ABSTRACT
In 1845 Friedrich Engels published his Condition of the Working Class in England. The book aroused enormous interest that reached out far beyond its own time. Inasmuch as Engels did not limit himself to portraying the distressed situation of the English labourer on the strength of numerous individual or group examples, as many had done before him, but tried to interpret it in the light of prevailing circumstances and conditions, he arrived at a position from which he could attack the whole capitalist industrial system. This he did with lasting effect. Not in Marxist writing alone but to a great extent in the non-Marxist literature Engels’ thesis went unchallenged.
