ABSTRACT
Friedrich Engels was born in the Rhineland town of Barmen in 1820. He was the eldest son of a prosperous textile manufacturer, who was himself the son and grandson of mill-owners. Although at this time Germany as a whole had hardly been touched by the Industrial Revolution. Barmen had been the site of a developing textile industry since the sixteenth century and was in fact one of the first areas in Germany to undergo thorough industrialization. In Bremen, Friedrich Engels worked in the office of Consul Heinrich Leupold, a business-friend of his father and the head of a textile-exporting firm. He remained there until Easter 1841. Engels' experiences in Manchester may be divided into two conventional kinds: those that were expressed in physical activity and direct observation; and those that have primarily to do with reading and writing. Engels left Manchester at the end of August 1844 and traveled home to Barmen by way of Paris.
