Letter to Friedrich Engels, August 14, 1874

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 14 August 1874


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO ENGELS[1]

IN RAMSGATE

[London,] 14 August 1874

DEAR FRED,

I suppose you will have received the letter 12 I posted to you last Tuesday[2] ? If not, we shall have to ask the Post Office to look into it, since another letter that Tussychen wrote likewise failed to arrive.

On going through the accounts with my wife yesterday, it turned out that she had had many additional expenses. So I gave her some of the money intended for my trip[3] : £16.5sh. for the LANDLORD and £15 for herself. For the moment I do not need more than what is left after I have made various purchases for the journey, and since I do not expect to be leaving Karlsbad before 18 or 20 September, you could send me what money I need then out of the next quarter's allowance.

However, it is very improbable that I shall be able to stay in Karlsbad. Last week there was a trial in Vienna where the accused was indicted on a number of counts, including the charge that he had sent a photograph of the 'Social Communist K.M.' (as the prosecutor described me) to London. Admittedly, this charge was not held by the court to be a criminal act.

New arrests have been made at all the Russian universities,[4] and it is obvious that throughout Europe the attempt is being made once again to turn the 'International' into a bogey.

HOWEVER THAT MAY BE, I shall set off tomorrow, since otherwise I shall arrive too late in the SEASON.

Tussy is feeling much better; her appetite is growing in geometric PROPORTION, but it is the characteristic feature of these women's ailments in which hysteria plays a part; you have to pretend not to notice that the invalid is again living on earthly sustenance. This too becomes unnecessary once recovery is complete.

The carbuncle did not develop into anything big, but it did go deep. Since yesterday the discharge has quite stopped, so it is starting to heal. A real blessing that I did not set off earlier. It could have been really unpleasant while travelling. HOWEVER, it was idiotic of Longuet to write about it to Jennychen. If there is any harassment in Karlsbad, I suppose I shall be compelled to beat a retreat to Hamburg. Borkheim is away.

With best regards to all.

Your

K. M.

Has Jennychen received the Lanterne which I posted off at the same time as the Peasant War[5] ?

If Rochefort fails to produce a good Lanterne this week, he will have to be written off. The French government is doing all that is humanly possible to ridicule other people.

  1. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx. On Education, Women and Children. Arranged and edited with an introduction and new translations by Saul K. Padover. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1975.
  2. ↑ 11 August
  3. ↑ On 15 August 1874 Marx, accompanied by his daughter Eleanor, left for Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) on doctors' recommendations, where he stayed from 19 August to 21 September. On the way back to London, Marx stopped off in Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg. In Leipzig, where he stayed approximately from 25 to 28 September, he had talks about the state of the German working-class movement with Wilhelm Liebknecht and Wilhelm Bios, as well as with members of the Leipzig party branch. While in Hamburg on 29 September-1 October, Marx met Social-Democratic leaders.
  4. ↑ In November 1873-March 1874, Russia witnessed mass arrests among the revolutionary-minded intellectuals and students in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and some other cities. The arrests broke up the Narodnik (Populist) group of the so-called Chaikovists (after the name of N. V. Chaikovsky, one of its founders). The members of the group conducted propaganda among the workers, in particular they read extracts from the first volume of Capital and published revolutionary literature. They were the first to issue Marx's work The Civil War in France in Russian. The majority of those arrested were involved in the 'trial of the 193' in 1877-78, the biggest political trial of the Narodniks in Tsarist Russia.
  5. ↑ F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany.