Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 8, 1857

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 8 May 1857


First published abridged in Der Briefwech-sel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXII, Moscow, 1929
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


62

MARX TO ENGELS[1]

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 8 May 1857

DEAR Frederick,

The £5 received.

Herewith a letter from Lassalle[2] which, when Lupus has seen it, you should return to me at the beginning of next week. What should I do about fellow? Reply or not reply? You'll be amused by the comical vanity of the laddie, who will do anything to become famous and, entirely without provocation, writes 75 sheets on Greek philosophy.[3]

I have written to Dana in exactly the terms you suggested. As regards your Bazancourt,[4] I had already urged him to return it. Steffen doesn't know of any book such as you require; he himself appears to be engaged on an English translation of Rüstow's Cäsars Heerwesen.

Pieper is on the point of falling back into his former foolishness. Has written me a 'genius's' letter. The enthusiasm—not the enthusiasm inspired in him by his new post, but that which he inspired in his new post cum attendant principal—appears AS ist ALLY to have waned. He wishes to go to Switzerland as a 'courier', or else sever connections with his principal at mid-summer and once again cut a dash in London with £20 in his pocket. When I next write I >hall pour cold water on the genius. If he is ever to become 'serviceable' again this young man must endure the parson's lash for some while yet.

Have you read the Crédit mobilier's[5] last report? It was in The Times[6] Indicates a DECLINE.

Pam AS REFORMER! He'll reform those boys WITH A VENGEANCE. If you possibly can, write a military piece on Persia or China next week. My wife is drawing ever closer to the catastrophe and is finding her secretarial duties increasingly onerous.

As regards your toothache, I would advise you to have recourse to the same means as I did after eighteen months' hesitation. Pull

the bugger out! I, too, always supposed my toothache to be rheumatic. Yet in the end a corpus delicti was discovered after all. When are you coming down here?

Salut.

Your

K. M.

With the coming of spring the children always go down with various ailments. So it has been again, first the youngest[7] and Laura and now it's little Jenny's turn.

  1. ↑ This letter was first published in an abridged English translation in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.—12, 30, 45, 54, 61, 67, 70, 93, 110, 128, 132, 224, 227, 254, 265, 319, 333, 359, 407, 430, 448, 459, 461, 518, 524
  2. ↑ Lassalle's letter to Marx of 26 April 1857
  3. ↑ Lassalle's Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos, published later.
  4. ↑ Engels made excerpts from Bazancourt's book between June and September 1856. In the autumn of that year he summed up the results of his critical analysis in an article entitled 'Saint-Arnaud'. Marx sent the article to the American journal Putnam's Monthly, but the editors returned it unpublished.—45, 51, 71, 73, 80, 93, 106, 124, 126, 128
  5. ↑ Engels means the establishment of banks similar to the Société générale du Crédit mobilier, a big French joint-stock bank founded by the Péreire brothers in 1852. The Crédit mobilier was to mediate in credit transactions and help in setting up industrial concerns and building railways in France, Spain, Austria, Russia and other countries. It was closely associated with Napoleon Ill's government and under its protection engaged in large-scale speculation. It went bankrupt in 1867 and was liquidated in 1871.—34, 68, 119, 126, 128, 133, 142, 145, 216, 225, 231, 240, 244, 291, 296, 349, 360, 437
  6. ↑ 'The Credit Mobilier of France', The Times, No. 22670, 2 May 1857.
  7. ↑ Eleanor Marx