ABSTRACT
In the 19th century, Manchester competed with Glasgow for the title of the second city of the empire: a crucible of the Industrial Revolution, where fortunes were made on the sweated labor of the city’s textile workers. Friedrich Engels lived in Manchester for twenty months in the 1840s, an experience which encouraged him to write his groundbreaking book about the appalling living conditions of the local working classes, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), when he was only 24. Engels’ prose painted a dark portrait of the effects of the industrial revolution on the people of Manchester and neighboring Salford. He wrote, “We must admit that 350,000 working people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, lthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and lthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the prot secured by the contractor”.1
