The Condition of the Working Class in England

Contents

1. Preface to the English Edition (1892) 37 min 18

   Written by Engels in English in 1892, nearly fifty years after the book. He explains that many of the abuses described have since faded in England (large-scale capitalism outgrows petty swindling, and epidemics forced sanitary reform) but are being repeated in newly industrialising France, Germany and America. He admits the book’s youthful theoretical standpoint and its failed prophecies, while noting how many came true. Most of the preface reprints his 1885 article “England in 1845 and in 1885”: after 1848 the manufacturers triumphed, free trade brought a long boom, and a privileged minority of factory workers and skilled unionists shared in England’s industrial monopoly. That monopoly is now breaking up, and with it, Engels predicts, socialism will return to England, as the New Unionism of the East End already shows.

2. Introduction 46 min 14

   How the Industrial Revolution created the English proletariat. Engels describes (rather idyllically) the domestic weavers and small farmers of pre-industrial England, then traces the inventions of 1764–1830 (the jenny, mule, power loom and steam engine) and the explosive growth of cotton, wool, linen, silk, iron, mining, agriculture, canals, railways and steamships. In sixty years England became a country like no other, and its mightiest product was the industrial working class. The middle class refuses to see the workers’ distress, and Engels forecasts a revolution that will make the French Revolution look like child’s play.

3. 1 The Industrial Proletariat 7 min 4

   A short chapter setting out the plan of the book. Engels will examine the industrial workers as a whole, then each section in turn, factory workers first, then miners and agricultural labourers, arguing that political consciousness follows closeness to modern industry. Manufacture centralises property, destroying the small middle class and splitting society into capitalists and workers, and it centralises people into great towns, where its effects are seen most clearly.

4. 2 The Great Towns 2 h 12 min 37

   The longest and most famous chapter: a tour of the industrial cities. London’s crowds show “the dissolution of mankind into monads,” a social war of each against all. Engels documents the slums of London (St Giles, Whitechapel), Dublin, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds and Bradford from official reports and newspaper cases, then gives his own detailed portrait of Manchester and its surrounding towns. He shows how the city’s layout hides the working-class districts from the middle class, and describes the Old Town along the Irk, back-to-back housing, cellar dwellings, overcrowding, ragged clothing, adulterated food and the precarity of life on weekly wages.

5. 3 Competition 36 min 13

   Competition is the war of all against all, among workers as well as between classes. The worker, owning nothing, is in effect the slave of the bourgeoisie, free only to accept its terms or starve. Engels sets out how wages are determined between a minimum (subsistence, shaped by custom) and a maximum (employers’ competition for workers), and shows that industry’s boom-and-bust cycle requires a permanent “reserve army” of unemployed workers, a term he coins here, who swell in every crisis and live by casual work, begging or crime.

6. 4 Irish Immigration 11 min 6

   English industry depended on a reserve of impoverished Irish migrants, who accepted the worst housing and lowest wages and so dragged down the conditions of English workers. Engels quotes Thomas Carlyle’s contemptuous portrait of the Irish and, while rejecting its exaggerations, repeats many of its stereotypes, though he blames society for the conditions that produce them.

7. 5 Results 1 h 40 min 46

   What industrial conditions do to workers’ bodies and minds. Engels charges English society with “social murder,” knowingly placing workers in conditions that kill them early, and proves it with official statistics: epidemics, infant mortality, life expectancy by class and street, stunted growth. He surveys the lack of education, the demoralising effects of compulsory toil and insecurity, drink, sexual “licence” and rising crime, explaining each by social conditions rather than moral failure. He also finds the workers more humane than the bourgeoisie and argues they have become “a race wholly apart.”

8. 6 Single Branches of Industry: Factory-Hands 2 h 8 min 74

   The workers under the Factory Acts. Machinery throws men out of work and replaces them with women and children, inverting family roles. Medical testimony from the 1833 Factory Commission documents deformities, stunted growth, early ageing, gynaecological harm and accidents. Engels traces the Factory Acts and the Ten Hours movement, ridicules Andrew Ure’s defence of the factory system, and describes factory discipline, fines, the truck system and company housing, concluding that the factory worker is in many ways less free than the medieval serf, except that the principle of freedom has at least been proclaimed.

9. 7 The Remaining Branches of Industry 1 h 1 min 24

   A survey of other trades: stocking-weavers and lace-makers of the Midlands, calico printers, bleachers and dyers, the metalworkers of Birmingham, the Black Country and Sheffield (where grinders die young of “grinders’ asthma”), the Potteries, glassworks, and the dressmakers and needlewomen of London, worked almost to death to supply the fashions of the rich. Everywhere the factory system and the employment of women and children advance.

10. 8 Labour Movements 1 h 12 min 27

    How the workers fight back, in stages: crime, machine-breaking, then trade unions and strikes after the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824. Unions cannot defeat the laws of the labour market, but they matter because they are the first attempt to abolish competition among workers, the foundation of bourgeois power. Engels describes union violence, the use of machinery to break strikes, the general strike of 1842, workers’ attitude to the law, and above all Chartism, a class movement for which the vote is a “knife and fork question.” He predicts the fusion of Chartism with socialism and names the Lancashire factory workers as the core of the movement.

11. 9 The Mining Proletariat 47 min 9

    Metal and coal miners. Engels draws on the 1842 Children’s Employment Commission: children of four and five underground, women hauling coal, crippling labour in thin seams, explosions and accidents caused by owners’ negligence, the truck system and tyrannical magistrates. The Mines Act of 1842 remained a dead letter without inspectors. He then recounts the rise of the Miners’ Association, its lawyer W. P. Roberts, and the great nineteen-week strike of 1844, which awakened the miners even in defeat.

12. 10 The Agricultural Proletariat 37 min 13

    The rural poor. In England, capitalist farming has turned country people into poverty-stricken day labourers who resist through poaching and arson against the Game Laws and the Poor Law. In Wales, ruined small farmers rose in the Rebecca Riots against road tolls. In Ireland, extreme subdivision of land has left over two million people dependent on relief, on the eve of the Great Famine. Engels attributes some of Ireland’s condition to the Irish “national character,” a lapse from his own method.

13. 11 The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat 56 min 16

    Engels’s indictment of the English middle class: corroded by the love of money, it sees workers only as “hands,” gives charity only to buy peace, and passes laws in its own interest. Its clearest statement of intent is Malthus’s population theory and the New Poor Law of 1834, with its deliberately punitive workhouses, the “Poor Law Bastilles.” Engels concludes that the conflict between poor and rich can only end in violent revolution, predicting it within a few years, a forecast that did not come true even as the book’s descriptions became classics.