Letter to Friedrich Engels, July 27, 1881

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 27 July 1881


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 for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46


MARX TO ENGELS

IN LONDON

Argenteuil[1] , 27 July 1881
11 Boulevard Thiers

Dear Engels,

I can't write at any greater length today as I have a mass of letters to get off and on this, our first day, the little ones[2] have rightly laid claim to me.

The journey from London to Dover went off as well as could be expected, i. e. my wife, who was most unwell when we set out from Maitland Park, did not notice any change for the worse as a result of the journey. On the boat she at once went to the ladies' cabin where she found an excellent sofa to lie on. The sea was quite calm and the weather couldn't have been finer. She landed in Calais in better shape than when she had left London and decided to carry on. The only stations where our TICKETS allowed us to break the journey to Paris were Calais and Amiens. She thought the latter place (ABOUT 2 HOURS' journey from Paris) too close to stop at. Between Amiens and Creil she felt diarrhoea coming on, and the griping pains also grew more violent. At Creil the train stopped for only 3 minutes, but she had just enough time to do what was necessary. In Paris, where we arrived at 7.30 in the evening, we were met at the station by Longuet. However the direct train from this station to Argenteuil left too late for us to wait for it. So, after the douaniers[3] had examined our trunks, by CAB to St Lazare station and from there, after waiting some while, by RAILWAY to our destination which we did not reach, however, until ABOUT 10 O'CLOCK. She was in very poor shape, but this morning (at any rate now, ABOUT 10 O'CLOCK) feels better than she used to do in London at a similar hour. At all events, the return journey will be made in much easier stages.

Longuet is introducing me to his doctor[4] today, so that we can act immediately in the event of the diarrhoea recurring.

We found everyone well here, except that Johnny and Harry had slight colds as a result of the change of temperature (all the children, especially Johnny, had been affected by the days of extreme heat). As a summer residence the house is first-class, must obviously have once served as such for a richard.[5]

WITH BEST COMPLIMENTS TO Pumps.

Your

Moor

It would seem that Tussy has written to her correspondent over there[6] telling him of my arrival and hence, or so Longuet tells me, this is already an open secret. The 'anarchists', he says, will impute to me the malicious intention of swinging the vote. Clemenceau told him that I had absolutely nothing to fear from the police.

  1. ↑ At the House of Commons sitting on 22 May 1876, one of the Irish M.P.s inquired of Prime Minister Disraeli whether the government intended to amnesty the Fenians who were still in prison. Disraeli stated that 15 Fenians remained imprisoned, and that the government had no intention of pardoning them since it regarded them as 'criminals and deserters'. The statement provoked a storm of indignation among the Irish M.P.s.
    The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who had taken their name from the 'Féne', the ancient population of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s among the Irish immigrants in the USA, and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the early 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals, and believed in conspiratorial tactics. The British government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. In September 1865 it arrested a number of Fenian leaders, who were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment (O'Donovan Rossa received a life sentence). In 1867, following the abortive attempt at an uprising, hundreds of Irishmen were thrown into prison.
    Marx and Engels, who repeatedly pointed to the weak sides of the Fenian movement, their reliance on conspiracy and sectarian errors, nevertheless had a high regard for its revolutionary character and did their best to encourage it to embark on mass struggle and joint action with the English working class.
    In the 1870s, the Fenian movement declined.
  2. ↑ Marx's grandsons: Jean, Henri, Edgar and Marcel Longuet
  3. ↑ customs officers
  4. ↑ Dourlen
  5. ↑ very rich man
  6. ↑ Carl Hirsch