The Condition of the Working Class in England is one of the best-known works of Friedrich Engels. Originally written in German as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, it is a study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels' first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution, and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. Engels argues that the Industrial Revolution made workers worse off. He shows, for example, that in large industrial cities mortality from disease, as well as death-rates for workers were higher than in the countryside. In cities like Manchester and Liverpool mortality from smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough was four times as high as in the surrounding countryside, and mortality from convulsions was ten times as high as in the countryside. The overall death-rate in Manchester and Liverpool was significantly higher than the national average (one in 32.72 and one in 31.90 and even one in 29.90, compared with one in 45 or one in 46). An interesting example shows the increase in the overall death-rates in the industrial town of Carlisle where before the introduction of mills (1779–1787), 4,408 out of 10,000 children died before reaching the age of five, and after their introduction the figure rose to 4,738. Before the introduction of mills, 1,006 out of 10,000 adults died before reaching 39 years old, and after their introduction the death rate rose to 1,261 out of 10,000.

Reproduction of the original: The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 by Frederick Engels

The Condition of the Working Class in England is a book by philosopher Friedrich Engels. Essentially a study of the industrial working class in England, the author argues that the Industrial Revolution made workers worse off.

The Condition of the Working Class in England is the best known work of Engels, and still in many ways the best study of the working class in Victorian England. What Cobbett had done for agricultural poverty in his Rural Rides, Engels did - and more - in this work on the plight of industrial workers in England in the 1840s.

Friedrich Engels' first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, has long been considered a social, political, and economic classic. The first book of its kind to study the phenomenon of urbanism and the problems of the modern city, Engels' text contains many of the ideas he was later to develop in collaboration with Karl Marx. In this book, Steven Marcus, author of the highly acclaimed The Other Victorians, applies himself to the study of Engels' book and the conditions that combined to produce it. Marcus studies the city of Manchester, centre of the first Industrial Revolution, between 1835 and 1850 when the city and its inhabitants were experiencing the first great crisis of the newly emerging industrial capitalism. He also examines Engels himself, son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer, who was sent to Manchester to complete his business education in the English cotton mills. Touching upon several disciplines, including the history of socialism, urban sociology, Marxist thought, and the history and theory of the Industrial Revolution, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class offers a fascinating study of nineteenth-century English literature and cultural life.

This, the first book written by Engels during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844, is the best known and in many ways the best study of the working class in Victorian England. The fluency of his writing, the personal nature of his insights, and his talent for mordant satire combine to make Engels's account of the lives of the victims of early industrial change into a classic.

The classic account of urban working-class life in Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, first published in English in 1892.

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892 by Frederick Engels. Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. The Condition of the Working Class in England is an 1845 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Engels, a study of the industrial working class in Victorian England. Engels' first book, it was originally written in German as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England; an English translation was published in 1885. The state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and, again, the commission p. viagent, who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and trouble. And it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer and his "hands."

A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames.