The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 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. 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." 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. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/friedrich-engels/the-condition-of-the-working-class-in-england-in-1844.
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.
March 1892 edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 With a Preface written in 1892 by FREDERICK ENGELS _Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky_ _London_ GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD _Museum Street_ PREFACE The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was first issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young, twentyfour years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed. It was translated into English, in 1885, by an American lady, Mrs. F. Kelley Wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in New York. The American edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been extensively circulated on this side of the Atlantic, the present English copyright edition is brought out with the full consent of all parties interested. For the American edition, a new Preface and an Appendix were written in English by the author. The first had little to do with the book itself; it discussed the American Working-Class Movement of the day, and is, therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second--the original preface--is largely made use of in the present introductory remarks. The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and,