Letter to Karl Marx, October 10, 1852

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 10 October 1852


First published in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 1, Berlin, 1929
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 39


ENGELS TO MARX IN LONDON

[Manchester,] Sunday, 10 October 1852

Dear Marx,

I am fed up with the perpetual delays over the pamphlet.[1] Month after month we are told it will appear and it never does. One excuse after another is trotted out and then dropped. Finally it is said to be definitely coming out at Michaelmas. La Trinité se passe, Marlbrough ne revient pas[2] Quite the contrary, for now we hear the man is dead and Bangya doesn't know what has become of the manuscript. It's too maddening. We must at long last insist on being told the plain truth. The thing's getting more suspicious every day. I don't, and you certainly don't, want our joint work to fall into the wrong hands. We wrote it for the benefit of the public, and not for the private delectation of the police in Berlin or anywhere else, and if Bangya proves intractable, I intend to act off my own bat. Our clerk Charles,[3] whom you know, is going to the Continent next week, via Hamburg and Berlin. I have asked him to inquire carefully into the matter in Berlin and, if the week he is spending there should not suffice, to enlist the help of our local agent. But I'll wager that we'll see what's at the bottom of this stink. What is all this about Eisermann or Eisenmann, the bookseller of whom there is no trace whatever in the directory of booksellers? But tracking down the 'editor of the former Constitutionelle Zeitung should not prove difficult. If things aren't in order, it is absolutely essential that we make a public statement, and that in all the more widely read German papers, so that the same trick won't be played on us as was played on Blanqui with the pièce[4] Taschereau.[5] As for Bangya's mystery-mongering, it is, in this instance at least, utterly uncalled-for, and having, for my part, had enough of TERGIVERSATION, I shall now take what steps I think fit.

Papa Kinkel is coming up here to give German lectures under the auspices of third and fourth rate poetical Jews. Cela sera beau![6] The secretary of the Athenaeum[7] tried to induce me to subscribe with the remark: 'WHEREVER THERE WAS SOMETHING LIKE A CHEQUERED LIFE, WERE IT ONLY AN ESCAPE FROM A SHIPWRECK OR SO, THERE WAS ALWAYS A NATURAL AND FAIR GROUND FOR SYMPATHY.' Voilà les arguments qu'on emploie pour lui mendier un auditoire![8]

No other news. Write and tell me if you hear anything more about the affair of the pamphlet, but it's hardly likely to affect my decision respecting Charles. Warmest regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ K. Marx and F. Engels, The Great Men of the Exile.
  2. ↑ Trinity goes by but Marlbrough does not return (from a French satirical song composed during the War of the Spanish Succession).
  3. ↑ Roesgen
  4. ↑ document
  5. ↑ Taschereau (the Taschereau document) was fabricated by the French police after the February 1848 revolution in order to discredit Blanqui. It was published on 31 March 1848 in the bourgeois journal La Revue rétrospective edited by Taschereau
  6. ↑ That will be nice.
  7. ↑ The Athenaeum —the name of the clubs which existed in a number of cities in England, including London and Manchester, and frequented by men of letters and scientists
  8. ↑ Such are the arguments used to obtain an audience for him.