Foreign Agitators in the New City?

One of the ideas that fascinate me most about such ideologically loaded texts is the question of the author's own political or social perspective. Gaskell's social perspective is obvious. Her repeated returns to the Bible for clarification of her character's motives or justification of their actions makes it clear that her observations and her fiction are both informed by by her religion. But where is Engels coming from? Engels is unique to the other authors we've read so far, because he comes with his a third ideology. Glaskell and Elliot, for example, discuss an old way of life and its replacement, that of- to use Mumford's term- the paleotechnic man. Engels's text, though certainly treating those subjects as well, is also haunted by the shadow of this other way of life, one that requires the repudiation of both the industrial monstrosity and the pastoral idyllic. For him, "the middle classes intend in reality nothing else but to enrich themselves by your labour while they can sell its produce, and to abandon you to starvation as soon as they cannot make a profit by this direct trade in human flesh" (10). Gaskell, Elliot, and Mumford each portray Engels's proletarian subjects as victims of a system, but Engels takes it one step further, personifying the entire world outside of the slums as this entity intent on human destruction. His language consistently positions the proletarian men and women as objects of some unified action against them. And who is the enemy? Well, England: "With the greatest pleasure I observed you to be free from that blasting curse, national prejudice and national pride, which after all means nothing but wholesale selfishness" (10). So is Engels then trying to restore the relative personal freedom and moral chastity of pastoral times? Is he trying to broker some sort of tenable peace between a time that is gone and the reality on the ground? Is the answer within you, young proletarian? Not really: "[medieval Englishmen] could rarely read and far more rarely write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired, never thought..." (17). This statement comes immediately after a description of an Eden-like medieval English town, with free time to garden and pious little children marrying if not before, then immediately after intercourse (17). But the parallel construction of this sentence orders pastoral religion and humility with ignorance, and Engels is not too shy to come out with it explicitly: "But intellectually they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind" (17). There's that shadow, "the mighty movement." This is the third ideology, ironically the brain-child of a fortunate son of Germany. Texts like these are very powerful hstorical examples of the real threats, the ones you don't see. People were suffering and desperate, and this made them vulnerable to more than their immediate physical hungers.