KARL MARX

LONDON 2 49
friendship between the two men may be attributable partly to this later
sifting and partly also to the fact that both correspondents (particularly
in the early 1850s) suspected that the authorities were intercepting their
letters.
Engels' move to Manchester in 1850 meant taking up where he had
left off eight years previously. The split in the Communist League and
the failure of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue removed his chief reason
for remaining in London; he had to earn his living; and his mother, to
whom he was very attached, urged on him at least an outward reconciliation
with his father. There was no representative of the Engels family
in the Manchester branch of the firm of Ermen and Engels, and his father
agreed to his acting in the family's interests there. The father's consent
was reluctant at first, but it turned to enthusiasm after plans to send his
son either to Calcutta or to America had failed, and after Engels had
demonstrated in his reports back to Barmen his capacity to handle business.
Early in 1851 his situation became more permanent, though some
difficulties still remained:
the problem is [he wrote to Marx], to have an official position as
representative of my father vis-a-vis the Ermens, and yet have no official
position inside the firm here entailing an obligation to work and a
salary from the firm. However, I hope to achieve it; my business letters
have enchanted my father and he considers my remaining here a great
sacrifice on my part. 162
When his father came over to Britain in July 1851 the matter was settled
to the satisfaction of both: Engels was to stay in Manchester for at least
three years. He later reckoned to have made more than £230 in his first
year there. His father, during his annual inspection the following year,
drew up a new contract with his partners that provided his son with an
increasing proportion of the profits, and by the end of the decade Engels'
income was over £1000 a year. Engels was, as Marx remarked, 'very
exact' 163 in matters of money and this money enabled him to act as Dutch
uncle to the entire 'Marx party'. Dronke received money from him, so
did Pieper; Liebknecht was fitted out, at Engels' expense, with a new set
of clothes in which to apply for a tutorship. But the lion's share went to
Marx: in some years Engels seems to have given him more than he spent
on himself. These sums of money - sometimes sent in postal orders,
sometimes in £1 or £5 notes cut in half and sent in separate letters -
often saved the unworldly Marx from complete disaster. 'Karl was frightfully
happy', wrote Jenny on one occasion, 'when he heard the fateful
double knock of the postman. "There's Frederic, £2, saved!" he cried