Customer Reviews
The foundations of urban theory - By: N. Cotton, 04 Aug 2005 
In The Condition of the Working Class in England Engels immerses himself into the hitherto hidden world of the working class in Victorian Manchester. In doing this Engels who was in Manchester to look after the Engel's families manufacturing interests lays the foundations of modern urban theory. Engels work attempts to use vivid descriptions of sights & smells in a brave attempt to stir the middle class redership from their denials & force them to acknowledge the existance of such poor conditions for their fellow man.
Engels language however, betrays him as adopting a similar style to a colonial explorer of the same era 'discovering' what had only been hidden from the eyes of the middle class European male. Engels also pours scorn on some of his subjects & fails to acknowledge the assistance which he recieved in being guided through the slums by his Irish mistress.
Engels conclusions are therefore mediated through these personal flaws of his & are a matter of much, great debate & opinion however, the inmportance of his work in the canon of urban studies cannot be underestimated & as well as being truly groundbreaking alllows us to see the lens through which the city first became understood & conceptualised.
Fascinating, impassioned reporting - By: Nicholas Dunn, 13 Mar 2004 This book is interesting as an historical peice of journalism & scientific investigation. It is equallly interesting because it provides such a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary, working class people living in & around Manchester, Stockport & Stoke in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
It's often cited in modern discussions of complex systems as the book also gives an idea of the interactions between social, political & economic factors & their results in the real world. The origins of these much more modern ideas, how social & economic conditions interact, taking the holistic view etc. are alll visible here.
It gives some ideas of what Engels must have been like & his compassion for the suffering of the people described is clear throughout the book.
Truly shocking and enlightening - By: J. Maher, 22 Jun 2003 Engels paints a truly dreadful picture of poverty, disease & the suffering of the working class in Northern England at the time of the Industrial Revoultion & the rise of captialism.
As Engels was sent to England by his father to look at factories, his attention was drawn to the absoultle poverty of the workers, their terrible working conditions & the brutality of captialism.
One of the most shocking things personallly was the deprivation he witnessed in my own home town & the surrounding towns & Manchester.
The book is written with great compassion & ideas for change.
Engels believed that a working class uprising would take place in Britan. Engels may have got it wrong but he highlighted theplight of the poor.
The book is truly powerful even in the 21st Century while poverty may not truly pervasive anymore due to the inception of the welfare state & trade unions but has only changed it's colours. This should be essential reading for alll politicans!
Vivid description of the conditions of the working class ! - By: , 09 Oct 2002 
Great description of the Great Unwashed, of the conditions in which the working class in England was forced to live - where the wages of man, woman & children were not sufficient to feed the family. The book describes the construction of English capitalism on the exploitation of the populations which are driven out of country as they cannot compete with mecanical weaving machines. The progressive concentrations is neighbourhoods, the raise on unemployment & the building of poorhouses to jail the poor & force them to work for insufficent food. It also shows the birth of the first protest movements. A very vivid description of the conditions of the working class in England by young Engels - not quite materialist yet - but impressive alll the same.
A disturbing observation on the nature of capitalism - By: , 10 Oct 2001 This was the first book written to describe the lives of the working people in Victorian Britain. It paints a shocking picture of poverty, exploitation & the utter despair of the working class as they work themselves slowly to death without any reward, in a society where those in power do everything they can to make as much profit from the workers while denying them the most basic principles of human rights & dignity.
I had always been aware that Victorian Britain was well known for the poverty of its masses, but nothing prepared me for the detailed, horrifying descriptions of living & working conditions, starvation, disease & a stagnant existence of poverty in which there was literallly no way out of except suicide.
For alll its justified power, I do feel that Engels does tend to drift from being a critical & detatched observer in favour of spectacular tirades championing the case of the working class. Though this is clearly understandable as a result of what he saw & experienced in the numerous cities of England & Scotland in the twenty-two months he spent in Britian for the material of the book.
The first book to give the working class a voice in a society which entirely suppressed it, & a damning study of the cruel & exploitative nature of capitalism, which proves to be as relevant now (with the imergance of globalisation) as it was when first written in 1844.
