Product Description

Written when Engels was only twenty-four, and inspired in particular by his time living amongst the poor in Manchester, this forceful polemic explores the staggering human cost of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. Engels paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in the new industrial towns, and for miners and agricultural workers--depicting overcrowded housing, abject poverty, child labour, sexual exploitation, dirt and drunkenness--in a savage indictment of the greed of the bourgeoisie. His fascinating later preface, written for the first English edition of 1892 and included here, brought the story up to date in the light of forty years' further refelection. A masterpiece of committed reporting and an impassioned call to arms, this is one of the great pioneering works of social history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83557 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Friedrich Engels was born in Germany in 1820, the son of a textile manufacturer. After his military training in Berlin he became Manchester agent of his father's business, and soon became immersed in the problems of the urban proletariat newly created by the industrial revolution. In 1844 he wrote this famous book and by 1848 he was a firm friend of Marx. Their ideas were incorporated into The Communist Manifesto, although the writing of the Manifesto itself was solely Marx's work. Engels provided Marx with money, and after 1870 spent all his time assisting him in his research and in supplying ideas and leadership to international socialism. After Marx's death Engels continued to work on Das Kapital, and completed it in 1894, a year before his own death. He also wrote The Peasant War in Germany, The Origin of the Family, Socialism, Utopianism and Scientific, and much else.

Customer Reviews

A disturbing observation on the nature of capitalism
This was the first book written to describe the lives of the working people in Victorian Britain. It paints a shocking picture of poverty, exploitation and the utter despair of the working class as they work themselves slowly to death without any reward, in a society where those in power do everything they can to make as much profit from the workers while denying them the most basic principles of human rights and dignity.

I had always been aware that Victorian Britain was well known for the poverty of its masses, but nothing prepared me for the detailed, horrifying descriptions of living and working conditions, starvation, disease and a stagnant existence of poverty in which there was literally no way out of except suicide.

For all its justified power, I do feel that Engels does tend to drift from being a critical and detatched observer in favour of spectacular tirades championing the case of the working class. Though this is clearly understandable as a result of what he saw and experienced in the numerous cities of England and Scotland in the twenty-two months he spent in Britian for the material of the book.

The first book to give the working class a voice in a society which entirely suppressed it, and a damning study of the cruel and exploitative nature of capitalism, which proves to be as relevant now (with the imergance of globalisation) as it was when first written in 1844.

Fascinating, impassioned reporting
This book is interesting as an historical peice of journalism and scientific investigation. It is equally interesting because it provides such a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary, working class people living in and around Manchester, Stockport and Stoke in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
It's often cited in modern discussions of complex systems as the book also gives an idea of the interactions between social, political and economic factors and their results in the real world. The origins of these much more modern ideas, how social and economic conditions interact, taking the holistic view etc. are all visible here.
It gives some ideas of what Engels must have been like and his compassion for the suffering of the people described is clear throughout the book.

one of the best social reports about the working class
When Friedrich Engels came to England in the 1830's, his father asked him to look at his factories and report back to him, by the time he had seen the factories for himself he was shocked at the level of poverty the workers were living and working in. This book was one of the first to document the consequences of early capitalism on the work force. It is recognised as one of the classic books of the victorian era.