Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 22, 1852

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 22 May 1852


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 1, 1929
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 39


MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London] 22 May [1852] 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

The first half of the 10-pound note arrived this morning. I intend to leave here on Friday,[1] this time by ship to Liverpool and thence to Manchester.

Apropos. Citizen Schramm[2] is travelling to America via Liverpool. Well, the fellow proposes, or so he confides to us, to descend upon you on Wednesday or Thursday. You must see if you can give him the slip.

Willich has had a rather nice adventure. Mrs von Brüningk, who provided him with free board, used to enjoy flirting with this old he-goat, as with the other ex-lieutenants. One day the blood rushes to the head of our ascetic, he makes a brutally brutish assault upon madame, and is ejected from the house with éclat. No more love! No more free board! Nous ne voulons plus de jouisseurs.[3]

Cherval, about whose heroism before the Paris Assizes in the matter of the Complot allemand-français[4] 14S you will have heard, has, as you may also have seen in the English papers (Morning Advertiser), escaped from the catchpolls in prodigiously daring manner—as it later transpired, with the connivance of the police to whom he betrayed everything he knew. Even the Great Windmillers[5] were forced to throw out the hero with whom they had been parading round London.

The Cologne people have at last been referred by the Board of indicting magistrates to the Court of Assizes. Unless a special Court of Assizes is appointed, they will not appear before July.[6]

Dronke sends his regards.

Your

K.M.

  1. ↑ 28 May
  2. ↑ Conrad Schramm
  3. ↑ We want no more sybarites.
  4. ↑ Franco German plot
  5. ↑ German Workers' Educational Society in London (see Note 24)
  6. ↑ Members of the Communist League (see Note 15) were arrested by the Prussian police in May 1851 and accused of 'treasonable conspiracy'. The accused remained in detention for about eighteen months. Eleven Communist League members (Heinrich Bürgers, Peter Nothjung, Peter Röser, Hermann Heinrich Becker, Karl Otto, Wilhelm Reiff, Friedrich Lessner, Roland Daniels, Johann Jacob Klein, Johann Erhardt and Abraham Jacobi) were brought to trial which began in Cologne on 4 October and lasted till 12 November 1852. It was rigged by the Prussian police on the basis of fabricated documents and forged evidence which included the so-called Original Minute-book of the Communist League Central Authority meetings and documents stolen by the police from the Willich-Schapper group. The trial was accompanied by an anti-communist hue and cry in the official press of Germany and other countries. On the basis of forged documents and perjury seven of the accused were sentenced to imprisonment for terms of three to six years. Marx, Engels and their friends and associates in England, Germany and America supported the Cologne prisoners in the press and supplied counsel for the defence with documents and material exposing police fabrications. The provocative actions of the prosecution and the contemptible methods of the Prussian police state were exposed by Marx in his pamphlet Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne and by Engels in the article 'The Late Trial at Cologne' (see present edition, Vol. 11)