About him as a person, his historical conditions, his life, his loved ones. Does anyone have any favorite biographies or even just passages from primary or secondary sources? Alternatively, if anyone has the time, what do you think is most important or interesting to understand about Karl Marx as a person, or perhaps about the historical context he lived in?
Apparently he couldn't leave the house at times because his wife, Jenny, had pawned his trousers. I guess it was typical back then to only have one pair of pants per household?
It wasn't, but Marx was very poor, partially because he couldn't write consistently for long periods and instead did so in short, manic bursts.
Hard to say now but he may have had ADHD or something similar.
So what was the typical number to own then? Two? Six? Ten?
If you could pawn them, they must have had more value back then than they do today.
Depends, both on what part of the 19th century and Marx's specific circumstances. When he first moved to London he had a fairly comfortable middle-class existence, so...4-10 pants, possibly more given Jenny was from a wealthy family. But Children and the dwindling of inheritances due to financial crashes hurt things and they swung between family comfortable and very poor depending on Marx's writing income.
Later, after Capital was published he began to get a more consistent income and were solidly lower middle class.
A (housed, factory jobbed) working-class person at least 2, probably 3-4. Old pair, good pair, Sunday best. Even very poor rural fishermen would own two pairs (you see this in some of Enid Blyton's novels) of outer clothes and more shirts, shifts etc and more became possible as the sewing machine and artificial dyes dropped clothing prices from 1860 on.
Also there's a split in the number and quality. An upper working class person might own more, but cheaper (or at least harder wearing), clothes than, say, a lower middle class women who had to keep up appearences.
So if Marx's last pair is being pawned they're right on the precipice of homelessness or starvation. This usually only happened when Engles was away for extended periods and Marx couldn't hit him up.
The Pawn market was huge, but in urban areas fashion was very important so upper and upper middle class garments were easier to find.
So in Paris in the 1790s the very poor might wear pawned finery 3 years out of date and soiled and unsuited for the life they lived, but the poor would wear well constructed garments appropriate for their job. Imagine if you had to work in a laundry with lye and soap wearing an 18th century silk gown. It'd last 3 days.