London, 9 December 1890 
122 Regent’s Park Road, N.W. 

Dear Comrade Mohrhenn, 

I really must thank you most warmly for the trouble you have 
taken over the photographs of my childhood home in the Bruch. 
They have given me enormous pleasure and have recalled many 
a youthful prank connected with the front doorstep and this or that 
room or window. Old Miss Demuth is right — the house in the Bruch, 
which in my time was No. 800, is the right one; behind it was our gar- 
den, between it and the Engels-Gang lay the bleachery and opposite 
that the houses belonging to my grandfather Caspar and his brother 
Benjamin Engels in which my uncles, Caspar and August, subse- 
quently lived. I believe I can just remember Miss Demuth; I must 
have seen her once or twice at my cousin Caspar’s house when we 
were both young. No doubt she can tell you about our original family 
home where my grandfather was born. It was up at the top of the En- 
gels-Gang, where it joins the Bruch, opposite the path which leads up 
to the B6oken and which was then nameless. It was a typical lower 
middle class, two-storied house; when I was young the ground floor 
was used for storage, while the upper floor was occupied by two of my 
grandparents’ former maids, by then pensioned off, who were known 
as Driitschen and Mineken. They would often treat us children to 
spiced apples and bread. The house was demolished when the railway 
came. 

Even in those days we used to say that the Bruch wasn’t anything 
like as god-fearing as it used to be and not so many years ago my 
brother Rudolf was quite outspoken on the subject.°’ Pointing at the 
house opposite, where a man called Ottenbruch had once lived and 
which bore an inn sign, he said: ‘See that place? Nowadays it’s a fa- 
vourite haunt for Social-Democrats!? Social-Democrats in the 
Bruch — that was, to be sure, a tremendous revolution as compared 
with 50 years before. 

It would certainly be a far greater one, however, if our old house 

were to become a Social-Democratic press. But you would have to go 
about it very artfully. Unless it’s been resold, the house now belongs 
to my brother Hermann, and he wouldn’t be likely to sell it if he knew 
what purpose you meant to put it to. Well, I don’t suppose anything 
will come of that just yet—it would be altogether too good to be true. 

Well, good-bye. Soom day Ah’ll coom to Barmen agean, an’ then 
Ah’ll coom an’ see thi, an’ then tha can tell me baht tmucky tricks 
they played on thi wi’ you Anti-Socialist Law o’ theirn.* 

Kindest regards, 

Yours, 

F. Engels