The Condition of the Working Class in England

Sent by his family to help run a cotton business in Manchester, the young Engels spent his off-hours walking the slums of England’s factory towns and writing down what he saw. First published in German in 1845, the result is a street-by-street account of how industrial capitalism housed, fed, and worked the people who ran its mills. He lays out the crowded courts of Manchester and Salford, wages that never kept pace, disease and early death, and argues that this misery was not accident but structure. Written before his partnership with Marx had fully formed, it remains one of the earliest works of social investigation to read an entire class through the conditions of its streets. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.