[Ventnor,| 8 November 1882

Dear Frep,

What do you think of Deprez’ experiment at the Munich Electricity
Exhibition? *? It was almost a year ago that Longuet promised to
procure Deprez’ works for me (notably his demonstration that electricity makes it possible to convey energy over considerable distances
by means of a simple telegraph wire).*?7 For a close friend of
Deprez’, Dr D’Arsonval, is a contributor to the Justice and has published this and that about Deprez’ investigations. Longuet, as is his
wont, is always forgetting.

I greatly enjoyed looking at the ‘parer’ you sent in which Sher-

* Mustard after dinner, i.e. shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. -
> See this volume, p. 359.

brooke and Rivers Wilson parade as ‘“rrustees In LONDON FOR THE bondholders’.*?8 In yesterday’s Standard, House or Commons pesates, Gladstone was severely rapped over the knuckles on account of the said
TRUSTEES,’ since the above-named Rivers Wilson also occupies a senior
(i.e. well-paid) position in the English Pustic Dests administration.
Gladstone, clearly much embarrassed, at first attempted To pooh-Pooh
[the matter] but, upon notice being given of a morion of censure over
Rivers Wilson, Gladstone mendaciously denied all knowledge of the
Galveston and Eagle etc. Railway Co. Our saintly GRAND OLD MAN? is
playing a role no less glorious over the ‘extradition’ from Gibraltar.*!? It was not for nothing, one recalls, that this same Gladstone,
together with one Graham, etc., underwent his apprenticeship in the
captious official oligarchy under Sir Robert Peel.

No one could be better suited for the clumsy, lying, stupid equivocation and lame excuses that characterise the Egyptian affair than Sir
Charles Dilke.*?° He has neither the pietistic casuistry of Gladstone,
nor the quizzical levity of the guondam* Palmerston. Dilke is simply an
ill-mannered parvenu who imagines himself great by reason of his
boorishness.

Since I take The Standard here, I too discovered therein the telegram from Frankfurt to which you allude.‘

Apropos. I should be glad if Bernstein could send me the Jahrbuch
containing the article by Oldenburg (at least I think that’s what the
author is called) on my theory of value. Although I don’t actually
need it, it would nevertheless be better if I had before my eyes what
was argued at the time. When I wrote to the little Dutch parson‘ the
whole thing was quite fresh in my mind. Since then there has been all
the business of my illness and also the loss of my wife —a long period
of intellectual twilight.

A violent wind rages ceaselessly here, particularly of an evening
and at night; first thing in the morning it’s usually wet, or at any rate
gloomy; during the day there are always fine intervals which have to
be snatched; at the same time the weather is unsettled, capricious.
Last Sunday,¢ for instance, at 4 o’clock, I went up onto the Downs
where I walked along the cart-track past Bonchurch, the topmost of

* ‘Imperial Parliament. House of Commons. Sir C. Rivers Wilson’, The Standard,
No. 18192, 7 November 1882.-” Gladstone-° erstwhile; here: late-4 See this volume, p. 363.-° H. Ofldenburg], ‘Die Grundlage des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus’,
Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpotitik, Jahrg. 1., Zweite Halfte, ZurichOberstrass, 1880.-' Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis (see this volume, pp. 65-67). -
8 5 November

whose houses, ascending in terraces, are almost on a level with the
track (the lowest are right down by the sea); the track goes meandering on, sometimes up, sometimes down, between the hilly part of the
Downs and where they dip down to the sea. (When I was here last
time with Tussy ?°* I didn’t venture up as far as the track.) Here one
can spend hours sauntering along, enjoying hill and sea air at one and
the same time. It was as warm as summer; the sky pure blue, with
only small, translucent white clouds; all at once a cold shower, sky sub.
DENLY Overcast. To this, no doubt, I owe the muscular rheumatism (afflicting the left side of my chest, close to the old corpus delictc*) which
on Monday night became so severe that on Tuesday, overcoming my
reluctance, I sent for a doctor. In reply to my questions, my oLp spin.
ster MacLean told me that there were 2 doctors who called at her
house. *The greatest, the most fashionable man-was ‘J. G. Sinclair
Coghill, Physician to the Royal Hospital for Consumption’.* I asked
* whether he be the old fogey whose coach I had had the displeasure
of meeting almost daily before the door of her house. Indeed,* he was
the man. For he comes to see a permanent lodger here, an * old lady
‘with whom nothing serious it was the matter’, but ‘she liked to see
the doctor at least 3 times in the course of a week’.* This johnny I declined. However, the 2nd doctor who was consulted by her other lodgers was, she said, a young man called Dr James M. Williamson. It
was him I called in; *indeed he is a nice young fellow, nothing
priestly about him.* In fact, he could prescribe nothing save a LINIMENT for me to rub in. (So long as this muscular rheumatism persists
it will hamper me, inducing as it does a feeling of discomfort, especially when I cough.) For the rest, he is apologetic about the bad
weather, As regards the cough which has, particularly of late and also
while I was in London, assumed an increasingly irksome, spasmodic
character, | am my own health officer and hope I shall soon rid myself of it without the aid of a doctor of medicine.

In order not to be too dependent on capricious variations in wind
and temperature when loitering out of doors, I am again forced to
Carry a RESPIRATOR with me, in CASE OF NEED.

A great commotion has been caused here by a letter that appeared
in The Standard’ and the Globe to that effect that Ventnor is a CENTRAL
HEAD OF TYPHOID FEVER and that a number of persons have fallen victim

* Here: seat of the trouble.-? ‘Typhoid at Ventnor’, The Standard, No. 18191,
6 November 1882.

to it of late. Official and unofficial replies to this ‘tip.’ have now
appeared in the local press. But the funniest thing of all is that the
Ventnor municipal panjandrum wants to start a libel case against the
writer of the letter!

Salut.
Moor