o F
T
u
a
THE
I
RIVER
PEOPLE’S
y
THE RIVER IRK FRIEDRICH! ENGELS
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
THE PEOPLE’S RIVER I
o ACTIVITY BOOKLET F
F Join Manchester Histories in uncovering the
hidden stories of people who live and work
along the River Irk in North Manchester.
T
The People’s River project is inspired by and Once you have completed all the activities we
designed to commemorate the 200th anniversary would love to see your responses. Send them in
of Friedrich Engels’ birth in 1820 and his connection an email to us via the address below:
to the industrial river. Engels, a German socialist philosopher and son of a wealthy textile [email protected]
manufacturer, wrote about the River Irk in his essay
Condition of the Working Class in England, based Or if you would prefer to write or draw directly on
on his experiences whilst living in Manchester. to the booklet you could post the completed sheets
with your contact details to the below postal address:
Discover for yourself the impact the river had on
people’s lives by exploring the life and writings of FAO Charlie Booth
Friedrich Engels. Manchester Histories, 3.17 Mansfield Cooper Building,
University of Manchester, LET’S GET STARTED Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL
This activity booklet will introduce you to Engels and the River Irk. Each chapter has its own creative activity at the end. You can choose to respond I however you would like to each activity.
You may wish to respond in the form of a poem, song, rap, a short story or perhaps you would prefer to sketch a drawing or take a photograph. However, you want to express yourself.
Each activity in this booklet is designed to take only a few minutes at a time and can be done alone, with friends, members of your family, your neighbours or work colleagues over a brew. There are six chapters in total.
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
INTRODUCTION
o FRIEDRICH ENGELS & THE RIVER IRK
Friedrich Engels was the son of a wealthy Victorian cotton J manufacturer who lived the high life of a young gentleman,
yet he was also a political revolutionary.
Engels wrote passionately about the lives of the Engels’ biographer, Tristram Hunt writes that poor in England and, with Karl Marx, created “he was drawn to Manchester – ‘where the The Communist Manifesto. In 1842 he was sent to modern art of manufacture has reached its Manchester from his native Germany and there perfection’ – precisely because it promised to
he was inspired to write The Condition of the validate the communism he had taken from his u Working Class on what he observed in poor areas earlier studies. Manchester’s role was to confirm, a around Manchester. not create, the theory.”
Manchester Tour Guide and Editor, Jonathan Victoria Mill, Weaste. Headquarters of Schofield, has gone even further in stressing how the Engels’ family firm, Ermen & Engels. Lancashire transformed Engels’ thinking and, with
it, the nature of socialism and later communism,
“without Manchester there would have been no
Soviet Union,” he declares. “And the history of the
20th century would have been very different”.
Portrait of Friedrich Engels, Age 20–25 (c. 1840–45).
I
y
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
CHAPTER ONE
o F WHO WAS FRIEDRICH ENGELS?
Where was he born?
What was his family like?
Why did he come to Manchester?
Friedrich Engels was born an industrial heir in Barmen, Germany on Tuesday the 28th November 1820. His father was a wealthy
businessmen who made his money from the production of linen
yarn bleaching and later cotton–spinning. T
u Engels’ father invested in cotton manufacturing in He was an extremely well-read young man and had a the North of England. He owned Victoria Mill which a talent for language. He may have been sent to was located next to Weaste Station, alongside the Manchester to learn the family business, but the
Manchester and Liverpool railway line. This was an young Engels also came to Manchester hoping to
ideal location both for receiving cotton imported learn more about the social and political struggles
through the Mersey docks and for supplying water that were taking place there.
from the River Irwell for the bleaching and dyeing Working for the family firm whilst living within an processes (see photograph on previous page). exploited community, Engels regularly felt the
In 1842 the young Friedrich Engels was sent to contradictions of his circumstances. In a letter to
Manchester to work in the headquarters of one of Marx he explained that he “forsook the company his family’s firms, Ermen and Engels. His father, and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and who was a strict Protestant and conservative in his champagne of the middle classes and devoted my
thinking sent him to Manchester to separate him leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse from his radical views that were in conflict with the with plain working men”. family business and their social standing. We can’t be certain, but it is likely he lived close-by It was hoped this change of location would prepare to Victoria Mill. It is said that he regularly drank in the twenty-something Engels for a life of business the Crescent Pub, which has only recently closed and would protect the family investment in cotton but is still standing. Victoria Mill stood until the manufacturing in Salford. However, Engels had 1960s when it was pulled down to make way for other ideas and so by day he worked as a mill clerk the M602 from Salford to Manchester. What learning the cotton trade, but by night he walked remains of Engels’ mark on the buildings in the area the streets of Irish Town (now Angel Meadows) is a block of council flats called ‘Engels House’. discovering stories of injustice and inequality.
Engels had learnt about the factory system from a young age. Every morning he walked through the y polluted streets of his home-town Barmen, on his way to school. There he also observed the living conditions of the city’s working class, which he described as being worse than that of animals.
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
ACTIVITY Have you ever embarked on a journey of discovery that changed the way you viewed or thought about the world? F PROMPTS:
• Maybe you visited a different place, city or country and
something you saw there changed how you thought or what you did?
• Maybe you have changed jobs and had to learn new skills?
• Maybe you have read a book, seen a film, or heard some music that changed your view on the world?
SHARE YOUR STORY WITH US HERE
T
u
a
I
y
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
N
o F
T
u E a
I
y
CHAPTER TWO C
WHAT WAS MANCHESTER LIKE 200 YEARS AGO?
What was it like to live and work in Manchester then?
What did people who weren’t from there say about it?
Between 1800 and 1841 Manchester’s population (including Salford) grew from 95,000 to over 310,000 on the back of a booming textile industry producing cotton thread and fabric.
In the late 1770s the inventor Richard Arkwright But so much more contributed to making Manchester had pioneered cotton production at his Cromford a great centre of industrialisation than the mills mills along the Derwent Valley. He was the first to and factories. Manchester was a marketplace, use steam power for the purposes of cotton a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical spinning in Manchester. By 1816 Arkwright’s thought; particularly around topics such as feminism,
Shudehill mill had been joined by a further socialism and the abolition of the slave trade. The eight-five steam powered factories employing Cottonopolis image, with its smog-cloaked factories almost 12,000 women and children as Lancashire and stark contrasts of misery and riches was an and Cheshire expanded to account for some attractive idea for writers wishing to document and
90 percent of Britain’s cotton production. work through the meaning of this new modern era.
HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT MANCHESTER AT THE TIME
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: John Georg May wrote:
“Thirty or forty factories rise on the top of hills” spewing “Hundreds of factories in Manchester
out their foul waste. In fact, he heard Manchester before which tower up to five and six storeys in
he entered it as no visitor could escape from the ‘crunching height. The huge chimneys at the side of i wheels of machinery’, ‘the noise of the furnaces’, ‘the these buildings belch forth black coal
shriek of steam from boilers’, or the incessant ‘regular beat vapours and this tells us that powerful
of the looms’. Inside the sprawling, filthy city he found, steam engines are used here... the houses
‘fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by are blackened by it. The river which runs the factories they pass’/ And yet, ‘from this foul drain the through Manchester is so filled with waste
greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the dye matter that it looks like a dye-vat.
whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows.’ The whole scene is one of melancholy.” o
Thomas Carlyle wrote: Hippolyte Taine wrote:
“Hast thou heard, with sound ears, the Manchester resembled nothing more than “a great
awakening of a Manchester, on a Monday jerry-built barracks, a “work-house” for hundreds of morning, at half-past five by the clock; the thousands of people, a hard-labour penal establishment. o rushing-off of its thousand mills, like the The penning together of thousands of workmen, boom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand times carrying out mindless, regimented tasks, ‘hands active, ten-thousand spools and spindles all set feet motionless, all day and every day’ was simply humming there - it is perhaps if thou knew improper. ‘Could there be any kind of life more it well, sublime as a Niagra, or more so.” outraged, more opposed to man’s natural instincts.’
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t
a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
o F
E
T
u
a
I
y
ACTIVITY Starting from where you live, where you work, C or in your imagination. Take a journey for about 20 minutes exploring your local area.
Whilst doing this make a list of everything you can
hear, remember or smell as you take your journey.
Make a note of where your journey began and where you
finished. Share with us some of the sounds, smells, sights, or memories you have experienced on your journey.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
H
o F
T
a
I
y
CHAPTER THREE C
ENGELS AND THE CONDITION OF
THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND
What did it say? Why was it important? What impact did it have?
Manchester and Salford have become eternally associated with Friedrich Engels: it inspired him to write one of the greatest works on British industrial experience called The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels was only 24 years old when he wrote this, it would see him rebel against his upbringing and distance himself from the B thoughts and opinions of his colleagues and family.
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t Manchester, like many industrial towns, was In the south of the city, just off Oxford Road, was
purposefully laid out in such a way that the rich where some of Manchester’s 40,000 strong Irish
and the poor were separated geographically. The immigrants lived. They were the most exploited,
buildings went up haphazardly on the crumbling lowly paid and abused of all the city’s residents;
side of river-banks and railways cut through old Engels wrote: 9 neighbourhoods. Engels wrote about “a peculiarly built town where a person may live in for years and “The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest
go in and out daily without coming into contact with sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal a working person’s quarter or even with workers”. and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all
directions…The race that lives in these ruinous
READ SOME OF ENGELS’ WORDS: cottages, behind broken windows, mended with
oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in
“The members of this money aristocracy can take dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench,
the shortest road through the middle of all the in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose,
labouring districts to their places of business, this race must really have reached the lowest stage
without ever seeing that they are in the midst of of humanity.”
the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the
left... For the thoroughfares leading from the Engels explains in this fundamental text what
Exchange... they suffice to conceal from the eyes would become a core Marxist principle, that class
T of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs was economically determined: and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.” “The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, Engels declared himself shocked by what he saw: who is subject to every possible chance, and has
not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn “I have never seen so systematic a shutting out the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, of the working class from the thoroughfares, so every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, tender a concealment of everything which might this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeois, inhuman position conceivable for a human being.” as in Manchester.”
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
o F
T
u
a
I
y
ACTIVITY Think about Manchester today - how do you C think it compares to what it was like when Engels lived there?
What has changed and what has stayed
the same?
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
o F
T
u
a
I
y
CHAPTER FOUR
ENGELS AND MARY BURNS
Who was Mary? What did Mary do?
So how did Engels, the rich German son of a factory owner, gain all this first-hand knowledge of the working classes living in Manchester and Salford? How did he walk amongst the people, be invited to look at their private living quarters without being confronted? Who was to be his guide?
B
Her name was Mary Burns – a vital contact to We know that Engels met Mary Burns in the early a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical Manchester’s undiscovered people and places and months of 1843 but there is a lot of debate as to t reportedly the first great love of Engels’ life. Eleanor how they met. She might have been working in his
Marx’s (Karl Marx’s daughter) childhood accounts of father’s mill or a similar factory or she might have
her are sketchy but she writes “she was a very been noticed by Engels whilst working as a
pretty, witty, and altogether charming girl... domestic servant.
of course, as she was a Manchester (Irish) factory The reason for this uncertainty is that she herself 9 girl, quite uneducated, though she could read, and write a little, but my parents... were very fond of her, could not read or write much, and because Engels
and always spoke of her with the greatest affection.” later burned much of his correspondence from this period of his life. Engels was also careful to not
“She introduced him to the life of the immigrant publicise his relationship with Mary, as he had to
Irish community in Manchester”, according to the retain both his social position within Manchester and
Historian, Roy Whitfield, “she escorted him on good relations with his wealthy, Protestant parents.
excursions through districts which would otherwise
have been unsafe for any stranger to enter; she Historians have suggested that there could have
was a source of information about factory and been a sense of political embarrassment as to his i domestic conditions endured by working people.” own class status, for one of the many socialist
criticisms against the factory and mill owners was
It is known she was born sometime between April their exploitation of female workers.
1822 and January 1823 and was the daughter of
an Irish dyer and factory-hand Michael Burns, who
came to Manchester in the 1820s. T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
o F
T
u
a
I
y
C ACTIVITY Think about someone who has inspired you like Mary Burns inspired Friedrich Engels and tell us about them.
Maybe they were a teacher or a relative that you knew well and who taught you something that has
stuck with you? Or perhaps it is a well-known person who you have never met but they’ve had a great
impact on your life because of their achievements.
S SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
o F
T
u
a
I
y
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
CHAPTER FIVE
ENGELS AND THE RIVER IRK
What did Engels say about the River Irk? Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition? What was the River Irk like then? • Does it look clean or polluted?
Y The River Irk is a river in the North West of England that flows through
the northern suburbs of Greater Manchester. It merges with the River
Irwell in the city centre of Manchester close to the Victoria Train Station.
Manchester’s rivers, in particular the River Irk, stick Engels also commented on the homes and out in the vivid descriptions that Engels produced. buildings surrounding the River Irk. He wrote: The river has often been interpreted as a metaphor “In one of these courts there stands directly at for the cost of human industrialisation in the the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, natural world in Engels’ writing. a privy without a door, so dirty that the In The Conditions of the Working Class Engels walks inhabitants can pass into and out of the court to the River Irk to record a view ‘characteristic for only by passing through foul pools of stagnant
the whole district’. He wrote: urine and excrement. Surrounding it are
hundreds more of these cattle-sheds for human “At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, beings, where men are reduced to the state of a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of animals, pigs share sties with children, hundreds debris and refuse which it deposits on the lower cramp into dank cellars, railways slash through right bank. In dry weather, an extended series of neighbourhoods, and privies, rivers and water the most revolting brackish green pools of slime supplies all seem to merge into one deadly mix.” remain standing on this bank, out of whose depth bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and “Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on give forth a stench that is unbearable even on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit the bridge forty of fifty feet above the level of that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from the water.” black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least 20–30,000 inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world.”
o F
T
u
a
I
y
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
ACTIVITY Take a walk to or look at some pictures of the River Irk online and make a note of what you see floating in the water and growing
on the river banks.
• Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
You can record what you see either in the form of a list T or a short descriptive piece of writing such as a poem.
Or you could take some photographs or draw sketches of everything you see.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
o F
T
T
a
I
y
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
CHAPTER SIX
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? What impact did the Condition of the Working Class have? • Is the water in a good condition? Who was Karl Marx and how did they begin working together? • Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
The Condition of the Working Class was actually finished back at
Engels’ parents house in Barmen in late 1844 and published originally
in German. It was not translated into English until a year later (mainly for an American edition).
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the By the summer of 1844 Engels’ apprenticeship in i Manchester had finished and the heir to Ermen
and Engels returned home to Barmen. On his way
back, he stopped off in Paris and met with a man
called Karl Marx. From then on, Engels’ life would
be forever connected with Marx. They would later
go on to write the Communist Manifesto together
and significantly change international politics and
culture across the world.
The impact of Engels‘ text The Condition of the Working Class was immediately clear within German Engels wrote to Marx 24 years later: “I like this radical circles. It’s widely acknowledged to be the place very much because of its coloured window first to describe the social conditions created such a the weather is always fine there.” The stained large-scale modern industry. Marx was particularly glass window and oak desk are still as Engels and taken with the book and its helpful inclusion of data, Marx would have found them in the bay window of reports and statistics. For the next forty years their Chetham’s Library. Only now it is encircled by friendship barely faltered. It is reported that Marx’s skyscrapers, hotels and the cranes of corporate children called Engels their second father. Manchester. Today, the oak desk is a popular shrine for communist pilgrims seeking some kind The duo would shortly return to Manchester for a of connection to the founders of Communism. study trip. When the two young communists were not exploring the destitute communities featured in It could be said that Friedrich Engels would always the Condition of the Working Class, they conducted appear secondary to Karl Marx, that he would work research by reading endless government and exist in the shadow of his collaborator. However, publications and liberal economists’ works. Their Engels said of Marx: “Marx was a genius; we others favourite spot for this academic research was the were at best talented. Without him the theory would bay window in Chetham’s Library, whose 100,000 not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly volumes they used for political and social data. bears his name.”
o F
T
u
a
I
y
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
i
T o
o
ACTIVITY Do you have a special place you like to go to in Manchester?
Maybe it’s somewhere you go to read, meet friends, or spend your free time at. Are there buildings or train tracks close by? • Is the water in a good condition? TELL US ABOUT IT • Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
T
t a privy without a door, so dirty that the i
PTO NEXT STEPS
o THANK YOU FOR TAKING PART IN F
THE PEOPLE’S RIVER
Once you have completed all the activities we would love to see your responses. Send them in an email to
us via the address below:
Or if you have written or drawn directly on to the T booklet you could post your completed booklet to
us with your contact details to:
a FAO Charlie Booth
Manchester Histories,
3.17 Mansfield Cooper Building,
University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL
Encourage others to get involved by sharing pictures
of your activities on social media by using the hashtag:
#thepeoplesriver
THANK YOU I
y
C
B
a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical t
9
A
i
T o
o
Are there buildings or train tracks close by? W • Is the water in a good condition?
• Does it look clean or polluted?
Y
t
a privy without a door, so dirty that the i