London as usual, October 30th 1872 

My dear Jenny, 

You must consider me an awfully cruel individual to think that I 
should be capable to poison, by malice prepensée, even with one drop 
of vinegar, the sweetness of your honeymoon. If Mottershead or 
Guillaume said such a thing of me, I should not wonder, but you! 
Indeed I never thought that there was in one of the numbers that 
little entrefilet? about a certain great man‘ whom I better not 
name, and if I had seen it I should have kept the number back or 
used Russian censorship to tease you a bit. 

Your account of Oxford people only gives a sad confirmation to 
the sad fact that landladies are the same all the world over, indeed 
one does not know which are the worst, landladies or landlords. 
It’s the difference of retail and wholesale which distinguishes the 
landlady of Stanhope House from the Marquis of Westminster,“ 
the principle is the same. 

a Laura Lafargue - > note; presumably ‘Proudhon y las huelgas’, L’Emancipacién, 
No. 68, 5 October 1872. -¢ P. J. Proudhon - 4 owner of residential areas in 
London 

Now the Lafargues are here™ and you no doubt now and then 
feel inclined to come over here, I hope you will recollect that there 
is always plenty of accommodation, both for you and for the 
Longuet of all Charlies, at our house, and he shall find a bed 
where he can stretch himself without laying crossways. And as I 
am on this subject, an idea strikes me. To-morrow night seven 
sharp we shall have the whole of your house, Lafargues and 
Ellen? and all, here for dinner, and would it not be a nice surprise 
if they found you here? I could not well write about this before, as 
the thing was only finally settled to-day, Mohr being so very 
uncertain on account of his hard work; but I know you’re quite 
capable of making up your mind even to-morrow morning, and so 
I hope you will come. And as there are generally such things to be 
had as return tickets available for three or four days, you might 
stay a few days here, and perhaps Longuet finds time to come on 
Saturday to take you back on Sunday or Monday morning. If you 
leave by 2.30 train Gf my old railway guide be still correct) you will 
be here in very good time, and indeed we might go across to 
Maitland Park” before dinner and see how they are getting on. I 
hope you will ruminate this suggestion to-morrow morning over 
breakfast and find it excellent. 

As to the purs, impurs and demipurs‘ I see very little of 
them, the purs are going to publish a pamphlet* containing 
all their grievances but it is still a mystery to me whether they 
will say much about us. At all events they are going to organise 
une société indépendente ot toute tendence anti-révolutionnaire serait 
exclue.© 

Last Sunday‘ Mohr delivered a lecture before the Knoten. 
brought a German chemical manufacturer, friend of Schorlem- 
mer’s (‘not unlike your brothers, but otherwise a_ typically 
easy-going son of the Palatinate’, as Schorlemmer described him in 
his unsealed letter!) who permitted himself one or two objections 
but was pretty well rebuffed by Lessner and a few other working 
men. 

So I am counting on your innate energy to make a bold decision 
and come here tomorrow; that would be an enormous pleasure. 

605 7 

a Helene Demuth - © the area where the Marx family lived - © pure, the impure and 
the semi-pure - 9 Internationale et révolution - ¢ an independent society from which all 
anti-revolutionary tendencies would be excluded - f 27 October - 8 Thus far English 
in the original. The rest of the letter is in German. 

My wife? and Pumps” join me in sending you both our best 
wishes. 

Your old 
F. Engels 

This page has, of course, been written in German especially for 
Longuet’s benefit. Lafargue is quite good at German and could 
follow Mohr’s lecture fairly well.