This forceful polemic explores the staggering human cost of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. Engels paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in the new industrial towns, and for miners and agricultural workers in a savage indictment of the greed of the bourgeoisie. His later preface, written for the first English edition of 1892 and included here, brought the story up to date in the light of forty years' further reflection.
Friedrich Engels (1820-95) was the son of a Manchester factory owner. He wrote several groundbreaking essays on contemporary social and political conditions in Britain, including The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), in which he criticised the working conditions and treatment of the urban poor. After Karl Marx' death, Engels completed and published the last two volumes of Das Kapital (1884, 1894) from his friend's surviving papers.
