Cambridge historian Emily Chung finds philosopher’s blistering depictions of segregation may have been exaggerated
Friedrich Engels stands accused of exaggerating, or perhaps taking “creative liberties”, with just how segregated Manchester was in the mid-19th century, a study has found.
The great socialist thinker, who co-authored with Karl Marx the Communist manifesto, was a Manchester resident, appalled and galvanised by the squalor and inequality he saw in the city.
His observations were published in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, a blistering, furious polemic of life in Manchester seen as the defining text of the British industrial experience.
In it he described shocking segregation. He wrote about swathes of “unmixed working-people’s quarters” stretching “like a girdle”. Beyond them were the middle bourgeoisie in their townhouses and beyond that “in remoter villas with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick” were the upper bourgeoise, also living it up on the “breezy heights of Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air”.
