Bad Ideas? by Robert Winston

Author:Robert Winston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409094401
Publisher: Transworld

INDUSTRY ON THE MOVE

Sent in 1842 to a branch of his father’s thriving textile business in Manchester, the Rhinelander Friedrich Engels was a keen observer of social life. Bored by business, contemptuous of the affluent bourgeoisie, he set about compiling a record of his impressions that would form the basis of a seminal work. The Condition of the Working Classes in England was to seal Engels’ reputation as a chronicler and thinker, and provide Karl Marx with material for his own assault on capitalism. While Marx’s Capital seems to me, for the most part, an extremely dull book, Engels’ prose has considerable descriptive power:

Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates this chaos of small, one-storied, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping-room all in one . . . Everywhere before the doors residue and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt here and there with the feet. This collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory . . . Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.

Later, Engels described the condition of child labourers in the glass industry: ‘many of the children are pale, have red eyes, often blind for weeks at a time, suffer from violent nausea, vomiting, coughs, colds and rheumatism. The glass-blowers usually die young of debility or chest infections.’

Engels was not alone in being moved by the appalling poverty of England’s industrial poor. In 1883 the writer Andrew Mearns compared the condition of urban slum-dwellers to the ‘middle passage of a slave ship’ and called for pity upon ‘these thousands of beings who belong, as much as you, to the race for whom Christ died’.

Writers like Engels and Mearns were not slow in pinpointing the cause of this human misery. In England, a shift in economic patterns had brought about polluted, overcrowded cities, filled with workers who were utterly dependent on factory-based labour for their own subsistence. It could not have been possible without the harnessing of fire.

Many writers have devoted time and thought to considering why the industrial revolution should have occurred in England first. In the first place, being an island meant that it had limited supplies of the timber being so greedily snapped up by landowners and industrialists in Marx’s Rhineland. This compelled the English to look elsewhere for sources of power. And criss-crossing our land underground were abundant, accessible seams of coal – a portable and super-efficient fuel. Also, while much of Europe was still hamstrung by ancient feudal institutions, which invested power in the hands of a few nobles, thwarting the ambitions of the middle classes, in Britain many of these privileges had been swept away in the Civil War, and there were fewer obstacles to the energy of those who lacked inherited wealth but had received sufficient education to go out to create their own.

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