The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892 Flashcards
Friedrich Engels · Public domain edition · 342 cards · 90 chapters
Friedrich Engels argues that early industrial capitalism produced severe misery for English workers and that later reforms often served manufacturers’ interests. The deck covers his evidence on wages, housing, surplus value, factory legislation, crises, Free Trade, and his 1892 reassessment.
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Chapter 1 · Question
Why does Engels say the 1844 conditions now seem primitive?
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Chapter 1 · Answer
The author argues that after the 1847 crisis, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Californian and Australian gold discoveries, expanding colonial markets, and railways and ocean steamers created a true world-market centered on England. This made England's industrial progress colossal and unparalleled, so the status of 1844 appeared comparatively primitive and insignificant by comparison.
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Section 14 cards
Why does Engels say the 1844 conditions now seem primitive?
The author argues that after the 1847 crisis, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Californian and Australian gold discoveries, expanding colonial markets, and railways and ocean steamers created a true world-market centered on England. This made England's industrial progress colossal and unparalleled, so the status of 1844 appeared comparatively primitive and insignificant by comparison.
Chapter 1
What did Engels claim was the real purpose of reforms like the Ten Hours' Bill?
The author argues these concessions to justice and philanthropy were means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few. The truck system was suppressed and the Ten Hours' Bill enacted, much against Free Trade and unbridled competition, but equally in favor of the giant-capitalist competing against smaller rivals who could not survive without such perquisites.
Chapter 1
According to Engels, what is the basis of surplus value?
The wage-worker sells his labour-force to the capitalist for a certain daily sum. After a few hours he has reproduced the value of that sum, but the contract requires him to work additional hours. The value produced during this surplus labour is surplus value, which costs the capitalist nothing but goes into his pocket.
Chapter 1
Did sanitation reforms substantially improve workers' housing, per Engels?
Engels says epidemics of cholera, typhus, and smallpox convinced the bourgeoisie of the need for sanitation. Drainage was improved and slums like Little Ireland cleared, but whole districts fell into the same dilapidation as towns grew. The bourgeoisie progressed in hiding distress; the 1885 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor proved no substantial improvement.
Chapter 1
Section 24 cards
According to Engels, which countries were breaking England's industrial monopoly by 1892?
Engels names France, Germany, and especially America as the formidable competitors breaking up England's industrial monopoly, a development he says he foresaw in 1844. Their manufactures were young compared with England's but increasing far more rapidly, and he notes they had arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in 1844.
Chapter 2
What parallels did Engels draw between American and English workers' conditions?
Engels argues the same economic laws were at work in America, producing struggles for a shorter working-day and legal limits on working-time, especially for women and children in factories. He cites the truck-system in full blossom and the cottage-system used by bosses to dominate rural workers, comparing the 1886 Connellsville coal-miners' strike to the North of England colliers' strike of 1844.
Chapter 2
Why did Engels decline to bring the book up to date in this translation?
Engels gives two reasons: doing it properly would roughly double the book's size, and Marx's Das Kapital, already in English translation, contains an ample description of the British working-class around 1865, when British industrial prosperity peaked. He says he would otherwise have had to cover again ground already covered by Marx's celebrated work.
Chapter 2
What did Engels revise about the period of industrial crises, and why?
The text originally stated the crisis period as five years, apparently indicated by events from 1825 to 1842. Engels notes that industrial history from 1842 to 1868 showed the real period to be ten years, with intermediate revulsions secondary and tending to disappear. He adds that since 1868 things changed again, to be discussed later.
Chapter 2
Section 34 cards
What did Engels claim Free Trade meant for England's policy?
Engels argues Free Trade meant readjusting England's whole home and foreign commercial and financial policy to suit the manufacturing capitalists, now the class representing the nation. Every obstacle to industrial production was removed, the tariff and taxation were revolutionised, all subordinated to cheapening raw produce and the means of living of the working class, and keeping down wages.
Chapter 3
How did manufacturer attitudes toward Factory Acts and Trades' Unions change after 1848?
The author argues manufacturers learned the middle class cannot gain full power without working-class help. Factory Acts, once their bugbear, were willingly submitted to and expanded to nearly all trades. Trades' Unions, once called devilish inventions, were patronised as legitimate and useful for spreading sound economical doctrines. Strikes, once nefarious, were gradually found occasionally useful, especially when masters provoked them.
Chapter 3
Which two sections of the working class did Engels say improved permanently?
Engels identifies two protected sections: factory hands, whose legally fixed working-day restored their physical constitution and gave moral superiority through local concentration, leaving them better off than before 1848; and the great Trades' Unions of trades dominated by grown-up men, like engineers, carpenters, joiners and bricklayers, an aristocracy of labour that secured a comfortable position and accepts it as final.
Chapter 3
What did Engels say about the condition of the great mass of workers?
Engels argues the great mass lived in misery and insecurity as low as ever, if not lower. The East End of London he describes as an ever-spreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work and physical and moral degradation when in work, and so in other large towns, smaller towns and agricultural districts. Two laws keep labour's value and average price at subsistence minimum.
Chapter 3
Section 44 cards
Why did Engels say England's Free Trade assumption was a delusion?
Engels argues the Free Trade theory assumed England would be the sole great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. But steam-power and machinery can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coal, and France, Belgium, Germany, America, and even Russia have coal. These nations chose to manufacture for themselves and the world rather than become pauper farmers for English capitalists, irretrievably breaking England's near-century manufacturing monopoly.
Chapter 4
What did Palgrave say in 1883 about English trade?
At the 1883 Southport meeting of the British Association, Mr. Inglis Palgrave, President of the Economic section, stated plainly that the days of great trade profits in England were over and there was a pause in several great branches of industrial labour. He said the country might almost be said to be entering the non-progressive state. Engels cites this to show he was not the first to point it out.
Chapter 4
Why does Engels call constant expansion capitalism's Achilles heel?
Engels argues capitalist production cannot stop: it must go on increasing and expanding or die. Even while England's monopoly lasted, markets could not keep pace with productivity, causing decennial crises. Now, as England's share of world markets shrinks, stagnation, distress, excess capital, and unemployed workpeople follow. Since constant expansion is capitalism's very basis and is now impossible, it ends in deadlock.
Chapter 4
Why does Engels expect Socialism to return to England?
Engels argues that during England's industrial monopoly the working-class partly shared its benefits, though unequally: a privileged minority pocketed most, but the mass had a temporary share now and then. That, he says, is why no Socialism existed in England since Owenism died out. With the monopoly's breakdown, workers will lose that privileged position and level with fellow-workers abroad—hence Socialism again in England.
Chapter 4
Section 54 cards
What did the jenny, invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves, make possible?
The jenny was a hand-moved machine carrying sixteen or eighteen spindles instead of the spinning-wheel's one, manipulated by a single workman. It produced more yarn than could be woven by available workers, lowering yarn costs and thus cloth prices. Rising demand for cheaper woven goods then increased the need for weavers and raised their wages.
Chapter 5
How did the weaver's position change after the jenny raised weavers' wages?
Since the weaver could earn more at his loom, he gradually abandoned his farming and gave his whole time to weaving. A family of four grown persons and two children could earn four pounds a week with eight hours' daily work. The class of farming weavers disappeared, merged into weavers living wholly on wages with no property, becoming proletarians.
Chapter 5
What was the old relationship between spinner and weaver, and how did the jenny destroy it?
Hitherto, so far as possible, yarn had been spun and woven under one roof. Once the jenny and loom both required a strong hand, men began to spin and whole families lived by spinning, while others set aside the superseded spinning-wheel. Those unable to buy a jenny were forced to live on the father's wages alone, beginning the division of labour later infinitely perfected.
Chapter 5
How does the author characterize the pre-industrial weavers' moral and intellectual life?
The author argues they stood on the moral and intellectual plane of yeomen, regarding the squire as their natural superior and settling disputes through him. They were respectable, led moral lives for lack of temptation, and rarely could read or write. Intellectually, he says, they were dead, living only for private interest, though he calls this existence not worthy of human beings.
Chapter 5
Section 64 cards
How did the new class of large tenants displace the yeomen?
When industrial workers left agriculture, many small holdings fell idle. New tenants-at-will took them, holding fifty to two hundred or more acres and liable to eviction yearly. With improved tillage and large-scale farming they sold produce more cheaply than yeomen, who then had to sell their farms, buy a jenny or loom, or become labourers for large farmers.
Chapter 6
What inventions does Engels credit with building the factory system for cotton spinning?
Capitalists set up jennies in large buildings driven by water-power. In 1767 Richard Arkwright, a Preston barber, invented the spinning throstle, which Engels calls the most important mechanical invention of the 18th century after the steam-engine. Samuel Crompton combined jenny and throstle into the mule in 1785, and Arkwright also invented the carding engine and preparatory frames.
Chapter 6
What effects does Engels attribute to machine-work defeating hand-work?
The author argues the consequences were twofold: on one hand, a rapid fall in prices, prosperity of commerce, conquest of foreign markets, and multiplication of capital and national wealth; on the other, a still more rapid growth of the proletariat, destruction of property-holding and security of employment, demoralisation, and political excitement.
Chapter 6
How did cotton import and export figures illustrate industrial growth?
Raw cotton imports rose from under 5,000,000 pounds annually in 1771-1775 to 528,000,000 pounds in 1841, with 1844 expected to reach 600,000,000. In 1834 England exported 556,000,000 yards of woven cotton goods and 76,500,000 pounds of yarn, with over 8,000,000 mule spindles at work, and Engels estimates 1845 figures were half again larger.
Chapter 6
Section 74 cards
What effect did reducing the silk import duty in 1824 have on English silk mills?
The chapter states that until 1824 a heavy duty of four shillings per pound on raw silk greatly retarded the English silk industry. In that year the duty was reduced to one penny, and the number of mills increased at once; in a single year throwing spindles rose from 780,000 to 1,180,000. The commercial crisis of 1825 temporarily crippled the branch, but by 1827 production exceeded all previous levels.
Chapter 7
What was the puddling process and why did it matter for English iron?
The chapter explains that coke-smelted iron had previously been convertible only into cast-iron. In 1780 a new method was invented for converting it into usable wrought-iron. This process, called puddling, consists in withdrawing the carbon that had mixed with the iron during smelting, and it opened a wholly new field for English iron production. Furnaces were built fifty times larger, and hot blasts simplified smelting.
Chapter 7
How did the West Riding of Yorkshire population and wool industry grow?
The chapter reports that in 1738 the West Riding produced 75,000 pieces of woollen cloth; by 1817, 490,000 pieces. Bradford grew from 29,000 inhabitants in 1801 to 77,000 in 1831, Leeds from 53,000 to 123,000, and the whole West Riding from 564,000 to 980,000. The author adds that since 1831 the population must have grown at least 20 to 25 percent further.
Chapter 7
Who introduced flax spinning successfully, and where did the linen industry concentrate?
The chapter states that the Frenchman Girard, who introduced flax spinning in 1810, was the first to succeed practically, though his machines gained importance on British soil through English improvements and use in Leeds, Dundee, and Belfast. In 1835 there were 347 flax spinning establishments employing 33,000 workers, half in the South of Scotland, over 60 in the West Riding, 25 in Belfast, and the rest in Dorset and Lancashire.
Chapter 7
Section 83 cards
What agricultural changes did large landowners make in this period?
The great holders applied capital to improving the soil: they tore down needless fences, drained and manured land, used better tools, and adopted crop rotation. Science aided them, as Sir Humphrey Davy successfully applied chemistry to agriculture, and mechanical advances benefited large farmers. Meanwhile, from 1760 to 1834, 6,840,540 acres of waste land were reclaimed, yet England shifted from a grain-exporting to a grain-importing country.
Chapter 8
What was the state of England's roads and who built them?
From 1818 to 1829, England and Wales built 1,000 English miles of roadway at the legally prescribed width of 60 feet, and most old roads were rebuilt on M'Adam's system. Scotland's Department of Public Works built nearly 900 miles of road and over 1,000 bridges since 1803. The author notes that, as with almost everything in England, this network was the work of private enterprise, with the State doing very little.
Chapter 8
When did canal building begin in England and who was key?
Before 1755 England had almost no canals. That year a canal was built in Lancashire from Sankey Brook to St Helen's, and in 1759 James Brindley built the first important one, the Duke of Bridgewater's canal from Manchester and nearby coal mines to the mouth of the Mersey, crossing the Irwell by aqueduct near Barton. England alone has 2,200 miles of canals and 1,800 miles of navigable river.
Chapter 8
Section 94 cards
According to Engels, what has become the national question since the Reform Bill?
The author argues the national question is what will become of the destitute millions of working-men who created England's greatness through their inventions and toil, who grow more conscious of their might, and who demand a share of society's advantages. He claims all important Parliamentary debates reduce to this question, though the middle-class tries to evade it.
Chapter 9
How does Engels explain the middle-class's refusal to acknowledge the workers' distress?
The author argues the manufacturing class, enriched directly by the workers' poverty, feels itself the mighty representative class and is ashamed to expose England's sore spot to the world. It will not confess even to itself that workers are in distress because it must bear the moral responsibility. Hence its scornful smile, ignorance, and absurd freedom from anxiety on soil that may collapse.
Chapter 9
What order does Engels propose for investigating the sections of the proletariat?
The author orders the investigation by the history of the proletariat's rise: first those connected with manufacture, who were the first proletarians; then the coal and metal miners, engendered by the industrial change; third, agriculture, which manufacture influenced; and fourth, Ireland. He claims intelligence is in direct proportion to relation to manufacture, with factory hands most enlightened.
Chapter 9
What three levers does Engels say manufacture used to transform the world since the mid-eighteenth century?
The author names the division of labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the application of machinery as the three great levers. Manufacture on a small scale created the middle-class; on a large scale it created the working-class and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, only to overthrow them when the time comes.
Chapter 9
Section 104 cards
What does Engels claim great towns demonstrate about class structure?
Engels argues that in great towns commerce and manufacture reach fullest development, centralising property and erasing old customs. Only a rich and a poor class remain, as the lower middle class vanishes daily. The formerly stable middle class becomes the most restless, consisting of remnants of the past and fortune-seekers—industrial Micawbers and speculators—where one may amass a fortune while ninety-nine become insolvent.
Chapter 10
How does Engels describe relations among people in London's streets?
The author argues that Londoners sacrifice the best qualities of human nature for civilization's marvels, leaving many powers dormant. Crowds of all ranks pass without a glance, bound only by a tacit agreement to keep to one's side of the pavement. This brutal indifference and unfeeling isolation of each in private interest is, he says, the fundamental principle of society everywhere, carried to its utmost extreme in the great city.
Chapter 10
What does Engels mean by 'social murder' and who does he say commits it?
Engels reports that during his residence in England twenty or thirty persons died of simple starvation in revolting circumstances, yet juries rarely had courage to return that verdict, finding backdoors to escape it. He adds that many more died indirectly when prolonged lack of proper nourishment brought fatal illness. The English working-men call this 'social murder' and accuse the whole society of perpetrating it perpetually; Engels asks whether they are wrong.
Chapter 10
What insecurity does Engels say the working-man faces regarding employment?
Engels argues no one assures the worker employment or guarantees that willingness to work, uprightness, industry, and thrift will obtain work. Every breeze, every whim of the employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the whirlpool. Though he may have means of living today, it is very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow—he knows it does not depend on himself.
Chapter 10
Section 114 cards
How does Engels describe the general layout and condition of working-class slums in English cities?
Engels describes slums as separate territories where the working class is crowded, usually one- or two-storied cottages in long rows, sometimes cellars used as dwellings, with three or four rooms and a kitchen. Streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, lacking sewers or gutters but supplied with foul stagnant pools; ventilation is impeded by confused building, and streets serve as drying grounds for laundry.
Chapter 11
What conditions does Rev. G. Alston report in his Bethnal Green parish?
Alston states the parish contains 1,400 houses inhabited by 2,795 families, about 12,000 persons, on less than 400 yards square. It is common to find a man, wife, four or five children, and sometimes both grandparents in one room where they eat, sleep, and work. Not one father in ten has clothing other than his working suit; many have no bed but a sack of straw and shavings.
Chapter 11
What rent figures does Engels give for slum dwellings near Drury Lane and Westminster?
Engels lists weekly rents in Charles Street: two cellar dwellings 3s.; ground-floor room 4s.; second-storey 4s. 6d.; third-floor 4s.; garret-room 3s. He says starving occupants of Charles Street alone pay house-owners a yearly tribute of £2,000, and the 5,336 families in Westminster pay yearly rent of £40,000 — showing property owners profiting from poverty.
Chapter 11
What statistics does Engels cite for overcrowding in the parishes of St. John, St. Margaret, and St. George, Hanover Square?
Citing the Journal of the Statistical Society for 1840, Engels reports 5,366 working-men's families in 5,294 dwellings in St. John and St. Margaret parishes — 26,830 persons, with three-fourths of families possessing but one room. In the aristocratic parish of St. George, Hanover Square, 1,465 working-men's families, nearly 6,000 persons, lived under similar conditions, more than two-thirds crowded one family per room.
Chapter 11
Section 124 cards
What did the coroner's inquest of Ann Galway reveal about her living conditions?
Ann Galway, 45, lived at No. 3 White Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London, with her husband and 19-year-old son in a room with no bedstead or furniture. She lay dead on a heap of feathers with no sheet or coverlet; the physician found her starved and scarred by vermin bites. Part of the floor was torn up and used by the family as a privy.
Chapter 12
What happened to the widow of the ex-soldier in Spitalfields in January 1844?
Her two starving sons stole and devoured a half-cooked calf's foot and were brought before a police magistrate. The widow lived at No. 2 Pool's Place, Quaker Court, Spitalfields, with six of her nine children in a back room with almost no furniture, no fire, and rags for a bed. She had sold her bedstead and pawned bedding for food. The magistrate ordered her provision from the poor-box.
Chapter 12
How does Engels qualify his claim that London workers live in such want?
Engels states he is far from asserting that all London working-people live in such want. He acknowledges that ten are somewhat better off where one is totally trodden under foot by society. But he asserts that thousands of industrious and worthy people find themselves in a condition unworthy of human beings, and that every proletarian is exposed to a similar fate without fault of his own.
Chapter 12
According to the London Times quoted by Engels, who sleeps in the parks and why?
The Times reports an average of 50 people of all ages huddle together in the parks every night, sheltered only by trees and hollows of the embankment. Most are young girls seduced from the country by soldiers and turned loose in destitution and early vice. The Times calls this a monstrous state of things, with wealth laughing heedlessly at want, and urges readers to act rather than theorise.
Chapter 12
Section 134 cards
What evidence does Engels give of overcrowding in London's refuges for the homeless?
Engels cites the Upper Ogle Street Refuge, built to shelter 300 nightly, which received 2,740 persons between January 27 and March 17, 1844, with applicants increasing and crowds turned away each night. The Central Asylum in Playhouse Yard supplied about 460 beds nightly in early 1844, sheltering 6,681 persons and distributing 96,141 portions of bread.
Chapter 13
How does Engels compare Dublin's poor districts to those of other British cities?
Engels calls Dublin's aristocratic districts better laid out than any other British city, but its poor quarters among the most hideous in the world. He argues this wretchedness is not specific to Dublin or the Irish character, since thousands of Irish live in English and Scottish cities and every poor population sinks into similar uncleanliness. He cites 1,318 persons in 52 houses in Barral Street.
Chapter 13
What did Dr. Lee testify about poverty in his Edinburgh parish in 1836?
Before the Commission of Religious Instruction, Dr. Lee testified he had never seen such misery: people without furniture, two married couples often sharing one room, and in one day he visited seven houses with no bed, some without even straw. Old people of eighty slept on board floors, and in one cellar two families lived with a donkey in darkness so deep persons could not be distinguished by day.
Chapter 13
Why does Edinburgh's Old Town layout worsen conditions for the poor, according to Engels?
Engels explains the Old Town is built on both slopes of a hill along the High Street, with narrow, crooked alleys called wynds opening downward and forming the proletarian district. Scottish houses are generally five or six storeys, unlike England where each family ideally has a separate house, so crowding on limited area is intensified. An English journal notes streets so narrow one could step between opposite windows.
Chapter 13
Section 144 cards
What housing conditions does Engels report for Liverpool's workers?
Engels states that over 45,000 people, a full fifth of Liverpool's population, live in 7,862 narrow, dark, damp, badly ventilated cellar dwellings. Besides these, he counts 2,270 courts, small spaces built up on all four sides with one narrow covered entrance, ordinarily very dirty and inhabited exclusively by proletarians. He uses these figures to argue that Liverpool, despite its commerce and wealth, treats its workers with barbarity.
Chapter 14
How does Birmingham's housing compare with Manchester and Liverpool, per the Artisan?
The Artisan, cited by Engels, reports many filthy old districts and about 2,000 courts in Birmingham, usually narrow, muddy, badly ventilated and ill-drained, with rear walls in common so ventilation comes from one side only. It notes newer courts are better built and kept, cottages are less crowded than in Manchester and Liverpool, cellar dwellings are unknown, and mortality during epidemics is far lower than in nearby Wolverhampton, Dudley and Bilston.
Chapter 14
How does Symonds describe the wynds of Glasgow?
J. C. Symonds, Government Commissioner on the hand-weavers, says he had seen wretchedness in worse phases here and on the Continent, but did not believe so much crime, misery and disease could exist in a civilised country until visiting Glasgow's wynds. He describes ten to twenty persons of both sexes sleeping indiscriminately on mouldy straw and rags, dung heaps in every court, and a fluctuating population of 15,000 to 30,000.
Chapter 14
Why were Glasgow's most dilapidated houses the most densely populated?
Symonds reports that most houses in the Glasgow quarter had been declared by the Court of Guild ruinous and unfit for habitation, yet precisely these were the most densely populated. The reason he gives is legal: according to the law, no rent could be demanded for them. Engels presents this as evidence of how housing law and poverty combined to concentrate people in the worst structures.
Chapter 14
Section 154 cards
What three elements does Engels call characteristic of modern manufacture?
Engels identifies the application of the forces of Nature, the superseding of hand labour by machinery (especially the power-loom and the self-acting mule), and the division of labour. He argues the cotton industry of South Lancashire shows these at their highest point and has remained ahead of all other branches of industry from the beginning to the present day.
Chapter 15
How does the river Aire change as it passes through Leeds?
The chapter states the Aire flows into the city clear and transparent and flows out thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse, like all rivers in the service of manufacture. During floods, water rises out of sewers into cellars, engendering miasmatic vapours and leaving a residuum injurious to health.
Chapter 15
What did the Huddersfield committee report in August 1844?
A committee appointed by a citizens' meeting reported that whole streets, lanes, and courts were neither paved nor supplied with sewers or drains; refuse and filth accumulated and rotted, and stagnant water pooled, making adjoining dwellings filthy and breeding disease that threatened the health of the whole town. This was despite Huddersfield being called the handsomest factory town.
Chapter 15
Why does Engels call Manchester the classic type of a modern manufacturing town?
Engels argues Manchester is where English manufacture has its starting point and centre, where the Exchange is the thermometer of trade, and where modern manufacture reached perfection. The cotton industry shows machinery and division of labour at their highest, so the effects on the working-class and the proletariat's attempts to rise develop most fully there.
Chapter 15
Section 164 cards
How do the industrial towns around Manchester differ from the city itself?
Engels states these towns are purely industrial and dependent on Manchester for all business, inhabited only by working-men and petty tradesmen, while Manchester has a considerable commercial population of commission and respectable retail dealers. Though nearly all have thirty to ninety thousand inhabitants, they are almost wholly working-people's districts, with only factories, shop-lined thoroughfares, and scattered manufacturer villas.
Chapter 16
What building conditions and housing types does Engels describe in these towns?
The towns are badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke and dingy from red brick turned black with time, the universal building material. Cellar dwellings are general: wherever possible these subterranean dens are constructed, and a very considerable portion of the population dwells in them.
Chapter 16
Why does Ashton-under-Lyne look better than most factory towns, and what drawbacks remain?
Ashton is built on a newer, more regular plan with five or six parallel streets, and its factories are confined to the valley by the river and canal, so streets are broad and cleaner and cottages look new, bright red, and comfortable. But every street has a concealed back lane, all the dirtier, and some streets already show shifting bricks and cracked walls.
Chapter 16
How does Engels contrast Stalybridge with the villas above it?
Coming over the hill from Ashton, the traveller sees fine large gardens and villa-like Elizabethan houses, but a hundred paces farther Stalybridge appears in a narrow, crooked ravine, in sharp contrast. Its first cottages are narrow, smoke-begrimed, old, and ruinous; most streets run criss-cross, ground floors are half-buried in earth, and there are multitudes of courts and back lanes amid shocking filth.
Chapter 16
Section 174 cards
How does Engels say Manchester's layout separates workers from the middle class?
Engels argues workers' quarters form a girdle about a mile and a half wide around the commercial district, with the bourgeoisie living beyond in Chorlton, Ardwick, Cheetham Hill, Broughton and Pendleton. Shop-lined thoroughfares let the wealthy travel to business without seeing the misery behind, which he calls a systematic, tender concealment of the working class.
Chapter 17
What does Engels say about the commercial district at night?
The commercial heart of Manchester, roughly half a mile long and as broad, consists almost wholly of offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole district is abandoned by dwellers and is lonely and deserted at night, with only watchmen and policemen traversing its narrow lanes carrying dark lanterns.
Chapter 17
What does Engels admit is common to all great cities before criticizing Manchester?
Engels concedes that this hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities, that retail dealers are forced by business to occupy the great highways, that good buildings outnumber bad ones on such streets, and that land near them is worth more. He still claims he has never seen so systematic a shutting out of workers as in Manchester.
Chapter 17
What remains of old pre-manufacturing Manchester, and who lives there now?
Between the commercial district's northern boundary and the Irk lies the old town, with narrow winding streets like Todd Street, Long Millgate, Withy Grove and Shude Hill. Engels describes old-fashioned houses whose original inhabitants moved to better districts, leaving the houses to a population strongly mixed with Irish blood. Behind them, courts and lanes are reached only through covered passages.
Chapter 17
Section 184 cards
What does Engels describe finding in the court on the Irk above Ducie Bridge?
Engels describes a court whose entrance holds a privy without a door, so filthy that inhabitants can only enter and leave by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. He calls these the most horrible dwellings he had yet beheld, and notes tanneries below fill the neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction.
Chapter 18
What happened to Allen's Court during the cholera, and what does Dr. Kay provide?
During the cholera, the sanitary police ordered Allen's Court evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime because of its condition. Engels says Dr. Kay gives a terrible description of the court's state at that time. Since then it appears partially torn away and rebuilt, with ruined walls, debris, and some newer houses visible from Ducie Bridge.
Chapter 18
Why does Engels argue the residents cannot be blamed for unclean dwellings?
Engels argues privies are so rare they are either filled up daily or too remote to use, and the only water at hand is the dirty Irk, since pumps and pipes exist only in decent parts of the city. He says it cannot be charged to these 'helots of modern society' if their dwellings are no cleaner than pig-sties, and blames landlords.
Chapter 18
What does Engels say about the newly built Leeds railway extension across the Irk?
Engels says the railway extension swept away some courts and lanes and laid others completely open to view. Under the railway bridge stands a court whose filth surpasses all others because it had been so secluded that the way to it could not be found without trouble; Engels says he would never have discovered it himself without the breaks made by the railway.
Chapter 18
Section 194 cards
How does the newer quarter near St. Michael's Church compare to the Irk district?
Engels describes it as having somewhat better order, with long straight lanes and square courts built to a plan. But ventilation remains as poor as in the Irk region because lanes and courts ignore adjoining ones, creating a labyrinth of blind alleys. Houses are newer and some streets have gutters, yet nearly every house has a cellar dwelling, rarely found in the older Irk district.
Chapter 19
What role do pigs play in the working-men's courts of Manchester?
Pork-raisers rent the courts and build pig-pens in them, sometimes several per court. Inhabitants throw all refuse and offal into the pens, where the swine grow fat. Because the courts are enclosed on all four sides, the atmosphere is utterly corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable substances. Engels notes this piggery repeats at every twenty paces behind the decent-looking Millers Street.
Chapter 19
How does Engels answer the claim that the horror belongs only to the Old Town?
The author argues the excuse proves nothing. The couple hundred genuinely old houses were long abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone crammed workers into them, built up every free spot to shelter masses drawn from agricultural districts and Ireland, and lets owners rent these cattle-sheds at high prices. He adds that landowners and the municipality did nothing to improve conditions when rebuilding.
Chapter 19
What general pattern does Engels describe for the construction of Manchester's working-class quarters?
In the Old Town, pure accident determined grouping: each house was built without reference to any other, and leftover scraps of space were called courts. In newer portions of that quarter and in other working-men's quarters dating from early industrial activity, a somewhat more orderly arrangement appears: the space between two streets is divided into more regular, usually square courts.
Chapter 19
Section 203 cards
How does the three-row back-alley building system affect ventilation?
Engels describes a front row of best cottages with back doors and courts, a narrow back alley built up at both ends, and a middle row whose rear walls are shared with a third row facing a second street. The first row gets comparatively good ventilation and the third is no worse than in the court method, but the middle row is at least as badly ventilated as court houses, and the back street stays filthy.
Chapter 20
Why does Engels say the neat appearance of new working-men's streets is deceptive?
The author argues the neat look is pretence that vanishes within ten years. The massive brick walls deceive the eye, but the walls are as thin as possible — outer walls one whole brick thick at most, some only half a brick with bricks laid lengthwise. Cellar dwellings sit under almost every cottage, many streets are unpaved and without sewers, and the construction itself is condemned.
Chapter 20
Why does the bourgeoisie avoid building on Manchester's east and north-east sides?
Engels states these are the only sides the bourgeoisie has not built on, because for ten or eleven months a year the west and south-west wind drives smoke from all the factories there. The result, he argues, is that the working people alone are left to breathe it, while the better-off districts escape the factory smoke.
Chapter 20
Section 214 cards
What conditions does Engels report in Little Ireland, southwest of Oxford Road?
Engels describes about two hundred old, dirty, back-to-back cottages in a deep hole by the Medlock, housing roughly four thousand people, mostly Irish. Streets are rutted and partly without drains or pavement; refuse and standing pools fill the area; smoke from a dozen factory chimneys darkens the air. He reports about twenty people per cottage and one usually inaccessible privy per one hundred and twenty persons.
Chapter 21
What does Dr. Kay report about cellars in Little Ireland?
According to Engels citing Dr. Kay, not only cellars but first floors of all houses in the district are damp. Some cellars once filled with earth have been emptied and are occupied again by Irish people. In one cellar below river level, water wells up through a clay-stopped hole, so its occupant, a hand-loom weaver, had to bale it out each morning and pour it into the street.
Chapter 21
How does Engels compare Salford's sanitation with Manchester's?
Engels argues Salford's construction and cleanliness are much worse than Manchester's. In Manchester the police periodically raid working-class districts, close the worst dwellings, and cleanse the filthiest spots; in Salford he says they have done absolutely nothing, and the narrow courts off Chapel Street, Greengate, and Gravel Lane have likely never been cleansed since built. He notes the Liverpool railway viaduct removed some filthy nooks but changed little.
Chapter 21
What example of extreme housing does Engels give near Oldfield Road and Cross Lane?
Engels reports finding a man apparently about sixty years old living in a cow stable between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane. The man had built a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling, obtained a bedstead, and lived there though rain dripped through the rotten roof. Too old and weak for regular work, he supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart, with dung-heaps next door.
Chapter 21
Section 224 cards
What did Engels conclude about Manchester's working-class housing after twenty months of observation?
Engels concluded that 350,000 working people of Manchester and its environs lived almost entirely in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, with surrounding streets laid out with no regard for ventilation, only for the contractor's profit. He argued that no cleanliness, convenience, or comfortable family life was possible there, and that only a physically degenerate race, degraded morally and physically, could feel at home.
Chapter 22
What did the Health Commission find when it inspected Manchester houses during the cholera threat?
A Health Commission was appointed when cholera approached and the bourgeoisie feared the slums would spread plague. Of 6,951 houses inspected in Manchester proper, 6,565 urgently needed whitewashing, 960 were out of repair, 1,435 damp, 452 badly ventilated, and 2,221 lacked privies. Of 687 streets, 248 were unpaved and 352 contained standing pools and refuse. Only a few of the worst spots were cleansed.
Chapter 22
How many people lived in cellars in Manchester, according to Gaskell and the Weekly Dispatch?
Gaskell gives 20,000 persons living in cellars in Manchester proper. The Weekly Dispatch, citing official reports, gives twelve per cent of the working-class, which agrees with Gaskell since the workers were estimated at 175,000, making 21,000. Engels adds that suburban cellar dwellings were at least as numerous, so the broader Manchester total was not less than forty to fifty thousand.
Chapter 22
What does the chapter say about the clothing of the working people?
Engels states the clothing of most working people was in very bad condition and not of the best-adapted material. Wool and linen had almost vanished from both sexes' wardrobes, replaced by cotton: cotton shirts, cotton print dresses for women, and fustian trousers and jackets for men. Fustian became the proverbial costume of working-men, called "fustian jackets," in contrast to the broadcloth of the middle class.
Chapter 22
Section 234 cards
Why does Engels say cotton clothing protects less than wool?
Engels argues that heavy cotton goods, though thicker, stiffer and heavier than woollen cloth, afford much less protection against cold and wet. Because of their thickness and the nature of the stuff, they stay damp much longer, and they lack the compact density of fulled woollen cloths. He notes the middle class can afford flannel next the skin, while workers are scarcely ever able to use a thread of woollen clothing.
Chapter 23
What does Engels say about the woollen coat a worker might buy?
Engels states that if a working-man buys a woollen coat for Sunday, he must get it from a cheap shop selling bad, so-called "Devil's-dust" cloth, manufactured for sale and not for use, liable to tear or grow threadbare in a fortnight. Otherwise he must buy from an old clothes'-dealer a half-worn coat already past its best days, which lasts but a few weeks.
Chapter 23
How does Engels contrast English and Irish patching habits?
Engels says the English and Anglo-Irish go on patching and have carried the art to a remarkable pitch, putting wool or bagging on fustian or the reverse, and it is all the same to them. The true, transplanted Irish hardly ever patch except in extremest necessity, when the garment would otherwise fall apart; ordinarily the rags of the shirt protrude through rents in the coat or trousers.
Chapter 23
What new custom does Engels credit the Irish with introducing to England?
Engels states that the Irish introduced the custom, previously unknown in England, of going barefoot. In every manufacturing town there is now to be seen a multitude of people, especially women and children, going about barefoot, and their example is gradually being adopted by the poorer English. He presents this as an observed change in English towns.
Chapter 23
Section 244 cards
Why do workers get inferior food at the market?
Engels argues workers receive wages Saturday evening, so they reach market at five or seven o'clock, after middle-class buyers have taken the best goods during the morning. Even if good food remained, the workers could not afford it. They buy poor potatoes, wilted vegetables, old cheese, rancid bacon, and tough meat from old or diseased cattle.
Chapter 24
What did Manchester butchers do with tainted meat, per Engels?
Engels cites the Manchester Guardian: at a January 1844 court leet, eleven meat-sellers were fined for selling tainted meat, with whole animals and fifty to sixty pounds of meat confiscated. Sixty-four stuffed Christmas geese, unsaleable in Liverpool, were sent to Manchester and sold foul and rotten. He notes similar cases reported within six weeks.
Chapter 24
How does the Liverpool Mercury describe food adulteration?
The Liverpool Mercury, which Engels cites as middle-class testimony, reports salted butter sold as fresh, sugar mixed with pounded rice or soap-boiling refuse, chicory in coffee, cocoa with brown earth, tea with sloe leaves or roasted used leaves, pepper with nutshells, manufactured port wine, and tobacco mixed with disgusting substances. Engels adds that Manchester tobacco dealers said no firm could avoid adulteration.
Chapter 24
Why do the poor bear the brunt of food fraud?
Engels argues the rich can pay reputable large shops, which would lose more than they gain by selling bad goods, and their habitual good eating lets them detect adulteration. The poor must buy cheaply from small dealers, cannot afford to inquire closely, and lack cultivated taste. Small grocers may knowingly buy adulterated goods to compete, and can move streets after fraud is proven.
Chapter 24
Section 254 cards
How did Engels describe the typical food of the working man as wages fell?
Engels says food varied with wages: better-paid workers ate meat daily with bacon and cheese for supper; lower wages meant meat two or three times a week with more bread and potatoes; further down animal food shrank to a bit of bacon with potatoes, then disappeared, leaving bread, cheese, porridge and potatoes, and among the Irish potatoes alone. Weak tea was drunk universally and seen as indispensable.
Chapter 25
What did Engels conclude about the average condition of the working-class in great cities?
Engels argues the great towns are mostly inhabited by workers, roughly one bourgeois to two, three, or four workers, who own no property and live on wages from hand to mouth. He says the average condition is much nearer the worst case than the best, and that workers pass through the whole range from comfort to starvation, so no fixed well-off class exists.
Chapter 25
What did Engels identify as competition's role in creating the proletariat?
Engels argues competition created the proletariat at the start of the industrial movement: higher weaver wages drew weaving peasants off their farms to their looms; the large farm system crowded out small farmers, reducing them to proletarians and drawing some to towns; it largely ruined the small bourgeoisie and pushed them down too; and it centralized capital in few hands and population in great towns.
Chapter 25
What did Engels report about food fraud prosecutions in 1844?
Engels cites Guardian reports of sessions fining dealers and farmers for light weights and false scales: Rochdale, Stockport, Manchester, Ashton, Hyde, and Bolton, with fines ranging from one shilling to two pounds, and some condemned only to pay costs. He argues the working-class, already the chief sufferers from frauds in quality, are also the usual victims of frauds in quantity.
Chapter 25
Section 264 cards
According to Engels, what is competition the complete expression of?
Engels argues that competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all that rules in modern civil society—a battle for life, existence, and everything, even life and death. It is fought not only between classes but between individual members of the same class, each seeking to crowd out and supplant the others.
Chapter 26
Why does Engels call the workers' competition among themselves the worst side of things?
Engels argues that competition among workers is the worst side of the present state for the worker and the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the bourgeoisie's hands. Hence workers try to nullify it through associations, while the bourgeoisie hates these associations and triumphs in every defeat that befalls them.
Chapter 26
How does Engels describe the proletarian's freedom of contract?
Engels argues the proletarian is helpless and, in law and fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which holds a monopoly of all means of existence protected by the State. The worker appears to make a free contract as a responsible adult, but his only real choice is accepting the bourgeoisie's conditions or starving, freezing, or sleeping naked among the beasts.
Chapter 26
What determines the minimum and maximum of wages, according to Engels?
Engels argues the minimum wage is the trifle more than nothing—half-pay and hope—since a worker prefers a pig-pen to no roof and rags to going naked. The maximum is set by competition among the bourgeoisie: when demand rises and all workers are employed, capitalists bid wages up, but only as far as increased demand permits, never sacrificing ordinary average profit.
Chapter 26
Section 274 cards
What determines how far average wages rise above the minimum?
Under average circumstances, with no competition among workers or capitalists, wages stand a little above the minimum. How far above depends on the workers' average needs and grade of civilisation—for example, whether they are accustomed to eating meat several times a week. The capitalists must pay enough to make that standard attainable, but no more, since neither side has occasion to compete.
Chapter 27
How does Engels compare the modern worker to the old slave?
Engels argues the worker is in law and fact the slave of the property-holding class, sold like goods and rising and falling in value like a commodity. The difference is that the modern worker seems free because he sells himself piecemeal by the day, week, or year, and belongs to no single owner but to the whole bourgeoisie—yet no one guarantees him subsistence.
Chapter 27
According to Engels, what causes surplus population?
Engels argues surplus population is engendered by competition among workers, which forces each to labour as much as possible. If a manufacturer can employ ten hands nine hours daily, he can employ nine at ten hours and the tenth goes hungry. Raised productivity, division of labour, and machinery then deprive many workers of bread, removing them from the market.
Chapter 27
What does Engels say about Malthus's theory of population?
Engels says Malthus was 'in his way' right in asserting there are always more people than can be maintained from available means of subsistence, and that Malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population so far as it goes. But Engels reframes surplus population as a product of worker competition and industrial forces, not a fixed natural law.
Chapter 27
Section 283 cards
According to Engels, why can manufacturers not accurately gauge market demand?
Engels argues that under unregulated production for profit, manufacturers cannot know how much stock is on hand or what competitors export. They rely on uncertain inferences from fluctuating prices and export "blindly, as guess-work," so a slight favourable report leads many to export at once, glutting the market until sales stop and workers are dismissed.
Chapter 28
How often does Engels say the commercial crisis usually recurs?
Engels states that after a brief period of activity and general prosperity, the crisis usually recurs once in five years; later in the chapter he says the "perennial round" of prosperity and crisis is usually completed once in five or six years. During it, wages fall, want becomes universal, poor-rates double or treble, and the starving increase.
Chapter 28
How does speculation worsen the crisis, according to Engels?
Engels argues that rising prices and favourable reports prompt merchants to buy on speculation, withdrawing goods from consumption when most needed and pushing prices higher. Daring speculators using fictitious capital and credit multiply the disorder, driving production to madness until urgent selling abroad collapses prices, credit is shaken, and bankruptcies follow.
Chapter 28
Section 294 cards
Where do these beggars usually seek alms, and from whom do they live?
Engels says these beggars appear almost exclusively in working-people's districts, living almost solely on gifts from the poor. They sing pleading songs, give speeches, or silently display their helplessness in busy streets, counting on workers' sympathy because workers know hunger and may face the same fate.
Chapter 29
How large is the surplus population, and what does the figure exclude?
Poor Law commissioners' reports give an average of one and a half million surplus poor in England and Wales. The figure covers only those who actually apply to the parish for relief, excluding the many who struggle on without it; it also includes many agricultural-district poor outside Engels's discussion. Scotland's number cannot be ascertained for want of Poor Law regulations.
Chapter 29
What did the 1842 crisis do to poor-rates and relief in Stockport, Bolton, and Leeds?
During the 1842 crisis poor-rates rose everywhere. In Stockport, eight shillings of poor-rate per pound of house-rent meant the rate alone was forty per cent of rent, and whole streets stood vacant. Bolton's rateable rents fell from 86,000 to 36,000 pounds while the poor rose above 14,000. Leeds's guardians exhausted a 10,000-pound reserve fund plus 7,000 pounds contributed.
Chapter 29
What does Engels claim about Irish immigration's role in English industry?
Engels argues English industry's rapid expansion required Ireland's numerous impoverished population as a reserve labor force. He cites calculations that over a million Irish had already immigrated, with nearly fifty thousand arriving yearly, mostly entering industrial districts and forming the lowest class of the population. He says they bring brutal habits, having grown up almost without civilisation.
Chapter 29
Section 303 cards
How does Engels say Irish immigration affects English workers' wages?
Engels argues that the Irish, willing to work for near-subsistence wages, undercut English laborers in every trade requiring mostly strength rather than skill. He claims this competition forces English wages down toward the Irish level, and that hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, and similar occupations are especially overcrowded with Irish workers, depressing wages and lowering the working class overall.
Chapter 30
What does Engels claim the Irish brought to English cities regarding housing?
Engels claims the Irish, accustomed to crowded mud-cabins at home, implanted the custom of crowding many persons into one room. He says the worst quarters of large towns are inhabited by Irish, most cellar-dwelling families are of Irish origin, and they keep pigs indoors or build pig-sties against house walls, accumulating filth that poisons the air.
Chapter 30
Why does Engels say the Irishman becomes a drunkard?
Engels argues society shuts the Irishman out of all other enjoyments, leaving drink as the only thing making his life worth having. He says the temptation is great and the Irishman cannot resist it, spending any money beyond necessities on spirits. Engels asks how society can blame him when it places him in a position where he almost necessarily becomes a drunkard.
Chapter 30
Section 314 cards
What does Engels mean by 'social murder'?
Engels argues that when society places thousands of workers in conditions where they inevitably die prematurely, knowing the consequences yet doing nothing, the deed is murder—not mere manslaughter. He calls it disguised, malicious murder because no individual murderer is visible and the deaths seem natural, since the offence is one of omission rather than commission.
Chapter 31
How does city air harm workers' health, per Engels?
Engels argues centralisation in great cities is itself unfavourable: dense populations and fires consume oxygen that is replaced with difficulty because building methods impede ventilation. Carbonic acid gas lingers in streets, so lungs get insufficient oxygen, causing mental and physical lassitude and low vitality. City dwellers thus suffer fewer acute inflammatory affections but more chronic ones than rural populations.
Chapter 31
What conditions does Engels say society imposes on the poor?
Engels lists: being drawn into cities with poorer air; relegated to the worst-ventilated districts; deprived of water and cleanliness; forced to dump offal, garbage and excrement into the streets; packed dozens into single rooms; given damp cellars and leaking garrets; supplied bad clothing and adulterated food; worked to exhaustion; and left with only sexual indulgence and drunkenness as enjoyments.
Chapter 31
What does Engels say society knows about these conditions?
Engels argues society knows how injurious these conditions are to workers' health and life, yet does nothing to improve them. He says he will prove this by citing official documents and reports of Parliament and the Government, showing that the consequences are known—making the act murder rather than mere manslaughter.
Chapter 31
Section 324 cards
To what does the official sanitary report attribute typhus among workers?
The official report on the sanitary condition of the working-class, compiled by England's leading physicians from other physicians' testimony, attributes typhus directly to the bad state of workers' dwellings in ventilation, drainage, and cleanliness. It asserts that a single ill-ventilated court or blind alley without drainage is enough to engender fever, especially when inhabitants are greatly crowded.
Chapter 32
How did the 1842 crisis fever epidemic compare with earlier Scottish outbreaks?
Engels reports that the fever after the 1842 crisis dwarfed all earlier epidemics: one-sixth of Scotland's indigent population was seized, and infection spread rapidly via wandering beggars. In Glasgow in 1843, twelve per cent of the population (32,000 persons) were seized, with thirty-two per cent perishing, versus under eight per cent mortality ordinarily in Manchester and Liverpool.
Chapter 32
What does Dr. Alison identify as the cause of typhus epidemics?
Dr. Alison attributes typhus directly to the want and wretched condition of the poor. He asserts that privations and insufficient satisfaction of vital needs prepare the frame for contagion and make epidemics widespread and terrible, and proves that periods of privation—commercial crises or bad harvests—each produced typhus in Ireland and Scotland, striking almost exclusively the working-class. Most victims, he testifies, were fathers of families.
Chapter 32
What childhood diseases does Engels link to workers' poor food?
Engels links workers' indigestible food, unsuitable for young children, plus the general custom of giving children spirits and even opium, to lifelong digestive disorders. He says scrofula is almost universal among the working-class, with scrofulous parents having scrofulous children, and that rachitis is extremely common, delaying bone hardening and causing deformities of the legs and spinal column.
Chapter 32
Section 334 cards
Why does Engels say drunkenness among workers is not a vice but an inevitable phenomenon?
The author argues that liquor is almost the workers' only pleasure, and their homes are comfortless, damp, and dirty. Bad air and food weaken their bodies, which violently demand a stimulus, and the public-house is the only place to meet friends. Add the example of the mass, neglected education, and intemperate parents, and drunkenness becomes the necessary effect of conditions on an object with no volition.
Chapter 33
How does the lack of affordable physicians push workers toward quack remedies and patent medicines?
English doctors charge high fees that workers cannot pay, so they do nothing or call in cheap charlatans and use quack remedies that do more harm than good. Vast quantities of patent medicines like Morrison's Pills and Parr's Life Pills are sold for every ailment. They rarely contain injurious substances, but taken freely and often they affect the system prejudicially, and buyers are urged to take as much as possible.
Chapter 33
What does Engels claim about Godfrey's Cordial and its effect on children?
Godfrey's Cordial is a drink prepared with opiates, chiefly laudanum, given by women who work at home to keep children quiet and, many believe, to strengthen them. Doses begin with newborns and increase as the child's system grows less susceptible; when the cordial fails, laudanum alone is given, often fifteen to twenty drops. The children become pale, feeble, and wilted, and usually die before their second year.
Chapter 33
How do death rates in large cities compare with the average for England and Wales?
According to Registrar-General Graham, the annual death-rate for all England and Wales was under 2.25 percent, about one in forty-five in 1839-40 and one in forty-six in 1840-41. In Manchester, including Chorlton and Salford, it was one in 32.72; in Liverpool, one in 31.90; in Edinburgh, one in 29; in Glasgow, one in 30. The author argues this shortening of life falls chiefly on the working-class.
Chapter 33
Section 344 cards
How did mortality differ between street and house classes in Holland's tables?
Holland's tables showed mortality in second-class streets was 18 percent greater and in third-class streets 68 percent greater than first-class streets. For houses, second-class mortality was 31 percent greater and third-class 78 percent greater than first-class. Mortality in bad streets that were improved decreased 25 percent. Holland concluded hundreds of neighbors were annually destroyed for want of evident precautions.
Chapter 34
What was average longevity by class in Liverpool in 1840?
In Liverpool in 1840, the average longevity of the upper classes—gentry and professional men—was thirty-five years. Business men and better-placed handicraftsmen averaged twenty-two years. Operatives, day-labourers, and the serviceable class in general averaged only fifteen years. Engels cites this from the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Working-Class, noting parliamentary reports contain a mass of similar facts.
Chapter 34
What share of working-class children in Manchester died before age five?
According to the report Engels quotes, more than fifty-seven percent of working-class children in Manchester perished before the fifth year. By contrast, twenty percent of children of the higher classes died under five, and not quite thirty-two percent of children of all classes in the country. Engels attributes the high death-rate chiefly to heavy mortality among young children of the working class.
Chapter 34
What child death causes does Engels cite beyond disease in cities?
Engels argues that beyond diseases from neglect and oppression, other influences raise child mortality. Many wives work away from home like their husbands, so children are locked up or given out to be cared for, and hundreds perish through accidents. He claims nowhere are so many children run over, killed by falling, drowning, or burning as in English cities, with burns and scalds especially frequent—six cases in one December 1844 week.
Chapter 34
Section 352 cards
What did Engels claim about the education the bourgeoisie provided workers?
The author argues the bourgeoisie gives workers only as much education as serves bourgeois interests, since it has little to hope and much to fear from working-class education. He notes England's education budget was only 40,000 pounds out of 55,000,000, compulsory attendance was nominal, and teachers were often worn-out workers without elementary knowledge or public supervision.
Chapter 35
Why did the working class remain without secular education, according to Engels?
The author argues the working class repeatedly demanded strictly secular public education from Parliament, leaving religion to the sects, but no Ministry granted it. The Minister served the bourgeoisie, which was divided into countless quarrelling sects; each would grant education only if workers accepted its own dogmas as an antidote. Since the sects fought for supremacy, workers remained uneducated.
Chapter 35
Section 364 cards
According to Engels, what practical training replaces school cramming for workers?
The author argues that the conditions of working-class life provide a practical training that replaces school cramming, renders confused religious notions harmless, and places workers in the vanguard of the national movement. Though barely literate, the English working-man knows where his own interest and the nation's lie, can speak in public, and can out-argue a Corn-Law-repealing bourgeois.
Chapter 36
What does Engels say schools contribute to working-class morality?
Engels argues that moral instruction, mixed with religious teaching in all English schools, has no better effect than the religious teaching itself. He claims schools contribute almost nothing to working-class morality, citing the Children's Employment Commission and other authorities. He says the bourgeoisie is too narrow-minded even to impress its own self-interested morality on workers.
Chapter 36
Why does Engels argue poverty drives workers to steal or suicide?
Engels argues that poverty denies workers nearly every enjoyment and removes the terrors of law, so the sacredness of property dies for those who own none. Want leaves the worker a choice between starving slowly, killing himself speedily, or stealing. He notes some workers are too moral to steal and instead starve or commit suicide, which he says has become fashionable among English workers.
Chapter 36
Why is insecurity worse than poverty for the proletarian, per Engels?
The author argues the proletarian's insecurity—living on wages hand to mouth, subject to every crisis and employer's whim—is more demoralising than poverty itself. Unlike the slave, assured a livelihood by the master's self-interest, or the serf with a scrap of land, the proletarian has no guarantee for life. He must either rebel to rescue his manhood or give up and seize the most favourable moment.
Chapter 36
Section 374 cards
What does Engels say about Carlyle's view of workers' rage?
Engels says Carlyle is right about the facts but wrong to censure the workers' wild rage against the higher classes. For Engels, this rage proves workers feel the inhumanity of their position, refuse to be degraded to brutes, and will one day free themselves from servitude to the bourgeoisie. Those without such wrath either submit humbly or fall into licentiousness, and in both cases are brutes.
Chapter 37
Why does Engels consider compulsory work degrading to workers?
Engels argues voluntary productive activity is the highest enjoyment, while compulsory toil is the most cruel, degrading punishment. Workers labor for money, not from natural impulse, in unbroken monotony. The division of labour reduces activity to mechanical manipulation repeated year after year, leaving no room for mental activity and scarcely time to eat, sleep, or enjoy nature, thus degrading a human being to the level of a brute.
Chapter 37
How does Engels respond to blaming great cities for workers' demoralisation?
Engels says bourgeois writers like Sheriff Alison and Dr. Vaughan attribute demoralisation to city centralisation because admitting poverty, insecurity, overwork, and forced work are the ruinous influences would force conclusions like giving the poor property and making laws against overwork, which the bourgeoisie dare not formulate. Engels argues cities only accelerate evils already existing in germ.
Chapter 37
What two paths does Engels say workers face under these conditions?
Engels says the worker must choose: either surrender to his fate and become a "good" workman who faithfully heeds the bourgeoisie's interest, in which case he certainly becomes a brute; or rebel and fight for his manhood to the last, which he can only do in the fight against the bourgeoisie. There is no third option in Engels' framing.
Chapter 37
Section 383 cards
How does Engels describe the effect of great cities on workers' class consciousness?
Engels argues great cities are the birthplaces of labour movements: there workers first reflected on their condition and struggled against it, the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first became manifest, and Trades-Unions, Chartism, and Socialism proceeded from them. He says cities turned the chronic social disease of the countryside into an acute one, revealing its nature and cure.
Chapter 38
What does Engels say the great cities destroyed between workers and employers?
Engels states that great cities destroyed the last remnant of the patriarchal relation between working-men and employers, aided by large-scale manufacture multiplying employees dependent on a single employer. He argues this hypocritically concealed the slavery of the worker, who remained an intellectual zero until estranged from his employer and convinced the sole bond was pecuniary profit.
Chapter 38
How does Engels assess Irish immigration's effect on the English working class?
Engels says Irish immigration degraded English workers and worsened their lot, but thereby deepened the chasm between workers and bourgeoisie and hastened the coming crisis. He argues the passionate, mercurial Irish temperament, mixed with the stable, reasoning English character, must in the long run benefit both, softening the cold rational English character and the bourgeoisie's rough egotism.
Chapter 38
Section 393 cards
How does Engels describe the separation between workers and bourgeoisie in England?
The author argues the working-class has become a race wholly apart from the bourgeoisie, sharing more with other nations than with the workers among whom it lives. Workers speak other dialects, hold other thoughts, ideals, customs, moral principles, religion, and politics. Engels calls them two radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make them, and says the proletariat is by far the more important for England's future.
Chapter 39
What evidence does Engels give that workers are more generous to the poor than the bourgeoisie?
Engels says beggars turn almost exclusively to workers, and more is done by workers than the bourgeoisie for maintaining the poor. He cites Dr. Parkinson, Canon of Manchester, who states the poor give one another more than the rich give the poor. Parkinson confirms this with testimony from Dr. Bardsley, who often declared the total sum the poor yearly bestow on one another surpasses what the rich contribute in the same time.
Chapter 39
What does Engels report about intemperance among English workers and its effects?
Engels says drunkenness is expected given conditions. Sheriff Alison asserts some thirty thousand Glasgow working-men get drunk every Saturday night. The 1830 Beer Act facilitated beerhouse opening, spreading intemperance. Gaskell estimates over a hundred secret distilleries in Manchester producing at least 156,000 gallons. Engels describes Saturday evening drunkenness, pawnshops reclaiming goods, and cites Lord Ashley's estimate that workers spend about twenty-five million pounds yearly on liquor.
Chapter 39
Section 404 cards
According to Engels, what two pleasures has the bourgeoisie left the working class?
The author argues the bourgeoisie left the working class only two pleasures: intemperance in intoxicating liquors and sexual licence. Having imposed a multitude of labours and hardships, the bourgeoisie drives workers to concentrate all energy on these two enjoyments and carry them to unbridled excess. Engels adds that the bourgeoisie itself maintains prostitution, so it has least right to reproach workers with sexual brutality.
Chapter 40
What reasons does Engels give for workers' lack of providence and respectability?
The author argues workers' failings trace to an unbridled thirst for pleasure, want of providence, and inability to sacrifice present pleasure for remoter advantage. He asks how a class that can buy only sensual pleasures through wearying toil, receives no education, and lives as a playball to a thousand chances with no security should practice providence. A class bearing all disadvantages without advantages, seeing society as hostile, cannot be expected to respect the social order.
Chapter 40
Why does Engels say family life is almost impossible for workers?
Engels argues comfortless, filthy, ill-furnished houses, often neither rain-tight nor warm, with foul air and overcrowding, make domestic comfort impossible. Husband, wife, and elder children work all day in different places and meet only night and morning, under perpetual temptation to drink. Yet the worker cannot escape the family, so family troubles, quarrels, neglect of domestic duties, and neglect of children follow, which Engels says existing social institutions foster.
Chapter 40
What statistics does Engels cite to show crime increased with the proletariat?
Engels cites Home Secretary tables: criminal arrests in England and Wales rose from 4,605 in 1805 to 31,309 in 1842, sevenfold in thirty-seven years. Lancashire alone had 4,497 and Middlesex 4,094 in 1842, together one-fourth of crime. Of 100 criminals in 1842, 32.35 could neither read nor write and 58.32 read and wrote imperfectly. In Scotland arrests rose from 89 in 1819 to 4,189 in 1842.
Chapter 40
Section 414 cards
What does Engels claim the criminal reports in English newspapers demonstrate about society?
Engels argues that newspapers reporting thefts, assaults, frauds, and family violence show society in visible dissolution, with all social ties giving way. He contends everyone treats his neighbour as an enemy or a tool, differences are settled by threats, violence, or law-courts, and this war grows more violent yearly as bourgeoisie and workers divide into two camps.
Chapter 41
According to Engels, why does the bourgeoisie remain calm despite growing social disorder?
Engels argues the bourgeoisie cannot see the facts, much less their consequences, because class prejudice and preconceived opinions hold the whole class in near-mad blindness. He finds it astounding they can read daily reports without fear of a universal outburst, and predicts national development will one day surprise the property-holding class with things undreamed of in its philosophy.
Chapter 41
Which workers does the Factory Act cover, and how does Engels characterize them?
The Factory Act regulates the working-day in mills where wool, silk, cotton, and flax are spun or woven by water or steam-power, covering the most important branches of English manufacture. Engels calls these factory-workers the most intelligent and energetic of English workers, therefore the most restless and most hated by the bourgeoisie, with cotton-workers leading the labour movement.
Chapter 41
Why does Engels say mechanical invention affected textile workers most deeply?
Engels notes the textile population had already been torn from its former way of life, so it is not surprising that later mechanical progress affected these workers most deeply and permanently. He cites Ure and Baines, saying the history of cotton manufacture is a story of improvements in every direction, with hand-work almost universally superseded by machine-work driven by steam or water.
Chapter 41
Section 424 cards
What did the jenny do to spinner employment, according to Engels?
Engels states the jenny, worked by one man, produced at least six times what the spinning-wheel yielded in the same time, so every new jenny threw five spinners out of employment. He presents this as the first example of machinery displacing workers and creating want, wretchedness, and crime.
Chapter 42
What figures does Leach give for mule spinners in 35 factories?
Engels cites James Leach's tables showing that in 1841, in 35 factories, 1,060 fewer mule spinners were employed than in 1829, though spindles in those factories increased by 99,239. Leach also cites five factories using only self-actors with no spinners at all.
Chapter 42
How does Engels answer the bourgeoisie's claim that lower prices create new employment?
Engels concedes that under favourable conditions, price reductions in goods with cheap raw material can increase consumption and prompt new factories. But he argues the bourgeoisie ignores that new factories take years to appear, that machinery shifts work to supervision done by women or children at lower wages, and that grown men are supplanted and not re-employed.
Chapter 42
What did improved carding frames do in the factory Engels describes?
Engels reports that improved carding frames threw four hands out of eight out of work in one factory, and the employer reduced the wages of the four retained from eight shillings to seven. He offers this as evidence that improvements displace half the operatives and cut pay for those who remain.
Chapter 42
Section 434 cards
What does Engels say is the worst situation for workers under machinery?
The worst situation is that of workers who must compete against a machine that is making its way. The price of their goods adapts to the cheaper machine product, so the human competitor gets only the lowest wages. The same happens to operatives working on old machines competing with later improvements. The manufacturer will not discard old apparatus or absorb the loss, so he fastens upon the living worker instead.
Chapter 43
How does Engels describe wages and conditions of hand-loom cotton weavers?
Engels calls hand-loom cotton weavers the most ill-used of all workers competing with machinery. With full work they earn no more than ten shillings a week; in average seasons a weaver counts himself fortunate to earn six or seven shillings while sitting at the loom fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Their workrooms are often damp cellars without wooden or paved floors, and their food is mostly potatoes, rarely milk, scarcely ever meat.
Chapter 43
How does Engels respond to the bourgeois claim that machinery improved workers' condition?
Engels says the operatives unanimously testify that machinery reduced wages, and that workers proclaim the bourgeois claim a falsehood at every meeting in the factory districts. Even if only piece-work prices fell while weekly wages stayed unchanged, he argues operatives still watched manufacturers pocket every gain from improvements. He concludes that under present social conditions, machinery's consequences for workers are solely injurious, bringing loss of employment, want, and suffering.
Chapter 43
What two escapes from despair does Engels say are open to workers?
Engels argues the uncertainty caused by the unceasing progress of machinery has an unnerving influence on workers, whose lot is precarious enough already. To escape despair, he says there are but two ways open: inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie, or drunkenness and general demoralisation. He states the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both, citing hundreds of uprisings and the moral dissolution that is another form of despair.
Chapter 43
Section 444 cards
Why does machinery replace adult men with women and children in spinning and weaving?
The human labour in spinning and weaving consists chiefly of piecing broken threads, which requires only flexibility of finger, not muscular strength. Because women and children have less muscular hand development, they are actually better fitted for this work than men, and they also work more cheaply. As steam or water-power takes over the expenditure of strength, fewer men are needed and women and children take their places.
Chapter 44
What did the manufacturers' 1844 tables claim, and how does Engels criticize them?
The manufacturers published tables claiming 52 per cent of factory workers were female and 48 per cent male, with more than half over eighteen, to prove machinery does not supersede adult men. Engels argues they omit how many adults were men versus women, and likely counted mechanics, engineers, carpenters and perhaps clerks. He calls the publications full of falsehoods, perversions and suppressions of facts.
Chapter 44
What figures did Lord Ashley give in 1844 on factory operatives' sex and age?
Of 419,560 factory operatives in the British Empire in 1839, 192,887 (nearly half) were under eighteen, and 242,296 were female, of whom 112,192 were under eighteen. That leaves 80,695 males under eighteen and 96,569 adult males, not one full quarter of the whole. Female percentages were 56.25 in cotton, 69.5 in woollen, and 70.5 in silk and flax-spinning mills.
Chapter 44
What consequences does Engels attribute to the employment of mothers and children?
Engels argues the employment of women breaks up the family: with both parents working twelve or thirteen hours, children grow up like wild weeds, are put out to nurse, and accidents multiply. He cites Manchester Coroner figures of 225 accidental deaths in nine months versus 146 in Liverpool over twelve months. He also claims children earning wages from about fourteen or fifteen pay parents board and lodging, emancipating themselves.
Chapter 44
Section 454 cards
What reversal of family roles does Engels describe when wives work in factories?
Engels describes families turned upside down: the wife supports the family while the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps and cooks. He says this happens very frequently, and in Manchester alone many hundred such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. He reports the wrath this reversal of family relations aroused among working-men while other social conditions remained unchanged.
Chapter 45
How does the letter from Robert Pounder illustrate the unemployed husband's shame?
Pounder recounts a man named Jack found mending his wife's stockings, who hid them when a friend, Joe, appeared. Jack explains his wife works in the factory from half-past five until eight and is too knocked up to do anything at home, while he has had no work for over three years. He weeps, wishes he had never married, and Joe curses the factories, masters and Government.
Chapter 45
What does Engels conclude about the family when the wife becomes the main earner?
The author argues that if the wife's reign over the husband, brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, then the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. He contends the family's binding tie was not affection but private interest lurking under a pretended community of possessions, and that society has sought salvation in a false direction.
Chapter 45
What does Dr. Hawkins report about mill girls as wives and mothers?
Hawkins states girls marry early and recklessly, with neither means, time, nor opportunity to learn household duties, and married life leaves no time for them anyway. The mother is away over twelve hours daily, the baby is nursed by a young girl or old woman, and the home is often a cellar without cooking, washing or sewing utensils. He hopes married women will be shut out of the factories.
Chapter 45
Section 464 cards
What moral effects does Engels attribute to women's factory employment?
The author argues that gathering both sexes and all ages in one workroom, among people lacking mental or moral education, harms female character. He says the manufacturer can only intervene when scandal occurs, not against the permanent, less conspicuous influence of dissolute workers on younger ones. Witnesses in the 1833 report called mill language indecent, bad, and filthy.
Chapter 46
What did witnesses and officials claim about morality among factory workers?
A Leicester witness said he would rather let his daughter beg than enter a factory, calling them gates of hell and linking most town prostitutes to mill work. A Manchester witness claimed three-fourths of young factory employees aged fourteen to twenty were unchaste. Commissioner Cowell placed operative morality somewhat below the working-class average, and Dr. Hawkins called the influence on young females most depressing.
Chapter 46
What power did Engels say the factory master held over female employees?
The author argues factory servitude confers a jus primae noctis on the master, making him sovereign over employees' persons. He claims threat of discharge overcomes resistance in nine of ten, if not ninety-nine of a hundred, girls. If the master is mean enough, the mill becomes his harem; the official report mentions several such cases, and employers not abusing this power does not change the girls' position.
Chapter 46
How does Engels describe the history of child labor in the mills?
Children were employed from the start, first because machines were small, later enlarged. Workhouse children were rented for years as apprentices, lodged and fed in common, completely slaves of masters who treated them barbarically. Dr. Percival and Sir Robert Peel forced the issue by 1796, and Parliament passed an Apprentices' Bill in 1802 removing the worst evils. Competition from free workpeople gradually crowded out the apprentice system.
Chapter 46
Section 474 cards
What working hours and child ages did the Central Commission report in factories?
The report states manufacturers rarely employed children of five, often six, very often seven, and usually eight to nine years old. The working-day often lasted fourteen to sixteen hours, exclusive of meals and intervals. Manufacturers also permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children, and often took part themselves.
Chapter 47
What effects did Engels attribute to the night-work system in factories?
Engels says some manufacturers ran two full sets of operatives, one working twelve hours by day and the other twelve by night. He claims the permanent loss of sleep caused irritation of the nervous system, general lassitude, and enfeeblement, fostering drunkenness and sexual indulgence. One manufacturer testified illegitimate births doubled in two years of night-work.
Chapter 47
What deformities did surgeons attribute to overwork in the mills?
Francis Sharp of Leeds reported about a hundred cases of bent thigh bones and three hundred of spinal curvature from protracted standing, appearing at ages fourteen to eighteen and after children began mill work. Dr. Ray described bent knees, weakened ligaments, and bent leg bones. Engels adds flattened feet, back and leg pain, swollen joints, varicose veins, and ulcers.
Chapter 47
How did Engels use Macclesfield to illustrate the worst child labor?
Engels says the Macclesfield silk district manufacturers employed the youngest children, from five to six years. Commissioner Tufnell's supplementary testimony includes manager Wright, whose sisters were crippled, and who counted cripples in streets: ten in Townley Street, fifteen in Watercots, twelve in Mill Lane, and others, with families attributing the deformities to overwork in silk-twisting mills.
Chapter 47
Section 483 cards
Why does Engels say factory work, though 'light,' is more enervating than other work?
The author argues that operatives have little to do but must stand the whole time; sitting is fined. This perpetual upright position presses the upper body on the spine, hips, and legs, producing the deformities described. He notes chairs introduced at Nottingham made these affections disappear, but manufacturers fear operatives would sit too much and spoil raw material.
Chapter 48
What did Dr. Loudon conclude about child and adult labor in the factories?
The Commissioner concluded it was clearly proved that children were worked an unreasonable and cruel length of time daily, and that even adults were expected to do labor scarcely any human being could endure. Consequently many died prematurely, others were afflicted for life with defective constitutions, and the fear of an enfeebled posterity was well founded physiologically.
Chapter 48
What did Dr. Ray observe at Wood's mill in Bradford about child workers?
Ray, factory surgeon at Wood's mill, the best-arranged in the district, found effects decidedly and greatly injurious even under the most favorable circumstances. In 1842, three-fifths of the children employed there were treated by him. The worst effect was not predominance of deformities but enfeebled and morbid constitutions, and all improved greatly after working hours were reduced to ten.
Chapter 48
Section 494 cards
What did Dr. Hawkins observe about Manchester factory children's appearance and play habits?
Hawkins reported that Manchester's factory classes showed obvious degeneracy of form and colour from the national standard, with low stature, leanness and paleness. Boys and girls from the mills had depressed, very pale appearances lacking youthful liveliness. Many told him they felt no inclination to play outdoors on Saturday and Sunday, preferring to stay quiet at home.
Chapter 49
How did Cowell's weight comparison show mill work stunted young operatives' growth?
Cowell weighed 46 youths aged 17 from one Sunday school: the 26 employed in mills averaged 104.5 pounds, while the 20 not employed in mills averaged 117.7 pounds. Engels cites this among hundreds of statements testifying that the growth of young operatives is stunted by their work.
Chapter 49
At what age did Manchester operatives become unfit for work, and why?
Most operatives were unfit for work at forty, a few lasted to forty-five, almost none to fifty. Causes included general enfeeblement of the frame and often failure of sight from mule-spinning, which strained the eyes by fixing gaze on long rows of fine parallel threads. Of 22,094 operatives in Stockport and Manchester factories, only 143 were over 45.
Chapter 49
What did Dr. Loudon's report say about pelvic malformation among female factory workers?
Loudon stated that although no example of pelvic malformation and some other affections came under his own notice, these things were so common that every physician must regard them as probable consequences of such working-hours, and as vouched for by men of the highest medical credibility. Engels adds that protracted work frequently causes deformities of the pelvis and spinal column.
Chapter 49
Section 504 cards
Why did workers like Thomas McDurt avoid staying home when ill?
The chapter reports that McDurt had a slight fever but could not stay home more than four days because he feared losing his place. Similarly, a girl too ill to work would not ask to go home, since the master was very particular and absence of half a day risked dismissal. The chapter presents this fear of losing employment as a general pattern in almost all factories.
Chapter 50
What effects does the chapter attribute to fibrous dust in spinning mills?
The chapter states that in many cotton and flax-spinning rooms the air is filled with fibrous dust, producing chest affections, especially among carding and combing-room workers. Effects include blood-spitting, hard noisy breathing, chest pains, coughs, and sleeplessness — symptoms of asthma ending in consumption in the worst cases. The operative has no choice of room, so a sound or weak chest makes no difference.
Chapter 50
What does the chapter say about early and late female development in factories?
The chapter says factory heat hastens development, so some girls of thirteen or fourteen are wholly mature; Robertson reported seeing a girl of eleven fully developed and pregnant, and said confinement at fifteen was not rare in Manchester. Such early development, like in tropical climates, is repaid by premature age and debility. Conversely, retarded development occurs: breasts mature late or not at all, and menstruation may first appear in the seventeenth or eighteenth year, sometimes the twentieth, or be wholly absent.
Chapter 50
What does the chapter report about machinery accidents and employer responsibility?
The chapter describes frequent accidents: squeezed-off finger joints, loss of fingers, hands, or arms, with lockjaw often following and causing death. Straps conveying power could seize a worker and throw them against ceiling and floor, rarely leaving a whole bone. The Manchester Guardian reported several fatal accidents in 1843, and the Manchester Infirmary treated 962 machinery wounds that year. The employer at best pays the doctor, or exceptionally wages during treatment; what becomes of an operative unable to work is no concern of the employer.
Chapter 50
Section 514 cards
According to Engels, why do workers clean machinery while it is still running?
Engels argues workers clean machinery in motion because employers would otherwise require them to do it during their free time, when the machinery is stopped. Since every free hour is precious, the worker often risks his life rather than sacrifice one. If employers took the cleaning time out of working hours, Engels claims, no operative would clean moving machinery.
Chapter 51
What remedy does Engels demand for workers injured or killed in factory accidents?
Engels insists blame ultimately falls on the manufacturer, and at the very least the employer should be required to provide life-long support for the incapacitated operative, plus support for the victim's family if death follows the accident. He also argues machinery should be fenced and children's employment forbidden if children cannot take care.
Chapter 51
How does Dr. Ure describe children's work in the factories?
Ure claims he visited many factories unexpectedly and never saw corporal chastisement or ill-humour; children seemed cheerful and alert, taking pleasure in the light play of their muscles. He likened their work to a sport and said they showed no exhaustion, skipping about playgrounds after leaving the mill. Engels counters that Ure observed only after five or six hours' work, not in the evening.
Chapter 51
How does Engels characterize Dr. Ure's account of the 1834 Factory Act?
Engels says Ure calls the Act, especially its compulsory education clause, an absurd and despotic measure against manufacturers that threw children under twelve out of work, leaving them to begging and stealing. Engels presents Ure as the bourgeoisie's chosen apostle, noting the report Ure cites consists of three folio volumes a well-fed bourgeois never studies through.
Chapter 51
Section 524 cards
What did the Factory Act of 1831 provide for young factory workers?
Based on Sir J. C. Hobhouse's motion, it barred anyone under twenty-one from cotton mills between half-past seven at night and half-past five in the morning, and limited young persons under eighteen to twelve hours daily and nine hours on Saturday. Engels notes it helped little, since operatives could not testify against masters without being discharged.
Chapter 52
How did Engels characterize the Sadler committee report of 1832?
Engels calls it emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system for party ends. He says Sadler's noble enthusiasm led him into distorted and erroneous statements, drawing from witnesses answers that contained truth in a perverted form. Manufacturers, incensed at being portrayed as monsters, then demanded an official investigation.
Chapter 52
What did the Factory Act of 1834 establish?
It banned employment of children under nine (except in silk mills), limited children aged 9-13 to 48 hours weekly or 9 daily, and young persons 14-18 to 69 weekly or 12 daily. It required 1.5 hours minimum for meals, banned night work under eighteen, mandated two hours' daily school attendance, and required age and school certificates from surgeon and teacher.
Chapter 52
What did Engels claim about the 1834 compulsory school attendance provision?
He argues it remained wholly a dead letter because the Government failed to provide good schools. Manufacturers employed worn-out operatives as teachers, sending children two hours daily to comply with the letter of the law, but the children learned nothing. He also notes inspectors found the working-day still fourteen to sixteen hours in some branches.
Chapter 52
Section 534 cards
What did Sir James Graham's 1843 factory bill propose, and why did it fail?
Graham's 1843 bill restricted children's working hours to six and one-half and strengthened compulsory school attendance, with better schools as its principal point. It was wrecked by dissenting jealousy: the schools were to fall under Established Church supervision with the Bible as general reading-book. Manufacturers and Liberals joined the dissenters, workers were divided by the Church question, and nearly two million petition signatures led Graham to withdraw the bill.
Chapter 53
What did Lord Ashley achieve on March 19th, 1844, and what happened to it?
Ashley carried, by 179 votes to 170, a resolution that "Night" in the Factory Act should mean six at night to six in the morning, so the ban on night-work would limit hours to twelve including free time, or ten hours of actual work daily. The ministry refused: Graham threatened to resign, and the House then rejected both the ten and twelve hour proposals by a small majority.
Chapter 53
How did the House of Commons finally pass Graham's Twelve Hours' Bill after rejecting its main points?
Graham and Peel announced a new bill and said they would resign if it failed. The new bill was the old Twelve Hours' Bill with changes of form, and the same House that had rejected its principal points in March now swallowed it whole. Engels argues most Ten Hours' supporters were Tories who dropped the bill rather than the ministry, and that these reversing votes brought the House into contempt among workers.
Chapter 53
Why does Engels call factory work 'not work, but tedium,' and what does he say it produces?
The operative merely supervises machinery and joins broken threads — no claim on thinking powers, yet blocking other thoughts, and no muscular activity. The engine never stops, and the overlooker's fine-book punishes any pause. Engels argues this monotony stunts mind and body; workers escape stupefaction only through rebellion against the bourgeoisie, otherwise drunkenness and demoralisation follow.
Chapter 53
Section 544 cards
According to the chapter, what did the court tell the striking operatives of Kennedy's mill?
In October 1844, operatives at Kennedy's mill in Manchester struck. Kennedy prosecuted them under a placarded rule that no more than two operatives in one room may quit work at once. The court decided for Kennedy, telling the workers they were their own masters and no one forced them to agree to such a contract, but having freely entered it they must be bound by it.
Chapter 54
What does the chapter claim about manufacturers and the fines they collect?
The author argues that, by the operatives' universal testimony, many manufacturers collect fines with heartless severity in order to pile up extra profits from farthings extorted from impoverished proletarians. Leach is cited as having a fines list ten feet long totaling 35 pounds 17s. 10d., and says a supervisor was dismissed for fining too little.
Chapter 54
How does the chapter describe clock manipulation in factories?
Leach claims operatives often found the factory clock moved a quarter of an hour forward with doors shut while the clerk noted absentees; he counted ninety-five shut out before a clock a quarter-hour slow at night and fast in the morning. The Factory Report relates similar facts, including a clock set back during working-hours and a machine clock measuring revolutions to extract overtime.
Chapter 54
What non-wage controls does the chapter say employers exercise over operatives?
The author argues the operative is his employer's slave in other respects: if his wife or daughter finds favour with the master, a hint suffices and she must submit; petitions for bourgeois interests are sent to the mill for signatures; enfranchised operatives are sent in rank and file to vote for the bourgeois candidate whether they will or no; and for a public meeting majority they are dismissed early and placed near the platform to be watched.
Chapter 54
Section 554 cards
What did the Truck Act of 1831 declare and how was it enforced?
The Truck Act of 1831 declared payment in truck orders void and illegal for most employees and made it punishable by fine. However, Engels notes that, like most English laws, it was enforced only here and there: comparatively efficiently in towns, but in the countryside the truck system, disguised or undisguised, continued to flourish.
Chapter 55
How did manufacturers evade the Truck Act while still forcing purchases?
After the Act, wages were usually paid in cash, but the employer retained means to force operatives to buy wares in his truck shop and nowhere else. Thus the system could be carried on under cover of the law, provided only that the operative received his wages in money, making the truck system difficult to combat.
Chapter 55
Why did Engels consider the cottage system profitable and exploitative?
Engels argues the manufacturer builds cottages for operatives, then earns twelve to fourteen per cent—double the ordinary house-owner's six per cent—because his factory guarantees occupants who pay punctually, so his cottages never stand empty and he runs no risk, yet he charges rent as if those disadvantages applied. Engels calls it an infamy when employers force operatives to pay rent for houses they do not occupy.
Chapter 55
What power did the cottage system give employers during disputes?
Engels states that if operatives strike, the employer need only give them notice to quit his premises, and the notice need only be a week. After that the operative is not only without bread but without shelter—a vagabond at the mercy of the law, which sends him without fail to the treadmill.
Chapter 55
Section 564 cards
How does Engels compare the English worker of 1845 to the Saxon serf of 1145?
The author argues the free working-man is worse off than the Saxon serf. Both are slaves of a thing: the serf bound to land, the worker to his necessaries and money. But the serf had a guaranteed place in feudal society, while the worker has none unless the bourgeoisie can use him. The serf's slavery was open; the worker's is disguised and hypocritical.
Chapter 56
What did the Children's Employment Commission report about child stocking weavers?
Children entered at six, seven, or eight years and worked ten to twelve hours daily in small, close rooms. They commonly fainted at work, became too feeble for ordinary household tasks, and grew so near-sighted they wore glasses in childhood. Many showed scrofulous symptoms, and manufacturers usually refused to employ girls who had worked this way as too weak. The condition was called 'a disgrace to a Christian country.'
Chapter 56
What did the Hinckley weaver's letters report about earnings and living conditions?
The letters, published in the Morning Chronicle, described 50 families and 321 persons supported by 109 frames. Each frame yielded about 5.5 shillings, each family about 11s. 4d. weekly. Rent, frame rent, fuel, light, soap, and needles took 5s. 10d., leaving 1.5d. per head daily for food and nothing for clothing. Beds were lacking, children went ragged and barefoot, and some worked Sundays out of poverty.
Chapter 56
Why did the stocking weavers' wages fall, and what kept them low?
Formerly they earned twenty to twenty-one shillings, but enlarged frames ruined their trade; most still worked old single frames and struggled to compete with machinery. By 1833-1844 they earned six or seven shillings for sixteen to eighteen hours daily. Competition from Saxon stocking weavers with starvation wages kept English wages from rising in Leicester, Nottingham, or Derby.
Chapter 56
Section 573 cards
What does the chapter say about the eyesight of lace winders and threaders?
The author reports that threaders suffer eye inflammation, pain, tears, and momentary uncertainty of vision while threading, though permanent injury is not universally observed. For winders, however, the chapter states it is certain their work seriously affects the eye, producing frequent inflammations of the cornea plus many cases of amaurosis and cataract.
Chapter 57
According to the Nottingham report, how did the labour system promote immorality?
The report states that threaders (chiefly boys) and winders (usually girls) were summoned to the factory at the same time, and since parents could not know how long they were wanted, the children had opportunity to form improper connections and remain together after work. All Nottingham inhabitants—police, clergy, manufacturers, workers, and parents—were unanimously of this opinion.
Chapter 57
What does the chapter say about bobbin-lacework in the agricultural shires?
Carried on in Northampton, Oxford, and Bedford chiefly by children and young persons, it is called most unwholesome: they work bent over the lace cushion in small, ill-ventilated, damp rooms, wearing stays with a wooden busk that displaces the ribs and makes narrow chests universal. The chapter says they usually die of consumption, are almost wholly without education, and prostitution is almost epidemic among them.
Chapter 57
Section 584 cards
How did machinery change cotton-printing employment in Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Scotland?
Engraved steam-driven cylinders, able to print four to six colours at once, superseded hand-work. One man with one child now does what 200 block printers once did, and a single machine yields 28 yards per minute. Of 11,000,000 pieces printed in 1842, 10,000,000 were by machinery alone, leaving many hand-printers starving or on short time.
Chapter 58
Why did fustian cutters' wages collapse after power-looms were introduced?
Hand-woven cloth was uneven and needed skilled cutting, but power-loom weft threads run exactly parallel, so cutting ceased to be an art. Displaced workers crowded into the trade and forced wages down; manufacturers then hired women and children at lower rates and moved cutting into factories. One cutter recalled 8d. a yard falling to 1d.
Chapter 58
What did Brocklehurst's lists show about silk weavers' wages?
Brocklehurst, a large silk manufacturer, showed a parliamentary committee that goods paying 30s., 14s., and 10s. in wages in 1821 paid only 9s., 7.25s., and 6.25s. in 1839, with no machinery improvement. His weavers' average weekly wage fell from 16.5s. in 1821 to 6s. in 1831, and dropped further afterward.
Chapter 58
How did weavers' cards let manufacturers deduct wages arbitrarily?
The card set return times, required illness to be reported within three days, rejected waiting for yarn as an excuse, and fined half the wages or more for faults, plus a penny per yard for lateness. One collector at Leigh reportedly brought his employer at least 15 pounds in fines per visit. Arbitration was abandoned because workers who insisted were dismissed.
Chapter 58
Section 594 cards
How does Engels describe the freedom of workers to accept or refuse the manufacturer's terms?
The author argues workers are "perfectly free" only in a nominal sense: the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and cards, but effectively tells them, in Leach's phrasing, that if they dislike being frizzled in his frying-pan they can walk into the fire. Refusal therefore means ruin rather than genuine choice.
Chapter 59
What is the "industrial democracy" Faucher identifies in Birmingham, and what does Engels say of it?
Faucher, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, contrasts Birmingham's many small employers renting shops with shared steam-power against Lancashire's manufacture and calls it "Democratie industrielle." Engels agrees with Faucher that it yields no favourable results for master or men, since competition divides profit among too many small employers and the centralising tendency of capital ruins most of them.
Chapter 59
Why does Engels say Birmingham iron-workers rarely joined English labour movements fully?
The author argues their peculiar midway position is to blame: small employers live partly on their apprentices' work, so they are neither genuine proletarians nor genuine bourgeois, their main support being their own labour. This position, plus the fact that apprentices may themselves become small employers, kept Birmingham politically radical but not Chartist, and rarely wholly committed to labour movements.
Chapter 59
What evidence does Engels give on the health, height, and education of Birmingham's working children?
Children are described as half-starved and ragged, some going without food from eight in the morning until seven at night, many barefoot in winter, hence small and weak. A recruiting surgeon calls the men small, delicate, and sometimes deformed; of 613 recruits only 238 were fit. Over half the children aged five to fifteen attend no school, and half of all criminals are under fifteen.
Chapter 59
Section 604 cards
What food did apprentices in Wolverhampton reportedly receive from employers?
Engels reports that apprentices in Wolverhampton and the Staffordshire iron district were fed almost exclusively meat from diseased animals, animals that had died naturally, tainted meat, veal from calves killed too young, and pork from swine smothered in transport. He says both small employers and large manufacturers with thirty to forty apprentices furnished such food, causing frequent bowel complaints and other diseases.
Chapter 60
What physical deformities did Engels report among Willenhall workers?
Engels states that in Willenhall countless persons had crooked backs and one crooked leg from perpetually filing at the lathe, called "hind-leg," giving the legs the form of a K. He adds it was said more than one-third of working-men there were ruptured, and that retarded puberty was found among girls and boys, extending even to the nineteenth year.
Chapter 60
How did nailers' pay and workload in Sedgeley work?
Engels says Sedgeley nailers worked in wretched, filthy, stable-like huts. Children began at ten or twelve and were considered skilled only at a thousand nails daily. Twelve hundred nails paid 5.75d; each nail took twelve hammer blows, and with a 1.25-pound hammer the nailer lifted 18,000 pounds for that pay, producing ill-formed, undersized frames.
Chapter 60
What did Dr. Knight say about Sheffield grinders' lifespan and asthma?
Dr. Knight of Sheffield said dry grinders' average life is hardly thirty-five and wet grinders' rarely exceeds forty-five. Fork grinders die between twenty-eight and thirty-two, razor grinders between forty and forty-five, table cutlery grinders between forty and fifty. He noted the hardest drinkers lived longest because they were oftenest absent from work, and that all attempts to prevent or cure grinders' asthma had wholly failed.
Chapter 60
Section 614 cards
Why did Sheffield grinders destroy dust-control devices meant to protect them?
Engels reports that although covered grindstones and artificial draughts to carry off dust were at least partially successful, grinders did not desire their adoption and even destroyed the contrivances. They believed such measures would attract more workers to the trade and thus reduce wages, preferring, in Engels's words, "a short life and a merry one."
Chapter 61
What did Dr. Knight tell grinders showing early asthma symptoms, and how did they respond?
Dr. Knight often told grinders who came to him with the first symptoms of asthma that returning to grinding meant certain death, but this warning was of no avail. Engels adds that once a man becomes a grinder he falls into despair, "as though he had sold himself to the devil."
Chapter 61
What illnesses did Engels attribute to the pottery dipping process?
Workers dipped finished ware into fluid containing large quantities of lead and often arsenic, or handled freshly dipped articles, leaving hands and clothing wet. Engels says this caused violent pain, serious stomach and intestinal disease, obstinate constipation, colic, sometimes consumption, and most commonly epilepsy among children; among men, partial paralysis of hand muscles, colica pictorum, and paralysis of whole limbs were ordinary.
Chapter 61
What did the commissioner find regarding education in the Potteries district?
Although schools were said to be comparatively numerous and to offer children instruction, the children were set to work twelve hours or more per day so early that they could not avail themselves of them. Three-fourths of the children examined could neither read nor write, and some who had attended Sunday school for years could not tell one letter from another.
Chapter 61
Section 624 cards
What health effects does Engels attribute to glass manufacture for children?
Engels reports that hard labour, irregular and night hours, and workplace heat of 100 to 130 Fahrenheit cause children general debility and disease, stunted growth, and especially eye affections, bowel complaints, and rheumatic and bronchial affections. Many children are pale, have red eyes, are often blind for weeks, and suffer nausea, vomiting, coughs, colds, and rheumatism. Glassblowers, he adds, usually die young of debility and chest affections.
Chapter 62
What does Engels say the report shows about the spread of the factory system?
Engels argues the report testifies to the gradual but sure introduction of the factory system into all branches of industry, recognizable especially by the employment of women and children. He says machinery is being introduced in all directions, destroying the working-man's independence, dissolving or inverting the family, and giving the great capitalist command of trade and the workers. Capital centralizes and society divides more sharply every day.
Chapter 62
What working conditions did London dressmakers endure during the fashionable season?
Engels states the fashionable season lasts about four months, when hours in the best establishments are fifteen, and in pressing cases eighteen a day; in most shops work is unregulated, leaving girls often only three or four, sometimes two, hours in twenty-four for rest and sleep. Some worked nineteen to twenty hours, or all night. Cases occurred of nine consecutive days and nights without undressing. About 15,000 girls were employed, sleeping and eating on the premises.
Chapter 62
What wages and hardships does Engels describe for London shirtmakers?
Engels says shirtmakers receive 1.5d. for an ordinary shirt, formerly 2d. to 3d., forced down after the St. Pancras workhouse began undertaking work at 1.5d. Fine fancy shirts, makeable in eighteen hours, pay 6d. Weekly wages are 2s. 6d. to 3s. Women must deposit money for materials, often pawning them, and one who could not redeem materials drowned herself in 1844.
Chapter 62
Section 634 cards
What did Engels claim about crime as the earliest form of worker rebellion?
Engels argues crime was the earliest, crudest, and least fruitful form of rebellion. Poverty destroyed the worker's respect for property, so he stole; crime rose with manufacturing, its yearly arrests tracking cotton bales consumed. But crime was only an individual protest, crushed by society's superior force, and never became the universal expression of working-class opinion, though workers might silently approve.
Chapter 63
Why did workers first oppose the bourgeoisie by resisting machinery?
Engels states workers first manifested class opposition by resisting machinery at the industrial period's start. Inventors like Arkwright were persecuted and their machines destroyed; later revolts demolished factories and machinery, resembling the 1844 printers' disturbances in Bohemia. This opposition was isolated, local, and aimed at one feature of social arrangements; once the momentary end was attained, social power punished the offenders and machinery was introduced anyway.
Chapter 63
What did the 1824 law change for working-class association?
Engels explains that the old unreformed oligarchic-Tory parliament passed a law in 1824 repealing all laws forbidding coalitions between working-men for labour purposes. Workers gained the right of free association previously restricted to aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Secret coalitions had existed before — Glasgow weavers' strikes in 1812 and 1822, Scottish miners in 1818 — with oaths, treasurers, and branches, but secrecy crippled their growth. After 1824, unions spread across England.
Chapter 63
What were the stated objects of the Trades Unions?
Engels says Trades Unions were formed to protect the single worker against bourgeois tyranny and neglect. They aimed to deal en masse with employers, regulate wages by employers' profit, raise wages when possible, and keep them uniform per trade nationwide; to limit apprentices and keep demand for labour high; to counteract indirect wage cuts from new tools and machinery; and to assist unemployed workers financially, including through the tramping card.
Chapter 63
Section 644 cards
What lawful means do Unions use to pursue their ends, and what weakens them?
A deputation or petition is sent to employers refusing the Union wage; if unavailing, the Union commands employees to stop work, producing a partial or general strike. These lawful means are very weak when workers outside the Union exist, or when members leave for momentary advantage offered by the bourgeoisie; such recruits, called knobsticks, let manufacturers defeat partial strikes.
Chapter 64
How do Unions fare against great versus minor forces in the labour market?
The author argues Unions cannot alter the economic law fixing wages by supply and demand, so they are powerless against great forces: in a crisis they must reduce wages or dissolve, and in a boom they cannot fix wages above spontaneous capitalist competition. Against minor, single influences they are powerful, restricting manufacturers' competition and hastening wage increases after a crisis.
Chapter 64
Why does the author say workers strike even when strikes seem useless?
The author argues workers must protest every reduction, even one dictated by necessity, because silence would recognize social conditions and admit the bourgeoisie's right to exploit them in good times and starve them in bad. Practical English people express this in action, unlike German theorists who sleep once their protest is registered.
Chapter 64
What gives Unions and strikes their real importance, according to the author?
The author argues their real importance is being the first attempt of workers to abolish competition, recognizing that bourgeois supremacy rests wholly on competition among workers, i.e. their want of cohesion. Because Unions attack this vital nerve, they are dangerous to the social order; if workers' mutual competition is destroyed, the rule of property ends.
Chapter 64
Section 654 cards
According to Engels, why must workers move beyond abolishing competition among themselves?
Engels argues that once workers abolish competition among themselves, necessity compels them to go further: they must abolish not just one kind of competition but competition itself altogether, or else they will recede and allow competition among themselves to reappear. He adds that workers perceive more clearly than the bourgeoisie that competition among capitalists also presses on them by causing commercial crises.
Chapter 65
What did the Glasgow Cotton-Spinners' Union secret committee do, and what happened to its leaders in 1838?
The Cotton-Spinners' Union, existing from 1816, had a secret committee unknown to most members that controlled funds absolutely and fixed prices on the heads of knobsticks and obnoxious manufacturers and on incendiarism in mills. In 1838 its leading members were found guilty of conspiracies, maltreatment of knobsticks, and incendiarism at Wood's mill, and were transported for seven years.
Chapter 65
How does Engels characterize the bourgeoisie's opposition to the Unions?
Engels argues the property-holding class, especially manufacturers in direct contact with workers, declaims violently against Unions and tries to prove them useless on grounds that are economically correct but for that reason partially mistaken and totally without effect on workers. He says the bourgeoisie's zeal shows it is not disinterested, since whatever goes into manufacturers' pockets comes out of workers'.
Chapter 65
What does Engels claim the Unions nourish, and what deeds does he cite as evidence?
Engels says the Unions greatly nourish the workers' bitter hatred of the property-holding class, and from them proceed, in times of unusual excitement, individual actions explained by hatred wrought to despair. He cites attacks with vitriol, the shooting of young Ashton in Hyde in 1831, and numerous incendiarisms and attempted explosions, including six cases in four months.
Chapter 65
Section 664 cards
According to Engels, what did Ure claim about the invention of new textile machines?
Engels reports that Ure argued new machines, such as the multi-colour calico printing machine and the improved warp-dressing machine, were results of disturbances and refractoriness among workers. Engels notes Ure elsewhere labours to prove machinery benefits workers, and criticizes bourgeois commentators who blame union agitation on self-interested paid agents.
Chapter 66
How does Engels characterize the frequency and purpose of strikes in England?
Engels argues scarcely a day passes without a strike somewhere, over wage cuts, refused raises, knobsticks, abuses, or new machinery. He says strikes decide nothing but are the strongest proof the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat approaches; they are the working-men's military school, preparing them for an unavoidable struggle.
Chapter 66
Why does Engels reject the Continental view that English workers are cowardly?
Engels argues the English working-man is second to none in courage, but fights differently: the French, being political by nature, use political weapons, while the English fight directly against the bourgeoisie in a peaceful manner for now. He says enduring a turnout with wife and children, hunger and want for months, demands loftier courage than insurrection.
Chapter 66
What happened in the May 1843 Manchester brickmakers' dispute Engels describes?
Pauling & Henfrey enlarged bricks without raising wages while charging more. Workers struck, the Brickmakers' Union declared war, and the firm imported knobsticks guarded by twelve armed ex-soldiers and policemen. The yard was stormed at night; the assailants, lit by a burning kiln, had their shots miss while enemy fire struck home. They demolished the yard, then withdrew to Eccles.
Chapter 66
Section 674 cards
Why does Engels say the law is sacred to the English bourgeois?
The author argues the bourgeois sees the law as his own composition, enacted with his consent and for his benefit and protection. Even a single injurious law is tolerable because the whole fabric protects his interests, and the sanctity of order, actively willed by one part of society and passively accepted by the other, is the strongest support of his social position.
Chapter 67
What are the six points of the People's Charter?
Drawn up in 1835 by a London committee headed by William Lovett: universal suffrage for every sane adult man unconvicted of crime; annual Parliaments; payment of MPs so poor men can stand; voting by ballot to prevent bribery and intimidation by the bourgeoisie; equal electoral districts; and abolition of the nominal 300-pound land qualification for candidates.
Chapter 67
What did Stephens mean by calling Chartism a knife and fork question?
Speaking at a meeting of 200,000 on Kersall Moor, the Methodist parson Stephens said Chartism was no mere political movement about winning the ballot. The author quotes him: Chartism means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and short working-hours. Engels notes this showed the peculiarly social character of the working-men's Chartism as early as 1838.
Chapter 67
Why did the working-men not support the Anti-Corn Law agitation?
After the 1839-40 uprisings subsided, the bourgeoisie turned to the Corn Laws and formed the Anti-Corn Law Association in Manchester, loosening its tie with the Radical proletariat. The author states the working-men soon perceived that abolition of the Corn Laws could be of little use to them while very advantageous to the bourgeoisie, so they could not be won for the project.
Chapter 67
Section 684 cards
Why did the Anti-Corn Law League adopt revolutionary language in 1842?
The crisis of 1842 hit the manufacturing bourgeoisie hard, and the Conservative party had held power since 1841. The League's journals and agitators used openly revolutionary language, calling on the people to rebel, as the Chartists had done earlier. The bourgeoisie hoped to use the crisis, the resulting want, and popular excitement to force repeal of the Corn Laws.
Chapter 68
What was the 'holy month' idea, and who revived it in 1842?
The 'holy month' was a general strike first broached by the Chartists in 1839. In 1842 it was revived, but this time not by workers wanting to quit work: manufacturers wished to close their mills and send operatives into country parishes on aristocratic property, forcing the Tory Parliament and Ministry to repeal the Corn Laws while the bourgeoisie stood safely in the background.
Chapter 68
How did the August 1842 uprising begin in Staleybridge?
At the end of July business improved, but three Staleybridge firms cut wages anyway. Two withdrew; William Bailey & Brothers stood firm and told objecting operatives that if this did not please them, they had better go and play a bit. The hands received this contemptuously with cheers, left the mill, paraded through town, and within hours every mill stood idle.
Chapter 68
What did the August 1842 uprising actually achieve?
The uprising ended without evil results, but it produced the decisive separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie resumed its law-abiding stance, swore in special constables, and gave the command to fire at Preston. Chartists were prosecuted while the bourgeoisie escaped and sold off old stock at advantage. Chartism then split over the Corn Laws, and Sturge founded the Complete Suffrage Association.
Chapter 68
Section 694 cards
How did Chartism change after shedding bourgeois elements?
The author argues Chartism became purely a working-man's cause once freed from bourgeois elements. The "Complete" journals and Radical bourgeoisie drifted toward Liberalism and Free Trade, opposing the Ten Hours' Bill and working-men's demands. The Chartist workers instead embraced every proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie, making Free Trade the point where Chartism separates from Radicalism.
Chapter 69
How does Chartist democracy differ from bourgeois political democracy?
The author argues Chartism is essentially social, a class movement. For Radical bourgeois, the Six Points are the beginning and end, meant at most to prompt constitutional reforms. For the proletarian they are merely means to further ends: "Political power our means, social happiness our end." Stephens's "knife and fork question" was truth for only some Chartists in 1838, but for all in 1845.
Chapter 69
What practical measures did English Socialists demand?
English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer. It demanded gradual introduction of possession in common in home colonies of two to three thousand persons combining agriculture and manufacture with equal rights and education. It also sought easier divorce, a rational government with complete freedom of conscience, and abolition of punishment, replaced by rational treatment of offenders.
Chapter 69
Why did the author criticize English Socialism's methods?
The author argues English Socialists were tame and peaceable, rejecting all methods but winning public opinion, yet so dogmatic that success was hopeless. They were blind to progress in the dissolution of the old order, denied historic development, and wished to establish Communism overnight. They dismissed class hatred, the only moral incentive toward the goal, preaching unfruitful philanthropy instead.
Chapter 69
Section 704 cards
How does Engels characterize Chartists versus Socialists?
Engels describes Chartists as theoretically backward but genuine proletarians representing their class, while Socialists are more far-seeing and propose practical remedies but originated from the bourgeoisie and so cannot fully merge with the working class. He argues the union of Socialism with Chartism, reproducing French Communism in an English manner, is the next step and has already begun.
Chapter 70
What does Engels claim about Mechanics' Institutes?
Engels argues the bourgeoisie withdrew Mechanics' Institutes from proletarian influence, making them vehicles for bourgeois-useful science and Political Economy, whose message for workers he says is resignation to starvation. He contends this education is subservient to ruling politics and religion, amounting to a sermon on obedience and passivity, and that most workers therefore avoid these institutes.
Chapter 70
Which workers form the nucleus of the labour movement, per Engels?
Engels states factory operatives, especially in the cotton district, form the nucleus of the labour movement, with Lancashire and Manchester as the seat of the strongest Unions, the center of Chartism, and home to most Socialists. He argues the more a branch is dominated by the factory system, the more its workers join the movement and develop clear proletarian consciousness.
Chapter 70
What health effects does Dr. Barham's report attribute to mine work?
According to the Children's Employment Commission's Reports cited by Engels, inhaling low-oxygen air mixed with dust and blasting smoke harms lungs, heart, and digestion. Climbing ladders over an hour daily stunts growth, so young starters never reach the stature of women working above ground. Many die young of galloping consumption, most of slow consumption by middle age, and become unfit for work between thirty-five and forty-five.
Chapter 70
Section 711 cards
What sleeping conditions did Commissioner Mitchell find in the Alston Moor district?
Mitchell visited a sleeping barrack 18 feet long and 13 feet wide, arranged for 42 men and 14 boys, or 56 persons, half sleeping above the other in shipboard-style berths. There was no opening for foul air to escape; though no one had slept there for three nights, Mitchell could not endure the smell a moment.
Chapter 71
Section 723 cards
What physical deformities does Engels report among coal miners?
Engels reports bent knees, distorted legs, spinal deformities, and other malformations, worsened by constrained working positions in weakened constitutions. He says witnesses and physicians claim a miner can be recognized by his shape among a hundred people in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, and Durham. Women are said to be seldom as straight as other women, with pelvis deformities causing difficult or fatal childbearing.
Chapter 72
At what ages do coal miners and loaders become unfit for work?
Engels states that in all districts without exception coal miners age early and become unfit for work soon after the fortieth year; a miner working past 45 or 50 is a great rarity, and they enter old age at forty. Loaders, who lift heavy coal blocks, age by the twenty-eighth or thirtieth year, so it is proverbial that loaders are old before they are young.
Chapter 72
What does Engels conclude about manhood and lifespan among coal miners?
Summarizing Dr. Southwood Smith, Engels concludes that prolonged childhood and premature age together greatly shorten the period of full manhood, and that overall length of life is below average. He notes few reach sixty, and even in comparatively wholesome South Staffordshire few men reach their fifty-first year, adding this to the bourgeoisie's reckoning.
Chapter 72
Section 734 cards
Why does working thin coal seams injure miners' joints?
When seams are thin, owners refuse to remove adjacent sand and clay, so passages stay too low to stand in. The miner lies on his side, loosening coal with his pick and resting on his elbow as a pivot, which causes inflammation of the joint; where he must kneel, the knee is affected too. Women and children crawl harnessed to tubs, and pushing with the head causes swellings and ulcers.
Chapter 73
How does Engels say mine ventilation and the Davy lamp relate to safety?
Engels argues proper ventilation via fresh air-shafts could almost entirely remove the harm of explosive hydrocarbon gas and suffocating carbonic acid gas, but the bourgeoisie won't spend the money. Instead workers are ordered to use the Davy lamp, which he calls useless because of its dull light and usually replaced by a candle. When explosions occur, the miner's recklessness is blamed.
Chapter 73
What does Engels report about mine accident deaths and inquest verdicts?
Engels cites the Mining Journal's figure of about fourteen hundred deaths yearly, and the Manchester Guardian reporting two or three accidents weekly in Lancashire alone. He notes coroner's juries are usually dependent on mine owners, and where not, immemorial custom yields a verdict of 'Accidental Death'; juries take little interest because they don't understand the matter. The Children's Employment Commission holds owners directly responsible for most cases.
Chapter 73
What did Lord Ashley's bill do, and why did it fail?
After the Children's Employment Commission's Report reached Parliament, Lord Ashley brought in a bill wholly forbidding women's work in mines and greatly limiting children's work. It was adopted but remained a dead letter in most districts because no mine inspectors were appointed to enforce it. Engels notes evasion was easy in rural districts, citing over sixty women still working in the Duke of Hamilton's Scottish mines.
Chapter 73
Section 744 cards
What five demands did the miners' new agreement of 1844 set out?
The men demanded: (1) payment by weight instead of measure; (2) weight determined by ordinary scales subject to public inspectors; (3) half-yearly renewal of contracts; (4) abolition of the fines system and payment for work actually done; (5) employers to guarantee miners in their exclusive service at least four days' work per week, or wages for the same. Roberts was empowered to draw up this agreement.
Chapter 74
How did the coal owners respond to the miners' proposed agreement?
The coal owners replied that for them the Union did not exist, that they would deal with single workmen only, and that they would never recognise the Union. They also submitted an agreement of their own that ignored all the miners' points, which the miners naturally refused. War was thus declared, and on March 31st, 1844, 40,000 miners laid down their picks.
Chapter 74
What role did W. P. Roberts play in the miners' movement?
Roberts was a Chartist solicitor from Bristol appointed the miners' 'Attorney General.' He organised strike and agitation with perseverance, travelled England, preached peaceful and legal agitation, and campaigned against despotic Justices of the Peace and truck masters. He obtained habeas corpus from the Court of Queen's Bench for condemned miners and secured acquittals, becoming a terror to mine owners.
Chapter 74
Why did the author say the coal miners were so thoroughly oppressed?
The author argues the truck and cottage systems were used to plunder workers, wages were reckoned by measure while coal was sold by weight, and fines were imposed at the overseer's discretion, sometimes leaving a worker owing money after a full week. He adds that nearly all Justices of the Peace in the coal districts were mine owners or their relatives and friends, acting as judges in their own cause.
Chapter 74
Section 754 cards
What did the Haslam notice announce about miners' wages and shop purchases?
The Messrs. Haslam announced that all persons employed in their colliery would receive their wages wholly in cash and could spend them when and where they chose. Goods bought in Haslam's shops would still be at wholesale prices, but workers were not expected to buy there, and work and wages would continue whether or not they purchased in those shops.
Chapter 75
How did the mine owners finally break the miners' strike?
After evicting the miners from their cottages and failing to provoke violence, the owners imported workers from Ireland and remote parts of Wales where no labour movement existed. This restored competition of workers against workers, and the strikers' strength collapsed. The owners then obliged them to renounce the Union, abandon Roberts, and accept the employers' conditions, ending the five months' battle at the close of September.
Chapter 75
Why does the author praise the miners' law-abiding conduct during the strike?
The author argues the miners' quiet, peaceable endurance was not fear of the constable's staff but the result of deliberation and the best proof of their intelligence and self-control. Had they resorted to violence, the unarmed miners would have been shot down and the owners would have won within a day or two. He cites this as evidence of true human culture among men described in 1840 as brutal.
Chapter 75
What gains does the author claim the strike achieved despite defeat?
The author argues the strike was not in vain. It roused the northern miners from intellectual death and brought them into the workers' movement, making at least two-thirds of them Chartists. Their endurance fixed public attention on the miners: Duncombe raised their condition in Parliament, and after the Haswell explosion Roberts secured an investigation by Professors Lyell and Faraday, plus a promise of protective measures from Peel.
Chapter 75
Section 764 cards
What did the miners of Lancashire do after North miners renounced their Union?
The Lancashire miners formed a Union of about ten thousand men and guaranteed their Attorney General a salary of 1200 pounds a year. In the autumn they collected more than 700 pounds, spending just over 200 pounds on salaries and judicial expenses, and the rest mainly supporting men out of work through lack of employment or disputes with employers.
Chapter 76
What did the miners' Union and 1844 strike achieve, according to the author?
The author argues the strike won for all England's miners the insight that united workers are a respectable power able to defy the bourgeoisie in extremity. He claims this gain of all labour movements will soon erase the difference in intelligence and energy favouring factory operatives, letting miners stand abreast of them, and asks how long before the bourgeoisie's social edifice collapses.
Chapter 76
How did the property-holding class react to the miners' resistance?
The bourgeoisie did not take warning. Instead of appreciating the workers' forward step, it saw only rage at people who refused to remain submissive, and read the workers' just demands as impertinent discontent, mad rebellion against 'Divine and human order,' or the work of lazy demagogues living by agitation. It tried without success to portray Roberts and Union agents as swindlers.
Chapter 76
What happened to the patriarchal relation between farmer and farm hand by about 1830?
Farm hands had lived on the farm, shared the farmer's fate, and were discharged only in dire necessity. But farmers found it profitable to dissolve this relation, drive hands off the farm, and turn them into day labourers. This happened pretty generally by 1830, freeing latent over-population, forcing wages down, and enormously increasing the poor-rate.
Chapter 76
Section 774 cards
What does the author say the term 'bold peasantry of England' actually describes?
The author argues it is a courtesy term for agricultural labourers living in wretchedness. He distinguishes two groups: those born into pauperism, depraved and without the strength of despair, and a more energetic class who become smugglers and poachers, fight gamekeepers and revenue officers, and grow embittered by prison life. Both, he says, share hatred of property-holders.
Chapter 77
Why does the chapter say agricultural labourers cannot combine to raise wages?
They are scattered, so combination is impractical. If one refuses low wages, dozens of unemployed or rate-supported labourers are thankful for any offer. Anyone who declines work is denied all relief except the hated workhouse by Poor Law guardians, who are themselves the farmers from whom he must get work.
Chapter 77
What penalties does the chapter describe under the Game Laws?
The author argues the Game Laws are more stringent than in any other country. A peasant who snares or shoots game, though the landlord has vast superfluity, goes to jail if caught; a second offence brings at least seven years' transportation. The severity causes bloody conflicts with gamekeepers and murders yearly, and the post of gamekeeper is dangerous and despised.
Chapter 77
What was 'Swing,' and what did the labourers do under that name?
The author argues the peasants remained in the first stage of resistance, individual rebellion through crime, and their favourite method was incendiarism. In winter 1830-31, after disturbances over coastguard increases, Poor Law changes, low wages and machinery, hay and corn-stacks and barns were burned nearly every night. Offenders were rarely caught, and workers blamed a mythical person named 'Swing.'
Chapter 77
Section 784 cards
Why does Engels say agricultural labourers are indifferent to Corn Law repeal?
The author argues that, like the operatives, agricultural labourers are thoroughly indifferent to the repeal or non-repeal of the Corn Laws, even though the question matters to them. He claims repeal would carry free competition and the present social economy to its extreme, leaving only a radical transformation of the social order as the next step.
Chapter 78
What did labourers demand at Earl Radnor's 1844 meeting near Highworth?
Earl Radnor, a Liberal landlord, caused a meeting to be held in October 1844 near Highworth to pass resolutions against the Corn Laws. The labourers, indifferent to those laws, demanded something wholly different: small holdings at low rent for themselves, and they told Earl Radnor bitter truths to his face.
Chapter 78
Why did agricultural labourers attend church despite bitterness toward the clergy?
A Morning Chronicle correspondent reported that labourers held certain little privileges of fire-wood and potato land, which they paid for, on condition of going to church. They voiced bitter feelings toward parsons who begged for missions to the heathen while wages fell. The correspondent asserted this condition was the rule among English country parishes, its opposite the exception.
Chapter 78
What were the Rebecca disturbances and how did they end?
In 1843 Welsh peasants, dressed in women's clothing and with blackened faces, destroyed toll-gates in armed crowds, demolished toll-keepers' houses, wrote threatening letters as the imaginary Rebecca, and once stormed Carmarthen workhouse. They lured militia with false signals. When police were reinforced they turned to incendiarism and attempted murder; many withdrew from disapproval or fear, peace returned, and a commission investigated.
Chapter 78
Section 792 cards
What does Engels identify as the fundamental cause of Irish poverty?
The author argues that Irish poverty stems from existing social conditions, especially competition expressed as subdivision of the soil. He rejects alternative explanations—middlemen, expropriation law, English oppression, Protestant tithes—as accounting only for the form poverty takes, not its existence. English oppression, he says, caused its earlier appearance but not the poverty itself.
Chapter 79
How does Engels describe the living conditions of nine-tenths of Irish country people?
They occupy wretched clay huts scarcely fit for cattle-pens, with scant food. Potatoes last half enough for thirty weeks, then nothing. In spring, wife and children beg with a kettle while the husband seeks work in Ireland or England, returning at potato harvest. Engels reports 585,000 heads of families in total destitution and, citing Sheriff Alison, 2,300,000 persons—27 percent—needing assistance.
Chapter 79
Section 804 cards
Whom does Engels include when he speaks of the bourgeoisie, and why?
Engels includes the so-called aristocracy, arguing it is a privileged class only in contrast with the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat. The proletarian sees both as property-holders, i.e., bourgeois, since before the privilege of property all other privileges vanish. The difference is that the bourgeois proper deals actively with manufacturing and mining workers, and as farmer with agricultural labourers, while the aristocrat contacts only agricultural labourers.
Chapter 80
What did the Manchester bourgeois reply to Engels' complaint about ill-built workers' housing?
Engels recounts walking through Manchester with a bourgeois and describing the bad, unwholesome building methods and frightful workers' quarters, saying he had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly and, at the corner where they parted, said: "And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir." Engels uses this to show money alone determines the bourgeois.
Chapter 80
How does Engels characterize the bourgeoisie's philanthropy?
The author argues the English bourgeois conceals egotism under hypocrisy, claiming philanthropic institutions no other country can boast of. Engels calls this Pharisaic: they first suck out the proletarians' life-blood, then give back a hundredth part of what belongs to them. Such charity degrades the receiver more than the giver, demands he surrender his claim to manhood and beg before alms press the brand of degradation on him.
Chapter 80
What did the Manchester Guardian letter writer demand regarding beggars?
The letter, published without comment as natural and reasonable, complains that main streets are haunted by swarms of beggars who shamelessly expose tattered clothing, sickly aspects, and disgusting wounds to awaken pity. The writer argues that paying the poor-rate and contributing to charities should earn the right to be spared such impertinent molestations, and asks why high police rates are paid if police cannot remove this nuisance.
Chapter 80
Section 814 cards
What does Engels claim the English bourgeoisie's charity is really about?
The author argues the bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest, treating gifts as a bargain: by funding benevolent institutions it buys the right not to be troubled, requiring the poor to stay in their "dusky holes" and despair unseen. He cites a letter signed "A Lady" as expressing the temper of the great majority, noting no reply appeared in later numbers.
Chapter 81
Why does Engels say the bourgeoisie pushes Corn Law repeal, and what do workers think?
The author argues manufacturers back repeal for their own immediate advantage: repeal lowers bread prices, wages fall toward other nations' levels, and manufacturers compete better. Any wage rise would be brief, since England's and Ireland's surplus population would supply operatives and a new crisis would follow. Workers understand this and demand support for the People's Charter as proof of sincerity.
Chapter 81
How does Engels describe the law's treatment of rich versus poor defendants?
The author argues enmity to the proletariat is the basis of the law. A rich man is treated favorably, the judge regrets the trouble and imposes a fine paid with contempt. A poor man is presumed guilty, his defense dismissed, and he is fined beyond his means or sent to the treadmill as a rogue and vagabond, even when nothing is proved against him.
Chapter 81
What does Engels say about police conduct toward bourgeois and proletarians?
The author argues police mirror the Justices of the Peace: the bourgeois may do as he wills and police stay polite and strictly lawful, while the proletarian is roughly and brutally treated. Poverty casts suspicion of every crime on him and cuts off legal redress, so protective forms of law do not exist for him. Only when associations like miners hire a Roberts does this become evident.
Chapter 81
Section 824 cards
What did enclosure of commons deprive the poor of, according to Engels?
Engels states that where commons remained, the poor could pasture an ass, a pig, or geese, and children and young people had a place to play outdoors. As one piece of common land after another was appropriated and cultivated, this gradually ended. Workers' earnings fell, and young people, deprived of their playground, went to the beer-shops. A mass of enclosure acts passed at every session of Parliament.
Chapter 82
What did the Bishop of London propose regarding cheap Sunday rail travel?
When the Government in 1844 moved to force railways to offer penny-a-mile third-class travel daily for workers, the Bishop of London proposed exempting Sunday—the only day working-men in work could travel—so travel would be open to the rich and shut off from the poor. Engels says the proposition was too direct and undisguised to pass Parliament and was dropped.
Chapter 82
What despotic provision did Mr. Miles's bill contain after committee review?
Engels recounts that Mr. Miles's bill on master and servant relations seemed unobjectionable, but after committee review it contained despotic provisions—especially one letting an employer bring any working-man who had contracted to work before a Justice of the Peace for refusal to work or misbehaviour, and have him imprisoned with hard labour for two months on the oath of the employer, agent, or overlooker, i.e. the accuser.
Chapter 82
How does Engels summarize Malthus's Law of Population and its practical conclusions?
Engels says Malthus's theory holds that the earth is perennially over-populated, so poverty, misery, and immorality must prevail, with some rich and moral and others poor and immoral. Malthus concluded charities and poor-rates are nonsense, that employing the poor merely displaces other workers, and that the problem is restraining the surplus population. Engels says Malthus declares the right to live nonsense, and this became the pet theory of the bourgeoisie.
Chapter 82
Section 834 cards
What did the 1834 New Poor Law abolish and replace it with?
It abolished all relief in money and provisions. The only relief allowed was admission to workhouses built immediately after. Regulations were designed to frighten away anyone with the slightest prospect of living without charity, ensuring relief was sought only in extreme cases after every other effort had failed.
Chapter 83
How were families treated inside the workhouses, and why?
Families were broken up: husband in one wing, wife in another, children in a third. They could see one another only at stated times after long intervals, and only if officials judged their behavior good. Engels says this aimed to prevent the 'superfluous' from multiplying and 'demoralised' parents from influencing their children.
Chapter 83
What did the Poor Law Commissioners' report claim the Old Poor Law did?
The report claimed relief fosters laziness and increase of 'surplus population,' acting as a reward for improvident marriage, a stimulus to population, and a premium upon illegitimate children. Engels accepts the description as correct but argues it proves present social conditions are good for nothing, not that poverty is a crime.
Chapter 83
What punishments in workhouses does Engels cite as examples of the law's spirit?
At Greenwich in summer 1843 a five-year-old boy was shut in the dead-room to sleep on coffin lids. At Herne a little girl got the same punishment for wetting the bed. Engels argues such cruelty follows the law's spirit, which treats the poor as criminals, regardless of its humane letter.
Chapter 83
Section 844 cards
What happened to George Robson after leaving the Coventry workhouse?
George Robson, dismissed from the Coventry workhouse in November 1843, had a neglected shoulder wound and was given food he could not digest. He was set to work at the pump and treated more brutally the more he complained. Discharged at his own request, he died at Leicester two days later; a surgeon at the inquest testified the wound and food caused his death.
Chapter 84
What did the 1843 investigation find at the Birmingham workhouse?
An official found four tramps shut up naked under a staircase in a black hole for eight to ten days, often without food until noon, in the severest season. A boy passed through every punishment grade, including the dog-hole and a filthy tramp-room. Women were placed in the dog-hole for refusing to go to church, and a sane woman was put in the insane department as punishment.
Chapter 84
How were patients restrained and neglected in the Bacton and St. Pancras workhouses?
At Bacton, Suffolk, in January 1844, a feeble-minded woman served as nurse, and restless patients were tied with cords over the covering and under the bedstead so nurses need not sit up; one patient was found dead, bound this way. At St. Pancras, London, an epileptic suffocated during an attack with no one coming, and four to eight children slept in one bed.
Chapter 84
What does Engels argue about pauper burials and the poor's refusal of relief?
The author argues paupers are buried like infected cattle: at St. Brides a ditch is reopened weekly and packed with corpses, contaminating the neighborhood, and a railroad through the Manchester pauper ground drew no protest, unlike a respectable cemetery. He cites five cases of people starving rather than enter workhouses, and argues the workhouses intensified working-class hatred of property-holders who admire the New Poor Law.
Chapter 84
Section 854 cards
How did Engels say the New Poor Law affected the labour movement?
Engels argues the New Poor Law accelerated the labour movement and especially spread Chartism, since it clearly formulated the bourgeoisie's view that the non-possessing class exists only to be exploited and to starve when no longer useful. Because the law was carried out most extensively in the countryside, he says it also facilitated the emerging proletarian movement in the agricultural districts.
Chapter 85
What did Engels claim about parliamentary support for the New Poor Law?
Engels argues the measure did not originate with one section of the bourgeoisie but enjoyed the whole class's approval. He cites the 1844 debates: the Liberal party had enacted the New Poor Law, the Conservative party under Prime Minister Peel defended it and altered only petty trifles in the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1844, and the Lords consented each time.
Chapter 85
What did Engels predict about English manufacturing versus America?
Engels argued that if present conditions remained unchanged, English manufacture would inevitably be vanquished by America within about twenty years, since America had vast resources, coal and iron, water-power, navigable rivers, and an energetic population. The proletariat would then become superfluous and must starve or rebel. He mocked the economist M'Culloch, who taught that America could not compete.
Chapter 85
What did Engels say would happen if England kept its manufacturing monopoly?
Engels argues that even if England retained the monopoly and factories multiplied, commercial crises would continue and grow more violent with expanding industry and a growing proletariat. The proletariat would increase geometrically through ruin of the lower middle class and concentration of capital, soon embracing the whole nation except a few millionaires, until it saw how easily power could be overthrown and revolution followed.
Chapter 85
Section 864 cards
What does Engels predict the commercial crisis of 1846 or 1847 will bring?
Engels predicts that the next commercial crisis, expected in 1846 or 1847, will probably bring with it the repeal of the Corn Laws and the enactment of the Charter. He calls commercial crises the mightiest levers for independent development of the proletariat, working together with foreign competition and the deepening ruin of the lower middle class.
Chapter 86
According to Engels, what would make the coming revolution less bloody?
The author argues that the revolution can be made more gentle as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, diminishing bloodshed, revenge, and savagery. Communism, he says, stands above the breach between bourgeoisie and proletariat and recognizes only its historic significance for the present, not its justification for the future.
Chapter 86
Why does Engels say English Socialism rests on individual irresponsibility?
Engels argues that English Socialism, i.e. Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. It does not occur to any Communist to wish revenge upon individuals, or to believe a single bourgeois could act otherwise under existing circumstances. The more workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous their present bitterness becomes.
Chapter 86
What does Engels claim about the war of the poor against the rich?
The author maintains that the war of the poor against the rich, now carried on in detail and indirectly, will become direct and universal. He says it is too late for a peaceful solution, classes are dividing more sharply, and the guerilla skirmishes will concentrate into more important battles until a slight impulse sets the avalanche in motion.
Chapter 86
Section 873 cards
How does the index categorize the Poor Law?
The index separates the New Poor Law (pp. 174, 175, 230, 235, 262 et seq., 269, 284 et seq.) from the Old Poor Law (pp. 176, 284, 285). It also lists law generally as a bourgeois institution (pp. 113, 130, 173, 176, 227, 281, 282, 288), and workhouses at pp. 287 et seq.
Chapter 87
What does Engels mean by 'society' as a responsible whole?
In footnote 95 Engels says that when he calls society a responsible whole with rights and duties, he means the ruling power, the class holding social and political control — in England and all civilized countries, the bourgeoisie. That class bears responsibility for those it grants no share in control. He adds that German capitalists had reached the English level by 1886.
Chapter 87
Which sources does Engels cite for official data and on the working class?
Footnote 7 cites Porter's Progress of the Nation (London, 1836–1843, three volumes) and other chiefly official sources. Footnote 65 cites Gaskell's The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), a Liberal work Engels calls valuable but to be used with discretion, since Gaskell confuses the whole working class with mill hands and predates the Factories Enquiry Commission.
Chapter 87
Section 883 cards
According to the 1844 Factory Inspector's report quoted, what wage pattern existed in Lancashire cotton?
The report by Factory Inspector L. Horner (October 1844) states that hundreds of young men between twenty and thirty, employed as piecers and otherwise, earned no more than 8 or 9 shillings a week, while children under thirteen working under the same roof earned 5 shillings and young girls of sixteen to twenty earned 10-12 shillings weekly.
Chapter 88
What did a manufacturer's data on 412 Lancashire factories show about married women workers?
Engels' note reports that in 412 Lancashire factories, 10,721 married women were employed. Of their husbands, only 5,314 also worked in factories, 3,927 had other employment, 821 were unemployed, and information was lacking for 659. Engels concludes that two, if not three, men for each factory were supported by their wives' work.
Chapter 88
What does Dr. J. Kay compare the cotton operative's endless toil to, and what effect does he claim?
In a passage Engels quotes, Dr. J. Kay likens the wearisome routine of endlessly repeated mechanical processes to the torture of Sisyphus, the burden of toil ever falling back like the rock. Kay argues the mind gains neither knowledge nor power of thought, the intellect dozes in dull indolence, the coarser nature flourishes, and the worker grows indifferent, lives in filthy poverty, and squanders earnings on debauchery.
Chapter 88
Section 894 cards
How does Engels say manufacturers present factory life to visiting outsiders?
Engels argues manufacturers stage guided tours: they show model country factories with airy rooms and healthy operatives, provide lunch, and lead visitors only to neat cottages of overlookers and mechanics. The employer's presence prevents indiscreet questions, and the school, church, and reading-room are shown while their controlling purposes are concealed.
Chapter 89
What does Engels claim manufacturers conceal on these guided visits?
Engels argues the manufacturer hides that the cottage system makes slaves of operatives, that a truck shop may operate nearby, that workers hate him, that the school trains children to subordination, that the reading-room carries only bourgeois prints, and that employees are dismissed for reading Chartist or Socialist papers.
Chapter 89
Why does Engels say the 'country manufacture' is favored for display?
Engels argues employers prefer showing country factories because free air and surroundings partly remove the health disadvantages of the factory system, and because the patriarchal servitude of workers can be maintained there longest. Dr. Ure praises this arrangement, but Engels says the manufacturer's paternal affection ends abruptly if operatives become Chartists.
Chapter 89
What does Engels say about the bourgeoisie helping visitors see Manchester's working-class quarters?
Engels argues rich manufacturers will not help a visitor tour the working-people's quarters of Manchester or see the factory system develop in a factory town. He says they neither know their employees' condition nor what they want, and dare not learn things that would make them uneasy or force them to act against their own interests.
Chapter 89
Section 904 cards
Why does Engels say he treats the bourgeoisie as a class rather than individuals?
Engels explains he speaks of the bourgeoisie as a class, so facts about individuals serve only as evidence of how a class thinks and acts. For that reason he does not examine distinctions among its sections, subdivisions, and parties, which he calls merely historically and theoretically significant, and he mentions only casually the few honourable exceptions within it.
Chapter 90
Which groups does Engels name as honourable exceptions among the bourgeoisie?
Engels names two groups: pronounced Radicals who are almost Chartists, such as MPs Hindly of Ashton and Fielden of Todmordon, and philanthropic Tories recently organized as "Young England," including MPs D'Israeli, Borthwick, Ferrand, and Lord John Manners, with Lord Ashley in sympathy. He calls Thomas Carlyle wholly isolated, going beyond all of them.
Chapter 90
What does Engels say about Young England's goal and its value?
The author argues Young England hopes to restore the old "Merry England" with its brilliant features and romantic feudalism. He calls this object unattainable and ridiculous, a satire upon all historic development. Still, he says the good intention, the courage to resist existing conditions and prevalent prejudices, and the recognition of the vileness of the present condition are worth something.
Chapter 90
What does Engels say about Carlyle's position among the English bourgeoisie?
Engels describes Thomas Carlyle as a half-German Englishman, wholly isolated, who was originally a Tory and goes beyond all those previously mentioned. According to Engels, Carlyle has sounded the social disorder more deeply than any other English bourgeois and demands the organisation of labour.
Chapter 90
Source and licence
Text used: Project Gutenberg eBook #17306 (Public domain in the United States). Generated from the full text; cards paraphrase the source.
Version: Public domain edition. Retrieved 2026-10-31. Cards reviewed 2026-10-31.
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