You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine: Engels and Gaskell

The traditional view of the American Progressive movement (1900-20) is that it represented the victory of the will of the people over elitist business interests. But in the 1960s, while I was an undergraduate majoring in history, this view was challenged by the New Left historians. William Appleman Williams and others showed that many of the corporate titans who were thought to have opposed the movement were actually fanning the flames behind the scenes. Their motive? To shore up their profits by eliminating the fly-by-night competitors who undercut them in the market. They knew that having to pay higher wages and give shorter hours would force the smaller outfits out of business. Then, once the captains of Industry controlled the market, they could jack up their prices again. So picture my surprise upon reading that Engels had described the same dynamic at work in England. As our text shows, in an 1885 Commonweal article, which was reprinted in the preface of the 1892 British edition of his book, Engels writes that British labor reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century were the capitalists’ way of  “crush[ing] all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors” (314).

I was not as surprised to see that Engels and Gaskell have similar accounts of the horrid living conditions of Manchester’s working class. As the epicenter of the British industrial revolution, Manchester evidenced many of its worst horrors. Engels and Gaskell drew on their personal observations and probably read the same contemporary texts. The editor of our Mary Barton edition assumes that Gaskell read Peter Gaskell’s The Manufacturing Population of England, and it’s known that Engels read this book, a fact that’s verified by the similarity between his and Gaskell’s text. Keith Welsh notes that the living conditions Engels witnessed were so repulsive that he could not bring himself to place people in his descriptions (27). But Gaskell has no such inhibitions. The Davenports live next to a pigsty, in a dark cellar room with a fetid smell so bad it could knock a man down, and there little children roll around on a wet brick floor soaked in filthy moisture from the feces-laden street.

But Engels and Gaskell differ in their view of working class family life. Commensurate with Peter Gaskell’s study, Engels pictures it as dysfunctional. The husbands, in a desperate attempt to relieve the mind-numbing monotony of their jobs, turned to drunkenness and sexual licentiousness. Those unable to find employment are emasculated by their working wives and children who become the family breadwinners. With Gaskell, however, the family continues to be the cornerstone of working people’s lives, regardless of whether or not they are employed. Barton, Wilson, and Davenport never suffer any diminution in their devotion to their families or change in their patriarchal status.

It’s true that Engels and Gaskell agree that the workingmen of Manchester had strong communal bonds. But while this idea is consistent with Gaskell, it’s incongruous with Engel. It seems to me that the same moral decay that led to the breakdown of family life should have also fractured working class solidarity. But when Engels wrote the Commonweal article, he knew that history had judged him as overestimating the class consciousness of the workingmen, since they never rose up in a victorious clash with the capitalists. It’s possible that the role of the captains of industry in the reform movement may have been Engel’s way of saving face, because it implies that the only thing he miscalculated was the extent of the capitalists’ deviousness. Elizabeth Gaskell’s prognosis, on the other hand (How could someone write about such miserable conditions without dispensing some hope?) was influenced by her deep Christian values. Where Engels puts his faith in a Marxist moment, if you will—although in 1845 Das Kapital had yet to be written—Elizabeth Gaskell anticipates that the two sides will achieve a moment closer to the 1960ish Kumbaya variety.  

 (1) Welsh, Keith Edward. Edmund Burke, Friedrich Engels, and Ideas of Community in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Poetry. Dissertation, U.M.I.: Ann Arbor, 1988. Google Search.