Originally published by Random House Published 2015 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business New material this edition copyright © 2015 by Taylor & Francis. Copyright © 1974, 1985 by Steven Marcus. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015000011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marcus, Steven, 1928- Engels, Manchester, and the working class / Steven Marcus. pages cm Revised edition of the author’s Engels, Manchester, and the working class 1986. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-5669-0 1. Engels, Friedrich, 1820-1895. 2. Working class--England-- Manchester--History--19th century. 3. Great Britain--Economic conditions--1760-1860. I. Title. HD8389.E534 2015 305.5’620942--dc23 2015000011 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5669-0 (pbk) To Lionel Trilling Contents Acknowledgements ix Preface xi New Introduction xvii 1 Historical Prologue 1 2 The Town 21 3 Friedrich Engels from 1820 to 1845 53 4 The Condition of the Working Class (1) 105 5 The Condition of the Working Class (2) 161 6 In Place of a Conclusion 201 Bibliographical Note 207 About the Author 209 Index 211 Acknowledgements A part of this study, in different form, has appeared as a chapter in The Victorian City: Images and Realities (London, 1973), 2 vols., edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff. I want to thank both editors for their kindness and cooperation. H. J. Dyos in particular merits a special note of gratitude for tireless encouragement and cajolery. The last draft of this work was completed at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford, California. The admin- istration and staff of that institution were most helpful. My thanks go especially to Miriam Gallaher. Devra Rosenberg has helped me with bibliography and proofs. A number of friends and colleagues read the manuscript at different stages and offered critical suggestions on a variety of topics. I want to express my thanks to Lillian Hellman, Eugene Genovese, F. W. Dupee and Lionel Trilling for their generosity in this connection. J. P. Bauke read through the manuscript critically with the question of translation in mind and helped me considerably with the rendering of certain passages. My wife, Gertrud Lenzer, made her stalwart energies and intelligence continually available to me, for which as she knows she has my unfailing gratitude. ix Preface The following study tries to consider a number of things together. First, there is a place: Manchester, the site and center of the first Industrial Revolution, a new kind of city in which the formation of a new kind of human world seemed to be occurring. Second, a relatively brief moment in time, roughly the fifteen years from 1835 to 1850, during which Britain—and Manchester—underwent the first grand crisis of the newly emerging system of social existence, the system known to us historically as industrialism or industrial capitalism. Third, there is a young man, Friedrich Engels, whose fortunes in life had brought him to this place at this time. Engels was in his early twenties when he first arrived in Manchester; he was the son of a prosperous German textile mill-owner, and the purpose of his protracted visit—it lasted twenty months—was to complete his business training in the Manchester cotton mills and offices owned in partnership by his father. In addi- tion, this young foreign businessman was an intellectual (although the term did not yet exist), and a self-taught one to boot; he had not been a university student and had not even completed the course of study in the Gymnasium of his native Rhineland town. Such disadvantages, however, did not deter him from holding definite views on a far-flung variety of recondite subjects; and he had already begun to publish essays, articles and journalistic pieces in certain organs of the liberal, democratic, radical and left-wing German-language movements. The combination of these three elements resulted some two and a half years later in a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. This effort, Engels’ first major publication in a distinguished career that was to continue without interruption for the next half- century, is also the best and most original work that he ever wrote, and the final purpose of the study that follows is its critical examination. The purpose and terms of the study having been framed, it may be fitting at the outset to direct attention to a number of difficulties. In particular there are the obvious dangers attaching to the fact that the xi Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class following essay trespasses on certain specialist disciplines and fields of study in which I can claim no professional competence. It touches unavoidably upon such matters as the history of socialism, of Marxist thought and Marxism, and of social theory in general. It fishes perforce in the troubled, not to say polluted, waters of the history and theory of the Industrial Revolution. In the nature of the case, it is compelled to deal with questions that involve the lively interests of urban studies and urban sociology. Finally, it deals with certain problems of nineteenth- century English literature and cultural life and history. It is only in the last of these that I feel qualified to fix critical judgments and render them in their (necessarily) argumentative form. I think it therefore useful to admit at once that this study almost certainly offends on a number of counts, and that historians, social scientists and others will find errors, innocences and crudities of thought that are probably, in the nature of the undertaking, inevitable, apart from whatever mistakes and awkwardnesses might have been avoided. To this it must be added that I was able to find no acceptable alternative in which the first class of error might be automatically eliminated. At the same time, it would be less than candid of me to deny that the taking up of such difficulties was not, in part, the result of deliber- ate intention. In this sense the present work may be regarded as part of a continuing experiment; some of its purposes may be described as follows: to ascertain how far literary criticism can help us understand history and society; to see how far the intellectual discipline that begins with the work of close textual analysis can help us understand certain social, historical or theoretical documents. In a previous study (The Other Victorians) most of the material I dealt with analytically could be appraised as “bad text,” in the sense that its complexities and contradictions were largely unconscious and revealed themselves in the prose as unintended ambiguities, lapses, non sequiturs and other less than logical formations. In the present study I have taken a “good text,” most of whose complexity is a result of conscious intention, and whose ambiguities, paradoxes and contradictions attach as much to its object as to itself. If this work succeeds in some measure, it may, perhaps, have some salutary effect on literary criticism or study in its present uneasy state as well. If literary criticism is not to decline further than it already has into aesthetic or political fashionability on the one side and academic stupor on the other, it must—in my judgment—now that its heroic modern period is past, begin to draw with increasing deliberation xii Preface upon the other cognitive disciplines. For literature and literary criti- cism are very little if they cannot sustain the claim to cognitive status. Either we take literature seriously in this sense or we don’t. If we don’t, then we can study and discuss it in a formal or formalistic way—as the arranging of patterns and designs, as a superior form of organized amusement, as a series of language games (all of which have their due place in a full account of the process). If we do, however, then we have to regard literature in ways that are comparable to the ways we regard any of the essential and fundamental human activities, such as language, sexuality or economics, although literature itself may not be ultimately irreducible as these three seem to be. And by the same token we have to regard the study of literature with the same seriousness that we regard the disciplines of study appropriate to those other activities. This, of course, is no place to argue theoretically the case for literature and the study of literature as modes of knowledge. This much may be said, however, in brief and in passing. According to Max Weber’s way of thinking, that which is distinctively and constitutively significant about human activity is that it produces meaning.1 Literary criticism, the study of literature, is nothing if it is not the study of meaning and meanings as they appear essentially in the forms of literature. It is, in addition, and by means of its own activity, the creation of further meaning. In these attributes literature and literary criticism are no different from other essential human activities and the branches of study that have grown up around them—both the activity and the discourse appropriate to it are cognitive and produce meaning.