Finding Mr Engels: Part 4
The final part of my series on Friedrich Engels in Manchester and how I think we should really tell the city's story
It’s a Saturday morning in July 2024 and I’m leading a group of Angel Meadow descendants on a tour of the district.
These are the same streets that Friedrich Engels walked 180 years ago. The same streets where my Irish ancestors lived.
With its residential towers of steel and glass, modern day Angel Meadow is a different place to the one visited by Engels.
His words in The Condition barely even echo here now.
Hell upon Earth.
Cattlesheds for human beings.
But some of the old buildings remain.
In the spitting rain, we pause under a large sycamore tree in the park and look silently out towards the old Charter Street Ragged School.
The windows of the empty school are dim with a century of dust.
A woman in the group breaks the silence.
“You know, my mum used to go to that school on Christmas Day when she was a girl and queue up for a present in the 1920s.
“Even when she was an old lady, she always remembered the doll that they gave her. It meant so much to her. She always talked about it.”
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When you read The Condition with a critical eye, you soon realise something is missing.
For all Engels’s horrible descriptions of this corner of Manchester, you never hear the people speak.
“Engels depicts one codified, unified proletariat separated off from its bourgeois enemy and pre-ordained to fulfil its historic destinity…” Tristram Hunt writes in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the book.
“As a consequence, we never hear the voice of the individualised working class speak in Engels’s account nor is there any senses of the multiple divisions within Manchester’s labouring masses — the street cleaners as opposed to cotton spinners, the washer-women as opposed to street vendors….”
The workers who lived here all appear alike in Engels’s world — oppressed by the system unable to look after themselves or keep their homes clean and waiting to be shown how to rise up in revolution.
But working class communities are obviously not like that.
For all its descriptive power, Engels’s view of Manchester takes away something of Mancunians’ pride, dignity and their humanity.
However hard the living conditions were, these places he visited were full of life.
People with hopes and dreams.
People who told jokes at the pub.
People who sang songs at work.
People who loved their families.
Looking at the 1851 census of the courtyards visited by Engels shows there was a master joiner named John Shields living in one of them. He would have been proud of his work.
In the street named Gibraltar, an Irishwoman named Hopkins had taken in two orphans who had nowhere else to go.
Allen’s Court, another courtyard visited by Engels, was described by a local doctor as being home to a group of “respectable silk weavers”.
These were people with the courage not just to endure these horrible circumstances but to stand up for themselves — some of them had been at Peterloo.
This is the fourth story in a series about Friedrich Engels and Manchester. You can read the previous stories below.
I discovered some of that strength and endurance when I visited that archaeology dig in Angel Meadow in 2012.
Down there beneath a car park off Dantzic Street, the archaeologists discovered the remains of the home of my three-times-great-grandfather William Kirby, an immigrant from County Mayo.
They invited me and my dad to have a look at what they had found.
Like time-travellers we climbed down into the cellar holes, stood on the flagstone floors and touched the impossibly thin brick walls that separated the houses.
They gave me a brick from William’s fireplace to take home.
I haven’t spoken about it much before but there is a sad story associated with that house.
William’s son, also named William, died there aged just two-weeks-old — his death brought on by a fever due to the conditions Engels had written about.
By some strange fate, the archaeology dig began on his birthday and lasted only two short weeks.
Even standing there in that hole, it was impossible to imagine the trauma the family went through that day, but they must have had incredible strength and courage just to endure.
While well-to-do people have lists of names and dates in their family Bibles, William’s Bible which has been passed down to me and my sons through the generations just says the word “dead” repeated over and over.
That word says more than Engels ever could about the living conditions in Victorian Manchester.
So I think we need to start shifting the story of Manchester away from Friedrich Engels.
He came here and wrote about the terrible conditions in what became an undeniably important book.
His words are still highly relevant today as cities around the world still struggle with issues he wrote about all those years ago.
But the real story here relevant to Manchester is about the men and women who made the city their home.
The real story is about who those people really were, about their great courage and about how they survived life in the world’s first industrial city.
That’s because they were the people who built Manchester for us so we can enjoy walking through the streets where Engels once walked on a sunny summer’s day like today.
Mr Engels Found?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on Friedrich Engels and Manchester.
I could have carried it on a few more weeks but think it would be best to move on to other things for the moment and maybe catch up with Engels again later.
What do you think about Engels in relation to the story of Manchester? Has your perspective on him changed?
Please do drop me a line in the comments below and let me know your thoughts.
If you want to hear me chatting away about Engels, you can catch up with this interview I did earlier this week on All FM.
P.S: I have a couple of spaces left on my tour of Angel Meadow today (2pm, Friday 27 June).
If you are free and want to book, you can purchase tickets here up until 12pm. It looks like it will be a dry afternoon under the sycamore tree.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks for writing the series. I am moving to Manchester soon and this has given me a new way to think about the city. I've some Engels, but I had not connected his writing to the fact I am going to live there. I think that the criticism that Engels was an overzealous lumper rather than a splitter is a keen one.
The categories to lump people into two groups certainly invites readers to see these groups as homogenous and as being defined by labor relations rather than other aspects of their lives. There surely were significant differences between different kinds of workers and there surely was a lot of joy, a lot of kindness, and a lot of community. As there was surely a lot of suffering. Likewise, the bourgeoise were not a homogenous group and I'd venture to suggest that there were likely different degrees of exploitation and different degrees of efforts to help their workers.
I certainly enjoyed the four posts, but agree that some greater variety would be nice -- Engels can always reappear here and there.
Thanks for the latest Engels installment . I do find the man fascinating but like you, I want to know more about the actual people that lived there. Their stories , that have been buried under the car park and may never be told, unlike Richard 111 in Leicester, are our link with a difficult past. The days of peeling back the layers are probably now over as more and more high rises are covering that wasteland that I remember.
Without your input, Dean , the story of your forebears living in that celler would never have been known . How lucky that the dig corresponded with you just being there able to observe and question. Just two weeks , it's amazing really but it changed the course of your life.
Engels was an observer ,I don't suppose he could actually really do anything for those poor unfortunates he came across on his walk to the dark side in Angel Meadow. His legacy was in writing about it but his agenda was ultimately the communist manifesto I suppose. The evidence in his book was to further that cause.
At least the 1851 census names these individuals and makes them human.
Has that car park now been built upon ?