Engels, F. (1845, 1987) The condition of the working class in England

Abstract

Friedrich Engels was born in Wuppertal, Germany, where his father owned a factory manufacturing textiles. He travelled to England in1842 to be the Manchester agent for his father’s business. Since his youth he had had a strong interest in philosophy, especially the work of Hegel, and while in England he became interested in the problems of the newly created urban working class produced by the industrial revolution. In 1845 he published The condition of the working class in England which was based not only in his own observations of working conditions but also on secondary sources and official documents. Engels is better known for his collaboration with Marx, which began in 1844, soon after Engels had adopted communist beliefs. Engels’ ideas contributed to the Manifesto of the Communist Party which was written by Marx in 1848. Engels also completed the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital, after Marx died. He was the sole author of Principles of communism (1847) – which was in some ways a first draft of the manifesto of the Communist Party – and Socialism: Utopian and scientific (1880). He died in London in 1895. Here we present an extract The condition of the working class in England (1845), which was the major text in which Engels dealt with the health consequences of capitalist industrialization and urbanisation. ... Such are the various working people’s quarters of Manchester as I had occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. If we briefly formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit that 350,000 working people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured by the contractor.

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