the condition of the working class in england 1845

It was also clear that the problem of the proletariat was not merely local or national, but international. Villermé’s Tableau de l’Etat Physique et Moral des Ouvriers employés dans les Manufactures de Coton, de Laine et de Soie (Study of the Physical Condition of Cotton, Wool and Silk Workers, 1840) is a distinguished piece of social investigation.

The 1830s and 40s, a decisive period in the evolution of capitalism and the working-class movement, saw books, pamphlets and inquiries into the condition of the working classes multiplying all over western Europe.Īlso read: Remembering Friedrich Engels at 200, the Philosopher of ScienceĮngels’ book is the most eminent, though L. By the 1830s, it had become clear to every intelligent observer that the economically advanced parts of Europe faced a social problem which was no longer simply that of ‘the poor’ but of a historically unprecedented class, the proletariat. The idea of writing a book about the condition of the working classes was not in itself original. It thus took the best part of a half-century for this masterpiece about early industrial England to reach the country which was its subject. The book appeared in its final form in Leipzig in the summer of 1845 and was published in English, with slight revisions by the author but substantial prefaces in 1887 (American edition) and 1892 (British edition). Like his slightly older contemporary Karl Marx, he became a ‘left Hegelian’, leaning increasingly towards communism and contributing to various periodicals and publications in which the German left attempted to formulate its critique of society.Įngels left for England in the autumn of 1842, making his first personal contact with Marx on the way, and remained there for the better part of two years, observing, studying, and formulating his ideas. Surrounded by the horrors of early industrial capitalism and reacting to the narrow and self-righteous mores at home, he took the usual road of progressive young German intellectuals in the late 1830s. He then points to the irony ‘that such unleavened exploitation is actively sanctioned by the Communist Party of China’.Įngels, born 200 years ago in Barmen on November 28 to a family of wealthy cotton manufacturers, was just 24 when he wrote the book. Towards the very end of his entertaining and sympathetic biography of Friedrich Engels, Tristram Hunt cites the comparison made by a Chinese scholar, Ching Kwan Lee, between the horrific working conditions in an 1840s Manchester cotton mill described by Engels in his seminal work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, and the factory experiences of a migrant worker in Shenzen 160 years later.

The condition of the working class in england 1845