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
{38} "Arts and Artisan at Home and Abroad," by J. C. Symonds, Edinburgh,
1839. The author, as it seems, himself a Scotchman, is a Liberal, and
consequently fanatically opposed to every independent movement of working-
men. The passages here cited are to be found p. 116 _et seq_.
{40a} It must be borne in mind that these cellars are not mere storing-
rooms for rubbish, but dwellings of human beings.
{40b} Compare Report of the Town Council in the Statistical Journal,
vol. 2, p. 404.
{49} "The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working-Classes Employed
in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester." By James Ph. Kay, M.D. 2nd
Ed. 1832.
Dr. Kay confuses the working-class in general with the factory workers,
otherwise an excellent pamphlet.
{55} And yet an English Liberal wiseacre asserts, in the Report of the
Children's Employment Commission, that these courts are the masterpiece
of municipal architecture, because, like a multitude of little parks,
they improve ventilation, the circulation of air! Certainly, if each
court had two or four broad open entrances facing each other, through
which the air could pour; but they never have two, rarely one, and
usually only a narrow covered passage.
{63} Nassau W. Senior. "Letters on the Factory Act to the Rt. Hon. the
President of the Board of Trade" (Chas. Poulett Thompson, Esq.), London,
1837, p. 24.
{64} Kay, loc. cit., p. 32.
{65} P. Gaskell. "The Manufacturing Population of England: its Moral,
Social and Physical Condition, and the Changes which have arisen from the
Use of Steam Machinery; with an Examination of Infant Labour." "Fiat
Justitia," 1833.--Depicting chiefly the state of the working-class in
Lancashire. The author is a Liberal, but wrote at a time when it was not
a feature of Liberalism to chant the happiness of the workers. He is
therefore unprejudiced, and can afford to have eyes for the evils of the
present state of things, and especially for the factory system. On the
other hand, he wrote before the Factories Enquiry Commission, and adopts
from untrustworthy sources many assertions afterwards refuted by the
Report of the Commission. This work, although on the whole a valuable
one, can therefore only be used with discretion, especially as the
author, like Kay, confuses the whole working-class with the mill hands.
The history of the development of the proletariat contained in the
introduction to the present work, is chiefly taken from this work of
Gaskell's.
{67} Thomas Carlyle. "Chartism," London, 1840, p. 28.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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