Letter to Friedrich Engels, August 1, 1856

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MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 1 August 1856

28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear E.,

The £5 note most gratefully received but not as yet the letter you promised me. Herewith a letter from the crazy Mirbach, which I have received—via Berlin!

No money from Sheffield yet. Today I got Pieper to send a dunning letter. Meanwhile there has been the following incident: Yesterday Urquhart's bulldog—THE CELEBRATED Collet—appeared at my house. He had come, he said, at the behest of the Grand Cophta himself. Urquhart was *very sorry, regretted, indeed, very much that Mr Ironside had interfered at all with my articles etc., which he thought of extraordinary value etc.* Then he asked me to tell him how the matter had come about. *Mr Urquhart imagined that the principal cause of the quarrel was the suppression of some parts of the copy etc.* I then told him what had happened

and showed him the written corpora delicti. Next, he asked me *whether I was willing to enter upon any compromise, which question I flatly denied, telling him that I was no penny-a-liner and not to be treated like the London literary vagabonds.* It seemed he was only awaiting this statement in order to tell me with EXTRAORDINARY SOLEMNITY that Urquhart thought The Free Press 'inadequate'. *Mr Ironside was placed on the horns of a dilemma because The Free Press was, indeed, but an extract from the Sheffield Free Press—a paper, by the bye, twice the dimensions of the F. P.— and what was suited to the wants of the readers of the Sh. F. P. was not all palatable to the readers of the F. P. and vice versa. Mr Urquhart had, therefore, resolved upon starting in about a month a diplomatic journal at London.* He hoped that I would let him have the whole of the Revelations and not bear him a GRUDGE. I returned a vague answer capable of being construed in the affirmative but leaving me free—if the conditions should prove too poor or the paper too crazy—to refuse. It will all depend on the nature of the paper. In London things are rather different from Sheffield, and, should Urquhart come out with his counter-revolutionary nonsense in such a way that collaboration with him would discredit me in the eyes of the revolutionaries here, I would be obliged, *of course, hard as it would be under the present miserable circumstances,* to decide against it. However, nous verrons. At all events I have now received adequate satisfaction as regards my LITERARY POINT OF HONOUR, in as much as the chief has all but disowned his LIEUTENANT. This is a satisfactory dénouement, if only on account of Bûcher and the democratic riff-raff.

There will now be much wrangling within the Urquhartite camp itself. It seemed to me that they evinced a bad TENDENCY to make a SCAPEGOAT of poor Cyples. E.g., Collet said he wasn't sure whether it was with Ironside's knowledge that Cyples had sent me the former's letter. To this I replied that Cyples seemed to be an honest fellow who had heard SECRET DIPLOMACY- SO greatly decried that he naturally assumed PUBLIC DIPLOMACY- to be the rule at the F. P. OFFICE.

Received a letter today from my wife. She seems greatly affected by the old lady's death. She will have to spend a week or 10 days in Trier in order to put up for auction what little in the way of effects her mother has left and to share the PROCEEDS with Edgar.

She has proposed the following scheme: After spending a few days more in the vicinity of Trier with a woman friend of hers, she will travel to Paris and thence direct to Jersey, having decided that we ought to spend September and October there. First, so that she herself can recuperate; secondly, because it's cheaper and pleasanter than London and, finally, so that the children should learn French, etc. She doesn't, of course, know anything about what has been taking place here. For the present I have written to say that it's a splendid scheme, although I cannot in fact see how it can be put into effect. Yesterday 1 again saw the New-York Tribune (WEEKLY). The whole paper is filled with nothing but the ELECTORAL DODGE and so it will be for months to come. We cannot hope seriously to tackle the N.-Y. T. until the presidential business is over.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

P.S. At Blind's, saw 2 volumes of Simon of Trier's émigré jeremiad. Watered-down twaddle, every other word a solecism, callow botchery, weak-kneed affectation, foppish naive pretension, a mess of Griinian Jew's ears in beggar's broth, one long platitude—nothing of the kind has ever before appeared in print. All that was needed to give the 'German Parliament' the final kick in the arse was this self-exposure on the part of one of its heroes. Needless to say, I did no more than leaf through it. I'd sooner swill soap-suds or hobnob with Zoroaster over mulled cow's piss than read through all that stuff. He and Co. are perpetually haunted by our ghost. L. Blanc, Blanqui, Marx and Engels are his Unholy Quadrinity which he never forgets. We two—the propounders of 'equal economic rights'—are said inter alia to have advocated 'Armed (!) appropriation of capital'. Even the jokes we cracked about Switzerland in the Revue 'fill him with indignation'. 'No Civil List, no standing army, no millionaires, no beggars'—

'Marx and Engels hope that Germany will never sink to such depths of degradation'. It's exceedingly odd, the way he speaks of us in the singular—'Marx and Engels says', etc.