Letter to Friedrich Engels, September 28, 1853

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 28 September 1853


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 1, Berlin, 1929
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 39


To Engels in Manchester

[London,] 28 September 1853
28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Herewith a letter from Weydemeyer, several from Cluss, a statement of Mr Willich's,[1] a letter from Mazzini to Mrs Mott (abolitionist) in America.

I have split your essay into 2 and rewritten it as 2 essays[2] which I have sent to New York, my wife acting as secretary.

Pieper has had his throat cauterised in the German Hospital. A little board hangs at the foot of his bed bearing the ominous message: Wilhelm Pieper syphilis secundaris. He is subjected to rigorous discipline, which is salutary for him.

W. Wolff has written to his confidant, Rings. He is going to try his luck in Manchester until the end of October. If he hasn't found anything by then, he will move on. For the time being, he says, he is living at number such and such, Great Ducie Street,[3] at 'another's expense'. He does not name you at all, which will give you an idea how obstinate and petty the OLD CHAP can be. After the way he grumbled about you he is, of course, ashamed to admit that he has any obligation towards you. Quant à nous autres[4] I don't know what he may have told Rings in his letter, since the latter says nothing about it.

I should like to clear up the matter with Mr Dronke,[5] having now learnt that he sold Pieper's Ricardo, likewise a German history of political economy belonging to the working man, Lochner, etc., etc. Needless to say this has reinforced my STRONG SUSPICIONS about him.

Before he left, Mr Wolff gave Imandt also an account—and a very garbled one coloured by philistine indignation—of his insolent onslaught upon me.[6] What annoys me is the excessive consideration I have always shown the old blusterer instead of baring my teeth at him.

Les choses marchent merveilleusement[7] ! All h[ell] will be let loose in France when the financial bubble bursts.

In the Reform there is a melancholic, stylised article by Jacobi about the end of the world.[8]

Don't let these lines fall into the wrong hands.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. Yesterday I received a few lines from Blind. He will now have to reconcile himself to abandoning his democratic hauteur in the knife and fork question.[9] He has lost his case and the whole of his wife's[10] fortune has been temporarily sequestered. So there will be no more subsidies. I feel sorry for him, despite the absurd manner he thought fit to adopt.

Have you been following the story about Bakunin in The Morning Advertiser?[11] Urquhart wrote an article in this connection[12] in which he suggests that Bakunin is suspect 1. because he's A RUSSIAN and 2. because he's 'A REVOLUTIONIST'; he goes on to assert that there are no honest revolutionaries among the Russians and that their would-be democratic writings (a swipe at Herzen and that polisson[13] Golovin) prove absolutely nothing; and finally, he tells the continental revolutionaries that, if they take Russians into their confidence, they are no less traitors than their governments.

The Russians, it would seem, then sent into the fray an Englishman (Richards), who nourishes a grudge against Urquhart, the latter having, on grounds of seniority, elbowed him out of the topic 'The Times and Turkey' in The Morning Advertiser. Richards maintains[14] that to declare Bakunin a SPY is just as PREPOSTEROUS as TO IMPEACH PALMERSTON FOR BEING BRIBED BY RUSSIA; he invokes the testimony of both Ruge and myself,[15] praises Herzen's 'idées révolutionnaires',[16] etc. Yesterday it was the turn of A. B., another minion of Urquhart's, who declared[17] that he was acquainted with all the writings of 'la jeune Russie,'[18] and that they proved the Tightness of Urquhart's views, pan-slavism, etc.

At all events, les intrigants russes[19] will realise that here it isn't as easy as in the pauvre[20] French democracy, to give themselves airs, gain INFLUENCE and behave as though they were a kind of aristocracy within the revolutionary emigration. Here it supposes hard knocks. What service have the jackasses done Bakunin save to have him seriously accused in public while themselves receiving a slap in the face?

  1. ↑ A. Willich, [To the Editors of the Belletristisches Journal und New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung, 28 August 1853], Belletristisches Journal und New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung, No. 25, 2 September 1853.
  2. ↑ K. Marx, 'The Western Powers and Turkey.— Symptoms of Economic Crisis', 'Panic on the London Stock Exchange.—Strikes' written in co-authorship with Engels.
  3. ↑ at Engels
  4. ↑ As for the rest of us
  5. ↑ See this volume, p. 364.
  6. ↑ ibid., pp. 364-65.
  7. ↑ Things are going splendidly.
  8. ↑ A. Jacobi, 'Ueber den Untergang der Erde', Die Reform, Nos. 44-48, 31 August, 3, 7, 10 and 14 September 1853.
  9. ↑ The knife and fork question—words, which came to symbolise the Chartists' social programme, pronounced by an English priest and Chartist, J. R. Stephens, at a meeting in 1838. See Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (present edition, Vol. 4, p. 519)
  10. ↑ Friederike Blind
  11. ↑ See this volume, pp. 359-63.
  12. ↑ D. Urquhart, 'Indeed?', The Morning Advertiser, No. 19408, 5 September 1853.
  13. ↑ lout
  14. ↑ A. B. Richards, 'Michel Bakounine and His Accuser. To the Editor of The Morning Advertiser', The Morning Advertiser, No. 19426, 26 September 1853.
  15. ↑ K. Marx, 'Michael Bakunin'.
  16. ↑ A. Herzen, Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie.
  17. ↑ A. B., 'Revolutionary Russians. To the Editor of The Morning Advertiser', The Morning Advertiser, No. 19427, 27 September 1853.
  18. ↑ young Russia
  19. ↑ the Russian intriguers
  20. ↑ poor