ABSTRACT
Edwin Chadwick, one of the principal authors of the Parliamentary Commission Report that led to the famous, or infamous, amending of the Poor Laws in 1834, later undertook researches into the causes of the influenza and typhus epidemics of 1837 and 1838. The prominence of the economic arguments in Moral and Physical Condition took on an unquestionable centrality in a work whose English title bears a striking similarity to Kay's pamphlet, and which overtly draws on that work only to turn its economic argument completely inside-out. Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1844) utilizes much of Kay's research as well as his rhetorical strategies, and in it Engels repeatedly acknowledges Kay's influence. Irish immorality epitomizes the degradation of the industrial order for Engels. Engels surpasses even Kay's rhetorical excess when he describes the course of the disease, warning that it threatens to drag the English very near to the boundary between human and animal.
