Letter to Karl Marx, October 6, 1857

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 6 October 1857


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel 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 for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


ENGELS TO MARX[1]

IN LONDON

St. Hélier, Jersey, 6 October 1857

3 Edward Place

Dear Marx,

L'affaire Harney resolved itself when the noble fellow called on Schramm yesterday evening while I was there. He has grown a big, jet-black beard thereby giving himself a strange appearance in some ways not unlike that of the greasy Jew in the boat that brought us ashore from the STEAMER; CERTAINLY an IMPROVEMENT. He made rather light of his Jersey POLITICS, saying he got A GREAT DEAL OF FUN out of them, etc.[2] ; the more serious view he certainly takes of them will no doubt emerge later on. Afterwards he and I went on a mild spree and I got him to tell me about the constitution, etc., etc., here; not a word was said about the old days. For the time being he seems DAMD GLAD to have withdrawn from high politics into his little royaume des aveugles.[3] As a borgne he's king of the opposition here, on his right THE FIRST GROCER, on his left THE FIRST TALLOW-CHANDLER IN THE TOWN. The battles are fought out in Royal Square and it was here that the GROCER knocked DOWN the rédacteur en chef of the Impartial de Jersey, a Bonapartist spy called Lemoine, the upshot of which was a lawsuit that has gone on for the past year and is to be decided on Monday. The Impartial has been suspended since the beginning of the monetary crisis in Paris and, so long as this lasts, will remain so. In Harney's view the whole history of Jersey may be divided into 2 periods: before and after the Hejira, or the expulsion of the crapauds.[4] They are noteworthy for the fact that nothing happened during either of them.

Schramm is busy with plans for new lodgings but will probably stay where he is after all. I urged him to move further south but, like most people in his condition, he tends to be contrary and also says that it is a question of money and that his relatives were already doing what they could. From Harney's description it's often downright cold here in winter when there's an east wind, and Schramm lives on the side of the town most exposed to the north-west winds. If, as he says, his difficulty in walking is no greater than it was three years ago, the disease may of course drag on for some time yet. Proof that here, too, people can contract consumption and die of it is provided by a case in this very house, for the daughter of my fat landlady succumbed to it. I hardly like to speak to him any more about moving south; it rubs him up the wrong way and he is after all very tetchy, as is only natural. As things stand I have not yet got down to work and there is also a mass of letters to be written; but tomorrow I shall make a start.

Yesterday I walked to the north coast—5 or 6 miles from here, very good roads, a pretty avenue here and there, magnificent blackberries en masse and a few very lovely small inlets on the coast. The island forms a plateau and once you're on top, it rises very gently almost as far as the north coast, and the beds of the streams are quite shallow. From the northern end you can see a long stretch of France (west coast of the Département de la Manche) and the island of Sark. I couldn't see Guernsey.

Schramm's brother[5] has informed him that a friend of his, a (probably Prussian) lawyer by the name of Berger,[6] about 50 years old, will be arriving in a few days and will spend the winter here. Do you know this individual? Presumably the fellow lives in London, and it is always as well to be informed to some extent about Mr Rudolf Schramm's acquaintances. I have a vague recollection that a fellow of this description bumped into us once in London.

I have also tracked down Steffen's guerrilla warfare in respect of Berg and the Mark: Holleben, Militairische Betrachtungen aus den Erfahrungen eines preussischen Offiziers. This book is his chief authority and maintains that the hedge and ditch country in parts of the Mark and Cleves recalls La Vendée,[7] and is admirably suited to a people's war. Not so the people who live there, unfortunately—this being the flat, agricultural part of the Mark. For the rest the book is a good one, but just the thing to encourage Steffen's predilection for skirmishes and guerrilla warfare; it leans too far in this direction.

Enclosed the list for C with comments 232

Kindest regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ The letter is written on notepaper bearing a view of the Gulf of St. Catherine in Jersey from the pier.—187
  2. ↑ Harney, the former leader of revolutionary Chartism, withdrew from the labour movement in the first half of the 1850s, when there was a general decline in the English proletariat's political activity. In the autumn of 1855 he went to St. Hélier, the capital of Jersey, to convey an address of solidarity from British radicals to Victor Hugo on the occasion of the British decision to expel him and other French emigrants from the island (see Note 16). Harney settled there and in mid-1856 became editor of The Jersey Independent, which he devoted almost entirely to local problems, criticising the local system from bourgeois- radical positions.—188
  3. ↑ Engels alludes to the French saying, 'Au royaume des aveugles les borgnes sont rois' ('In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king').
  4. ↑ Hejira (or Hegira)—the flight of Mohammed and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622, from which the Mohammedan era is dated. Here Engels alludes to the expulsion of French petty-bourgeois democratic refugees from Jersey in the autumn of 1855 (see Note 16), and calls them crapauds (philistines) (see Note 81).—188
  5. ↑ Rudolf Schramm
  6. ↑ Engels means Hermann Buck. 8 194
  7. ↑ Vendée—a department in the west of France. During the French Revolution it was the centre of a royalist revolt in March 1793 in which the local peasant masses took part. The revolt was suppressed in 1795 but attempts to revive it were made in 1799 and later.—189