Eastbourne, 29 August 1887 

Dear Mr Schoenlank, 

Your letter, forwarded to me here by Kautsky, places me in something 
of a quandary. I read with interest the excerpts, published in the Neue 
Zeit, from your valuable work on the looking-glass industry and would 
not object on principle to your doing me the honour of dedicating the 
book to me.'%¢ But, in the first place, dedications are now rather out of 
fashion and, in the second, Marx and I have always felt a certain aversion 
to such more or less uncalled-for-tributes. And at present I happen to be 
in a frame of mind which makes me think my merits grossly overrated 
in some quarters. If one is so fortunate as to collaborate for forty years 
with a greater man and measure oneself against him day by day, one is 
given the chance of evaluating one’s own achievements in accordance 
with a true standard. And I feel instinctively that to place any undue 
emphasis on my own activities is unwittingly to detract from what we all 
of us owe to Marx. 

Nor can I agree with you when you dub me the father of descriptive 
economics. You will find descriptive economics in Petty, Boisguillebert, 
Vauban, and Adam Smith, to name only a few. Such accounts, notably of 
proletarian conditions, were written by Frenchmen and Englishmen 
before I did mine. It was just that I was lucky enough to be precipitated 
into the heart of modern large-scale industry and to be the first whose 
eyes were opened to its implications—at any rate the most immediate 
ones. 

So from a personal point of view, I would sooner you abandoned your 
intention, and this solely on the grounds outlined above. But should you 
fail to be convinced by them, I would not venture to dictate what you 

should do. 

Yours very faithfully, 
Fr. Engels