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
will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the
Irish price; at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is,
superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior,
yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to
an equality with that."
If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish
national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who
migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which
they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The
worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them
little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes
they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only;
whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does
such a race want with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large
towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished
for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely
count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the
first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and
the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses. I have
occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly
populated parts of Manchester. The majority of the families who live in
cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have,
as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and
are now making the English workers acquainted with it. Filth and
drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness,
which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered,
and which is the Irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely
dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The
Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he
was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps
which disfigure the working-people's quarters and poison the air. He
builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is
prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with
himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is
wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his
horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to
kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it,
ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand
times repeated in all the great towns of England. The filth and
comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to
describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a
heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for
his nightly couch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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