Friedrich Engels: to England

Abstract

In 1844 a group of radical German intellectuals published in Paris and Brussels the first edition of the German—French Yearbooks. In spite of the plural title only one issue ever appeared. In spite of the bi-national designation, the articles were all by Germans and, in spite of the editors’ primarily theoretical concerns, an article that aroused particular interest was on ‘The Condition of England’. It was not actually by an Englishman but was a review by a German of a book by a Scot, and, in a journal of declared advanced thought, by a rather conservative Scot at that. Engels’s review of Carlyle’s Past and Present was one of his first published writings on England and served as part of the preparatory material for The Condition of the Working Class in England. Whereas Mill and Carlyle became personally acquainted fairly early in their respective careers, Carlyle never knew of Engels and Engels only knew of him through his writings. Of our three authors, Fried-rich Engels is the only one who was not British and yet it was he who wrote the most thorough analysis of the situation in the country. His Condition of the Working Class in England is both acknowledged as his ‘masterpiece’¹ and indeed a pioneer contribution to British social history.² Though much discussed in Germany, Engels’s work did not achieve the instant celebrity of Carlyle’s Past and Present; indeed it was not translated into English until 1887, and not published in the country it described until 1892, yet of the two it is, a century-and-a-half after first publication, by far the better known. Engels’s preparatory work for it was completed in the two years following his assignment to the Manchester branch of the family firm in November 1842 and it was published in German in Leipzig in 1845. Just as Mill took it upon himself to be the English expert on France, and Carlyle the British specialist on German literature, so Engels adopted the role of expert on England for the benefit of a German readership. However, at about the same time, Engels’s intellectual collaboration with Marx began, and his detailed work on Britain ended with Engels spending much of the second half of the 1840s in France, Belgium and Germany.