Definition
This chapter discusses the 1845 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Engels, the study of the working class in Victorian England.
Biography
Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820–5 August 1895), born in Germany, in Barmen (since 1929, part of Wuppertal, a town east of Düsseldorf, both just south of the Ruhr), was the son of a Pietist (i.e., highly Protestant) cotton textile mill-owner who had a plant there, and in Weaste, Salford, which is now part of Greater Manchester. Barmen’s neighboring town was Elberfield, where Engels attended the local Gymnasium; already, in 1839, he described the demoralized life of factory workers there, and the gap between them and “respectable people,” meaning the Pietists. He notes the consumptiveness present, the syphilis, the child labor, and the “terrible distress among the lower classes, particularly among the factory operatives in the valley of the River Wupper” (Henderson 1967: 123–124).
At the age of seventeen, he began work at a...
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Bibliography and Further Reading
Briggs, Asa. 1968. Victorian cities. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Carver, Terrell. 2003. Engels. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dyos, H.J., and Michael Wolf, eds. 1973. The Victorian city: Images and realities. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Engels, Friedrich. 1986. The origin of the family, private property, and the state, ed. Michele Barrett. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Engels, Friedrich. 2005. The condition of the working class in England, ed. Victor Kiernan. London: Penguin.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1969. Mary Barton: A tale of Manchester life. London: Everyman.
Henderson, W.O. 1967. Engels: Selected writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Kettle, Arnold. 1958. The early Victorian social problem novel. In From Dickens to hardy, ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Kirkland, Richard. 2012. Reading the rookery: The social meaning of an Irish slum in nineteenth-century London. New Hibernia Review 16: 16–30.
Lucas, John, and Standish Meacham. 1975. Review: Engels, Manchester and the working class: A discussion. Victorian Studies 18: 461–472.
Marcus, Steven. 1974. Engels, Manchester, and the working class. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Nord, Deborah Epstein. 1990. “Neither pairs nor odd”: Female community in late nineteenth-century London. Signs 15: 733–754.
Smith, Sheila M. 1980. The other nation: The poor in English novels of the 1840s and 1850s. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Thompson, Dorothy. 1984. The chartists. London: Temple Smith.
Thompson, Dorothy. 2015. The dignity of chartism, ed. Stephen Roberts. London: Verso.
Tillotson, Kathleen. 1954. Novels of the eighteen-forties. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Tambling, J. (2020). Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_213-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_213-1
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