the classic account of living conditions during the Industrial Revolution

The first authorised UK edition of Engels' major work in the distinctive publisher's red cloth.

Engels (1820-1895) lived in England for the majority of his adult life, first in Manchester where he worked in his father's textile mill, and afterwards in London where he resided from 1870 until his death twenty-five years later.

His eyewitness account of the poor working conditions, child labour, and disease almost universally present in the manufacturing towns of the period became an instant classic when it was first published in Leipzig in 1845. 'In particular his description of the spatial configuration of Manchester, constructed in such a way that its affluent burghers need never confront the squalor and misery upon which their wealth was based, has been seen as a decisive symbol for the invisibility of the conditions in which wealth under capitalism was produced' (ODNB).

The Condition of the Working-Class was not translated into English until 1885 when the American social reformer Florence Kelley brought-out an edition authorised by Engels that was published in New York in 1887.

To this edition, the first authorised to be published in the United Kingdom, Engels added a new preface with the qualification that the 'production bears the stamp of his youth', and that the 'state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned' (Preface).

First authorized UK edition; 8vo (19 x 13 cm); printer's device to title, 4pp publisher's ads to rear, occasional pencil annotations, moderate spotting; publisher's red cloth, upper cover stamped in black, spine lettered in gilt, spine faded, corners rubbed with loss, lower cover a little faded, slightly soiled; xix, [1], 298, [2], 4[ads]pp.