как квартирный вопрос испортил Карла Маркса
Here is a description of one typical residence on Dean Street, penned in the early 1850s:
[The flat] has two rooms, the one with the view of the street being the drawing-room, behind it the bedroom. There is not one piece of good, solid furniture in the entire flat. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, finger-thick dust everywhere, and everything in the greatest disorder. ... When you enter the... flat, your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything covered with dust; it is dangerous to sit down.
Living in this two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. (Apparently a maid with an aversion to dusting.) Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husbands' productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx.
-- Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map