Book description
Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory
figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile
family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester
cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the
comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was
also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in
the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the
co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and
the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das
Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels's
era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled
his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy.
Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing
England - of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes -
it is a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological
struggle, and family betrayal.
