Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, September 30, 1891

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 30 September 1891


First published abridged in Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F.A.Sorge und Andere, Stuttgart, 1906 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVIII, Moscow, 1940
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE

IN HOBOKEN

London, 30 September 1891

Dear Sorge,

I spent a fortnight in Scotland and Ireland with Pumps and Louise Kautsky[1] after which I attended to the proofs of the new edition[2] of the Origin of the Family; now I am dealing with arrears of correspondence, and shall then finish off Volume III.

Meanwhile I enclose a business communication for Mother Wischnevetzky which you will, I trust, be able to pass on to her. Except by way of business I don't, of course, want to have anything to do with her.

I am sorry to see from your letter of the 15th that you are plagued with the gout. That being so, it's certainly a good thing that you should be eating less nitrogenous food and taking more physical exercise.

The Brussels Congress did in fact go off better than you suppose. The only one of the Germans to behave boorishly was Liebknecht, but he had been most grossly provoked by Nieuwenhuis in the rudest, clerico-jesuitical way. Louise, who represented the working women of Vienna, says that Nieuwenhuis' base attacks and insinuations were utterly outrageous.

The TRADES UNION Congress was also a success.[3] The 'old' unions did everything in their power to get the Liverpudlian eight hours resolution overturned and their failure to do more than whittle away a small fragment of it is of itself a defeat for them and their middle-class allies. You ought to have seen the liberal papers, in particular the Scottish ones, and the way they wrung their hands over the aberrations of the English working man and his lapse into socialism.

The People is quite impossible. It's ages since I have seen such a silly hotchpotch of a paper. Who has translated my Entwicklung? Jonas?

I'll send the necessary to the Socialiste and report back to you later.

Lafargue has been put up as candidate in Lille and is thus entitled to spend the 5 weeks of the période électorale out of prison and to engage in propaganda. He is unlikely to get in but, come the general election, he is sure of being returned in the Département du Nord.[4]

Abetted by Hyndman, Gilles continues his attempts to besmear Aveling — not a bad thing on the whole, firstly because he's such a colossal blackguard and secondly because we shall succeed increasingly in getting Hyndman out into the open. More news of all sorts by the next post.

Warm regards to your wife[5] and yourself.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ In the summer and autumn of 1891 Engels repeatedly interrupted his work and left London owing to overstrain. From 26 June to 24 August (with intervals) he rested with Carl Schorlemmer and George Julian Harney in Ryde (Isle of Wight) at the home of Mary Ellen Rosher (Pumps), the niece of his wife, and roughly between 8 and 23 September he toured Ireland and Scotland with Mary Ellen Rosher and Louise Kautsky.
  2. ↑ the fourth German edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
  3. ↑ This refers to the twenty-fourth annual Congress of British Trades Unions, held in Newcastle from 7 to 12 September 1891. It was attended by 552 delegates, representing about 1,300,000 (according to other sources, about 2,000,000) organised workers. The majority of the delegates came from new unions. The delegates speaking for the old, conservative unions made an attempt to secure the cancellation of the resolution on the eight-hour working day adopted by the previous, Liverpool Congress (see Note 27), but were defeated by 232 votes against 163. The congress voted for the unions' participation in the forthcoming parliamentary elections.
  4. ↑ In a letter of 23 September 1891 Laura Lafargue told Engels that the French Workers' Party had put up Paul Lafargue as its candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in a by-election in Lille to replace the deceased deputy Werquin. This enabled Lafargue to get out of prison and conduct the election campaign in North France. He was elected to the Chamber on 8 November 1891 and did not have to go back to prison.
  5. ↑ Katharina Sorge