page_title: Friedrich Engels
section_title: Back in Britain
hierarchical_section_title: Friedrich Engels / Biography / Back in Britain
caption_attribution_description: Friedrich Engels' House in Primrose Hill – London Català: Casa d'Engels a Anglaterra
context_page_description: Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, historian, communist, political scientist, journalist, political activist and businessman. His father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford, England, and Barmen, Prussia.
  Engels developed what is now known as Marxist theory together with Karl Marx and in 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research in English cities. In 1848, Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Marx and also authored and co-authored many other works. Later, Engels supported Marx financially, allowing him to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx's death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. Additionally, Engels organised Marx's notes on the Theories of Surplus Value, which were later published as the "fourth volume" of Das Kapital. In 1884, he published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State on the basis of Marx's ethnographic research.
  Engels died in London on 5 August 1895, at the age of 74 of laryngeal cancer and following cremation his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head, near Eastbourne.
context_section_description: To help Marx with the new publishing effort in London, Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue, Engels sought ways to escape the continent and travel to London. On 5 October 1849, Engels arrived in the Italian port city of Genoa. There, Engels booked passage on the English schooner, Cornish Diamond under the command of a Captain Stevens. The voyage across the western Mediterranean, around the Iberian Peninsula by sailing schooner took about five weeks. Finally, on 10 November 1849 the Cornish Diamond sailed up the River Thames to London with Engels on board.
  Upon his return to Britain, Engels re-entered the Manchester company in which his father held shares in order to support Marx financially as he worked on Das Kapital.
  Unlike his first period in England (1843), Engels was now under police surveillance. He had "official" homes and "unofficial homes" all over Salford, Weaste and other inner-city Manchester districts where he lived with Mary Burns under false names to confuse the police. Little more is known, as Engels destroyed over 1,500 letters between himself and Marx after the latter's death so as to conceal the details of their secretive lifestyle.
  Despite his work at the mill, Engels found time to write a book on Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation and the 1525 revolutionary war of the peasants, entitled The Peasant War in Germany. Engels also wrote a number of newspaper articles including "The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution" which he finished in February 1850, and "On the Slogan of the Abolition of the State and the German 'Friends of Anarchy'" written in October 1850. In April 1851, he wrote the pamphlet "Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance against France".
  Marx and Engels denounced Louis Bonaparte when, on 2 December 1851, he carried out a coup against the French government and made himself president for life. In condemning this action, Engels wrote to Marx on 3 December 1851, characterising the coup as "comical" and referred to it as occurring on "the 18th Brumaire" – the date of Napoleon I's coup of 1799, according to the French Republican Calendar. Marx was later to incorporate this comically ironic characterisation of Louis Bonaparte's coup into his essay about the coup. Indeed, Marx even called the essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte again using Engels's suggested characterisation. Marx also borrowed Engels characterisation of Hegel's notion of the World Spirit that history occurred twice, "once as a tragedy and secondly as a farce" in the first paragraph of his new essay.
  Meanwhile, at the mill owned by his father in Manchester, Engels started working as an office clerk, the same position he held in his teens while in Germany where his father's company was based. However, Friedrich worked his way up to become a partner of the firm in 1864. Five years later, Engels retired from the business and could focus more on his studies. At this time, Marx was living in London but they were able to exchange ideas through daily correspondence. One of the ideas that Engels and Marx contemplated was the possibility and character of a potential revolution in the Russias. As early as April 1853, Engels and Marx anticipated an "aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia which would begin in "St. Petersburg with a resulting civil war in the interior."  The model for this type of aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia against the autocratic czarist government in favour of a constitutional government had been provided by the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Although an unsuccessful revolt against the czarist government in favour of a constitutional government, both Engels and Marx anticipated a bourgeois revolution in Russia would occur which would bring about a bourgeois stage in Russian development to precede a communist stage. By 1881, both Marx and Engels began to contemplate a course of development in Russia that would lead directly to the communist stage without the intervening bourgeois stage. This analysis was based on what Marx and Engels saw as the exc
caption: Engels's house in Primrose Hill, London
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