Manchester, Saturday, 9 July [1853] 

Dear Marx, 

At four o’clock this morning my old landlady roused me from 
my slumbers saying there was a gentleman wanting to speak to 
me. Dragging myself out of bed, I went to the door where I found 
a little man with a cas, a colossal trunk and a travelling bag, who 
told me his name was Jacobi and that you and Pieper had sent 
him to me. Marx and Pieper! I thought. Who the devil can this 

2 at a moment - > the most necessary things 

Jacobi be? Is he the illegitimate son of one in K6nigsberg* or 
what? Until finally the little man pulled your letter” out of his 
pocket, somewhat taken aback at not being instantly welcomed 
with open arms, stranger though he was—whereupon it occurred 
to me that he was, as your letter confirmed, the communist trial 
Jacobi to whom I hadn’t given a thought, believing him long since 
well and truly lodged in a Prussian prison cell. Que faire? I took 
him in, together with his belongings and, drunk with sleep, 
chatted with him for half an hour before offering him my sofa to 
sleep on, for the house was crammen rut of people. Luckily my old 
man is out of town until tomorrow and so, this very morning, I 
took the good party martyr by the collar, engaged lodgings for 
him and forbade him to show his face here until my old man’s 
departure raises the interdict. 

This warlike’ Westphalian way of behaving, the doltishness 
of spending a whole week in London and then choosing a train 
that arrives in the middle of the night and, on the pretext of not 
knowing what’s what, turning a man’s house upside down and 
imposing himself, all this was no more calculated to predispose me 
in his favour than was the discreet question put to me at the very 
outset as to how I stood with my old man. Further exchanges have 
raised the fellow in my estimation a little, but not very much. He 
proposes to call on Borchardt with letters from you and Kinkel 
(almost beats Marx and Pieper), to burst in on little Heckscher 
without ceremony and without an introduction in the hope that 
the latter will immediately provide him with all possible informa- 
tion about his trave and, for sheer joy at the prospect of fresh 
‘scientific’ intercourse, make half his practice over to his new 
competitor—and other such philistine conceits. His foolishness in 
going to Kinkel will do him more harm than good. Kinkel gives 
him letters not to Mr but to Mrs Schunck, a piece of effrontery 
which is also a gross and direct breach of English etiquette, and 
again, if Mr Kinkel, who was fed and paid cash for his buffooneries 
on German literature, if Monsieur Gottfried, I say, believes he can 
send letters of recommendation (other than fund-raising licences) 
d’égal a égal to these merchants, he’s damned weil mistaken. Apart 
from that, Monsieur Jacobi, a ce qu’il me parait; is not the man to 
make his fortune here. 

As soon as my old man has left, I'll send you some money. I 

4 Dr Johann Jacoby - > See previous letter. - © What’s to be done? - ¢ Marx uses 
the word ‘kriegisch’, which may mean ‘warlike’ or may be a pun on the name 
‘Kriege’. - © as between equals - f or so it seems to me 

can’t very well take anything before that, since I run the risk every 
day that he will check my accounts, which alone would be enough 
to provoke a lively argument of the kind I prefer to settle in 
writing. 

The idea that I am not writing because of ‘pique’ made me 
laugh. De quoi donc?* 

Regards to your wife and children and do your best to stick it 
out, at least until my hands are free again—within the week, I 
hope. 

Your 

F. E.