Source 17.2: Urban Living Conditions

If factory working conditions were deplorable in the early decades of the English Industrial Revolution, the urban living conditions for many of those workers were no less horrific. In a classic description of industrial Manchester in the early 1840s, a twenty-four-year-old Friedrich Engels, later a close collaborator with Karl Marx, provided a vivid portrait of urban working-class life in England’s premier industrial city. By the time his German-language account was translated into English in 1886, Engels acknowledged that “the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous.” He added, however, that broadly similar conditions were prevalent in later-industrializing countries such as France, Germany, and the United States.

Questions to consider as you examine the source:

Friedrich Engels

The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844

Manchester contains about four hundred thousand inhabitants. . . . The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people's quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working people's quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle-class. . . .

Here [in Old Town Manchester] one is in an almost undisguised working-men's quarter, for even the shops and beer houses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness. But all this is nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the same time. Of the irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey an idea. Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found. . . .

In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. . . . Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge, known as Allen's Court, was in such a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. . . . At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk [River], a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse. . . .

In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench. . . . Above the bridge are tanneries, bone mills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse [where the desperately poor found shelter and employment], . . . which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people's quarter below.

Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates into 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. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found two beds — and such bedsteads and beds! — which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room. In several others I found absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned against it. Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet. This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river. . . .

In almost every court one or even several such pens [of pigs] may be found, into which the inhabitants of the court throw all refuse and offal, whence the swine grow fat; and the atmosphere, confined on all four sides, is utterly corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable substances. . . .

Such is the Old Town of Manchester. . . . Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.

Source: Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), 45, 48–53.