Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Social reportage from Manchester and other English industrial towns, based on Engels’s own observations and official reports.
Introduction
Engels wrote the book in Barmen in the winter of 1844–45, drawing on some twenty-one months in Manchester, where he had worked for a cotton firm part-owned by his father, as well as on official reports and newspapers. It appeared in Leipzig in 1845, when he was 24. He describes the working-class districts of Manchester and other industrial towns, child labour, disease and the effects of competition, and predicts a revolution in England. An English translation followed only in 1887, in New York. The book counts among the early classics of empirical social research and urban sociology; historians still debate how representative its picture was.
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Connections
Taken up in
- The Communist Manifesto1848 · Karl Marx
- Capital1867 · Karl Marx
More works by Friedrich Engels
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