ABSTRACT
By the 1840s, the Industrial Revolution had transformed conditions in many English cities, particularly in the Midlands and the north of England. In the selection The Great Towns reprinted here, Friedrich Engels employs a peripatetic method of observation and analysis. A town, London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. Manchester lies at the foot of southern slope of a range of hills. The town 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. The great towns are chiefly inhabited by working-people, since in best case there is one bourgeois for two workers, often for three, these workers have no property whatsoever of their own, and live wholly upon wages.
