I've marked a couple of passages from Francis Wheen's biography of Marks.
Have you tried 'book darts' - they're brilliant.
He was a saint, wasn't he?
As a bit of a contrast to the noble sentiments expressed above -
Having quit the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung -
"I had begun to be stifled in that atmosphere. It is a bad thing to to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks instead of clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words.
I found this fascinating too.
Marx was congenitally unsuited to any regular employment. As usual Engels saved the day, sacrificing his own journalistic ambitions in London to take a job at the Manchester office of his father's textile firm Ermen and Engels. He remained there for almost twenty years.
He acted as a secret agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade. expert observations on the state of international markets, and - most essentially - a regular consignment of small denomination banknotes,pilfered from the petty cash box or guilefully prised out of the company's bank account. As a precaution against mail theft ( 
) he snipped them in two, posting each half in a separate envelope.)
PS - on a sceptical note -not sure what 'low value bank notes' were in the mid 19th century., I thought they used gold sovereigns etc.
