ABSTRACT
Friedrich Engels' account of Manchester is a central part of the intellectual and imaginative vision that is The Condition of the Working Class in England. In his Preface to the first German edition, Engels puts forward a number of claims, two of which are at this juncture pertinent. First, he asserts, this work could only have been written about England. It is only in England that working-class conditions may be found to exist in their "classical form" in their fullest realization. Moreover, it is only in England that adequate material has been collected for any kind of exhaustive representation of these conditions, as it is only in England that this material has been set on record and so to speak "confirmed" in large numbers of official inquiries and reports. Second, this work is the first in or out of England that attempts within the compass of a single volume to deal with all the various types of workingmen.
