The Condition of the Working Class in England

A young factory manager's two years in the Manchester slums, checked against the government's own reports — the book that handed Marx his proletariat.

by Friedrich Engels542 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England
First published: 1845(aged 25)
Original language: German

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Overview

Sent to Manchester in 1842 to learn the cotton trade at his father's firm, a German in his early twenties spent the better part of two years off the ledger and in the slums instead, guided through them by Mary Burns, an Irish mill-hand. What Engels saw there he set against the government's own Blue Books — factory inspectors, medical officers, parliamentary inquiries — and the match is the book's method: private observation corroborated by the state's own figures. Its claim is that the factory system had produced a wholly new class, the proletariat, and that this class's squalor, disease and early death were not misfortune or vice but the ordinary working of competition — a thing he called social murder, committed by a middle class that knew the conditions killed and left them in place. Charity was therefore beside the point; the misery was built in, and only the workers, massed in the new cities, could end it. The book appeared in Leipzig in 1845, written in German for Germans, with a preface to the British working class in English — though they could not read the rest of it for another forty years. Marx, whom Engels had just met, took its materialism into everything the two of them wrote afterward. By the time an English translation reached America in 1887, Engels was conceding in his prefaces to the later editions that factory legislation and a better-off upper layer of workers had softened the worst of what he had recorded. The system he had diagnosed had not moved.

Key concepts

What does Engels mean by the proletariat?

The proletariat is the wholly new class the factory system created: workers who own no property or means of production and possess nothing to sell but their labour. Thrown onto the market for wages and massed in the industrial cities, they live at the mercy of competition. Engels treats them not as the old poor but as a distinct class produced by industry itself, and the only force capable of ending its own condition.

What is 'social murder'?

It is Engels's name for the deaths caused by the conditions of working-class life — the disease, hunger and early mortality of the slums. He calls it murder because the middle class knows these conditions are lethal and leaves them in place, so society kills by arrangement rather than by any single hand. The phrase turns squalor from a misfortune into a crime with a responsible party.

What was Engels's method in the book?

He combined two years of direct observation in the Manchester slums, guided by the Irish mill-worker Mary Burns, with the government's own Blue Books — reports of factory inspectors, medical officers and parliamentary inquiries. Private witness corroborated by the state's own figures is the book's method, meant to make the indictment unanswerable: even official evidence, gathered by the authorities themselves, confirmed what he had seen with his own eyes.

How does the book connect to Marx?

Engels wrote it at twenty-four, before he had properly met Marx, yet its materialism — explaining a class's fate by the economic system rather than by morals or misfortune — fed everything the two of them wrote afterward. It handed Marx the proletariat as the central figure of history and modelled the documentary, class-based analysis that became a hallmark of the partnership and the works it produced.

Did Engels later revise his conclusions?

Partly. In prefaces to the later editions he conceded that factory legislation and a better-off upper layer of workers had softened the worst of what he had recorded in the 1840s. But he insisted the system he had diagnosed had not moved: the underlying relation of capital and labour, and the competition driving it, remained in force even where the sharpest early misery had eased.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A wholly new class

What kind of human being does the factory system create, and why can only that being undo it? Engels argues the machine age produced a class with nothing but its labour — and its own remedy.

The factory system, Engels contends, produced something history had not seen: the proletariat, a class owning nothing but its capacity to work and thrown wholly onto the market for wages. Its poverty is not the old rural want but a condition manufactured by competition, which pits worker against worker and drives wages to the edge of survival. Because the misery is built into the system and not into the people, charity cannot touch it; only the workers themselves, massed and made conscious in the new cities, can end it. It is the analysis Marx took over whole, and the class he built his politics around.

proletariat
labor
capitalism
exploitation
competition
class conflict
class consciousness
wages
industrialization

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Social murder

When a class dies young in filth and disease that everyone in power knows about and no one ends, what should we call it? Engels refuses the word misfortune and reaches for a harder one.

Guided through the Manchester slums and checking what he saw against the government's own Blue Books, Engels argues that the disease, squalor and early death of the workers are not accident or vice but the ordinary working of competition. He calls it social murder — killing committed by a middle class that knows the conditions are lethal and leaves them in place. The charge is deliberate: where others saw misfortune to be relieved by charity, Engels saw a structural crime built into how the city and the trade were organised, which no almsgiving could answer, only a change in the system itself.

poverty
health
public health
mortality
housing
urbanization
sanitation
environment
urban planning

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Within this work

passages held: 542
distinct concepts: 703
by passages held, corpus-wide: #134

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “public health” and “urban poverty”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
public health	urban poverty	24
child labor	occupational health	19
poverty	public health	18
poverty	working class	17
child labor	industrialization	11
public health	working class	9
industrialization	urban poverty	7
child labor	poverty	6
child labor	public health	6
industrialization	occupational health	6
industrialization	poverty	6
industrialization	public health	5
urban poverty	working class	5
child labor	working class	4
class conflict	working class	4
occupational health	public health	4
class conflict	poverty	3
industrialization	working class	3
child labor	class conflict	2
occupational health	poverty	2
occupational health	working class	2
class conflict	industrialization	1
class conflict	occupational health	1
class conflict	public health	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) you are here DE
1877 Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft)
Provoked by a rival socialist's rising influence in the German party, this two-year polemic doubled as Marxism's first systematic textbook; three of its chapters became the widely read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
EN
1883 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft)
Three chapters of Anti-Dühring, reworked in 1880 into a pamphlet for French readers and issued in German in 1883. By Engels's own count, in his introduction to the English edition of 1892, it had reached ten languages, and he knew of no socialist work translated so often, not even the Communist Manifesto or Capital.
DE
1886 Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy (Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie)
The 1888 book edition carried the first printing of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach; Engels had written the essay in 1886 to review a study of Feuerbach and retrace his and Marx's exit from Hegel.
EN
1896 The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (Anteil der Arbeit an der Menschwerdung des Affen)
A fragment from the unfinished Dialectics of Nature, in which Engels turned his materialism on natural science and human origins; the rest of that project went unpublished until 1925.
DE

— or open another of their works