Finding Mr Engels: Part 3
It's 1844 and a well-dressed man is walking through the streets of the world's first industrial city. The cotton looms are thumping like a heartbeat.
You have to picture the scene.
It’s 1844 and a well-dressed man is walking through the streets of Manchester.
His ears are tuned in to the music of the world’s first industrial city:
The flying shuttles thumping across the cotton looms like a heartbeat.
The click-clack of the clogs on the cobbles.
The man spins left off the street through a covered passageway and finds himself in a yard criss-crossed with washing lines.
As the smell hits his nostrils, he fears for a second he might have lost control of his bowels.
But then he looks down at his feet and finds the source of it on the slime-covered floor of the court.
Offal.
Rotten cabbage leaves.
Human waste spilling out from overflowing privies.
A bluebottle buzzing past his face forces him to collect his thoughts.
It’s only then that he finally sees the people who live here — watching him from their doors.
In his frockcoat and top hat, he knows he looks out of place.
He suddenly feels lost and alone.
That man is Friedrich Engels and he went into that courtyard off Long Millgate while researching living conditions in Victorian Manchester for his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
I know these same places too — or the ghosts of them — after studying the same corner of the city where my ancestors lived.
My own walks around there made me realise the best way to understand the book is not to get bogged down in the politics of it, but simply to follow Engels into the backstreets and try to understand what he saw.
I can do that because book acts as a route map. Like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, Engels gave us detailed directions of where he went so we can follow in his footsteps.
This is the third story in a series about Friedrich Engels and Manchester. You can read the two previous stories below. If you enjoy reading them, please consider supporting my writing with a paid subscription or you can also donate a book here.
One of his first stops after setting off from the direction of Manchester Cathedral is Ducie Bridge, which still looks down over the River Irk.
Engels says it is a “coal-black, foul-smelling stream” bubbling with sulphurous gases.
“The stench,” he writes, is “unendurable even on the bridge 40 or 50 feet above”.
When I walk down beside the river today, I notice that it still gives off a stink after heavy rain — the lingering scent of the Victorian city.
But it was in the coutyards behind Long Millgate that Engels went on to make his most vivid descriptions of the conditions in Manchester.
And this is where I catch up with him on the road leading into that courtyard with the slimy floor, although the original buildings and the overflowing privies are long gone.
“He who turns left here from the main street is lost,” Engels writes.
“He wanders from one court to another, turns countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys, until after a few minutes he has lost all clue.”
In one of the courts, Queen Anne, he finds a toilet 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.”
Somehow Engels manages to find a way through the mire and he ends up in an area called Gibraltar.
I can still step into the last of it, an old road still holding its setts, as sleek Metrolink trams now carry the workers on the railway bridges above.
This is the corner of Manchester that Engels writes was “Hell upon Earth”.
“Immediately under the railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass all the others by far,” he writes.
“Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small, one-storeyed, one roomed huts.
“This whole collection of cattlesheds for human beings was surrounded on all sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river.”
It was here, down by the stinking Irk, in one-roomed huts overshadowed by the railway arches, that Engels found what he was looking for — the most shocking living conditions in the first modern city.
What he wrote about it would change the world.
And if you go down there, standing in the half-darkness listening to the trams rattling above your head, you can almost imagine him walking by in his frockcoat and top hat.
Next time: What Engels didn’t say.
Why not check out The Meander — my new series exploring the backstreets of Manchester exclusively for paid subscribers…
Have a great weekend!
I don't want this series to end. I've located Queen Anne Court on my 1849 Godfrey map. I find these maps an invaluable resource, the geek in me finds this series of maps fascinating and I have quite a collection now.
Do you know the old photograph of Gibralter Dean? It may have been on the Manchester Archive image collection, not sure. It shows a row of broken down houses in an awful state. I suppose it's no wonder all these courts and alleys leading down to the Irk were swept away. Do you think or know if the clearance of them (19C probably) was a direct result of Engels findings/book ? Were the Manchester authorities suitably ashamed of these dwellings and how people were forced to live ? also that they were so close to the city centre and becoming a stain on civic pride.