| Manch
r
9
th
July 1869.
Dear Jenny
My best thanks for
your two
kind letters
and for the Beer which
arrived safely on Wednesday and was tried on Thursday after a day’s settling
I have just been into the cellar to fetch another
bottle up, it is very nice, and
Lizzie
especially likes it because it reminds her more of her beloved “Bavarian” than
the regular Vienna Beer. There is no doubt it will soon be emptied, and the more
so as I am afraid it will not
last
keep
very long in hot weather, being lighter than the common Vienna Beer, so
that there will be plenty of pretexts for taking frequent “headers” into the
cellar and fetching up a bottle or two of “that same”.
I, and indeed all of us, were very much amused with your
description of that highly aristocratic soirée. That little bit of a
printed caution about
mobbing
, & the fact of its
being sent round with the invitations, is more than characteristic of “that
lot”, as we say here in Lancashire. Very good, too, on the part of these
Britishers, to describe this, their own darling “vulgar habit” as one “common
throughout Europe”—common, indeed, wherever the British 
| snob—and the snob
and the flunkey is at the bottom of all of them—puts his foot! Ich möchte doch
einmal den Ort auf dem Continent sehn wo ein solches Circular bei solcher
Gelegenheit erlassen würde. Übrigens geht aus der ganzen Geschichte klar hervor,
dass die Beimischung reicher upstarts auch in den aristokratischen Regionen
anfängt, die Überhand zu bekommen & in fact, is now swamping “society”.
Desto besser. Deine Beschreibung, wie das Circular, passen ganz auf unsre
Manchester
mock-“society”
& je mehr sich das feine Gesindel in London manchestrisirt, desto
erfreulicher für uns.
I am just now in the honey-moon of my newly-recovered
liberty, and you will not require to be told that I enjoy it amazingly. As my
eye, although very much better, still requires a little Schonung, I have not yet
settled down to regular work & indeed shall not be able to do so until all
my business affairs are regularly settled, which will take about a month. In the
mean time I walk about a good deal with
Tussy
& as
much
many
of the family, human and
canine,
as I can
induce
to go with us. We have just come back from a long walk through 
| the fields
to Heaton Chapel, about 5 or 6 miles the way we went, Tussy,
Lizzie
,
Mary
Ellen
, myself & two dogs, and I am specially instructed to
inform you that these two amiable ladies had two glasses of beer
a-piece
(this is the
vernacular
Lancashire in which I got my orders). No wonder I had to bring them home by the
train (we have a station about seven minutes’ walk from our house), but no
sooner arrived, than they walked, in common with me, into your Lager Beer. Now
they are getting their tea ready, or getting themselves ready for it, I don’t
know which, and after that there will be a reading of Irish novels which is
likely to last till bedtime or nearly so, unless relieved by a bit of talk about
the
“convicted
nation”. Anyhow, they seem to like
it and so it’s all right to me.
Inzwischen schicken sie Dir alle die herzlichsten
Grüsse, & ich thue dasselbe.
Von Herzen Dein
F. Engels.
Wenn Du &
Mohr
nicht vor Ende dieses
Monats nach Deutschland geht oder nicht vor Ende Sept
em
b
e
r
zurückkommt, so wär’ es wohl möglich dass ich Euch dort irgendwo träfe.