Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class

by Steven Marcus, Marcus Aurelius

Reprint. Originally published: 1st ed. New York: Random House, [1974].

Genres: History, Philosophy, Economics, Biography

271 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Steven Marcus is George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University and was Dean of Columbia University from 1993-1995. He is also the author of Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey and Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis and has edited, together with Lionel Trilling, the one-volume edition of Ernest Jones's The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. His essays and reviews have appeared in many periodicals, including Commentary, The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and The New Statesman.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inspired by the move of my niece to Manchester, I picked this item up. It is a detailed review of Friedrich Engels' first book, his account of Manchester published in 1844. Written by a sympathetic literature professor, it's a bit different in its approach from what one might expect. Although sociological, political and economical considerations appear alongside relevant biographical information, the author also attempts to psychologize Engels and to intelligently speculate about the philosophical unpinnings of his work within the cultural context of his times. Thus there is much about Engels' father on the one hand and about Hegel and Carlyle on the other.

[Marius Bagu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book!

While the author himself seems to be a fanatic socialist, and very much in love with the persona of Engels, his insights and commentary are of high quality. I must be just, thus objective and fair, and give credit where credit is due, regardless of the writer’s personal and political views. And thus, while I find author’s sympathy toward Communists, and especially Engels himself, repugnant, he does a very good job in writing this book.

Engels, and many other socialists, though I despise them, and with objective reason, nonetheless, have pointed out many problems of Laissez-faire Capitalism that took place during the Industrial Revolution and it’s aftermath. Some of their conclusions, and especially the solutions proposed by them, to the problems of Laissez-faire Capitalism are abhorrent, repugnant, and wicked, and that’s here nor there. The precursor to their conclusions and solutions are especially the well-known Bolshevik Revolution, which on it’s own brought death, oppression, and misery to tens of innocent millions of people.

Many things that Engels wrote in his own book, The Conditions of the English Working Class, are historically accurate. That’s the truth that Laissez-faire Capitalists, Libertarians, and Anarcho-Capitalists have to swallow and take into account.

Upon many things that Engels touched in The Conditions of the English Working Class, and these have a lot of historical background, are:
- The oppression of the poor and needy, and of the workers in general.
- The oppression of women and children. Women who barely gave birth had to go back to the factory and work long hours, even shifts of 12 hours a day, which is insane. Children, as well, had to work between 10, 12, and even 14 hours a day, and that even starting from a young age as 9. Again, this is insanity.
- The lack of a minimum wage law gave the masters leeway to abuse the workers, and not only to give them, the simple workers in factories, subsistence pay, but to even take advantage and cut, time after time, their salaries. And here is the thing, there was no need for that. The profit margins were high. Again, the wickedness of human kind. What the evilness of men can do when there is no restrain. It is abhorrent. Wickedness of the highest order!
- The lack of union rights gave the masters free reign to crush the seemingly unions that workers created in order to get at least a scrap of justice.
- Because the pay was so bad, the living conditions were execrable, and they barely could get on from day to day. Not talking about good food, but even this was let’s say, for the lack of a better word, a privilege.
- Medical Care? You wish! Total indifference of the politicians to the plight of the poor, the needy and the simple worker!
- In the absence of a law to stipulate a maximum hours of work per week or even day, the workers, men, women, and even children, as I said, had to work long shifts. Men, especially, had to work, day after day, even up to 16 hours shifts.
- Let us not forget about the grueling working conditions, the heat, and the misery that the workers had to endure inside the factories.

Let me put forth a quote from Engels' book, as to give an idea of the state of things for the simple working class people, of those who were poor and needy. Thus, he justly gives this account of things:
"As in life, so in death. The poor are dumped into the earth like infected cattle. The pauper burial ground of St. Brides, London, is a bare morass, in use as a cemetery since the time of Charles II., and filled with heaps of bones; every Wednesday the paupers are thrown into a ditch fourteen feet deep; a curate rattles through the Litany at the top of his speed; the ditch is loosely covered in, to be reopened the next Wednesday, and filled with corpses as long as one more can be forced in. The putrefaction thus engendered contaminates the whole neighbour hood. In Manchester, the pauper burial-ground lies opposite to the Old Town, along the Irk; this, too, is a rough, desolate place. About two years ago a railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery, how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed bodies to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it happened, and piles were driven into newly made graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in further detail."

I have no words to describe his account also. I am speechless. Every word I would use would not comprehend the whole subject, and I would do an injustice to the entire issue.

While Engels himself realized all these problems and injustices, instead of trying to find just and better solutions, as I said, the reform of and through legislation, he and Marx came up with the Communist Manifesto. Socialists like Engels, Marx and Owen understood perfectly why Laissez-faire Capitalism is destructive for the well-being of society as a whole, but they themselves went overboard and landed in Lala Land, and that’s a real shame.

What is interesting, and here is something that Socialists, in their close-mindedness could not comprehend, is that there were simple workers who were oppressed and abused, and as soon as they found a way to become masters themselves, they did exactly as their own masters have done previously to them. In other words, the idea of class struggle has no objective sense. It is stupid from the get-go. The problem was not the fact that there were classes in society, but the lack of justice in the economy, and lack of restrain to the evil behavior of the individuals. What was necessary, in simple words, were Labor Laws. That’s all. No utopia, no Lala Land, no fantasies. Labor Laws. Period!

Again, the book is excellent. The author, even though he is not shy to show his sympathy toward Engels, does a really great job and his commentary is of high quality.

Glad I read this book!

[Bernard English · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apart from reviewing some of the key points from Engels book, such as the assertion that "When they [members of the working class] perish they are the victims of murder. Yet it is a very odd kind of murder, and this on several counts: [quoting Engels] 'no one can defend himself against it'" Engels is further quoted as writing, 'it does not appear to be a murder since the murder is not seen. Everyone and yet no one is responsible for the murder.'

What Marcus does is situate Engels into the times, so although Engels' courage in exposing the brutality of English workers stands out, he is nonetheless connected to middle class values and doesn't come across as just an freakish moralist. For example Marcuse points out that Engels "believes unwaveringly in the gospel of work." In fact, I believe he calls Engels a typical Victorian, but couldn't locate that quote. Reading it did just enough to want to get me to read Engels' original work. What you probably can't get from the original, is the reaction of some other famous Victorians to seeing Manchester, the most famous of which was Alexis de Tocqueville."

[Jim Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Marcus book is an excellent complement to Engels’s, The Condition of the English Working Class and is best read after Engels youthful but brilliant and moving book about the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the lives of working people and bourgeois alike of the 1840s.

His book also nicely argues for an appreciation of Engels Hegelian methodology, which I was only dimmy aware of when I first read The Condition.

My only criticism of the book is that Marcus makes absolutely no effort to address Engels’ anti-Irish racism which is especially evident in the chapter on “Irish Immigration.”

If you read Engels book then this is a must-read follow-up book that you will very much enjoy, too.

[Whitney Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read out of curiosity to learn more about unions and the history of working class labor movements.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Manchester for its simultaneously dazzling and dreary history, so I was excited to read about its makeup and character at that time. At the time of writing “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844”, 64% of Manchester was working class, 74% of Salford was, and outlying communities were 90% working class. I love histories of pestilent, grimy England during this period, which I got a little of with this book, but not a lot. The Poor Law Reform Act of 1834 created the workhouse. Handlooms came out of the domestic space and became industrial nightmares. Factory owners claimed that the workers liked the intense heat created by the friction of the looms. Prior to Engels’ great study, writers such as Carlyle, Disraeli, and sadly even Dickens, wrote about the wonder of the factories and the looms is mythmaking or mystical terms, with scant cognition of the poor health of the girls working in them. Indeed, until the middle class had a firmer grasp on what conditions were actually like, there would be no way to help the working class. After “Condition of the Working Class” writers such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Dickens’ later works dealt with the various strata of society more realistically. Manchester was then described as a spider with legs and web stretching outward to the cities and town beyond, or as the chimney of the world, or as a sewer spewing gold.

The author spends the next quarter of the book describing the means by which Engels threw himself wholeheartedly into Manchester’s domestic life, workers’ meetings, and squalor, learning how to be truly fluent in Mancunian life. There is also attention paid to his relationship with Irish factory girl Mary Burns, who would become like a common-law wife to him until her death in 1863. The author also spends time examining Engels’ strained relationship with his evangelical father.

This may not have been the book for me. I knew in advance that the book was mostly literary criticism, which I have greatly enjoyed on other topics, but I struggled to stay interested during the second half of the book, which focused on the quality of the writing in “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844”. I much preferred the first quarter, which examined the kind of writing that occurred about the north at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

[Felix Hayman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best work on Engels ever written, because it is written by a researcher in literature and not a political theorist.It covers the social history behind the writing of The Conditions of the Working Class in England and also the history of industrialisation in Manchester in the 19C.
Perhaps we find ourselves to intimidated to day by post modern fears of historicism that such a book could never be written today, and it probably wont. This is the kind of writing that makes you think, not bamboozle you with naive Marx scholarship as is present in recent writings on Mark and Engels