Engels, Manchester and the Working Class
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Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (1974) is a book by Steven Marcus.
Marcus takes the inadequacy of previous critical approaches as the impetus for his project about the life of Friedrich Engels in Manchester. Pigenholed as a monument to socialism, an interpretation of industrial revolution, or a historical document of urban life, Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England has been widely misunderstood, Marcus argues, because the brutal demoralization and dehumanization that it documented begarred description, and therefore a literary approach that takes into account the inadequacies and displacements of language is crucial to understanding it. Engels accomplishment was not so much explaining the material forces that built Manchester into a landscape of industrial squalor, but in reckoning with a spectacle of such enormity that words themselves failed as a means of representation.
The first section pursues the question of why the bourgeois German son of a factory master would forsake his own class. Taking Eric Hobsbawm to task for ignoring psychoanalytic questions altogether, Marcus rejects the simplistic formula of an Oedipal turn on his father, but argues for a more subtle understanding of Engels as envisioning a proletarian fury transformed into consciousness, thereby synthesizing and resolving his admiration and resentment of his own father. Nonetheless, Marcus argues that Engels never could overcome his middle-class feelings of superiority over his romantic partner, Mary Burns, despite his enduring love for her. Marcus then turns to comparing Engels's analysis of Manchester to those of major literary observers, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edwin Chadwick, and French economist Léon Faucher. Marcus argues that Engels succeeds along with Dickens not because they get their data right or wrong, but because they echo the deepest unconscious contradictions of men.
The academic reaction to Marcus's work on Engels generally faulted his biographical Freudian approach to material and historical processes. Myrna Chase judged that Marcus's "psychological analysis of Engels must be judged more humorous than profound. Echoing Chase, John Lucas argues that Marcus's "psychoanalytic speculations" are entirely unhelpful and in some cases "plain silly," noting that whether Engels saw Thomas Carlyle as a father-figure is "not of the slightest importance." Lucas adds that Marcus's failure to take Elizabeth Gaskell's novels seriously prevents Marcus from seeing the limitations of Engels's perception of the working class. By using the worst examples of filth and poverty as archetypal, Marcus colludes with Engels in erasing the gradations of the working class and their efforts at cultural production. Alfred Jenkin wondered whether the frequent errors of fact about Manchester implied that Marcus had never set foot in the city. E. V. Walter faulted Marcus's wandering and elliptical style of analysis, characterizing his work as "excruciatingly mannered" and "inconclusive."
