Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  To reach this sublime state of co-operation a confrontation needed to be occasioned with the contemporary capitalist system which was the cause of so much of modern man's dehumanization. As a result, Hess urged the abolition of private property and, with it, an end to the alienating effects brought about by the money economy. Only then could the prevalent culture of egoism and competition be curtailed and, in its place, arise a new sociability based on freedom and human fellowship. In the great historical movement towards socialism, each member of what he called the European triarchy – France, England and Germany – had a specific role to play: Germany was to provide the philosophical foundations of communism; France was already well advanced with the political activism; and industrializing England was to gather the social kindling. ‘The antagonism between poverty and the aristocracy of money will reach a revolutionary level only in England, just as that opposition between spiritualism and materialism could reach its culmination in France and the antagonism between state and church could reach its apex only in Germany.’59

  Hess was amongst the first to introduce this ‘social question’ – the human costs of industrial capitalism – into the political dynamic. In an article entitled ‘On the Approaching Catastrophe in England’, Hess explained how the gathering storm was the product of powerful socio-economic climacterics.

  The objective causes that will provoke a catastrophe in England are not of a political character. Industry passing from the hands of the people into those of the capitalists, the trade that used to be carried out on a small scale by small traders more and more being controlled by large scale capitalists, adventurers and swindlers, land property concentrated by the laws of heredity in the hands of aristocratic usurers… all these conditions that exist everywhere, but principally in England and which constitute, if not the exclusive, at least the principal and essential causes of the catastrophe that threatens us, have a social and not a political character.60

  Increasingly, Hess's practical, socially oriented theorizing was drawing the Young Hegelians in an overtly communist direction. By the autumn of 1842, according to Engels, some of the Young Hegelian ‘party’ (within which he included himself), ‘contended for the insufficiency of political change and declared their opinion to be that a social revolution based upon common property, was the only state of mankind agreeing with their abstract principles’.61

  What was equally obvious was that England – with its vast manufactories, wealthy mill owners and hideously brutalized proletariat – was all set to stage the Approaching Catastrophe. ‘The English are the nation of praxis, more than any other nation. England is to our century what France has been to the previous one.’62 And it was to England that Friedrich Engels was now heading. Before departing, he called in on Moses Hess himself, with whom he had begun an initial correspondence. Hess recalled the visit in a letter to his friend the Jewish poet Berthold Auerbach. Engels arrived, he wrote, as a shy, naive, ‘ “first year” revolutionary’ (ein Anno I Revolutionär) of the French revolutionary, Montagnard type. By the time he had finished his tutorial with Hess and continued on his way to England, Engels the Young Hegelian had been converted into ‘an extremely eager communist’.63

  3

  Manchester in Black and White

  On 27 August 1842 an advertisement appeared on the front page of the Manchester Guardian. Beneath an announcement by William Ashworth, ‘beerseller of Heywood’, that he ‘will not be answerable for any debt or debts that my wife, Ann Ashworth, may contract after this day’, the firm of Ermen & Engels bought space to express ‘their deep sense of obligation not only to the authorities, police, and special constables, but also to their kind neighbours, for the very efficient and preventive measures adopted, and ready assistance given, to afford protection to their works, and the people in their employ, during the late disturbances’. What was more, ‘E. & E. beg to add, that these feelings are fully shared in by their people, to whom it is only due further to state, that they have without exception exhibited the best disposition and conduct during the recent general turn out.’ In short, Engels's father and business partner wished to thank the British state for crushing the most invigorating display of working-class dissent since the days of Peterloo.1

  The months before the 1842 ‘Plug Plot’ riots were ones of political disenchantment and accelerating poverty across Manchester. ‘Any man who passes through the district observing the condition of the people, will at once perceive the deep and ravaging distress that prevails, laying industry prostrate, desolating families, and spreading abroad discontent and misery where recently happiness and content were enjoyed,’ reported the Manchester Times.2 But such accounts of despair in Lancashire's cotton slums had little impact on the landowners, industrialists and merchants sitting in session at Westminster. Three months earlier MPs had summarily rejected a million-strong National Petition from the working-class Chartist movement and, with it, their demand for universal male franchise. And now they showed an equal disdain in the human cost of the ‘hungry 40s’.

  In fact, Manchester's millocrats had exploited working-class disarray in the aftermath of the petition's rejection to drive through a series of 50 per cent wage cuts, starting in Stalybridge. In response, the mill workers headed out to the Lancashire moors for mass rallies, renewed demands for the People's Charter and the rousing cry of ‘a fair day's wage for a fair day's work’. Strikes followed in the mills and coalpits of the surrounding villages of Ashton and Hyde (with workers giving the riots their moniker by pulling the boiler plugs from factory steam engines), disturbances flared in Bolton, and by the morning of Wednesday 10 August 1842 some 10,000 men and women were ominously circling the vast mills of Manchester's Ancoats district. Despondent, armed and increasingly violent, the workers looted shops, torched factories and attacked the police.

  Much to the admiration of the Ermen & Engels directors, the response of the authorities was swift and savage. The Riot Act was read, the army mobilized and special constables sworn in from across the middle classes, including members of the German merchant community who marched ‘through the city with their cigars in their mouths and thick truncheons in their hands’.3 The rioters were rounded up and, by late August, with 2,000 troops drafted in by train, Manchester resembled an occupied city.4 ‘In the streets there were unmistakable signs of alarm on the part of the authorities,’ recalled the Chartist Thomas Cooper. ‘Troops of cavalry were going up and down the principal thoroughfares, accompanied by pieces of artillery, drawn by horses.’5 In the face of such military bravado, and the early signs of an economic upturn, the working-class mood quietened.

  But the Plug Plot riots were merely the surface fury of a much deeper social malaise. Like few other nineteenth-century cities, industrial Manchester was experiencing openly aggressive class warfare between a prospering bourgeoisie and an impoverished proletariat. ‘The modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester… the effects of modern manufacture upon the working class must necessarily develop here most freely and perfectly,’ noted Engels. The result was that ‘the enemies are dividing gradually into two great camps – the bourgeois on the one hand, the workers on the other’.6 And no one thought they had seen the last of the struggle.

  Manchester, this city of social division, would over the succeeding century come to be inviolably associated with Engels: it would inspire him to write one of the greatest works on the British industrial experience, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), as well as provide his home and workplace for some two decades. It was also here in the mid-1840s that Engels would make a series of intellectual and ideological advances instrumental to the development of Marxism. Lancashire delivered to Engels the essential data to flesh out his pre-existing philosophy. If Berlin had been a city of the mind – with its lecture halls and beer-room debates – then Manchester was about matter. Along Deansgate and Great Ducie Street, in the Salford rookeries and Oxford Road enclaves, Engels harvested the ‘facts, facts, facts’ of indu
strial England to devastating effect. Communism took a step forward as he married his German philosophical inheritance to the class fissures and ‘red in tooth and claw’ capitalism he saw at work on the streets of London, Leeds and Manchester. Hess's theorizing became flesh as Engels realized that communism offered the only credible settlement for such a grievous social state. And while the French might have realized this truth ‘politically’ and the Germans ‘philosophically’, Engels believed the English were accepting this conclusion ‘practically, by the rapid increase of misery, demoralization, and pauperism in their own country’.7 This was the breakthrough of his Manchester days.

  In Manchester it had been tangibly brought to my notice that the economic facts which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in historiography are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force. I learned that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes in society. And I realized that in a highly industrialized country like England the clash of social classes lay at the very root of the rivalry between parties and were of fundamental significance in tracing the course of modern political history.8

  Yet such political advances did nothing to alleviate the awkward tensions of Engels's own status: residing in Manchester on the pay of his father, he was there as a bourgeois, a mill owner apprentice, to learn the business and extract value from the proletariat at a time when his politics were taking him in a very different direction. The young Engels, it would be fair to say, did not wholly share the sentiments of his Ermen & Engels colleagues when it came to crushing working-class resistance.

  So much of what we think we know of Victorian Manchester is itself the product of Engels and his lacerating prose. Written when he was just twenty-four, The Condition of the Working Class would in the twentieth century come to serve as a literary shorthand for the horror, exploitation and class conflict of urbanizing Britain. However, Engels's work forms part of a much broader literature – some known, some unknown to Engels himself – on the industrial city and Manchester especially. ‘As you enter Manchester from Rusholme, the town at the lower end of Oxford-road has the appearance of one dense volume of smoke, more forbidding than the entrance to Dante's inferno,’ was a typical response to the phenomenon of Manchester by the co-operative pioneer George Jacob Holyoake. ‘It struck me that were it not for previous knowledge, no man would have the courage to enter it.’9

  To the Victorian mindset, ‘Cottonopolis’ stood for all the horrors of modernity: it was the ‘shock-city’ of the Industrial Revolution, an awful metonym for the terrifying transformations of the age of steam. Between 1800 and 1841 its population (including Salford) grew from 95,000 to over 310,000 on the back of a booming textile industry which flourished – like Barmen and Elberfeld – thanks to its technology clusters, reserves of labour power and helpfully damp climate. The entrepreneur and inventor Richard A who had pioneered cotton production at his Cromford mills along the Derwent Valley – was the first to use steam power for the purposes of cotton-spinning in Manchester in the late 1780s. By 1816 his Shudehill mill had been joined by a further eighty-five steam-powered factories employing almost 12,000 men, women and children as Lancashire and Cheshire expanded to account for some 90 per cent of Britain's cotton production. By 1830 there were in excess of 550 cotton mills in Lancashire with well over 100,000 workers. However, unlike the surrounding towns of Oldham, Ashton and Stalybridge, Manchester was more than just a cotton capital. It was a marketplace, a

  1. die Börse.

  2. die alte Kirche.

  3. das Arbeistshaus.

  4. der Armenkrchhof wischen Briden der Liver pooler & Leedser E. B. Hof.

  5. St. Michael's Kirche.

  6. Scotland Bridge überd Irk. Die Strasse von 2 nach 6 heisst Long Millgate.

  7. Ducie Bridge übered. Irk.

  8. Little Ireland.

  Map of Manchester from the 1845 German edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England.

  distribution hub and a centre of finance, with even more investment and design value channelled into the warehouses of Portland and Princess Streets than its notorious factories and mills. It was at the centre of a mutually supportive web of north-west towns dependent as much upon its mercantile base, construction industry and retail sector as its cotton mills. The city's wealthiest citizens were as likely to be bankers, brewers or merchants as the mill owners of Victorian lore.10

  Nonetheless, the Cottonopolis image, with its smog-cloaked factories and stark contrasts of misery and Midas-like riches, made the city a honey-pot for those wishing to decipher the meaning of industrialization. So, after he had studied democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville in 1833 turned to ‘this new Hades’. Approaching the city, de Tocqueville spotted ‘thirty or forty factories rise on the top of hills’ spewing out their foul waste. In fact, he heard Manchester before he entered it as no visitor could escape from the ‘crunching wheels of machinery’, ‘the noise of the furnaces’, ‘the shriek of steam from boilers’, or the incessant ‘regular beat of the looms’. Inside the sprawling, filthy city he found (as Engels had in Wuppertal), ‘fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by the factories they pass’. And yet, ‘from this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows.’11

  The French voyeur was not alone. Partly through commercial connections as well as official requests for industrial intelligence, German visitors – such as the historian Frederick von Raumer, the author Johanna Schopenhauer, the Prussian bureaucrat John Georg May, even Otto von Bismarck – were thick on the ground in Hulme, Chorlton and Ardwick. May was mesmerized by the ‘hundreds of factories in Manchester which tower up to five and six storeys in height. The huge chimneys at the side of these buildings belch forth black coal vapours and this tells us that powerful steam engines are used here… The houses are blackened by it.’12 A few years later a French visitor, the liberal journalist Léon Faucher, was similarly appalled by ‘the fogs which exhale from this marshy district, and the clouds of smoke vomited forth from the numberless chimneys’. Equally disgusting was the state of the waterways. ‘The river which runs through Manchester is so filled with waste dye matter that it looks like a dye-vat. The whole scene is one of melancholy.’13

  Accompanying the industrial pollutants were the infernal working conditions in which the helots of this city slaved. Manchester was renowned for its work ethic. ‘Hast thou heard, with sound ears,’ asked the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle, ‘the awakening of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at half-past five by the clock; the rushing-off of its thousand mills, like the boom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand times ten-thousand spools and spindles all set humming there – it is perhaps if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagra, or more so.’14 The mill owners, as we shall see, were especially keen on effective time management. When the future Poet Laureate Robert Southey visited one Manchester factory he was proudly informed by the owner, ‘There is no idleness among us.’ The child workers came in at 5 a.m., had half an hour for breakfast, half an hour for dinner and left again at 6 p.m. – at which point they were replaced by the next shift of children. ‘The wheel never stands still.’15 The result, according to the German travel writer Johann George Kohl, was a new race of people. ‘In long rows on every side, and in every direction hurried forward thousands of men, women and children. They spoke not a word, but huddling up their frozen hands in their cotton clothes, they hastened on, clap, clap, along the pavement, to their dreary and monotonous occupation.’16 The French historian Hippolyte Taine thought Manchester resembled nothing more than ‘a great jerry-built barracks, a “work-house” for 400,000 people, a hard-labour penal establishment’. The penning together of thousands of workmen, carrying out mindless, regimented tasks, ‘hands active, feet motionless, all day and every day’ was simply improper. ‘Could there be any kind of life more outraged, more opposed to man's natural instincts?’17

&nbs
p; Alongside the favela tourism of the day, there was a highly developed canon of indigenous urban criticism which Engels devoured. One of the most eloquent testimonials was from the physician to the Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary, Dr James Phillips Kay. His 1832 polemic, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, was a part-Christian, part-scientific critique of the misery he confronted on his cholera rounds in ‘the close alleys, the crowded courts, the overpopulated habitations of wretchedness, where pauperism and disease congregate round the source of social discontent and political disorder’.18 Like Engels, the son of a Nonconformist mill owner, Kay was morally affronted by Manchester's combination of unnecessary suffering in the face of such unprecedented prosperity – ‘a slumbering giant… in the midst of so much opulence’. Alongside such eyewitness accounts were the official publications of civil servant Edwin Chadwick, whose Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) gave a stark assessment of the effects of rapid industrialization on public health: ‘The annual slaughter in England and Wales from preventable causes of typhus which attacks persons in the vigour of life, appears to be double the amount of what was suffered by the Allied Armies in the battle of Waterloo.’19 Inevitably, Manchester came in for particularly strong censure from the city's assistant Poor Law commissioner, Dr Richard Baron Howard, who described how whole streets were ‘unpaved and without drains or main-sewers’ and were ‘so covered with refuse and excrementitious matter as to be almost impassable from depth of mud, and intolerable from stench’. ‘In many of these places are to be seen privies in the most disgusting state of filth, open cesspools, obstructed drains, ditches full of stagnant water, dunghills, pigsties etc., from which the most abominable odours are emitted.’20