Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, March 21, 1891

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 21 March 1891


First published abridged in Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F.A. Sorge und Andere, Stuttgart, 1906 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVIII, Moscow, 1940
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE

IN HOBOKEN

London, 21 March 1891

Dear Sorge,

Have shown your letter re Miss Anna[1] to our friends and promptly complied with your instructions. Enclosed you will find a brief note to the same in which she is hauled over the coals and notified that the letters she has written hitherto, with their repeated requests for money, have fallen on stony ground.[2] I have been asked to tell you that people in this country are of the opinion that enough has now been done for her both over here and out there, that she must now arrange for her own advancement and that this could best be achieved out in the country, doing agricultural work such as she is used to. To this I replied that that sort of thing would be possible only in a district where she could get along without any English, but that since such districts did exist out there, the thing was not impossible. At all events, New York and sea-ports generally would not appear to be at all the right terrain for a female of her ilk and if she is to achieve anything, she must go so far away as to make it very difficult for her to come back again.

In the meantime you will also have had my letter[3] with a money order for ten pounds and will, under the circumstances, have been able to put it to good use. Between ourselves, I believe that, should need arise, I could again raise a like amount, but that would probably be that. I have also been asked to request you people to be strict in regard to money matters so that the person concerned may finally realise that this idling can't go on for ever.

Besides the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung I am also sending you today a Volks-Tribüne and Figaro (Paris MEETING), and an Italian translation of the Manifesto.[4] The People's Press and Commonweal have both gone phut.

I do not yet know whether or not I shall reply to the Vorwärts article,[5] but I am beginning to incline towards your view.[6] There are a few points I really ought to touch on; however, it might be possible to do so in some other way.

I am having to arrange for new editions and/or new introductions to 1. The Civil War in France, 2. Marx's Wage Labour and Capital[7] and 3. Entwicklung des Sozialismus[8] ; the German party is to bring them out in editions of 10,000 copies.

My reply to Brentano[9] will be published by Meissner in about 8 or 10 days' time. You shall have it straight away.

Then I have a new edition of The Origin of the Family, etc.[10] to see to (5,000 sold!), after which, however, I shall apply myself inexorably and unremittingly to Volume III.[11]

Sam Moore arrived in Liverpool the day before yesterday and will probably be here in about a week's time. At Christmas he caught some horrible disease from which, however, he has completely recovered.

I trust your wife[12] is her old self once more. Warmest regards to her and to you.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ Stanislaw Padlewski
  2. ↑ fell flat
  3. ↑ See this volume, pp. 137-39.
  4. ↑ Manifesto del Partito Comunista 1847, Milan, 1891.
  5. ↑ ° the third German edition
  6. ↑ 19 March
  7. ↑ the first separate German edition
  8. ↑ the fourth German edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
  9. ↑ In his preface to the fourth German edition of Volume I of Capital in June 1890 (see present edition, Vol. 35) Engels described in detail Marx's 1872 polemic with the German economist Lujo Brentano, who had accused Marx of misquoting a passage from Gladstone's parliamentary speech of 16 April 1863 in reproducing it in the Inaugural Address of the Working Men's International Association and in Volume I of Capital. Brentano's reaction to Engels' presentation of the case was the pamphlet Meine Polemik mit Karl Marx, Berlin, 1890, the introduction to which was published in Deutsches Wochenblatt, No. 45, 6 November 1890. On 4 December this journal carried a note containing two passages from Gladstone's letters to Brentano of 22 and 28 November 1890 in which Gladstone asserted that Brentano was right. Engels replied in a brief article, 'In the Case of Brentano Versus Marx' (Die Neue Zeit, 9. Jg., 1890/91, 1. Bd., Nr. 13) and, at greater length, in a pamphlet of the same title, published in April 1891, which contained a large number of documents, including the above-mentioned article (see present edition, Vol. 27).
  10. ↑ the fourth German edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
  11. ↑ of Capital
  12. ↑ Katharina Sorge