Letter to Friedrich Engels, December 5, 1860

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 5 December 1860


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
Printed according to the original
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41


MARX TO ENGELS[1]

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 5 December [1860]

Dear Engels,

Best thanks for the article.[2]

My wife is getting on very well, and I believe the wine is doing her more good than any medicine. But at night, when she is restless, can't sleep, and is even a little delirious, it's still very disturbing.

How about letting me have another article by Saturday,[3] about my lawsuit—perhaps, dated from Berlin? When I find writing LEADERS awkward, I date them from Berlin, Paris, etc. Such articles are easier to get through.

Might not something be said about the Chinese war? Or Bonaparte's military preparations, etc.?[4]

At the moment, I have absolutely no 'ideas' about anything. What I have got is an "orrible'[5] headache.

The children—poor little devils—are still living in exile.[6] To cheer them up, I have sent them a bottle or two of wine. The day before yesterday, the little one[7] saw me walking past Liebknecht's house and shouted from the window: 'HALLOO, OLD BOY!'

Apropos! As soon as Freiligrath heard of my wife's illness (didn't, of course, know what it was), he, of course, wrote me a letter full of 'feeling'. But when I sent him Herr Vogt[8] —with, of course (you can see just how many ideas I have from the way 'of course' has cropped up 3 times in 3 lines), a friendly inscription, and he had occasion to write to me about SOMETHING ELSE, he forgot to say a word about the book, or TO ACKNOWLEDGE its receipt. To suggest that he had forgotten to do so, he wrote at the bottom of his letter, 'In great haste'. I believe there are certain parts that worry him stiff. Firstly, his 'indiscretion' re Vogt. But Fazy, in particular. He was intending to move to Geneva in the spring. One wonders whether the disclosure of the Fazy scandal might not prove a hindrance.

Blind, who had already ordered a copy from Petsch last Thursday,[9] didn't get one until yesterday [Tuesday]. The thing wasn't distributed in London until then so as to prevent MR ALBERTS, OF THE PRUSSIAN EMBASSY, warning Berlin before my package of books arrived there. In London, of course, there have been a lot of jibes at my 'undignified' mode of attack. Twelve COPIES were ordered yesterday by that louse Trübner.

Salut. Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ Excerpts from this letter were first published in English in a footnote in The Letters of Karl Marx. Selected and Translated with Explanatory Notes and an Introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
  2. ↑ This article, as well as the one Marx received on 12 December, was written by Engels at Marx's request (see this volume, pp. 220 and 222). It is not known whether the New-York Daily Tribune published it.
  3. ↑ 8 December
  4. ↑ In late January 1861 Engels wrote the article 'French Armaments'. Originally intended for the New-York Daily Tribune, it was revised by the author for The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire, in which it appeared on 2 February 1861, No. 22 (see present edition, Vol. 18).
  5. ↑ In the original: 'öklüchen' instead of 'ekeligen'.
  6. ↑ See this volume, pp. 214, 216.
  7. ↑ Eleanor Marx
  8. ↑ K. Marx, Herr Vogt.
  9. ↑ 29 November