Onondaga Community College

• HIS 107

• The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels (1845) Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a historian, philosopher, and lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx. As a youth, he joined a number of German socialist organizations even while serving his apprenticeship in the industry. He met Marx at university and the two became close friends. In 1842 Engels moved to England where his father owned an interest in a cotton mill. There he worked as a businessman by day and a sociological inquirer by night. He entered the homes of working people, questioned them about the conditions of their employment, and observed their diet and their health. From these studies came The Condition of the Working Class in England, an attack on English industrial capitalism. Engels describes the lives of the poor workers in pitiless detail, exposing the horror of the conditions in which they worked. His observations did not differ much from those of the English parliamentary commission that had been officially charged with the task, but his conclusions were starkly different. He believed that no possible reform could be undertaken that would successfully improve the lives of the poor workers. The only solution was the overthrow of the capitalist system. . . . The manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society today is revolting. They are drawn into the large cities where they breathe a poorer atmosphere than in the country; they are relegated to districts which, by reason of the method of construction, are worse ventilated than any others; they are deprived of all means of cleanliness, of water itself; since pipes are laid only when paid for, and the rivers so polluted that they are useless for such purposes, they are obliged to throw all offal and garbage, all dirty water, often all disgusting drainage and excrement into the streets, being without other means of disposing of them; they are thus compelled to infect the region of their own dwellings. Nor is this enough. All conceivable evils are heaped upon the heads of the poor. If the population of great cities is too dense in general, it is they in particular who are packed into the least space. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets was not enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air which they breathe at night is enough in itself to stifle them. . . They are deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual indulgence and drunkenness, are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the maddest excess in the only two enjoyments at their command. . . How is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to be healthy and long-lived? What else can be expected than excessive mortality, an unbroken series of epidemics, a progressive deterioration in the physique of the working population? Let’s see how the facts stand. That the dwellings of the workers in the worst portions of the cities, together with the other conditions of this life of this class, engender numerous diseases, is attested on all sides. . . If one roams the streets a little in the early morning when the multitudes are on their way to their work, one is amazed at the number of persons who look wholly or half-consumptive. Even in Manchester, the people have not the same appearance; these pale, lank, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed ghosts, whom one passes at every step, these languid, flabby faces, incapable of the slightest energetic expression, I have seen in such startling numbers only in London, though consumption carries off a horde of victims annually in the factory towns of the North. In competition with consumption stand typhus, to say nothing of scarlet fever, a disease which brings most frightful devastation into the ranks of the working-class. . . When one remembers under what conditions the working-people live, when one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and corner swarms with human beings, how sick and sleep in the same roo