The Condition of the Working Class in England

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The foundations of urban theory - Rated
In The Condition of the Working Class in England Engels immerses himself into the hitherto hidden world of the working class in Victorian Manchester. In doing this Engels who was in Manchester to look after the Engel's families manufacturing interests lays the foundations of modern urban theory. Engels work attempts to use vivid descriptions of sights and smells in a brave attempt to stir the middle class redership from their denials and force them to acknowledge the existance of such poor conditions for their fellow man.

Engels language however, betrays him as adopting a similar style to a colonial explorer of the same era 'discovering' what had only been hidden from the eyes of the middle class European male. Engels also pours scorn on some of his subjects and fails to acknowledge the assistance which he recieved in being guided through the slums by his Irish mistress.

Engels conclusions are therefore mediated through these personal flaws of his and are a matter of much, great debate and opinion however, the inmportance of his work in the canon of urban studies cannot be underestimated and as well as being truly groundbreaking allows us to see the lens through which the city first became understood and conceptualised.

Fascinating, impassioned reporting - Rated
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.

Truly shocking and enlightening - Rated
Engels paints a truly dreadful picture of poverty, disease and the suffering of the working class in Northern England at the time of the Industrial Revoultion and the rise of captialism.
As Engels was sent to England by his father to look at factories, his attention was drawn to the absoultle poverty of the workers, their terrible working conditions and the brutality of captialism.
One of the most shocking things personally was the deprivation he witnessed in my own home town and the surrounding towns and Manchester.
The book is written with great compassion and ideas for change.
Engels believed that a working class uprising would take place in Britan. Engels may have got it wrong but he highlighted theplight of the poor.
The book is truly powerful even in the 21st Century while poverty may not truly pervasive anymore due to the inception of the welfare state and trade unions but has only changed it's colours. This should be essential reading for all politicans!

Vivid description of the conditions of the working class ! - Rated
Great description of the Great Unwashed, of the conditions in which the working class in England was forced to live - where the wages of man, woman and children were not sufficient to feed the family. The book describes the construction of English capitalism on the exploitation of the populations which are driven out of country as they cannot compete with mecanical weaving machines. The progressive concentrations is neighbourhoods, the raise on unemployment and the building of poorhouses to jail the poor and force them to work for insufficent food. It also shows the birth of the first protest movements. A very vivid description of the conditions of the working class in England by young Engels - not quite materialist yet - but impressive all the same.

A disturbing observation on the nature of capitalism - Rated
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.