Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, February 15, 1861

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 15 February 1861


First published in: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Bd. III, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41


MARX TO FERDINAND LASSALLE

IN BERLIN

[London,] 15 February 1861

Dear Lassalle,

I did not, as I had intended, send off a second letter to you on the heels of my first,[1] because, in the meantime, a crisis had supervened, i.e., a financial crisis. Dana wrote from New York, saying that it (the Tribune) had dismissed all its European correspondents, retaining nobody save myself, but that 1. the Cyclopaedia[2] was to be temporarily suspended; 2. my contributions were to be suspended for 6 weeks; 3. finally, that in future I was to write one article less per week.

Under these circumstances and in view of the expenditure arising out of my wife's illness, I have got to go to Holland and see my uncle Philips, if I am to put my financial affairs in some sort of order. Since I require money for the trip I have drawn a bill on you for £20 (ABOUT 34 talers) payable at 6 weeks' sight. I shall send you the required sum from Holland before the expiry date or else bring it to Berlin in person, for I may possibly come as far. I shall come, by the by, simply as a traveller if, that is, I cross the Dutch border and enter Germany. (If I were Karl Heinzen — Heineke the lusty knave[3] — I should say OVERSTRIDE.)

Your

K. Marx

  1. ↑ See this volume, p. 251.
  2. ↑ New American Cyclopaedia
  3. ↑ Heineke the lusty knave is the hero of the German folk song Heineke, der starke Knecht, a parody of 16th-century grobian literature. In his work 'Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality' (present edition, Vol. 6) Marx compared Heinzen's journalistic writings with samples of grobian literature.