The reality and the prospect of poverty haunted many in England during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Due to the broad sweep of the enclosure movement and the burgeoning of industry, once self-sufficient peasants and artisans increasingly sought employment in factories and already-crowded commercial centers. The migration from rural to urban settings served to swell the labor pool in the cities, and often the more fortunate factory workers found subsistence wages and 14-hour work days. The less fortunate found no means of support at all and often were sent to poorhouses where conditions were even more brutal. Whether we examine the region around Manchester, where factories dominated, or London, where sweatshops and the docks were the primary source of employment, cities were filthy, housing abysmal, and the mood threatening. Even members of Englandıs elite during this period recognized the squalor that infected many parts of the country. Future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli recognized that poverty threatened to disrupt, if not splinter, English society in the middle of the century. Disraeli wrote that England in the 1840ıs was "Really two nations. One rich, one poor." Parliamentary commissions and reports examined many facets of poverty, but there was no unanimity as to what if anything- should be done. Some believed that the poor had themselves to blame or that poverty was a natural, inevitable outcome of human existence. Virtually all observers viewed this social and economic turmoil with alarm. Such writers as Charles Dickens and Frederick Engels described conditions and anticipated dire consequences if circumstances went unchanged. However, just as they saw greater urgency in actually improving the conditions of Englandıs poor than did representatives in Parliament, Dickens and Engels took different stances on how the problems of poverty arose, and on how they could be solved. Dickens and Engels not only recognized the problem of poverty, but publicly, frequently and vociferously urged action to eliminate poverty. Dickens saw an impoverishment of the spirit throughout England at this time that may have emerged from the focus on making money. Engels saw a material decline in standards of living that threatened the physical existence of a growing class of English men and women.