Letter to Karl Marx, January 27, 1859

Author(s)	Friedrich Engels
Written	27 January 1859

First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40

ENGELS TO MARX

IN LONDON

[Manchester,] 27 January 1859

Dear Moor,

I look forward keenly to your communication. Meanwhile herewith some bits of Paris gossip.

Yesterday I wrote to Freiligrath about Kinkel, the pretext being provided by the good fellow himself. I had written to him about the matter of the bill, adding a few comments on the political and economic aspects of the international situation, and this inspired him to declare: 'The Hermann will undoubtedly be followed one day by a Neueste Rheinische Zeitung.'^[1] What led him to mention Kinkel's rag I cannot imagine, unless he hoped to induce me to speak my mind on the subject of Johann Gottfried,^[2] in which case he was not disappointed. I must say that his attempt to establish some sort of connection between ourselves and that rotten little paper annoyed me very much. The day before yesterday I tried twice to write him a letter,^[3] but it was too crude, I was too angry, so I left the thing over until yesterday. I treated him very decently, but Monsieur Gottfried with considerable asperity. I told him that Kinkel was exploiting him in order to establish his credentials as a poet, since his own literary fame, spuriously acquired as a result of his wife's importunate advertising, would not otherwise endure; that the Hermann had only served to increase the contempt I had always felt for this vacuous, affected, dandyish jackanapes, and that I'd not forgiven the 'cur' the dirty tricks which he had played on you and me in America and was too cowardly to admit.^[4] It was a three page letter; as I said, Freiligrath can have no complaint about the way I treated him but, indirectly and by reading between the lines, he will learn a great deal. I'm curious to see what he will do.

I have had another visitor in the person of a Wuppertal poet and distant relation^[5] of mine; in London he made straight for Freiligrath, of course, who wrote saying that he seemed to be a nice chap. I replied that he was at any rate robust, healthy and neither vain nor affected—qualities which, modern German poets

being what they are, made up for a comparative lack of talent. Freiligrath told this chap that his salary was a thousand pounds.

I was terribly annoyed at Freiligrath's surreptitious introduction of the Hermann into his letter, but he'll never play another trick of that kind on me, you may be sure of that.

Many regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Just for a joke I enclose one of the rejected drafts of my letter to Freiligrath.

↑ In a letter to Engels that has not reached us Freiligrath probably wrote about the projected publication of a new revolutionary newspaper which was to be a sequel to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, organ of the proletarian wing of the democratic movement during the 1848-49 revolution in Germany. Freiligrath seems to have given an incorrect interpretation of the trend of the future newspaper as against that of the petty-bourgeois weekly Hermann which Gottfried Kinkel began to publish on 1 January 1859.—370, 372
↑ Gottfried Kinkel. Engels ironically calls him Johann after his wife, Johanna Kinkel.
↑ See this volume, pp. 370 71.
↑ Gustav Levy's visit to Marx in London in late February 1856 was preceded by another, in the second half of December 1853, when he also came with a message from Düsseldorf workers. This shows that after the 1848-49 revolution the proletarian circles in the Rhine Province continued to regard Marx and Engels as their leaders. Already during his first visit Levy maintained that an uprising was needed in Germany and that the factory workers were ready for it. Marx, then too, argued that, with reaction rampant in Germany, an uprising would be premature, as would a resumption of the activities of the Communist League in Germany urged by Levy.—25
↑ Carl Siebel

[1] In a letter to Engels that has not reached us Freiligrath probably wrote about the projected publication of a new revolutionary newspaper which was to be a sequel to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, organ of the proletarian wing of the democratic movement during the 1848-49 revolution in Germany. Freiligrath seems to have given an incorrect interpretation of the trend of the future newspaper as against that of the petty-bourgeois weekly Hermann which Gottfried Kinkel began to publish on 1 January 1859.—370, 372

[2] Gottfried Kinkel. Engels ironically calls him Johann after his wife, Johanna Kinkel.

[3] See this volume, pp. 370 71.

[4] Gustav Levy's visit to Marx in London in late February 1856 was preceded by another, in the second half of December 1853, when he also came with a message from Düsseldorf workers. This shows that after the 1848-49 revolution the proletarian circles in the Rhine Province continued to regard Marx and Engels as their leaders. Already during his first visit Levy maintained that an uprising was needed in Germany and that the factory workers were ready for it. Marx, then too, argued that, with reaction rampant in Germany, an uprising would be premature, as would a resumption of the activities of the Communist League in Germany urged by Levy.—25

[5] Carl Siebel

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]