The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 2 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~130,000 words · 599 passages
Cite this work
- APAFriedrich Engels. (n.d.). The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/friedrich-engels/the-condition-of-the-working-class-in-england-in-1844
- MLAFriedrich Engels. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/friedrich-engels/the-condition-of-the-working-class-in-england-in-1844.
- ChicagoFriedrich Engels. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/friedrich-engels/the-condition-of-the-working-class-in-england-in-1844.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The investigation Engels made at twenty-four into how the workers of Manchester actually lived, published in 1845.
Context and history
His father had sent him to work in a family cotton mill, and Engels did something else: he walked the districts, talked to people, read parliamentary reports and sanitary statistics, and wrote it all down. The result is at once an indictment and one of the first pieces of social fieldwork done in Europe: streets without drains, houses without windows, sixteen-hour days, children in the factories, life expectancy by neighbourhood. The book's strength is that almost all of it is documented and can be checked. It came out in German and took more than forty years to appear in English. It is also the text that convinced Marx that theory needed this kind of material.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
"The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying out. The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of 1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working-class, politically, into the tail of the 'great Liberal party,' the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed.…