Marx & Engels in Manchester
Next tours
STOP PRESS: Engels 200th Birthday Special moved to early 2021, date to be decided.
INSTEAD: Friedrich Engels at 200:
Zoom talk-tour, Sat 28 Nov, 5.30pm.
Book with eventbrite by pressing here:

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Part 1: The Frock-Coated Communists
Date: To be re-arranged from Saturday 28 November 2020.
Meet: Engels statue, HOME, 11.30am.
Booking:

Part 2: The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester
Date: To be re-arranged from Saturday 28 November 2020.
Meet: St Ann’s Church, 2.30pm.
Booking:

Two hundred years ago on this day, 28 November 1820, Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen, Prussia. He went on to devise a new political creed – communism – which the world has been confounded with ever since. His great friend, Karl Marx, also had a part to play.

But Engels was more than a revolutionary campaigner, he was also one of the greatest writers who ever lived – no one captured and critiqued the horrors of Victorian Manchester more vividly, as related in his ground-breaking work, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845).

We will visit his haunts and match the quotes to the location, probably from the English version, The Condition of the Working Class in England, rather than German, unless you insist.

These two different tours will be led by Penguin author and expert Manchester historian, Ed Glinert, a bit of a revolutionary himself.

 

 

 

 

 

What do we hear about? If you want to blame any one place for the creation of communism, blame Manchester. It was here, in the middle years of the 19th century, that the movement’s two founding figures, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, arrived from Germany to conduct much of their research into poverty and social conditions, fuelling their original take on how society could be reorganised along class lines. Their work resulted in some of the most influential political books ever written, including The Condition of the Working Class in England. 

Then there was the later and better-known Manifesto of the Communist Party. How strange that must have seemed when published in 1848. No such body as the Communist Party then existed, nor, as Francis Wheen explained in his 1999 biography of Marx, was the work really a manifesto. As a piece of literature the Manifesto is clumsy and pedestrian. Its famous early line – “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” – pales alongside its precursor, Rousseau’s great epithet from the Social Contract: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains”.

But as a piece of political propaganda its resonance has been phenomenal. Only one other book – the Bible – and that is of unsure translation – has had such an impact on humanity. The Manifesto of the Communist Partyis the most influential book that ever arose from debates held by heavily-bearded German visitors in sawdusty pubs, the cornerstone of a philosophy that powered the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, North Korea and a much of east Europe for the latter half of the 20th century, and still propels much political thought worldwide.

Friedrich Engels came to Manchester in December 1842 to work at the headquarters of the family firm of Ermen & Engels in Weaste. His father sent the young firebrand to Manchester to rid him of his radical views; so he hoped. It didn’t work. If anything, Friedrich became even more devout. By day he worked as a cotton merchant. By night he scoured the slum streets of Irish Town (now Angel Meadow) rooting out instances of injury, injustice and inequality.

These were brilliantly outlined in The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1844 (which no one could have read in English until the end of the century as it was available only in German). Now it’s our most potent set of descriptions of down and out Manchester at the height of the industrial revolution.

Here’s an example of Engels on the slums off Oxford Street: “In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about 200 cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about 4,000 human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal, and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions…The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity.”

Engels stayed in Manchester on and off for almost 30 years. Marx came to visit him a number of times, lodging at 70 Great Ducie Street near Strangeways prison, a house since demolished. Engels had various Manchester addresses over the years. In the 1860s he lived at 6 Thorncliffe Grove, 25 Dover St, and 58 Dover Street – all in Chorlton-on-Medlock, all long demolished. He left no easily retraceable trail as he was wary of the German authorities, through the British secret service, catching up with him. Indeed on 11 March 1933, the 50th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, the Manchester Guardian sought help in tracking down Engels’s Manchester movements. “The 50th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx is a reminder that through his great friend, collaborator and benefactor, Friedrich Engels, Marx had the closest of links with Manchester. Oddly enough neither the directories of the time nor the accessible biographies tell us where Engels lived…here is a problem for some local historian.”

Letters from helpful local historians soon flooded in, but the best research was conducted by Ruth and Eddie Frow, founders of the Working Class Movement Library that can now be found on Salford Crescent, in the 1960s. The Frows pieced together almost every aspect of Engels (and Marx’s) life in Manchester. It’s thanks to them that modern-day scholars and guides know so much, as you can find out on our walks.