Letter to Friedrich Engels, April 23, 1857

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MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

London, 23 April 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park,

Haverstock Hill

Dear Fred,

I shall write to Dana not later than tomorrow. For me, the thing has come as a godsend, as you can imagine. It has also reassured my wife, which is important in her present SITUATION. I shall write to Steffen straight away (the fellow has changed his lodgings without notifying me, but is still in Brighton). Pieper, as you will remember from one of my previous letters, has been a schoolmaster in Bognor since Christmas, AND I SHALL CERTAINLY LEAVE HIM THERE. He was becoming daily more vacuous, idle, useless and expensive. Under the iron rod of the parson in whose service he now is, he will again come to his senses. Moreover, the laddie left me just at a time when, because of my wife's condition, he thought himself indispensable and did not seem averse to the idea of my

pressing him to remain on more favourable terms. I DID NOTHING OF THE SORT but merely expressed my satisfaction at his having at long last found a post. In the event, it transpired that his 'indispensabil- ity' was merely a figment of his own imagination. My wife fulfils the function of secretary without all the BOTHER created by the noble youth. As tutor to the girls he was quite unsuitable. So both parties have benefited from the change and, if the fellow again becomes serviceable, as I am convinced he will, he'll be much fortified by the realisation that I do not need him in any way.

Hence there can be no question of setting up an office in London. There is no one here who is any good. It's possible—and this I shall know within a day or two—that Dana has approached Freiligrath direct. Our Freiligrath is again MALCONTENT with his post though it enables him to earn £300 very comfortably with little or nothing to do. What he finds tedious is, for one thing, the moaning and groaning of the shareholders, who vent their displeasure on him, and, for another, his admittedly ambiguous position, which places a great deal of responsibility on him while allowing him barely a semblance of autonomy. That, AT LEAST, is the interpretation he himself puts on his FEELINGS. What in fact LURKS beneath all this is, or so it seems to me, a general distaste for RESPONSIBILITY. A clerical post which would relieve him of it, as at Hood's, is and always will be his dream. Then, too, he is tormented by the conflict between his renown as a poet and the rate of exchange. So far as I can gather from his occasional CONFESSIONS, all these Crédits mobiliers are privily assailed by considerable MISGIVINGS. He was assured by an old hand on the Stock Exchange that never, in a practice of 40 YEARS' STANDING, had he experienced a chronic state of crisis such as now prevails. I haven't yet got round to it, but some time I must really investigate the relationship between the rate of exchange and BULLION. The role played by money as such in determining the bank rate and

t h e MONEY MARKET IS SOMETHING STRIKING AND QUITE ANTAGONISTIC T O ALL LAWS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. Worthy of note are the 2 newly published volumes of Tooke's History of Prices. A pity the old man's head-on collision with the CURRENCY PRINCIPLE chaps should lead him to give such a one-sided TURN to all his disquisitions.

I wrote to Dana as much as a fortnight ago asking for the return of your Bazancourt.

The Urquhartites—who have asked me to send them a detailed BILL—have paid me £10 on account; this was most welcome, since

I owed that much to baker and butcher alone. The girls are growing up very quickly and their education, too, is becoming expensive. At the LADIES SEMINARY they frequent, they are having PRIVATE LESSONS with an Italian, a Frenchman and a DRAWING MASTER. Now I have also got to find a chap for music. They learn extraordinarily fast. The youngest one—the BABY—is an astonish- ingly witty little thing and claims that SHE HAS GOT TWO BRAINS.

For my own part I would much prefer to supply Dana with articles on, say, Ricardo, Sismondi, etc. That sort of thing does at least admit of objective treatment from the Yankee point of view. German philosophy is difficult to write about in English. However, I shall suggest various things to Dana and leave the choice to him.

For the past six months I've been constantly having to call in the doctor for my wife. She is, indeed, very much run down.

Apropos. Dr Freund has passed through the court of bankruptcy—assets £200, debts £3,000.

The Bright and Cobden party cannot help but thrive now that Faucher is the foreign editor of their London paper, The Morning Star. I'm now on speaking terms with the chap since I can't help encountering him sometimes at Edgar Bauer's. The man considers himself the finest fellow in the world. 'Bruno Bauer has lost his self-confidence. He feels that it is I, not he, who will conquer Prussia.' He is A CURIOUS FREETRADER TOO, who doesn't even know what the MIDDLE CLASSES are. Prussia is, and ought to be, ruled by 'the officer and the student', 'I bowl over any English meeting at which I speak', 'I have made history. It was I who drew up Cobden's Canton MOTION', to cite only a few of his tropes. The chap's a veritable Munchausen of mendacity, a veritable Ancient Pistol of braggadocio, and once in 6 months it's amusing to listen to his boasting.

Have you—or Lupus—heard anything about a Römische Ges- chichte published somewhere near Heidelberg, which is said to contain much that is new?

How goes it with the landlord of the Golden LION? Salut.

Your

K. M.