The Condition of the Working-Class in England
Engels
1845
The Condition of the Working-Class in England
Friedrich Engels · 1845
A 24-year-old walks Manchester's slums and writes down what industrialization actually cost.
13 chapters · 116,040 words · ~8.8 hr read
In 1844 Engels spent his days in a Manchester cotton firm and his nights walking the streets the factory system built, cross-checking what he saw against the government's own commission reports. The result is the empirical foundation under everything he and Marx wrote afterward — class struggle here is not a theory but a walked geography of courts, cellars, mills, and mines. And the book comes with its own 50-years-later verdict: the 1892 preface, written by the aging Engels, on what came true, what improved, and why he still thought the cause lay in the system itself.
Contents
The Prefaces
Engels's 1892 preface — his own verdict on the book fifty years on — and the Introduction's history of how the factory system unmade the old weaver's world.
The Survey
The evidence, trade by trade and town by town: the great towns, competition and immigration, the factory hands, the mines, and the fields.
The Verdict
The closing indictment of the bourgeoisie — and the prediction of a revolution that the 1892 preface would have to answer for.