Friedrich Engels and the England of the 1840s
W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chalonert describe how it was from incomplete evidence, and in a spirit of political prejudice, that Engels compiled his famous account of the condition of the British working-classes.
Few intellectual partnerships can have had such momentous results as that of Marx and Engels, the fathers of “scientific” socialism and communism. Although Friedrich Engels is not so well known as Karl Marx, he had a considerable influence upon the formation of Socialist doctrines, and he played a significant part in Socialist propaganda in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Engels’s first visit to England, which took place between November 1842 and August 1844, marked the climax of the formative period of his career, during which he was preparing himself for his life’s work as a Socialist agitator.
Engels’s apprenticeship in Manchester—for it was there that he spent nearly the whole of his time—was important for two reasons. First, he became well acquainted with the manufacturing districts, and collected the material from which he wrote, upon his return to Germany, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. This work established his reputation among Socialists as an expert upon the social consequences of modern industrialization.
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