286 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTclippings from German, English, and French newspapers dealing
with astronomy, linguistics, science, politics, China, the American
Civil War, labor items, the northern lights, eclipses, comets, me
teors and planets, meteorology, mathematics and physics, spirit
ualism, telepathy, and phrenology. The last-named, which in
trigued so many of his generation, he disposed of with the terse
comment, "I know just enough about this skull business to know
it is a colossal error."
Among his papers he also preserved a tracing made by his own
hand of a cartoon referring to him and his reforms, which had
appeared in the Fliegende Blatter of Munich in 1851.^1 He was
jealous of his reputation and almost pathologically concerned
with what impression he may have made on the world at large.
When an acquaintance in 1869 called his attention to a brief ac
count of his career in a German Conversations-Lexicon, Weitling
became furious because of what he considered unfair references
to his published works and attributed authorship of the unsatis
factory article to a Jew. It should be added, however, that he pre
served both favorable and unfavorable comments about himself
in his collection of clippings. Late in life, during a serious illness,
he unfortunately destroyed many of his manuscript letters and
other papers.^2
Though forced to rely for a livelihood primarily on his work
as a tailor and on the help which the two women members of his
family could give him, Weitling once held a political appointment
for a short time. He apparently got the appointment as registrar
of immigrants at Castle Garden through friends in the Demo
cratic party, i.e., Tammany Hall. The duties of the post involved
preparing annual reports and registering the passengers who ar
rived on immigrant ships from the British Isles and Germany.
Looking after the German immigrants soon became his chief re-
(^1) Fliegende Blatter (Munich), XII (1851), 152.
(^2) For another reference to Weitling, see Fritz Ens, Carl Schaeffer, and Franz
Zinkernagel (eds.), Hebbels Werke (Leipzig, 1913), I. In "Mutter und Kind,"
Canto 7, line 1903, written in 1858, Hebbel mistakenly referred to Weitling as
though he had died.