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Ancoats and Friedrich Engels

Founded by Richard Arkwright in 1771, England’s first cotton mill was nestled within the Derbyshire Dales on the River Derwent. Yet, it was instead Manchester in the following decades that harboured Britain’s burgeoning industrial cotton industry, and the Industrial Revolution that accompanied it. 

Ancoats formed a central part of Manchester’s growing status as a cotton metropolis, or ‘Cottonopolis’ as many described it at the time, and was a regular topic of discussion amongst contemporary commentators and social reformers. Alongside inspiring fictional works focussed on the experiences of the new urban working class such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Ancoats likewise characterised the political thought underlying new, radical movements shaped by the Industrial Revolution. 

Friedrich Engels, better known as co-author of the Communist Manifesto alongside Karl Marx, was significantly influenced by his time spent in Ancoats and other working-class areas of Manchester, writing a whole book dedicated to analysing the new industrial proletariat and the impact of nascent industrial capitalism: The Condition of the English Working Class.

Engels describes much of Ancoats in despairing terms – unpaved roads, open sewers, and intentionally shoddy housing designed only to last thirty years as a cost-cutting measure. As for the Medlock, thanks to the rows of factories lining the stretch of the river flowing past Ancoats, it had become “coal-black, stagnant and foul”. Yet, unlike so many Liberal-leaning writers of the period, Engels principally pinned the blame for the decrepit condition of the working class and their environment not on the residents, but on the industrial bourgeoise responsible for the construction of housing, their profit motive overriding the proletarian’s need for dignity. 

While Engels simply observed conditions in Ancoats in The Condition of the English Working Class without casting judgment on what ought to be done to improve conditions, his attribution of responsibility to the bourgeoisie was further elaborated in his more explicitly political writings. These formulated the beginnings of a socialist ideology that would go on, in one shape or another, to change the course of world history, and the history and physical landscape of Ancoats. 

The Condition of the English Working Class can be accessed online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf