Friedrich Engels from “The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844”

It is funny that Engels is in this anthology of English authors, as he is German, though I am glad because he truly understands the conditions of the factory workers and I did think about his work when I was writing about Carlyle. Here Engels shows the conditions of London in 1844 stating “Everywhere one finds on the one hand the most barbarous indifference and selfish egotism and on the other the most distressing scenes of misery and poverty” (502). This echo’s Carlyle’s themes about how industry has produced a new class of people who are self centered. Engels work centers on this conflict of self interest and not looking out for their fellow man. Engels points out that in England one can walk through the city and never have a pleasant encounter as everyone tends to keep to themselves, something that is still very true today in England. Here he focuses on the struggle between classes. For those who are not aware of Engels and Marx’s theory of history is can be summed up by class warfare. Essentially there will be an upper class; Marx would dub the bourgeoisie, and the lower class, the proletariat. There would be a war between these classes which would bring the classes together, then over time they would separate again only to come back together. Communism was the answer for this problem. For Engels and his exploration of London at the time of 1844 shows a dreary place to live in if you live in poverty. It shows how awful the average conditions of the workers where. Through careful reading of this text you can get an idea of what industrial age writers did not like about the new conditions of labor that are brought forth by industrialization. I wonder what Engels would have written had this been 1851 with the opening of the Crystal Palace in London. I tend to think that he would find a dichotomy of what is shown in the Crystal Palace and what the conditions truly were outside of it. It is clear from Engels writing that farm life would be preferential to living in this climate in London.