Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist, 2010 ✓

Gutzkow’s notoriety came from his 1835 novel, Wally the Skeptic, which combined a racy narrative of sexual liberation with religious blasphemy and cultural emancipation. The lengthy ramblings of his ‘new woman’ heroine, Wally — with her liberal sentiments on marriage, domesticity and the meaning of the Bible — managed to encompass just about every known anathema to Biedermeier society. […]

Engels identified enthusiastically with Young Germany’s rejection of romanticized medievalism.

Whatever the social niceties, Engels and Mary were in each other’s arms over 1843—4. And while there was, as later letters testify, deep affection between them there was also, for Engels, a very helpful entrée into the dark continent of industrial Manchester. Taking him by the hand, Mary Burns acted as his underworld Persephone, profoundly enriching Engels’s appreciation of capitalist society. ‘She introduced him to the life of the immigrant Irish community in Manchester,’ according to Roy Whitfield, ‘she escorted him on excursions through districts which would otherwise have been unsafe for any stranger to enter; she was a source of information about factory and domestic conditions endured by working people.’ Mary helped to provide Engels with the material reality for his communist theory.

Friedrich Engels’s two worlds — of the mill owner and Mary Burns — profoundly influenced his journey from philosophy to political economy and, in turn, had a marked effect on the emergent shape of Marxism. Uniquely, Engels was able to fuse his real experience of industrial capitalism and working-class Chartist politics with the Young Hegelian tradition. ‘German Socialism and Communism have grown, more than any other, from theoretical premises,’ he noted censoriously. ‘We German theoreticians still knew much too little of the real world to be driven directly by the real conditions to reforms of this “bad reality”. In a seminal 1843 article for the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher (Marx’s latest newspaper), ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, he showed the fruits of his Manchester experience by dropping the Berlin theorizing for a hard—headed empirical analysis of the economic contradictions and social crises coming Europe’s way.