Frederick Engels Written September 1844 to March 1845
Published in Leipzig in 1845
Endnotes
[115] Engels' plans to produce a big work on the social history of England were formed while he was still living in that country (from November 1842 to August 1844). Initially he intended to implement them in the form of a series of articles in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher under the general title of The Condition of England. The February 1844 issue of the journal carried the first article in this series, and the other articles were published later in the Paris Vorwärts! (August-October, 1844 — see present edition, Vol. 3) since the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had ceased to be published. The series, however, remained incomplete. In the articles he wrote Engels was able merely to touch upon his main theme — the condition of the working class in England. He intended to amplify it later in one of the central chapters of his intended book on the social history of England, but in the end his realisation of the proletariat's special role in bourgeois society prompted him to make the condition of the English working class the object of a special study. Upon his return to Barmen early in Septemberl844, Engels at once set about the accomplishment of his revised plan, using material he had collected while in England. "I am buried up to the neck in English newspapers and books from which I am compiling my book on the condition of English proletarians", he informed Marx on November 19, 1844. In January 1845 the work was appreciably advanced and, informing Marx of this on January 20, Engels told him of his intention to start, once it was finished, on a new work: On the Historical Development of England and English Socialism. In mid-March 1845 the manuscript was completed and sent to the Leipzig publisher Wigand. It appeared at the beginning of June 1845, when Engels had already moved to Brussels, where Marx, banished from France, had been since February of that year. The response in the German press was lively. Many newspapers and journals, in particular the Allgemeine Preussische Zeitung, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, the Janus. Jahrbücher deutscher Gesinnung, Bildung und That, 1845, the Gesellschaftsspiegel, Jg. 1845, and a number of others carried reviews of the book. And in socialist circles it was received with great approval. Weydemeyer wrote that Engels' book was "without doubt one of the most important phenomena in our recent literature" ("Dies Buch gehört dem Volke", 1845). O. Lüning noted that the book instilled not only "hatred of and wrath against the oppressors", but also "a feeling of hope and faith in the final victory of reason and justice, in the eternal reason of mankind, which, despite all dangers and storms, will secure a beautiful future" (Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1846). Revolutionary workers were educated on Engels' book. F. Lessner, a German worker who subsequently became an active member of the Communist League, recalled, for example, that it "was the first book I acquired and from which I first obtained an idea of the working-class movement". Bourgeois critics, while acknowledging the accurate observation and the literary merit of the book, nevertheless deplored its revolutionary conclusions. Thus, in a review of recent literature published in the Berlin journal Janus. Jahrbücher deutscher Gesinnung, in 1845 (Bd. 2, Heft 18), Professor F. A. H. Huber accused the author of making his work "a call for murder and arson written with bile, blood and passion". The polemic over Engels' book continued in the following years. For instance, the prominent German economist B. Hildebrand devoted to its analysis a considerable part of his work Die Nationalökonomie oder Gegenwart und Zukunft, Frankfurt am Main, 1848. Acknowledging the author's talent and the originality of his research, this critic took great exception to his communist ideas and declared his characterisation of English bourgeois society to be true in detail but incorrect as a whole. Engels' book became well known also outside Germany. As early as July 1845, a few weeks after it was published, reviews appeared in Russia (Literaturnaya Gazeta No. 25, July 5, 1845). Engels' work was highly rated by revolutionary democrats. N. V. Shelgunov, in an article published in the journal Sovremennik in 1861, demonstrated the groundlessness of Hildebrand's attacks on Engels, whom he called "one of the best and noblest of Germans". The article summarised with approval the main content of Engels' work (Sovremennik, LXXXV, Sec. 1). Marx, in his own economic researches, based himself in many respects on the material and conclusions of his friend's work, which he quoted in many passages of Capital. But later, Engels himself was very critical of his book. Acknowledging that it was written with genuinely youthful inspiration, "freshly and passionately, with bold anticipation" (see his letter to Marx of April 9, 1863), he at the same time found in it certain weaknesses typical of the initial stage in the development of scientific communism. In later editions he took steps to warn the reader of its shortcomings. Thus, in the Appendix to the American edition (1887), which was included in the Preface to the English and German editions of 1892, Engels wrote: "... This book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of modern Socialism from one of its ancestors — the German philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working class alone." Engels went on to explain why his assumption in 1845 that the social revolution in England was imminent had not been borne out. Among the causes for this he emphasised the decline of Chartism after 1848 and the temporary preponderance of reformist tendencies in the English working-class movement — bred out of England's industrial monopoly on the world market, which had turned out to be much more lasting than he had assumed. The Condition of the Working-Class in England had several editions during the author's lifetime. As early as 1848, Wigand's publishing house in Leipzig put out a new impression of the work, marked "Second Edition" on the title page, although it was merely a reprint of the first. The book was published in English for the first time in New York in 1887 in a translation made by the American Socialist Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. The American edition is the authorised one. Engels edited the translation, made a number of changes in the text, omitted the address "To the Working-Classes of Great-Britain" and the Preface to the first German edition of 1845, and provided the book with the new Preface of 1887 addressed to the American reader together with an Afterword (the Appendix written in 1886) dealing with changes that had since taken place in the condition of the English working class. He included in this Afterword the text of the article "England in 1845 and in 1885", which he had written in 1885. The title of the book was altered to The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844; in the table of contents only the titles of the chapters were preserved, without the enumeration of the questions discussed in them which had appeared in the German edition of 1845 (at the same time a short subject index was added); some drawings and the plan of Manchester were omitted, a number of references to sources in the text were given as footnotes, etc. The text of the American edition was reproduced almost without change in the authorised English edition which was published in London in 1892. Engels wrote another special Preface, including in it almost without change the Afterword to the American edition of 1887, while the Preface for American readers was omitted. In the same year the Dietz publishing house in Stuttgart published the authorised second German edition, the text of which reproduced in the main that of 1845. Engels wrote for it a new Preface, identical on the whole with that of the 1892 English edition, but with additions in the concluding part and a number of new footnotes. The present edition reproduces the English translation made by Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky and edited by Engels himself. This text has also been collated with the original German edition and the major different readings affecting the meaning are given as footnotes. Some parts of the text which were omitted by Engels when he edited the English translation (for instance, the address to the English reader, the Preface to the first edition, the poem "The Steam King" by Edward Mead, the enumeration of subjects in the table of contents, etc.) have been restored according to the German edition, the relevant indications being given in footnotes or Notes at the end of the volume. The title of the book has also been given according to the first edition. Slips and omissions made by Florence Wischnewetzky have been corrected; in particular, she did not have at her disposal a number of English sources used by Engels and she gave quotations from them in retranslation from the German (in the American and English editions of 1887 and 1892 this was specially mentioned in the Translator's Note). In the present edition the texts of English sources quoted by Engels have been given according to the original, taking into account the author's method of quoting (abridgments, re-arrangement of the text, and so on). Errors in dates and in names of persons and places have been corrected, account being taken of the corrections introduced in the book: Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Translated and edited by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, New York, 1958. Use has been made of some original texts from rare sources quoted in the above-mentioned edition. The author's prefaces to subsequent editions and the Afterword to the American edition of 1887 will be included in the relevant volumes of the present edition according to the dates of their writing.