Letter to Friedrich Engels, December 19, 1860

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MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 19 December 1860

Dear Frederick,

THANKS for the £2. I have sent Lenchen to the POST OFFICE to collect it.

My wife, or so Allen thinks, will not have any pock marks. She is, of course, still very indisposed (and it's precisely when they're recovering that sick people grow more restive and impatient), but Allen is perfectly satisfied with her PROGRESS.

As for myself, I am today (the worst thing was lack of sleep) much the better for having slept soundly all night and hope to be ALRIGHT again in 2, or, at the most, 3, days' time.

Having been too unwell to go out this week, I don't know how the book has been selling in London. Though I've been told by Liebknecht that the London Workers' Society has bought 6 copies for its library this week.

Zimmermann of Spandau (now a lawyer in London), formerly a member of parliament, bosom friend of Vogt, once a great traducer of the Volk and of my own person, last week gave a dinner at which the lawyer Höchster (known from Elberfeld, now a very busy avocat in Paris) was present; our friend Rheinländer also attended. Zimmermann declared that Blind was hopelessly compromised. As TO Vogt, he [Zimmermann] had been reluctant to credit bribery, although aware of the chap's vanity and frivolity. But now my work had convinced him that Vogt was nothing but an ordinary mouchard only distinguished from muchardus vulgaris by the size of his salary, etc. Moreover, he (Z.) had written to acquaintances in Switzerland in order to leave Mr Vogt in no doubt about his views.

Bücher has written and told Borkheim that the case against Vogt has been fully proved. Also that my work had eradicated any 'prejudice he might have had against Marx's agitational activities'. He had, he wrote, expressed his views on these two points in the Camberwell businessmen's circle (to which he gives lectures on the history of German jurisprudence) and written ditto to 'influential persons in Germany'.

Zimmermann and Bücher are of importance here because of the philistines.

In the course of my ordeal—during the past 4 weeks—I have read all manner of things. Inter alia Darwin's book on Natural Selection. Although developed in the crude English fashion, this is the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views. By comparison, A. Bastian's Der Mensch in der Geschichte (3 stout volumes; the chap's a young Bremen doctor who has spent several years travelling round the world), with its attempt to present psychology in terms of 'natural science' and history in terms of psychology, is bad, muddled, and amorphous.

The only useful thing in it is a few ethnographical ODDITIES now and again. And, what is more, very pretentious and atrociously written.

Apropos. As regards Ludwig Simon, try and guess how I succeeded in catching out the gentle Kunigunde.

Lassalle, from whom I got a letter a few weeks ago, is very ill. Not gout—osteitis? Is publishing, or so he writes, 'a long and important work' with Brockhaus in 2 volumes, 17 hours in bed, 3 hours up, and busy proof-correcting this 'long and important work'. I can hardly suppose the anti-Vogt piece, which I sent him, will serve to alleviate his aches and pains. But whose fault is it that he's a Berlin 'idealist politician'?

Have I already written and told you what a 'crassly material basis' there is to the intimacy between Freiligrath and student Blind?

Salut.

Your

K. M.