The Condition of the Working-Class in England

Glossary

C

Cellar Dwellings: Underground rooms used as housing—"perhaps with cellars used as dwellings" is part of Engels' template description of every English slum—counted city by city in the Great Towns survey as an index of how far a town's poverty goes. The comparative method is characteristic: Birmingham, he notes, has no cellar dwellings "though a few cellars are misused as workrooms," and correspondingly shows lower epidemic mortality than its neighbours, while Liverpool and Manchester house whole populations below street level.; Related: The Great Towns, Lodging-Houses, Manchester
Chartism: The movement for the People's Charter—the working masses' demand for "their share of political power"—which Engels treats as the political form of English working-class revolt, distinctive because the English "fight, not against the Government, but directly against the bourgeoisie." The book records the 1842 Manchester "universal turnout for the Charter and higher wages" and the internal split over "whether the Charter should be carried by physical or by moral force." Writing in 1892, Engels adds the postmortem: after the crash of 1847 and the Irish famine raised "the prospect of revolution," the French Revolution of 1848 frightened England's middle classes, and "at the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally."; Related: Trades Unions, The Turnout, The 1892 Preface
Commercial Crises: The periodic collapses of trade that punctuate the book's economic argument and supply some of its starkest numbers: in the 1842 crisis, an Anti-Corn Law League committee report found the poor-rate doubled, applicants for relief trebled or quintupled, and "a multitude of applicants belong to a class which had never before solicited relief." Engels' 1892 preface looks back on the pattern as settled fact—"a crisis every ten years, in 1857 as well as in 1866"—by then regarded as "natural, inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to." The crises periodically swell the unemployed reserve and undo whatever gains workers have made.; Related: The Reserve Army of Workers, Competition, Free Trade and the Corn Laws
Competition: The chapter-length analysis of the mechanism Engels treats as governing the whole system: the worker "rises and falls in value like a commodity"—"if the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their price falls," down to starvation for those "left in stock." His sharpest formulation targets the appearance of freedom: today's worker "seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year," being "the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class." Competition among workers depresses wages; competition among capitalists produces the periodic crises.; Related: The Reserve Army of Workers, Surplus Population, Commercial Crises
Cottage Industry: The pre-factory domestic system in which weavers worked at home on hand-looms, rented "a little piece of land" to cultivate in leisure hours, and "vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity." Engels refuses to romanticize it: the old weavers were "intellectually... dead," comfortable in a "silent vegetation" that was "cosily romantic as it was... nevertheless not worthy of human beings." The industrial revolution, on his account, destroyed this existence and, precisely by making workers "machines pure and simple," forced them "to think and demand a position worthy of men."; Related: The Industrial Revolution, The Spinning Jenny, The Agricultural Proletariat

F

Factory Hands: Workers in the mechanized textile mills, the subject of the book's longest industry chapter and, in Engels' ranking, the workers "most enlightened as to their own interests." The chapter compiles medical testimony on what mill work does to bodies—a Leeds surgeon reports children "much paler, and their fibre less vigorous," with "numberless cases of scrofula, lung trouble... arising from mill work," warning that without fresh country arrivals "the race of mill-hands would soon be wholly degenerate"—alongside the manufacturer's political grip on his operatives, marched "in rank and file to the polls" to vote for bourgeois candidates. It also narrates the ten-hours agitation from Sadler's committee onward.; Related: The Ten Hours' Bill, The Truck System, The Industrial Proletariat
Free Trade and the Corn Laws: The manufacturing capitalists' great political cause: "the capitalist class clamoured for Free Trade in corn," John Bright threatening to send "the starving population of the towns back to the country districts... not as paupers begging for bread, but as an army quartered upon the enemy." The 1892 preface calls the repeal of the Corn Laws "the victory of the manufacturing capitalist" over the landed aristocracy and dates from it the "new industrial epoch" of English world dominance; the body of the book uses an Anti-Corn Law League report as evidence for the 1842 crisis. Workers in the text are notably unsentimental about it—the Holmfirth weaver's letter jeers at "the noble-hearted Free Trade Clique" whose truck payments were themselves the reality of "Free Trade."; Related: The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie, Commercial Crises, Chartism

I

Irish Immigration: The short chapter arguing that mass immigration from famine-poor Ireland supplied England's industry with a labour reserve willing to work "for wages that will purchase him potatoes," thereby pressing down English wages and living standards from below—Engels blames crowding "many persons into a single room" partly on habits "implanted by the Irish immigration," while tracing the drink and squalor he describes to poverty and exclusion ("since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others"). The chapter quotes Carlyle's "wild Milesian" portrait approvingly, and its account of Irish character reflects the ethnic stereotyping standard in 1840s English writing on Ireland, running alongside its genuine economic argument about labour-supply competition.; Related: Competition, The Great Towns, Surplus Population

L

Labour as a Commodity: The premise Engels takes from the economists and presses to its conclusion: labour has "its price," and the worker "rises and falls in value like a commodity." His formulation of what distinguishes this from "the old, outspoken slavery" is one of the book's sharpest: the modern worker "seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class." This 1845 sketch anticipates the fuller wage-labour analysis he and Marx developed later.; Related: Competition, Surplus Population, The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie
Lodging-Houses: Commercial nightly-rent housing at the bottom of the urban market, documented in the Great Towns survey: Birmingham alone has "over four hundred," "nearly all disgustingly filthy and ill-smelling, the refuge of beggars, thieves, tramps, and prostitutes, who eat, drink, smoke, and sleep here without the slightest regard to comfort or decency." In Engels' argument they mark the stage below even the rented cottage or cellar—the point where housing dissolves into mere nightly shelter for the destitute and transient.; Related: Cellar Dwellings, The Great Towns

M

Malthusianism: The population doctrine of Malthus as it operates in the book: partially conceded as a description ("so far, Malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population" as to how the labour market treats unsaleable workers) and wholly rejected as an explanation, since for Engels the surplus is made by competition, not by nature. Its practical face is the New Poor Law's workhouse regime, which he says was designed by "the refined ingenuity of a Malthusian" to be "the most repulsive residence" imaginable so that only the utterly desperate would apply for relief.; Related: Surplus Population, The New Poor Law, Competition
Manchester: The book's central case study and Engels' own city—he worked there in his family's cotton firm—described street by street and, in his telling, built so that the business classes could travel for years "without ever seeing" the workers' quarters. It is the site of the notorious "Little Ireland" slum, of the 1842 turnout, and of the closing anecdote of the whole book: a bourgeois who listened quietly to Engels' catalogue of "the frightful condition of the working-people's quarters" and replied, "And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir." The 1892 preface notes that "Little Ireland" had since disappeared, while whole districts once "almost idyllic" had sunk into the same decay.; Related: The Great Towns, The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie, The Turnout

S

Social Murder: Engels' most famous charge, built by strict analogy: "When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder." When society places hundreds of proletarians where "they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death," knows it, and "yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder... since the offence is more one of omission than of commission." He credits the coinage to the workers themselves—"the English working-men call this 'social murder,' and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually"—and announces his task as proving the accusation from official evidence.; Related: The Great Towns, The Parliamentary Commission Reports, The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie
Surplus Population: The economists' term Engels turns against them: when too many workers are on hand, "want of work, poverty, and starvation, and consequent diseases arise, and the 'surplus population' is put out of the way." He concedes Malthus a limited point—"there are always more people on hand than can be maintained from the available means of subsistence"—but relocates the cause: "Surplus population is engendered rather by the competition of the workers among themselves," which forces each to labour to the limit of his strength, not by any natural law of reproduction. The surplus is thus a product of the system that then disclaims responsibility for it.; Related: Malthusianism, The Reserve Army of Workers, Competition

T

The 1892 Preface: Engels' retrospect written nearly fifty years after the book, and the first chapter the modern reader meets: it concedes that "the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous"—truck suppressed, the Ten Hours' Bill enacted, slums like "Little Ireland" swept away—while insisting the improvements were selective, benefiting the "'protected' sections" (factory hands and the great unions' skilled men) and financed by England's industrial monopoly. Large-scale capital, he argues, had simply outgrown "petty thefts": the reforms came "much against the spirit of Free Trade" but "quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother," and the mass of workers remained subject to the ten-year crisis cycle and the unemployed reserve.; Related: The Ten Hours' Bill, The Truck System, Chartism, The Reserve Army of Workers
The Agricultural Proletariat: The farm labourers created when "the former Union of industrial and agricultural work was dissolved, the abandoned fields thrown together into large farms, and the small peasants superseded by the overwhelming competition of the large farmers"—former landholders and leaseholders "now obliged to hire themselves as labourers." Their distress dates, in Engels' account, from the point when machinery's perpetual improvement "made it impossible for manufacture to absorb the whole surplus of the agricultural population." In his ranking of class consciousness they come last, "scarcely at all" enlightened as to their own interests—the fractions of the proletariat being political in direct proportion to their relation to manufacture.; Related: The Industrial Proletariat, Cottage Industry, Surplus Population
The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie: The closing chapter's indictment of the English middle class as a class for whom "all the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh." Its thesis sentence: "It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money," and its formula for the employment relation—"The manufacturer is Capital, the operative Labour"—with nothing human in between. The chapter also covers the bourgeoisie's legislative works, the New Poor Law chief among them. This is a more empirical, personally observed portrait than the Manifesto's abstract "bourgeoisie," three years before that pamphlet was written.; Related: The New Poor Law, Manchester, Social Murder, Free Trade and the Corn Laws
The Cottage System: The second of the "two further arrangements" (with truck) that "force the operative under the dominion of the manufacturer": housing owned by the employer and rented to the workers, making the roof over a family's head depend on the same man who pays—or stops—their wages. In the mining districts Engels calls it "universal, and here almost a necessity; but it is used here, too, for the better plundering of the workers," listing it alongside direct cheating like paying by measure while selling coal by weight, so that a not-quite-full tub earns "no pay whatever."; Related: The Truck System, The Mining Proletariat, Factory Hands
The Great Towns: The subject of the book's longest survey: London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, and above all Manchester, opened with the image of London as a place "where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end." The chapter's structural claim is that every great town has its slums built to a pattern—"the worst houses in the worst quarters," unpaved streets "filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters"—and that poverty has been assigned "a separate territory, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can." The street-by-street documentation, often from personal observation, is the book's signature method.; Related: Manchester, Cellar Dwellings, Lodging-Houses
The Industrial Proletariat: The new class the industrial revolution engendered, ordered in the book by nearness to manufacture: factory hands first ("eldest children of the industrial revolution," who "have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement"), then miners, then agricultural labourers. Engels' analytical premise is blunt: in manufacture "the human being, the worker, is regarded... simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages," and the same centralising force that concentrates capital concentrates population into manufacturing towns. The word names a specifically new formation, not a synonym for the poor of earlier centuries.; Related: Factory Hands, The Mining Proletariat, The Agricultural Proletariat
The Industrial Revolution: The transformation Engels dates from "the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton" in the later eighteenth century—"a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognised." England is "the classic soil of this transformation" and therefore "the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat." The term was still novel when Engels wrote in 1845; his framing of it as a social revolution comparable to France's political one ("As in France politics, so in England manufacture") predates its adoption by later historians.; Related: The Spinning Jenny, The Industrial Proletariat, Cottage Industry
The Mining Proletariat: The coal and metal miners—nearly 194,000 workers by the 1841 census tables the chapter reproduces, including thousands of women and children—created because industry's demand for fuel and metal "engendered a new proletariat." Engels' bill of particulars: ruined health, "danger of sudden loss of life," no schooling, and plunder on top of wages—truck "the rule, not the exception," the cottage system "universal," and payment rigged so that coal "is sold by weight" while "the worker's wages are reckoned chiefly by measure," a not-quite-full tub earning nothing at all.; Related: The Truck System, The Cottage System, The Industrial Proletariat
The New Poor Law: The 1834 act under which "all relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was admission to the workhouses immediately built." Engels reports the workhouses' popular name—"Poor Law Bastilles"—and their design logic: regulations "such as to frighten away every one who has the slightest prospect of life without this form of public charity," with food "worse than that of the most ill-paid working-man while employed, and the work harder," lest anyone prefer the workhouse to wage labour. Opposition to it, personified in the text by the imprisoned agitator Richard Oastler, ran through the factory districts alongside the ten-hours movement.; Related: Malthusianism, Surplus Population, The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie
The Parliamentary Commission Reports: The official investigations—reports of bodies like the Children's Employment Commission, factory-inquiry committees such as Sadler's of 1832, workhouse inspectors, and physicians' surveys—that form the evidentiary backbone of the book, quoted at length in nearly every chapter. Engels' method is to convict English society largely out of its own official mouth, citing surgeons on mill children's "stunted growth," inspectors' overcrowding counts, and commission testimony, while also flagging bias where he finds it (he calls Sadler's report "emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system, for party ends"). These government publications are the volumes later readers know collectively as the Blue Books.; Related: Social Murder, Factory Hands, The Ten Hours' Bill
The Reserve Army of Workers: Engels' early formulation of a concept later developed fully in Marx's Capital: "English manufacture must have, at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months." The reserve "is larger or smaller, according as the state of the market" demands, and its existence keeps wages down and the employed disciplined. Engels' own 1892 preface returns to the idea, noting that every improvement for the mass of workers "always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the unemployed reserve."; Related: Surplus Population, Competition, Commercial Crises
The Spinning Jenny: "The first invention which gave rise to a radical change in the state of the English workers": the hand-powered spinning machine "invented in the year 1764 by a weaver, James Hargreaves, of Standhill, near Blackburn," carrying "sixteen or eighteen" spindles "instead of one spindle like the ordinary spinning-wheel." Engels traces the chain of consequences—suddenly more yarn than weavers could work up, cheaper goods, rising demand—as the first link in the mechanization that produced the mule, the factory, and the industrial proletariat itself.; Related: The Industrial Revolution, Cottage Industry, Factory Hands
The Ten Hours' Bill: The demand "which should forbid all operatives under eighteen years of age to work longer than ten hours daily," made general throughout the manufacturing population by Trades Union agitation and taken up in Parliament by "the philanthropic section of the Tory party, then led by Michael Sadler," whose 1832 committee produced the first great (if, Engels says, partisan) exposure of the factory system. Writing in 1892, Engels records both its eventual enactment and his considered verdict: fixing the working day "within relatively rational limits has restored their physical constitution" and made the factory hands one of only two "'protected' sections" of the working class to see permanent improvement.; Related: Factory Hands, The Parliamentary Commission Reports, The 1892 Preface
The Truck System: "The payment of the operatives in goods" rather than cash: the manufacturer opens a shop—the "Tommy shop," "usually charging twenty-five to thirty per cent. more than others"—and pays wages "in requisitions on the shop instead of money," trapping workers in overpriced credit. The Truck Act of 1831 declared such payment "void and illegal," but Engels reports that "like most other English laws, this has been enforced only here and there," with the system flourishing "disguised or undisguised" in the countryside, in Leicester's hosiery trade, and above all in mining, where he calls it "the rule, not the exception." His 1892 preface counts its suppression among the reforms big capital could by then afford.; Related: The Cottage System, The Mining Proletariat, Factory Hands
The Turnout: The period word for a strike, which Engels defends against the charge of cowardice with a pointed comparison: "courage is required for a turnout, often indeed much loftier courage, much bolder, firmer determination than for an insurrection," because it means facing "gradual starvation" with wife and children "for months together, and stand firm and unshaken through it all." The great example in the text is the 1842 general turnout at Manchester "for the Charter and higher wages," born, like the Lyons revolt, of "stagnation in business, and the want consequent upon it."; Related: Trades Unions, Chartism
Trades Unions: The workers' combinations made lawful when the 1824 repeal of the anti-coalition laws gave working men "the right of free association," previously "restricted to the aristocracy and bourgeoisie"; before that date only secret societies existed, like the Glasgow weavers' associations whose enforcement ran to vitriol-throwing. Their objects, as the text lists them: "to deal, en masse, as a power, with the employers; to regulate the rate of wages according to the profit of the latter... and to keep it uniform in each trade throughout the country," ordering strikes where employers refused the scale. Engels' 1892 preface notes the later irony that the largest manufacturers eventually learned "to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades' Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes—at opportune times—a powerful means to serve their own ends."; Related: The Turnout, Chartism, The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie