The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

About this book

At twenty-two, Friedrich Engels, the son of a German textile manufacturer, was sent to work in his father's firm in Manchester, then the industrial capital of the world. Walking its streets with the Irish working woman Mary Burns, he recorded what he saw: the airless courts and cellars where workers' families lived, the filth and disease, child labour, the long hours and accidents in the mills, and the gulf between the comfortable middle-class districts and the slums hidden behind the main streets.

Context and significance

Engels published the book in German in 1845, at twenty-four, and it became a founding work of the socialist movement and an influence on his friend Karl Marx. This English translation of 1887 is by the American reformer Florence Kelley. Read The Communist Manifesto and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, set in the same city.

About the author