A Clerical Error Hands Queen Victoria's Ledgers to Karl Marx

The Full Scan

Marx applies to be a Municipal Accounting Assistant, a post he wants for its dullness and its salary, which might at last let him marry Jenny von Westphalen in Trier. Somebody has misfiled the advertisement. He refuses to bow, informs the young Queen that the monarchy ought in due course to be dismantled, and she keeps him on anyway. Victoria reads his pamphlets overnight, in German, and demands lessons. Soon armed with a card admitting him "to any room in which the Crown keeps an account," he opens the books: fifty thousand pounds on wigs, and more on the ceremonial horses' oats than the nation spends teaching children arithmetic.

From there the comedy escalates by a strict and rather beautiful logic. A memorandum on bookkeeping goes down the wrong pneumatic tube and the seamstresses redesign the corset. The palace corgis occupy the Privy Council Chamber, and a demoted footman who can read their Bark Code becomes Minister of Irony. The Duke of Strathclyde, a free-market grandee who signs his covenants in Seville marmalade, answers with a cartoon and six words pasted across London: THE GERMAN AT THE QUEEN'S EAR. Marx's riposte, a private satire about a Professor Pfennig and the Cucumber Standard, falls into the Queen's hands, and she serialises it in the London Gazette under her own seal.

The sentences are the first pleasure. Sir Percival "was a moustache with a man attached"; the English, Marx notes, have perfected a third kind of architecture, "the kind that apologises for taking up room." Winslow's similes are Wodehousian, but her best scenes are quieter. In the third chapter the old head clerk, Mr. Tillingham, copies a stable lad's wage and a horse blanket's price onto the same page for the first time in thirty years, and a joke about red ink becomes something nearer to grief.

The characters are the second pleasure. Victoria is rendered in her own chapters and in a secret diary kept in a biscuit tin, and Winslow lets her be clever, cross and nineteen at once. Marx is pompous, kind and frequently ridiculous, and the book mocks him as freely as it mocks the Crown. His Red Ink Directive, written to laugh at himself, becomes a weapon in the Duke's hands. Even the Duke earns a reluctant wince of sympathy. When Marx answers the cartoon with a column of figures, the novel gives the round to the enemy: "He had brought a column of figures to a duel, and the Duke had brought a bird."