June 1873/[illegible number] Modena Villas/Maitland Park.” If Marx sent a letter in addition to the book, it has not survived. Darwin responded six months later with a brief note.

Dear Sir

I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both Earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.

I remain Dear Sir/Yours faithfully/Charles Darwin

Darwin’s copy of Capital appears opened but unread, and his response, though polite, makes further discussion or correspondence seem unwelcome. 

And this is the extent of their interactions. There were rumors they had corresponded a second time. Marx supposedly wanted to dedicate Capital Volume II to Darwin, had asked in a letter lost to history, and had been refused in a letter from Darwin to Marx found among Edward Aveling’s papers. Again addressed to “Dear Sir,” Darwin requests that “the Part or Volume not be dedicated to me,” mostly because of its “direct arguments against christianity and theism.” He feared allowing the dedication would imply approval of its contents, and this might upset certain members of his family, most likely his wife.

But this letter was not written to Karl Marx. Capital Volume II was posthumously pieced together. It never reached the state within Marx’s lifetime that the “proof-sheets” Darwin says he received could have existed. And although Capital Volume II has thrilling discussions about how much of 10,000 lbs. of yarn must to be sold to realize surplus-value, there are really no “direct arguments against christianity and theism” found within its pages. Neither the timing nor the content of the letter suggest it would have been written to Marx regarding Capital Volume II. 

It turns out Darwin’s letter was written to Edward Aveling, who wanted to dedicate his forthcoming The Student’s Darwin to the man himself—a book, it should be noted, containing “direct arguments against christianity and theism.” Besides being the author of The Student’s Darwin, Edward Aveling assisted with the first English translation of Capital Volume I, which is part of why anyone might assume a letter from Darwin to a “Dear Sir” found among Aveling’s papers was possibly written to Karl Marx. But there’s more to it than that.

Like Darwin and Marx, Aveling and Marx never met, but this didn’t stop Aveling from often claiming they had. He even suggested he had been at Marx’s deathbed, once stating, “I stood by the side of his corpse, hand in hand with my wife.” In addition to the total fabrication that he had been there at all is the partial fabrication that he might have been there because of his “wife.” Aveling and Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor were romantically involved, lived together, and collaborated regularly until death did them part, but they were never technically married. It was actually after Aveling secretly married someone other than Eleanor that his endless infidelities and lies became too much for her to bear. She committed suicide. Or he poisoned her before she could change her will and stop him from getting the money Engels had left her. But either way, it was only about four months after Eleanor’s death that Aveling’s failing kidneys failed him for the last time, and he was also dead. He seems like he was a real piece of shit.

Eleanor had been the executor of her father’s literary legacy, in part because she understood his work better than almost anyone, and also because she was one of the only people left alive who could readily decipher his legendarily horrible handwriting. So the home she shared with Aveling was filled with letters to and from Karl Marx. With no one around to explain what was what, a letter from Darwin to Aveling was mistaken for a letter from Darwin to Marx, and decades of rumors about Marx’s undying adoration for Darwin abounded, along with rumors that Darwin had totally rebuffed him.