Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

nothing.’

      His literary tastes were becoming more political and prosaic. He bought a topical pamphlet, Jacob Grimm über seiner Entlassung, which described the dismissal by Göttingen University of seven liberal professors who had dared to protest at the oppressive regime of Ernst August, the new King of Hanover. ‘It is extraordinarily good and written with a rare power.’ He read no fewer than seven pamphlets on the ‘Cologne affair’ – the refusal, in 1837, of the Archbishop of Cologne to obey the King of Prussia. ‘I have read things here and come across expressions – I am getting good practice, especially in literature – which one would never be allowed to print in our parts, quite liberal ideas, etc … really wonderful.’ In one of his letters to the Graebers, emboldened by beer, he referred to Ernst August as ‘the old Hanoverian he-goat’.

      The most obviously ‘progressive’ voices of the time came from the Young Germany group of writers, disciples of Heine who advocated free speech, the emancipation of women, an end to religious tyranny, and abolition of hereditary aristocracy. ‘Who can have anything against that?’ Engels asked, half-mockingly. He was impatient with their easy, vague liberalism, but in the absence of anything more rigorous or analytical he had nowhere else to turn. ‘What shall I, poor devil, do now? Go on swotting on my own? Don’t feel like it. Turn loyal? The devil if I will!’ So, faute de mieux, he became a Young German himself. ‘I cannot sleep at night, all because of the ideas of the century. When I am at the post office and look at the Prussian coat of arms, I am seized with the spirit of freedom. Every time I look at a newspaper I hunt for advances of freedom. They get into my poems and mock at the obscurantists in monk’s cowls and in ermine.’

      Back home in Barmen his parents knew nothing of their son’s democratic fever: he did his best to keep them in ignorance, then and for many years afterwards. Even in middle age, when he and Marx were joyfully awaiting the imminent crisis of capitalism, Engels was always on his best behaviour during Friedrich senior’s visits to Manchester, playing the part of a dutiful heir who could be trusted with the family fortune – just as, out riding with the Cheshire Hunt, he was able to pass himself off as a conservative local businessman. His communism, his atheism, his sexual promiscuity: these all belonged to his separate life.

      To those in the know, Engels’s true opinions of his parents and their milieu were obvious as early as March 1839, when he wrote a coruscating attack on the smug, complacent burghers of Barmen and Elberfeld for the Telegraph für Deutschland, a Young Germany newspaper. The eighteen-year-old author hid behind the pseudonym ‘Friedrich Oswald’ – a necessary precaution, since the articles were nothing less than journalistic parricide. In the ‘gloomy streets’ of Elberfeld, he reported, all the alehouses were full to overflowing on Saturday and Sunday nights:

      and when they close at about eleven o’clock, the drunks pour out of them and generally sleep off their intoxication in the gutter … The reasons for this state of affairs are perfectly clear. First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen – and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six – is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. The weavers, who have individual looms in their homes, sit bent over them from morning till night, and desiccate their spinal marrow in front of a hot stove. Those who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness.

      As the reference to mysticism implies, Engels had already identified religion as a handmaiden of exploitation and hypocrisy: ‘For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.’ He even named some of these snivelling pharisees, though he forbore to mention his own father.

      The ‘Letters from Elberfeld’ caused outrage. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ he wrote to Friedrich Graeber, one of the few to be let in on the secret. ‘Do you know who wrote the article in the Telegraph? The author is the writer of these lines, but I advise you not to say anything about it. I could get into a hell of a lot of trouble.’

      In the spring of 1841 Engels left Bremen for military service in Berlin, enlisting in the Household Artillery. The choice of Berlin, capital city of Young Hegelianism, was no accident: though his army uniform gave him a camouflage of respectability and reassured his parents, he spent every spare moment immersing himself in radical theology and journalism. He pulled off a similar trick in the autumn of 1842 when dispatched to the Manchester branch of Ermen & Engels: while apparently training himself in the family business, as a dutiful heir should, he took the opportunity to investigate the human consequences of capitalism. Manchester was the birthplace of the Anti-Corn Law League, the centre of the 1842 General Strike, a city teeming with Chartists, Owenites and industrial agitators of every kind. Here, if anywhere, he would discover the nature of the beast. By day he was a quietly diligent young manager at the Cotton Exchange; after hours he changed sides, exploring the terra incognita of proletarian Lancashire to gather facts and impressions for his early masterpiece, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Often accompanied by his new lover, a redheaded Irish factory girl called Mary Burns, he ventured into slum districts which few other men of his class had ever seen. Here, for example, is his picture of ‘Little Ireland’, the area of Manchester south-west of the Oxford Road:

      Masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk. 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, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live?

      What gave the book its power and depth was Engels’s skilful interweaving (he was a textile man, after all) of firsthand observation with information from parliamentary commissions, health officials and copies of Hansard. The British state may have done little or nothing to improve the lot of the workers, but it had collected a mass of data about the horrors of industrial life which was available to anyone who cared to retrieve it from a dusty library shelf. Newspaper reports, particularly from criminal trials, provided yet more details. ‘On Monday, 15 January, 1844,’ Engels noted:

      two boys were brought before the police magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. The magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details from the policeman. The mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her husband … When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed.

      Engels was astonished to discover that the organs of the British bourgeoisie provided so much incriminating evidence against themselves. After quoting several gruesome cases of disease and starvation, published in the middle-class Manchester Guardian, he exulted: ‘I delight in the testimony of my opponents.’ One need only study the citations from government Blue Books and The Economist in the first volume of Capital to see how much Karl Marx learned from this technique.