Letter to Philipp Pauli, December 16, 1876

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 16 December 1876


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVI, Moscow 1935
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


ENGELS TO PHILIPP PAULI

IN RHEINAU

London, 16 December 1876

Dear Pauli,

Yesterday I sent you, carriage paid, per CONTINENTAL PARCELS EXPRESS and thereon per German Imperial parcel post, a crate addressed to: Dr Pauli, Mannheim (Chemical Works, Rheinau), Germany, containing a PLUM PUDDING for your wife,[1] a currant cake baked for you by my wife,[2] a book, a small box of handkerchiefs and a small ink-pot for Pumps. As the crate would not hold anything further, we were forced to put a new dress for her into the crate containing the pudding for the Schupps; that's the worst of these crates—one just has to take them as one finds them; they are German toy manufacturers' crates.

Should the small crate fail to turn up by Wednesday[3] at the latest, you had better make inquiries at the parcels office in Mannheim; the postal service is responsible for it—that office and CONTINENTAL PARCELS EXPRESS are agents one for the other. However, I hope that everything will arrive all right since we sent the things in good enough time for them to arrive before the Christmas bustle, which the Imperial postal service admits it can't cope.

Your two letters have arrived and I would thank you belatedly for the information about Schmidt. Similar news from Frankfurt[4] : Sonnemann, whom he gave as a reference, doesn't know him either, but one of the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung knows him as a 'professional lèse-majesté man' and ditto a martyr with intent who later, 'on the strength of his martyrdom, became perhaps a bit of a schnorrer' (North German term for a cadger). He wrote to me again, whereupon I drew his attention to the bogus references he had given me and since then have heard nothing more from the elephant on crutches.

I shall see to it that you get the articles in one form or another as soon as several have come out. Later on they will come out in a separate edition which you will also receive, of course.

During the past four or five days my wife has got very much better for no apparent reason; it's almost miraculous how these sort of things seem to happen in the case of women between 40 and 50. I only hope it lasts.

The small crate also contains some Christmas evergreen, holly with its ritual red berries, for sticking into the pudding when it's dished up. The holly's right on top, so that the customs men get their fingers pricked.

And now, warmest regards from my wife and myself to you all, and a merry Christmas!

Your

F. Engels

  1. ↑ Ida Pauli
  2. ↑ Lizzie Burns
  3. ↑ 20 December
  4. ↑ Engels then goes on to retell and quote a letter from one of the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Eduard Sarny, of 5 September 1876, which was a reply to Engels' inquiry, most probably to Leopold Sonnemann, made on 2 September 1876.