Wk. 7 Primary Source Friedrich Engels, Industrial Manchester (1844)

Question 1

Friedrich Engels, Industrial Manchester (1844)

Answer 1

Friedrich Engels, Industrial Manchester (1844) – Along with new machines and factories, the Industrial Revolution created a new social class: the urban working class or proletariat. Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was the son of a German cotton manufacturer who worked in Manchester, England, on behalf of his families’ firm. There he met Karl Marx, and the two collaborated on a number of works, most famously The Communist Manifesto of 1848. In this work, Engels described the living conditions of factory workers in Manchester.

Why were conditions so bad? – The poor were exploited for their cheap labor. Their living conditions were ruined by the pollution of the factories and the layering of living quarters one atop another for the workers to be close to the factories. The poor had no representation. Nobody cared about them and they had no way to stand up for themselves.

• Back then, the “working class” was just a term for the poor – the exploited labor that did the menial and unskilled jobs. And the other people wanted nothing to do with these people except reap the benefits of their toil. The people of MAnchester separate the “working class” from the rest of society, referring to the working class as “Paupers”.
  
  • Geographically separate them – “by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle-class.”
  • Refers to their “working Quarters as a whole other place – specifically the “Old Town of Manchester” so not to be confused with all of Manchester proper.

Why did Engels think they were specifically a product of “the industrial epoch,” as he writes at the end of this excerpt?

The decrepit nature and filth of these neighborhoods came about only after the creation of the factories, and it was the pollution of the factories and the exploitation of the workers that lent to the unpalatable nature of the workers’ living conditions.

• “every scrap of space left by the old way of building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is left to be further occupied.”
• “unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld.”
• “passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.”

The factories poluted the area to a point where it was unlivable.

• “tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction.”
• “tanneries, bone mills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk,”
• “Allen’s Court, was in such a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime.”
• “coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank.”
• Lived with the pigs – “the pork-raisers rent the courts and build pig-pens in them. In almost every court one or even several such pens may be found, into which the inhabitants of the court throw all refuse and offal, whence the swine grow fat; and the atmosphere, confined on all four sides, is utterly corrupted by putrefying animal”
• Engels blames the Industrial Revolution – “Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.”