On October 21, 2025, four British newspapers headlined the same story, claiming that a Cambridge study had shown that Frederick Engels was grossly mistaken on the class divisions in Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845. The Times ran the headline: “Why Engels Was Wrong to Say Manchester Typified ‘Cruelty of Capitalism.’” The Guardian (formerly the Manchester Guardian) announced no less critically: “Engels ‘Took Creative Liberties’ with the Description of Class Divides in Manchester.” The Manchester Evening Newsreferred to: “The Slums of Manchester Where Wealthy Doctors and Engineers Lived: The Data Was Described as ‘a Big Surprise’ by Researcher.” The Daily Mail blared: “The Inventor of Communism ‘Exaggerated’ Class Divides in Victorian Britain Before Condemning the ‘Cruelty’ of Capitalism, Study Finds.”
Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, written when he was 24 years old, has long been regarded by historians as the most systematic and thoroughgoing analysis of the deplorable conditions of the industrial working class in early Victorian England available from the times. Nevertheless, given the role that Engels’s book played in the development of historical materialism, there have been continual attempts in the reigning ideology to prove his analysis wrong, all of which have failed dismally. One such attempt, in 1958, was a systematic attack, including retranslation, of Engels’s book by University of Manchester historians W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, of which the esteemed historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote: “The two editors have clearly worked for years checking every reference of Engels, discovering every slip and error, not to mention some that are not there. Rarely has a book been subjected to such systematic and painstakingly hostile cross-examination. It can be said quite categorically that he comes out of it with flying colours; much better, in fact, than one might have expected” (Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958]; Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men [New York: Anchor, 1964], 134–35).
The newest attack on Engels’s book arises from an article published in The Historical Journal in October 2025, written by Emily Chung of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge. Chung’s analysis purports to prove that Engels had exaggerated the level of class segregation in early Victorian Manchester. Her criticism focuses on Engels’s use of a single word in a single sentence on one page of his book—a book over three hundred pages long aimed at every aspect of working-class conditions. There Engels had written that, “With the exception of [the central] commercial district, all Manchester proper, all Alford and Hulme, a great part of Pendleton and Chorlton, two-thirds of Ardwick, and single stretches of Cheetham Hill and Broughton are all unmixed working-people’s quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around the commercial district.” Extracting his three-word phrase, Chung indicates that for Engels, Manchester, outside of its central commercial district, was characterized by “unmixed working-class” populations. This would have applied, she says, especially to Ancoats, described by Engels as a working-class slum, which at the time of the 1851 census was the most densely populated area in all Britain. The average age of a laborer in Ancoats at the time Engels was writing was just 17. It was estimated that half the population living in Ancoats in 1851 consisted of poorly paid Irish immigrants. In the infamous “Little Ireland” area, 4,000 Irish lived in just 200 houses in some of the very worst slum conditions. On Parliament Street in 1832, there was only a single privy for 380 people. Ancoats was at the center of the typhus epidemics of 1824 and 1849–1851 and the cholera epidemics in the city in 1832, 1849, and 1854. Ancoats occupies a special place in Chung’s criticism of Engels. Her data is organized on the basis of separate registration subdistricts used in the census that did not exist in Engels’s day. Ancoats was not made into a registration subdistrict until the 1930s. Yet, it gives Chung a close match between Engels’s analysis of a working-class district and the census data (Emily Chung, “Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester,” The Historical Journal [2025]: 5, 9; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1975], vol. 4, 348; “The Ancoats District of Manchester c. 1790 to the Present Day,” Eduqas GCSE History Factsheet, wjec.co.uk).
Chung claims that, as part of the Cambridge project of digital mapping, using the 1851 census, she is able to determine the class position of individuals and families and combine that with other sources indicating where people lived, thus enabling her to map individuals from various classes to specific buildings with a success rate “above 75 percent” (though this average referred to the official censuses up to 1901, and not just 1851, where the match was likely to have been far lower). Individual residences, she points out, were not all “unmixed” in the working-class areas of Manchester, but rather some were “mixed,” with a small part of the population consisting of professionals such as doctors and teachers, military officers, news agents, clerical employees, and small shopkeepers, frequently living in the same buildings as workers. Chung’s analysis thus suggested that the conditions in the working-class districts of Manchester were considerably better than Engels and other commentators at the time had suggested (Chung, “Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Agriculture,” 8–10; Chung, “Granular Georeferencing in Industrial Manchester, 1851–1901,” Cambridge Working Paper in Economic and Social History, April 2025, 4).
In her research, Chung divides the population into six classes, with middle-class professionals and tradespeople in the top two rungs, referred to as the “wealthier employed classes” (the bourgeoisie, as Engels explained, lived in the suburbs outside the city and do not enter into Chung’s analysis). Chung defines class simply in terms of occupation. In doing so, she does not provide detailed information on how the various occupations are sorted by class. Indeed, there is no discussion of the full variety of occupations she considers. Instead, a few select occupations, primarily in the top two tiers, are referred to in order to make her case. Ironically, one of the main historical studies that Chung says influenced her occupational approach to class—T. H. C. Stevenson’s classic 1928 article in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society—actually claimed that it was impossible to determine class by occupation reliably before 1921 because census designations were often assigned by trade or type of manufacture rather than specific occupations, meaning that owners, managers, and workers, were not distinguished (Chung, “Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Agriculture,” 8–10; Chung, “Granular Georeferencing in Industrial Manchester, 1851–1901,” 4, 15–16; T. H. C. Stevenson, “The Vital Statistics of Wealth and Property,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 91, no. 2 [1928]: 211).
For these and other reasons, it is logical to be skeptical about Chung’s method, which claims that the use of digitalized techniques to map individuals by class and residences on a “granular” level are far superior to all on-the-ground investigations of the time—that of Engels and numerous other careful contemporary witnesses. But even assuming that these new techniques allow us to obtain more granular information in this area, what do they teach us? It turns out, according to Chung’s own analysis, that upwards of 7 percent of the residents of Ancoats were included in the two top rungs (the “wealthier employed classes”) of her six-class scheme, consisting of professionals, semiprofessionals, and those employed in trade, many of whom were in fact wage workers and dismally poor. Conversely, more than 92 percent of the population in Ancoats, and in some areas “95–100 percent,” were classified in her research as working class. Based on this, Chung oddly concludes that Engels had exercised “creative liberties” in seeing Ancoats as an “unmixed working-class” area (Chung, “Granular Georeferencing in Industrial Manchester, 1851–1901,” 18–19; Chung “Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester,” 5, 9).
Throughout her analysis, Chung’s main point is that petty bourgeois/lower middle-class individuals sometimes occupied the same buildings with workers, creating a “mixed” environment. Nevertheless, she is forced to acknowledge that in those cases where workers in the bottom four rungs of her occupational-class ladder resided in the same house as individuals in the wealthier employed classes, it was the former who occupied the uninhabitable cellars and the attics of the buildings (Chung, “Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester,” 11–12).
The truth is that, rather than demonstrating that Engels had exaggerated in referring to “unmixed working-class” sectors of Manchester, her actual findings strongly reinforce Engels’s overall account, which, as Hobsbawm had said, passes with “flying colours” here as well. Even according to Chung’s research, as noted, there were sections of Ancoats where the working class made up “95–100 percent” of the population (Chung, “Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester,” 9; Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry [London: Rockliff, 1958], 106–10).
There is to be found in the targeting of Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in Chung’s work, and even more in the eagerness of the British newspapers to exploit her conclusions, a kind of desperation aimed at disproving Engels’s analysis. All this shows that the class struggle over the history of capitalism is not simply confined to the past but is also part of the present as history.