The rare first edition of Engels’s first book, The Condition of Working Class in England, based on his work and observations in the factories and slums of Victorian Manchester.
“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” (Gareth Stedman Jones in ODNB).
“In November 1842 Engels left for England to work in his father’s Manchester textile firm, Ermen and Engels. Already a revolutionary republican and an admirer of Jacobinism from his days in the Young Hegelian circle in Berlin, Engels was converted on his way to England by Moses Hess to a belief in ‘Communism’. Convinced also by Hess’s book of 1841, Die europäische Triarchie, of the imminence of social revolution in England, Engels used his two-year stay to study the conditions which would bring it about. From this visit came two pieces of writing which were to establish his lasting importance. The first, an essay entitled ‘Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie’ (’Outlines of a critique of national economy’) published in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844, was the earliest Young Hegelian attempt at economic criticism and exerted a decisive influence upon Marx’s identification of socialism with the critique of political economy. The second, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England nach eigner Anschauung und authentische Quellen, was published in Leipzig in 1845 (English trans. as The Condition of the Working Class in England, New York, 1887). It established his fame in Germany and has remained famous as a classic account of urban conditions during the period of the industrial revolution. Together these works attest to the importance of what Engels accomplished before his collaboration with Karl Marx and indicate that Marxist socialism was as much the creation of Engels as of Marx” (ODNB).
Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Marx und Engels, p. 10; Draper E171; Goldsmiths’ 34358; Kress C.6579; Rubel, Engels 18; Stammhammer I, 72.
