Engels, Friedrich (1820—95) German social scientist, philosopher and co-author with Marx, Karl of The Communist Manifesto (1848), one of the most influential texts of the nineteenth century. Engels’s work is greatly overshadowed by his more famous collaborator, but it is often said with some justification that it was Engels who created Marxism. Not only did he provide Marx with crucial financial assistance enabling him to carry out his work, he did a great deal to promote his work as well. Engels was born in Barmen in what is now Wuppertal, a northern Rhineland city in Germany. The eldest son of a textile manufacturer, he was compelled to join the family business at a young age, though his inclinations actually tended in the opposite direction towards radical philosophy and politics, a passion he kept alive by writing. In 1842, his father sent him to work in his company’s Manchester factory in an effort to distract him from his leanings. On the way to Manchester, as fate would have it, he stopped in Cologne to visit the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical periodical for which he had contributed several articles, and there he met Karl Marx. The two famously did not hit it off immediately, but the seeds of a powerful working friendship were nonetheless sown in this encounter. Manchester, then the global centre for textile manufacturing, and one of the most ghastly examples of how cruel laissez-faire capitalism can be, brought Engels face to face with the effects of the transformation in the mode of production brought about by the Industrial Revolution. His observations were brought together in Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845), translated as The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 (1887) as a cautionary tale to his countrymen about the dangers of industrialization. He showed that the workers and their families in Manchester suffered considerably higher rates of illness and premature death than their counterparts in less industrialized cities. Engels returned to the continent in 1844, stopping first in Paris to once again visit Marx. This time their meeting went well and they began a collaborative partnership that was to last for the rest of their lives. Engels helped Marx finish his attack on the so-called ‘Young Hegelians’, Dieheilige Familie (1845), translated as The Holy Family. The following year they were both forced to move to Brussels for political reasons. There they were contacted by the German Communist League and asked to prepare a programme statement outlining their goals. The result, which was published in February 1848, one of the most tumultuous years in European history, was Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, translated as The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1850). Engels would later say, rather modestly, that although both their names were on the book’s cover, the reality was that it was all Marx’s work. Both Marx and Engels returned to Germany in 1848 and together started and edited a new daily newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung (New Rhinelander Times) in Cologne. But the newspaper was soon suppressed for its anti-government stance. Engels took part in the revolution of 1848—49 as an aide-de-camp to August Willich, but the uprising was soon crushed and he was forced to flee. He escaped to Switzerland and from there he made his way back to England, where he remained for the rest of his life. Although he hated it, he took a position with his father’s firm in Manchester, using his income to support both himself and Marx. He retired from business in 1870 and moved to London, where Marx was living. From 1870 until his death, Engels occupied himself with editing Marx’s great, but unfinished work Das Kapital. He also found time to write a number of works himself, the best known of which are translated as: Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880); and The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Further Reading: T. Carver Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (1989). J. Green Engels: A Revolutionary Life (2008).