Letter to Karl Marx, March 20, 1857

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 20 March 1857


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXII, Moscow, 1929
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


ENGELS TO MARX

IN LONDON

Manchester, 20 March 1857

Dear Marx,

It had already occurred to me that you might once again be in something of a hole. Whatever can be done by me, will be done. If at all possible I'll send you another five-pound note next week or, if I can't get hold of one, a POST OFFICE ORDER. In the latter case, be sure to let me know at what POST OFFICE I should make it payable. I've had very heavy debts to pay this month, with people tracking me down to the office, so that there was no option but to stump up. Otherwise you'd have had the five pounds straight away. It's lucky, by the way, that this parliament business has begun, with China thrown in for good measure[1] ; at this juncture the Tribune will need help again and will be forced to come to TERMS.

I've been sounding the Guardian chap about the possibility of making contact with REVIEWS and MAGAZINES up here. But this chap, too, seems to be hunting round in the hope of fixing up something for himself and there's not much to be got out of him. However, I shall see. Since he knows my opinion of Palmerston and declares it to be PREPOSTEROUS he is all the less likely to give us a recommendation in politicis.[2] All the same, I have a certain HOLD ON THE FELLOW but as yet haven't devised any way of exploiting it.

I share your view of Palmerston's intentions and prospects in the new parliament. Bonapartist despotism wielded by Pam together with a Corps législatif. We shall see what that leads to.

According to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung the Circassians (which, not specified) have actually appointed Bangya 'head of the house'; he was selected for this snug berth precisely because he is a foreigner, so that none of the native chiefs could complain of having been slighted. What has become of Sefer Pasha (a man of quite a different stamp to Koscielski) is far from clear. I regard the whole thing as a stroke of genius on the part of the Russians, and we shall probably hear no more of the 300 Polish Spartans.

The Nord must have changed its mind again. The Guardian's Brussels correspondent quotes passages that are violently anti-

Palmerston. Can you let me have the most relevant bit? That sort of thing never comes my way here and in any controversy I must always have CHAPTER AND VERSE immediately to hand.

While putting my old newspapers in order recently, I discovered the loss of one of the main bundles of English papers and cuttings from the Guardian, Free Press, etc., etc. Nothing, luckily, connected with our party archives—they are safely stored away. But everything, with a few exceptions, relating to Palmerston—Tucker's pamphlets,[3] the cuttings containing your articles you had sent me (many of these are also being sat on by Lupus, etc.). I needed and was looking for them precisely in order to refresh my memory as to detail. Have you got any duplicates you could send me, likewise the full text of your articles which appeared in Urquhart's London paper[4] ? These should be fairly easy to get hold of. I would find the things particularly handy just now.

Bob Lowe's prospects up here are poor. Some of the philistines have come out against Bright; however I believe he will scrape through this time. Lowe will make an ass of himself as soon as he arrives here. But it would be splendid were he to get in.[5]

Warm regards to your wife and children. Write again soon and tell me how your wife is.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ 'Pera. 20 Febr.', Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 63, 4 March 1857.
  2. ↑ as far as politics are concerned
  3. ↑ Engels means Tucker's Political Fly-Sheets, a series of 12 issues published by the Urquhartite Tucker in London in 1853 and 1854 and republished in 1855. Issues 1 and 2 contained the pamphlets 'Palmerston and Russia' and 'Palmerston and the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessy', reproducing the content of articles 3, 4 and 5 of Marx's 8-article series on Palmerston published in The People's Paper in 1853 (see present edition, Vol. 12, pp. 341-406). The other issues carried mostly articles by David Urquhart also attacking Palmerston's foreign policy.—110, 111, 115
  4. ↑ This refers to a work planned by Marx on the history of British and Russian diplomacy in the eighteenth century, of which he only completed five chapters of the Introduction. For these he made use of pamphlets, diplomatic documents and unpublished manuscripts, mostly of the period of the Northern War (the Russo-Swedish war of 1700-21), which he found in the British Museum Library. His negotiations with Nikolaus Trübner for publication of the work ended in failure. The chapters of the Introduction appeared by instalments in Urquhart's Sheffield Free Press from late June to early August 1856 as they were sent in by Marx. Eventually publication was stopped because of arbitrary editorial abridgements and printing errors. In June 1856 the London Free Press began reprinting the text from the Sheffield paper, and on 16 August 1856 it started reproducing the chapters from the beginning, with publication continuing until 1 April 1857. In both papers the unfinished work was printed under the title Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century (see present edition, Vol. 15). In 1899 Eleanor Aveling, Marx's daughter, published it in London in book form under the heading Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century.—46, 56, 73, 81, 94, 110, 112, 120
  5. ↑ The facts connected with the election campaign in Manchester and some data concerning Robert Lowe, John Potter and other candidates for Parliament related by Engels in this letter and those of 11, 20 and 31 March were used by Marx in his article 'The Defeat of Cobden, Bright and Gibson' (present edition, Vol. 15).—104, 110, 117