He further found: “Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every other with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but proportionally large agricultural population. While making this study, Engels explored English life in the pre-industrial era and concluded that the village craftsman’s life was “comfortable in their silent vegetation, but for the industrial revolution they would have never emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human being”, as “intellectually they were dead”.

He did learn it from the life around him and it was self-taught. While the working class lived in such destitution, the rich were amassing enormous wealth.Įngels’ attempt to find interconnections between seemingly disconnected phenomena in the life in England was his first training in methods of science. Questions of crime, morality, prostitution and death from typhus epidemic did not escape his attention. He studied the working class life from various angles-conditions of work, use of machinery, destitution of the worker, the condition of women and children, the capitalists’ callous neglect of workers’ health, hygiene and education, and so on. Engels’ guide was Mary Brown from the Irish working class and thus he got to know a world full of misery and despair. He studied the condition of the working class (a study that was published with the title “The Condition of the Working Class in England” in 1843 because of Marx’s insistence) with detailed field work, taking great care with numbers and figures, often drawing the sketches himself. Though he hailed from Barmen, a centre for textile manufacture in the industrially backward Germany, Engels was sent to the industrial heartland of England to get him trained in modern manufacture, business and management, and also to keep him away from the unwanted influence of revolutionary activity that had filtered in from France to Germany.Įngels, of course, would learn industrial and business management with due diligence and rigour, but “forsook the company of dinner parties, port wine and champagne of the middle class”, devoting his “leisure hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with the Working-Men”.

In 1842, 22-year-old Friedrich Engels’ family sent him to its textile firm in Manchester for apprenticeship.

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