The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels/Chapter 10
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In the meantime, Engels' father was not content to see his son in the midst of the revolutionary movement in England, and he wrote offering him a post in Calcutta; this, however, Engels refused. He found, however, that by means of journalism, which was the career he had decided to follow, he could earn no more than enough to keep himself.
On the other hand, Marx had a wife and three young children, and could, by means of his writings, earn very little to support his family. Engels felt he could not stand by and see a great man like Marx, whose genius he recognised from the first days of their more intimate relations in Paris, waste his strength in petty writings, for a living. Under these circumstances, he decided that he must earn enough to be able to support Marx, while the latter went on as far as possible with the working out of the economic and philosophic theories they held in common. Consequently, although he hated the idea, he decided, after all, to go back into his father's business. In 1850 we therefore find him back in Manchester as a clerk at the cotton mill of Ermen and Engels, and in December of that year Mrs. Marx writes to thank him for his sympathy with them in the loss of their baby. She says that his letter had comforted her greatly in her sorrow. "My husband and all of us have missed you very much and have often longed to have you with us. Still, I am glad you have gone and are on the way to become a great cotton lord! …" She advises him to make himself indispensable to his father, and "I already see you in imagination as Frederick Engels, junior partner of the senior Engels, and the best of it all is that in spite of all cotton trade you will still remain the old Fritz … and will not become estranged from the holy cause of freedom … the children chatter much about uncle Angels, and the small Till sings the song you have taught him, fine. …"
For the next twenty years, Engels and Marx saw one another only for brief intervals from time to time, but they maintained constant intellectual intercourse by corresponding almost daily. No sooner did any idea on economic science or philosophy strike one of them, than he immediately communicated it to the other, asking for his opinion, advice, and further elucidation by means of new facts the other might possess. Whilst in Manchester, Engels, besides his work in the business, continued his studies particularly on military history and science. He also worked at comparative philology and the natural sciences. Speaking of his study of Russian, March, 1852, he deplores the little time he gets for the study of the Slav question, at which he was then working. He would like to write more for Ernest Jones' paper, but what with spending the whole day in the office, writing a weekly report to his father, the Tribune article, and almost weekly articles for Wehdemeyer, he has a bit more than he can manage. He must spend some regular time on the Slav question—"I have pegged away at Russian for the last fourteen days, and am fairly well on with the grammar, another two or three months will give me the necessary vocabulary, and then I can start doing something else. I must finish with the Slav languages this year, and in reality they are not so very difficult. Apart from the intrinsic interest the subject has for me, I am also led thereto by the consideration that at least one of us should know the languages, history, literature, and the details of the social institutions of just those nations with whom we shall directly come into conflict. … Bakunin has only become of some importance because no one knows Russian. And the old pan-Slav trickery that the old Slav communal ownership can be transformed into Communism, and that the Russian peasants are to be regarded as born Communists, will again be widely canvassed."
In 1859, during the Italian war, Engels published the pamphlet The Po and the Rhine. Marx was enthusiastic in its praise when he read the manuscript. In accordance with his advice, it was published anonymously at first, in order that it might be "attributed to some high-placed general," and in May, 1861, on the occasion of a trip to Germany, Marx writes to Engels saying that in high military circles the pamphlet is indeed so regarded.
After the conclusion of the Italian war, Engels wrote another pamphlet, entitled Savoy, Nice and the Rhine, and in 1865, in the pamphlet The Prussian Military Question and the German Labour Party, Engels attacked the incompetency and half-heartedness of the liberals and radicals, pointing out that a solution of the military problems of Prussia, as of every other serious question, could only be arrived at by a proletarian party.
In the middle of the sixties, the Labour movement began to revive in England and the Continent, and in 1864 the International Workingmen's Association was formed. Though Marx was the intellectual leader of the International, Engels, too, did a great deal of work for it.