Read The Marx Sisters for Free Online

fields that disappeared hundreds of years ago.
    Now although the block lies in the middle of thriving commercial districts—the City to the south and the railway termini at Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross to the north, and in the other direction, Bloomsbury to the west and Clerkenwell to the east—despite this, Jerusalem Lane has remained largely untouched by development since it was first built up, in a haphazard fashion, by small builders and speculators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.’
    Kathy tried to catch Brock’s eye, wondering how she could return the solicitor to the present, but Brock, attentive and contentedly munching on a chocolate digestive biscuit, seemed happy to let him continue.
    ‘This lack of attention from developers was due not to its location or potential, you understand, but rather to the confusing complexity and multiplicity of freeholds, lease-holds and tenancies which established themselves within the block, and which frustrated the most determined attempts to replace the warren of small buildings with something more coherent and profitable. There is that one row on the west side of the block, where an Edwardian developer managed to buy up about half of the street frontage and build that rather flamboyant red brick and stone trimmed office building seven storeys tall (thanks to the recent introduction of Mr Otis’s patent safety lifts), butthe rest of the block remained as we see it, a jumble of fragmented ownerships, uses, floor levels and building forms.
    ‘Now’—Mr Hepple leaned forward over the desk and looked intently at them, as if he was getting to the point of his story—‘because of this, rents in Jerusalem Lane have remained low throughout its history, and within a generation of its construction it had established itself as a small haven for poor newcomers to the city, and in particular immigrants and refugees from Europe. The first such wave was of Russian Jews, fleeing the pogroms of the 1830s, and we can still see the traces of their early occupation of the area in the synagogue at the south end of the Lane, opposite Mrs Winterbottom’s house, and by the name of the public house,
The Wandering Jew
, across the road in the next block to the north, and of course by the name of Jerusalem Lane itself.
    ‘After the disturbances in the year of revolutions, 1848, political refugees from Germany, France and half a dozen other European countries found their way to the Lane. Did you by any chance notice the engraving over there by the door?’
    ‘I did,’ Brock said. ‘It looks like a Doré.’
    ‘Quite right, Chief Inspector! It is one of Gustave Doré’s scenes of Victorian London, and it is actually a view of Jerusalem Lane as it was in the decades after that influx of refugees from the continent.’
    Brock and Kathy got up and had a look at the drawing hanging in its black and gold frame. It showed a narrow street teeming with hawkers, beggars, handcarts and ragged children.
    ‘Among those refugees, and the most famous of our former residents, was Karl Marx, who lived for most of 1850 with his family in the house of a Jewish lace dealer at number 3 Jerusalem Lane, which most recently has been Adam Kowalski’s home and bookshop. You can see a plaque, mounted in the wall outside the shop a few yearsago to record the fact that the Marxes lived there.’ Mr Hepple chuckled and a twinkle came into his eye. ‘It was not a period which the Marx family was to look back on with much nostalgia. They lived in great poverty in two rooms on the second floor, one of which was shared by the whole family: Karl, his pregnant wife Jenny, their three small children, and their maid. The other room was used by Karl alone as his study, chaotically untidy and invariably filled with a fog of tobacco smoke so thick that it stung the eyes of anyone who ventured in. There he worked late into the night on his researches into British capitalism and composing his
Address