BOME

Details, Details, Details:

Engels as Literature

by Adina Lopatin

A. Early Edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England

Friedrich Engelsí The Condition of the Working Class in England is an undisguised work of social commentary that indulges in certain literary modes to appeal to a broader audience. It is natural that Engelsí work does not rely fully on characters and plot; Engels view of history is based on class conflict, not individual stories. His belief in dialectical materialism draws him to write in abstract, large-scale generalizations. However, Engels uses human examples and telling details in borrowing from the literary tradition to allow his audience to relate to the greater cause.

Engels begins by dedicating his writing to the working classes. He writes in the first person, talking to the reader in a colloquial tone.

I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggle against the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done so: I forsook the company and the dinner parties, the port wine and champagne of the middle class, and devoted my leisure hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with Plain Working Men; I am both glad and proud of having done so.

Regardless of whether Engels is writing simply to demonstrate his faith in the working man, to explain himself to his own class, or to justify his work in his own eyes, his use of details allies him with his reader. Engels is much more effective when he mentions "dinner parties, port wine, and champagne," than when he refers to "the middle class." The reader can taste champagne, and immediately grasps Engels' point. The use of telling details relies on the connotation, the readerís association with an image, rather than the denotation, the strict, literal meaning. When the reader can interpret information placed before him, he assimilates automatically. When he is spoon-fed the information, he easily overlooks it.

At the beginning of the section entitles The Great Towns, Engels addresses the feelings of the individual in the great city. While the exposition of the vast indifference of modern London undeniably proves a point in Engels argument about modern social conditions, it is unique in that technical social commentators do not often address

feelings. Engels writes:

B. Women at work, c. 1880

After roaming the streets of the capital a day or twoone realizes for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city. The hundreds of thousands of classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, with the same interest in being happy? And they still crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that eachkeep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

Engelsí use of human relations, on the most mundane level, as evidence of "social warfare" separates his work from that of other social commentaries. His focus on interaction between common people as important indication of larger social trends is a literary inclination, which furthers his purpose in widening the accessibility of the work.

Engels emphasizes the relative clarity of his work as opposed to more technical social inquiries written by the self-serving bourgeoisie. He refers to other social inquiries as "voluminous reportsÖdamned to everlasting slumber among heaps of waste paper on the shelves of the Home Office." Engels complains that the avaricious bourgeoisie have not "even done as much as to compile from those rotting Blue Books a single readable book from which everyone might easily get some information on the condition of the great majority of ëfree-born Britonsí?" No, he complains, "they have left it to the foreigner to inform the civilized world of the degrading situation you have to live in." Engels sees his work as a lucid, intelligible exposition of poverty, as contrasted to others, whose unrestricted reliance on "hard facts" obscures their meaning.

Engelsí vividly detailed descriptions of conditions in working class neighborhoods are more reminiscent of literature than of the stereotypically fact-filled social studies. Though he occasionally lapses into pages that sound very much like Adam Smith, Engels remains remarkably faithful to a concrete, explicitly detailed writing style. Instead of simply stating

that the working classes live in poor conditions, Engels writes:

C. The Rookery, St. Giles, London

The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal, and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon garbage heaps and in the puddlesÖ. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

Engels paints pictures with words so that his audience can see the degradation of the

English working class. Instead of mentioning people standing in the street, Engels refers to "a horde of ragged women and children swarm[ing] about." Instead of merely pronouncing the houses rundown, Engels tells the reader of the broken windows, oilskin, and rotten door-posts.

By indulging in literary devices, Engels made his social study more accessible to bourgeois society. Though he was clearly not a novelist, Engels borrowed many techniques from the literary tradition that enhanced an otherwise dry and scientific work. Engels hoped that his literary inclination made his readers feel empathy for the English working class, and that their empathy would lead them to support the socialism he advocated in the Communist Manifesto.

A. From: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/cond-wce/index.htm

B. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/core/pics/

C. Illustration to Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present, 1851, by Thomas Miller. From: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/victorian/dickens/

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