Letter to Friedrich Engels, April 12, 1860

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 12 April 1860


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41


MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 12 April 1860

Dear Engels,

BEST THANKS for the hundred pound note. It came as a glorious surprise THIS MORNING. The whole family was filled with glee.

You may or may not have seen that the Kölnische Zeitung (Schlesinger, London) has had the impudence to talk about the Brimstone Gang[1] and its Russian redolence. WELL! Through the good offices of my bankrupt friend Speck I am now hot on the trail of the whole Brimstone Gang here in London.

D'abord,[2] you'll have seen in the papers that Palmerston has amused himself by presenting Mr Reuter (the Jew from Trieste of telegraph fame) to the Queen.[3] And who do you think is factotum to this grammatically illiterate Jew Reuter? — Siegmund Engländer, who was expelled from Paris because, although a spy in the pay of France (600 frs. per month), he was discovered to be a 'secret' Russian spy. This same Reuter, together with Engländer, Hörfei and Schlesinger, was a partner in a Bonapartist lithographic news agency in Paris (an honorary member being one Esterhazy, a MAN ABOUT TOWN and the cousin of Esterh., the Austrian ambassador); they fell out, etc. Mr Bernhard Wolff, chief proprietor of the Berlin 'National-Zeitung' and owner of the Berlin telegraphic bureau, is hand-in-purse (partners) with S. Engländer, who is at present editing European world history in Reuter's name. N. B. Russia has now joined the 'Austro-German Telegraphic Union' and, pour encourager les autres, has got Pam to present her Reuter to the QUEEN. I am to get a detailed account of Schlesingers entire curriculum vitae, as well as that of Reuter's.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

My thanks to Siebel for the notes, which arrived today. Also for his Religion und Liebe.[4] My wife thinks highly of the latter.

  1. ↑ The original Brimstone Gang (Schwefelbande) was a students' association in Jena University in the 1770s whose members were notorious for their brawls. Later the expression Brimstone Gang came to be applied to any group of ill repute. In Geneva in 1849-50 it was also the jocular name for a small company of German refugees, inoffensive and happy-go-lucky idlers. In his pamphlet Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung, Vogt included Marx and his party associates in the 'Brimstone Gang', although they had nothing to do with it (for details see this volume, pp. 70-71 and Marx's Herr Vogt, present edition, Vol. 17, pp. 28-37).
  2. ↑ First published: Julius Reuter. A list of persons presented to Queen Victoria on 28 March 1860, was published in The Times, No. 23580, 29 March 1860.
  3. ↑ Victoria
  4. ↑ [C. Siebel,] Religion und Liebe. Roman aus dem Tagebuche eines Anonymen, Hamburg, 1860.