Ryde, England, 19 August 1892 
The Firs, Brading Road 

Dear Victor, 

That’s what comes of exuberance. Instead of gallivanting round 
with you and yours in Lunz or Vienna, I have got to stay here in 
Ryde, miserably cossetting what Heine called ‘my not altogether 
healthy body’; though walking and drinking are forbidden, boredom 
evidently is not. I had so very much looked forward to seeing Vienna 
at last, to being with you and all the others and, in particular, to be- 
coming personally acquainted with your wife * and children, and now 
this confounded business crops up. Besides, I had also intended to ob- 
tain the opinion of a Viennese or— possibly a/so—a Berlin doctor 
on this somewhat obscure case and to ask you, after acquainting you 
with the facts, which specialist you would recommend. For over here 
there are as many medical faculties as there are hospitals, and the 
only men whom family doctors recommend are those from the hospi- 
tal where they themselves did their training; this is not altogether 
a bad thing because they are the men they know best, but it narrows 
down the field of possible consultants very considerably and reduces 
the medical world of London to the dimensions of a small German 
university town. Accordingly, this sudden relapse is, in addition, posi- 
tively detrimental to me. 

Well, if there’s one consolation — it is that to postpone is not to de- 
fer indefinitely, and what has misfired one year may perhaps come off 
the next. At all events this has taught me a lesson which I shall not 
soon forget. To be completely done out of my summer trip— and 
what a trip! —is bad enough and I shall have cause enough to rue it 
this winter, for I know all too well that the slight change of air from 
London to Ryde °*° does not have anything like the same effect on 
my old carcase as a trip to the Continent and to the Alps in particu- 
lar. My health will not be as good this year as it was after the trips 
I made, first to America, ! then to Norway ° and, last year, to 

* Emma Adler 

Scotland and Ireland. ?** But I hope we'll get over it, in which case 
we shall definitely fix things up next year. For I have got to go to 
Vienna and, if possible, also to the Austrian Alps; the Swiss Alps har- 
bour too many Swiss and have already been turned into too much of 
a showplace, so I really would prefer Anzengruber’s peasants. And, 
by then, or so I hope, I should find you and your wife in perfect 
health, while I myself would again be in case to go climbing about in 
the mountains. Until next year, then! 

While here I’ve been dabbling in early Christianity and am read- 
ing Renan“ and the Bible. °**° Though shockingly superficial, Renan 
is a man of the world and as such his outlook is wider than that of the 
German scholastic theologians. Otherwise his book is a novel and 
what he said of Philostratus is equally applicable to himself, namely 
that it could be used as an historical source in the same way as, say, 
the novels of Alexandre Dumas pére could be used as a source on the 
period of the Fronde. In matters of detail I have caught him mak- 
ing the most shocking howlers. Moreover, he plagiarises the Germans 
with unparalleled effrontery. 

Louise will have passed on to you the information I sent her the 
day before yesterday about the cotton operatives in Lancashire and 
their sudden conversion to the eight hour day.” '5* The same sort of 
thing is happening daily. Yesterday meetings of delegates represent- 
ing entire districts again voted unanimously in favour of the 48 hour 
week, while in other districts the motion was carried in all cases 
with a majority, usually of two thirds. This has finally broken the 
back of the opposition in the working class. 

The Russians are unfortunate. First they have a famine which will 
recur again this year, if in more chronic form, and then the cholera. 
And now, when their friend Gladstone has come to the helm here, he 
has to appoint Rosebery, who refuses to have any truck with Glad- 
stone’s Russophilia, as his Foreign Secretary. 

August wants me to go to Berlin if at all possible. Well, I should like 
to, but can it be done? For the past ten days I have hardly set foot 
outside the garden gate and don’t yet know whether I am really on 
the mend. For the fact is that, if I bestir myself just a little too soon or 
a little too much, I may find myself back where I started. And I have 
got to make up my mind in ten days or a fortnight at the latest — well, 
we shall see. 

4 E. Renan, Histoire des origines du christianisme.-' See this volume, pp. 497, 503-04. 

So give my regards to all our friends and above all to your wife and 
children, and tell them how sorry I am not to have been able to come 
over this year. But next year I hope to make up for it. And warm re- 
gards to yourself from your crippled old 

F.E. 
I shall be staying here at least until the 31st of this month. °*°