Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, beginning of October, 1853

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written October 1853


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 28, Moscow, 1962
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 39


To Joseph Weydemeyer in New York

[London, beginning of October 1853]

... Blind has suddenly become aware that the knife and fork question[1] is just as important as a South German view of the Turkish question. As you know, this gentleman had grown very grand, very much the homme d'état,[2] very much the superior émigré. You will also know that an article of Pieper's poking fun at Russia[3] —a frivolous scrawl well-suited to the Neu-England-Zeitung and such as could only have been concocted on the spur of the moment by a homeless waif—caused Blind to loose off in the Neu-England-Zeitung no fewer than 3 articles within 2 months, more or less fraternising (true love never fades) with Heinzen, etc. Hence his relations with us were strained. When I say 'us' I except Mr Lupus, who was naturally drawn to Blind by his Morning Advertiser sympathies and who, for some time past, has generally evinced a curious tendency to snarl at his so-called party friends and sympathise with political philistines. A few days ago then, Mr Blind reappears, bringing my wife a letter to Cluss, i.e. for Wolff who had written him a fond letter of farewell in which he invited him to correspond and left him Cluss' address.[4] Needless to say, my wife informed him that England for the present was still harbouring the great Turkophile.[5] But that was not, of course, the reason why our ex-friend of Falstaffian proportions had called. The court in Baden has sequestered the entire fortune of the children by his first marriage (the 2nd was contracted in the 13th arrondissement) until such time as they are handed over to the Jews in Germany to be given a Jewish upbringing. Thus Mr Blind has been reduced to 1/4 of his or his wife's[6] income and he now regards the 'knife and fork question' as worthy of consideration, even before the Turkish War has been decided and Petersburg taken by storm. In these much changed circumstances, and needing the assistance of the advocate Jones (Ernest), he once again remembered that I exist, which, of course, is damned flattering to me...

  1. ↑ 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)
  2. ↑ a statesman
  3. ↑ Probably Pieper's report from London of 31 May in Die Reform, No. 22, 15 June 1853.
  4. ↑ Wilhelm Wolff's impending departure for Manchester. He lived there from the first half of September 1853 to the end of his life in 1864
  5. ↑ See this volume, pp. 369-70 and 372.
  6. ↑ Friederike