Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Friedrich Engels was a young German sent to work in Manchester, and instead of just doing business he walked the poorest streets and wrote down what he saw. Families crowded into damp, filthy courts. Children worked long days in mills. Sickness spread fast. This book, in Florence Kelley's translation, with Engels's own preface of 1892, shows the human cost of the new factories, in plain, angry detail, from a man who was there and looked closely.
Friedrich Engels came to Manchester in 1842 to work in the cotton business in which his father was a partner. He was twenty four when he finished this book in 1845, and instead of reporting on trade he reported on people: the weavers, mill hands, miners, and Irish labourers whose work was making England rich and whose lives were being shortened by the conditions in which they were housed, fed, and employed.
Chapter by chapter he walks the reader through London, Manchester, and the factory and mining districts, describing courts without drainage, cellars where families slept in damp, children at the loom, and the diseases, above all consumption and typhus, that followed from bad air, bad water, and long hours. He quotes doctors, inspectors, and newspapers, but his authority is his own walking: he says he went into the homes themselves.
The text shelved is Florence Kelley's translation, transcribed from the January 1943 reprint of the March 1892 edition, and it includes Engels's 1892 preface, in which the older author calls the book a youthful work and measures how far England had moved since 1844. It lasts as firsthand evidence from inside the first industrial nation.
Friedrich Engels, aged twenty four, spent his time in Manchester watching how the new factory England actually lived, and wrote this report in 1845. In Florence Kelley's translation, it walks the slums of Manchester, London, and the mill towns street by street: the housing, hunger, sickness, and long hours of the people who made industrial wealth. This edition includes Engels's own preface of 1892, looking back at what had changed.
The title page states the edition's facts directly: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, with a preface written in 1892, by Frederick Engels, translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky, published by George Allen and Unwin. The text is transcribed from the January 1943 reprint of the March 1892 edition, so what you read is the mature English edition Engels himself oversaw, not a modern reworking.
His 1892 preface tells the book's history. The work was first issued in Germany in 1845, when its author was twenty four, and he is, he says, ashamed of neither its good nor its faulty features. Mrs. Kelley translated it in America in 1885, and for that edition Engels wrote a new preface and an appendix; the American preface, being about the American movement of the day, is omitted here as irrelevant, while the original preface is largely used in these introductory remarks.
The preface then measures the distance travelled since 1844: the repeal of the Corn Laws, the gold discoveries, the world market, and the passing of the truck system and the coming of the Ten Hours Bill. Read it as Engels's own frame for his youthful evidence.
Edition: Florence Kelley's translation, in the edition of 1892 with the author's preface of that year; the work was written in 1845. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 17306.
The first chapter
The order of our investigation of the different sections of the proletariat follows naturally from the foregoing history of its rise. The first proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it, and accordingly, those employed in manufacture, in the working up of raw materials, will first claim our attention. The production of raw materials and of fuel for manufacture attained importance only in consequence of the industrial change, and engendered a new proletariat, the coal and metal miners. Then, in the third place, manufacture influenced agriculture, and in the fourth, the condition of Ireland; and the fractions of the proletariat belonging to each, will find their place accordingly. We shall find, too, that with the possible exception of the Irish, the degree of intelligence of the various workers is in direct proportion to their relation to manufacture; and that the factory hands are most enlightened as to their own interests, the miners somewhat less so, the agricultural labourers scarcely at all. We shall find the same order again among the industrial workers, and shall see how the factory hands, eldest children of the industrial revolution, have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement, and how the others have joined this movement just in proportion as their handicraft has been invaded by the progress of machinery. We shall thus learn from the example which England offers, from the equal pace which the Labour Movement has kept with the movement of industrial development, the historical significance of manufacture.
Since, however, at the present moment, pretty much the whole industrial proletariat is involved in the movement, and the condition of the separate sections has much in common, because they all are industrial, we shall have first to examine the condition of the industrial proletariat as a whole, in order later to notice more particularly each separate division with its own peculiarities.
It has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in the hands of the few. It requires large capital with which to erect the colossal establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with which to press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand labour of the independent workman out of the market. The division of labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the application of machinery, are the three great levers with which manufacture, since the middle of the last century, has been busy putting the world out of joint. Manufacture, on a small scale, created the middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes. Meanwhile, it is an undenied and easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-class of the "good old times" has been annihilated by manufacture, and resolved into rich capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other.
The centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here. Population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment requires many workers employed together in a single building, living near each other and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory. They have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary; handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall, and the immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one. The greater the town, the greater its advantages. It offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments can be built more cheaply because of the competition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in remote country districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd, and direct communication with the markets supplying raw material or demanding finished goods. Hence the marvellously rapid growth of the great manufacturing towns. The country, on the other hand, has the advantage that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and country are in constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of the town to- day, wages sink so low in the country to-morrow, that new investments are most profitably made there. But the centralising tendency of manufacture continues in full force, and every new factory built in the country bears in it the germ of a manufacturing town. If it were possible for this mad rush of manufacture to go on at this rate for another century, every manufacturing district of England would be one great manufacturing town, and Manchester and Liverpool would meet at Warrington or Newton; for in commerce, too, this centralisation of the population works in precisely the same way, and hence it is that one or two great harbours, such as Hull and Liverpool, Bristol, and London, monopolise almost the whole maritime commerce of Great Britain.
Since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most clearly observable here. Here the centralisation of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name Merry Old England conveys no meaning, for Old England itself is unknown to memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. Hence, too, there exist here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more completely with every passing day. Thus the class formerly most stable has become the most restless one. It consists to-day of a few remnants of a past time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes, industrial Micawbers and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune, while ninety-nine become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine live by perpetually repeated failure.
But in these towns the proletarians are the infinite majority, and how they fare, what influence the great town exercises upon them, we have now to investigate.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Written 1845. Author died 1895. Kelley translation published before 1900. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
Starvard