From the beginning, the British Industrial Revolution had its critics. Some handicraft workers — notably the Luddites, who attacked factories in northern England in 1811 and later — smashed the new machines, which they believed were putting them out of work. Doctors and reformers wrote of problems in the factories and new towns, while Malthus and Ricardo concluded that workers would earn only enough to stay alive.

This pessimistic view was accepted and reinforced by Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the future revolutionary and colleague of Karl Marx (see Chapter 21). After studying conditions in northern England, this young son of a wealthy Prussian cotton manufacturer published in 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in England, a blistering indictment of the capitalist classes. The new poverty of industrial workers was worse than the old poverty of cottage workers and agricultural laborers, according to Engels. The culprit was industrial capitalism, with its relentless competition and constant technical change. Engels’s extremely influential charge of capitalist exploitation and increasing worker poverty was embellished by Marx and later socialists (see "The Birth of Marxist Socialism" in Chapter 21).

And if the new class interpretation was more of a deceptive simplification than a fundamental truth for some critics, it appealed to many because it seemed to explain what was happening. Therefore, conflicting classes existed, in part, because many individuals came to believe they existed and developed an appropriate sense of class feeling — what we now call class-consciousness.