The revised second edition of Engels’s first book, based on his work and observations in the factories and slums of Victorian Manchester, published nearly fifty years after the first edition of 1845, substantially revised with a new preface and issued simultaneously in variant bindings of printed wrappers and publisher’s cloth - the present wrappers issue is extremely scarce.
‘Engels’s first book is important in several respects. Not only was it written from an unusual perspective - that of a German philosophical communist dedicated to the cause of the working classes - and not only was it based on extensive reading of government inquiries and press reports, it was also the product of Engels’s extensive contacts with local labour activists. In addition, in his eyewitness description of the vivid contrast between suburban and proletarian Manchester, Engels produced what many have regarded as a classic account of the nineteenth-century industrial town, fit to stand comparison with Dickens’s Hard Times or Disraeli’s Sybil’ (ODNB).
Provenance: (1) from the library of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola (1843-1904), with an inscription ‘dai libri di Antonia Labrolia’ to the title page; (2) from the library of Professor Luigi Dal Pane, with his private library inventory label and purple ink ownership stamp to the title page and terminal blank.
Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Marx und Engels, p. 10; Draper E171.
