The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892Engels, Friedrich
History
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892
Engels, Friedrich
Great Britain -- Economic conditions; Working class -- Great Britain
bourgeois regime, with thieves, swindlers, and prostitutes; when one
reflects that many a mother gives the baby on her arm gin to drink, the
demoralising effects of frequenting such places cannot be denied.
On Saturday evenings, especially when wages are paid and work stops
somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working-class pours from its
own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen
in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an
evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others
lying in the gutter. On Sunday evening the same scene is usually
repeated, only less noisily. And when their money is spent, the
drunkards go to the nearest pawnshop, of which there are plenty in every
city--over sixty in Manchester, and ten or twelve in a single street of
Salford, Chapel Street--and pawn whatever they possess. Furniture,
Sunday clothes where such exist, kitchen utensils in masses are fetched
from the pawnbrokers on Saturday night only to wander back, almost
without fail, before the next Wednesday, until at last some accident
makes the final redemption impossible, and one article after another
falls into the clutches of the usurer, or until he refuses to give a
single farthing more upon the battered, used-up pledge. When one has
seen the extent of intemperance among the workers in England, one readily
believes Lord Ashley's statement that this class annually expends
something like twenty-five million pounds sterling upon intoxicating
liquor: and the deterioration in external conditions, the frightful
shattering of mental and physical health, the ruin of all domestic
relations which follow may readily be imagined. True, the temperance
societies have done much, but what are a few thousand teetotallers among
the millions of workers? When Father Matthew, the Irish apostle of
temperance, passes through the English cities, from thirty to sixty
thousand workers take the pledge; but most of them break it again within
a month. If one counts up the immense numbers who have taken the pledge
in the last three or four years in Manchester, the total is greater than
the whole population of the town--and still it is by no means evident
that intemperance is diminishing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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