Friedrich Engels

Life and work

He began writing publicly in Bremen using the pseudonym "Friedrich Oswald" to hide his identity from his family.^[3] His first major work, Letters from Wuppertal (1839), offered a brutal critique of industrialisation's human costs in his home region.^[3] After compulsory military service in Berlin, he joined the Young Hegelian circle Die Freien and attended lectures by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.^[4][5][6] There, Engels began a twenty-year relationship with Mary Burns, who guided him through the city's slums and working-class districts.^[7]

His research culminated in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), a work of communist theory presenting the proletariat as the historical agent of its own liberation.^[3][8] Because his father worried about his literary and philosophical interests, Engels was taken out of the Gymnasium in September 1837, just before his seventeenth birthday, and was expected to enter the family firm, which ended his ambition to study law at university.^[3] After finishing his military service in October 1842, Engels returned briefly to Barmen; later that same year, his father sent him to Manchester to work as a clerk at Ermen & Engels's Victoria Mill, a move designed to distance him from radical politics.^[3][1] During a stop in Paris in August 1844 while traveling back to Germany, Engels met Marx for the second time at the Café de la Régence, and this encounter cemented their enduring friendship and partnership.^[3]

What the cited sources add

The same source notes his mother told him stories of Greek heroes.^[2] A 1976 account states Engels developed a particular admiration for the Irish, writing "Give me two hundred thousand Irish... and I will destroy the British monarchy."^[7]