Engels, Friedrich

(1820 -1895)

Information

Later Visits

In 1875 Engels was in Ramsgate with Lizzie Burns from mid-August to 22nd September. In 1876 they stayed at 3 Adelaide Gardens from 20th May to 2nd June and later that year they were at 11 Camden Square from 24th July to 1st September with Jenny, Marx’s wife. In a letter to a friend, Engels mentioned, almost guiltily, the ‘very idle life’ they had been leading, the fine weather and ‘the excellent bottled beer’. In a letter to Marx he referred once more to the changing social character of the holidaymakers.
There is a poignant note to the letter Engels wrote to Marx in 1877 from 2 Adelaide Gardens, where he had taken Lizzie for her failing health from 11th July to 28th August. ‘The magic powers of sea bathing have failed her for the first time’. The next year his mistress was dead. After her death he did not return to Ramsgate until 1880 when he spent several days with the whole Marx family at 10 Cumberland Road. Thereafter he preferred to holiday elsewhere, like Bridlington, where, as he wrote to Marx’s son-in-law, unlike Ramsgate, the atmosphere was ‘more provincial’ and there were ‘no ‘ARRYS’.

Quotations

25th August 1876
To Marx,
At this moment Ramsgate is populated almost exclusively by small GREENGROCERS and other quite small SHOPKEEPERS from London. These people stay here a week, for as long as the RETURN TICKET is valid, and then make way for others of the same ilk. It’s the former day-trip public which now takes a week off. At first sight one would think they were working men, but their conversation immediately betrays the fact that they are RATHER ABOVE THAT and belong to quite the most disagreeable stratum of London society – they’re the kind who, in speech and manner, are already preparing themselves, after the inevitably pending bankruptcy, for the no less inevitably impending career of COSTERMONGER.