Alan Ryan
A CAPITAL FELLOW
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
By Tristram Hunt (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 416pp £25)

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Poor Engels. He spent his best years 'playing second fiddle', as he himself described it, to his friend Karl Marx. He was for most of his adult life the only source of income for Marx and his family. There must have been many years when Engels spent less on himself and his mistress Mary Burns than he did on Marx's family. He sacrificed both his intellectual and political career to that of Marx. It is hard to imagine anything less congenial to Engels than working in the family firm of Ermen and Engels of Barmen and Manchester; yet he did it for one reason only - to allow Marx to devote himself to that cumbersome masterpiece Das Kapital. It took twenty years to write, and when Marx died, only the first - and most interesting - volume had been published. Engels duly edited and published the other two.

Yet Engels had published his own masterpiece when he was in his mid-twenties. The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a work that shows what historical materialism is; while Marx was still weaving philosophical spells, Engels had walked the streets of Manchester, read everything there was to read on the 'Condition of England Question', and turned it all into coruscating prose. The capacity of the industrial bourgeoisie for world-transforming innovation along with the wholesale dehumanisation of the workforce it employed was spelled out in the terms made familiar by The Communist Manifesto in 1848. But Engels put aside his talent for allying empirical observation with insurrectionary fury in order to supply Marx with the contemporary illustrations for Das Kapital. It has been a cliché for more than a century that whatever one thinks of Marx's economics, there is no denying the force of the innumerable descriptions of the sheer horror of working life in early Victorian England. Those were supplied to Marx by Engels, often at a moment's notice and almost invariably in response to a peremptory demand for help.

If all that was not enough, Engels has always been slighted by commentators who favour the philosophical Marx, or who think that a Marxism untouched by Engels's altogether rougher political instincts would have been the inspiration for a humanist socialism at the opposite pole to the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism. The Frock-Coated Communist is, in part, an attempt to do some justice to Engels and to bring him out from the shadow of the man he served so devotedly. And it does an excellent job of it. Even more, it is a real biography, warts and all, and one that situates Engels in the extraordinary variety of contexts in which he lived and moved, from Barmen Pietism, through Berlin Hegelianism, and the brothels of whichever city he found himself in, to the Manchester slums, the counting house of Ermen and Engels, the Cheshire Hunt, and his long retirement in Primrose Hill, where he became, for the twelve years between Marx's death and his own, the 'Grand Llama of the Regent's Park Road', as H M Hyndman acidly called him.

How did it happen that an insurrectionary socialist rode to hounds - with much-admired dash and daring? The story begins in the Rhineland, in Wuppertal. Engels's family was quite unlike Marx's: Marx's father was a lawyer from a line of rabbis, who read Voltaire and converted to Christianity only when the fall of Napoleon brought back the Prussian government and the exclusion of Jews from professional life. Engels's family was piously Protestant: it was perhaps less narrowly and rigidly Pietist than he sometimes gave out, but it was deeply God-fearing. Engels was bright, energetic and sexually uninhibited. His father made the classical error of pulling him out of school to go and work in the family business - cotton spinning and weaving. He loathed it. Happily, his father did not keep him under the family's eye in Barmen. Sent off to be a clerk in Bremen, Engels went to the bad as energetically as he did everything in life.

Within a very few years he had succumbed to and revolted against the political romanticism of Young Germany, fallen in love with Young Hegelianism - that branch of the followers of Hegel who saw their master as a critic of everything irrational in the world, including the Prussian state and Christianity - and decided that philosophy was simply religion wrapped up in obscurity. Characteristically, he became a temporary disciple of Hegel while he was serving as a volunteer artilleryman in Berlin; volunteers with adequate means were not required to live in barracks, and aside from some limited training could spend their time as they chose. He spent it boozing and philosophising. Hunt gives a wonderfully even-handed account of the young Engels. The reader never quite gets to the point of deciding that Engels's parents should have cut off his allowance and sent him to America, as they were on occasion tempted to do, but only the most hard-boiled reader would have no sympathy with them. They sent him in the end no further than Manchester, and we should be glad.

The latter half of the 1840s looks with hindsight to be a preparation for the great outbreak of revolutionary uprisings in 1848. In fact, the assorted communist groupuscules to which Marx and Engels belonged were more successful in alarming the authorities than in making any great difference to the course of history. But alarming the authorities meant a life of avoiding police spies, evading deportation, and, if necessary, heading for the next refuge. Even before 1848, that tended to mean England, the one country that happily took in the political exiles of Europe.

Romantics who think of 1848 as the great missed opportunity to bring liberalism to Germany and eastern Europe will be disheartened by Hunt's insistence that the revolutionary annus mirabilis was no more than a period in which assorted groups with assorted grievances managed, or almost managed, to keep their rulers on the run for a few months. Engels had a good revolution, however. He came under fire, proved an able but not a reckless commander, and had the sense to head for France when the Prussian army overwhelmed the Rhineland revolutionaries. Comparing the girls of Burgundy to 'the starched ironing boards of Prussia', he had a thoroughly good time and one entirely consistent with his declaration in Eleanor Marx's autograph book that his vision of heaven was Château Margaux 1848.

But he had no income and Marx was close to destitution. He bit the bullet and rejoined the family firm. Hunt is eloquent about the sacrifice, and not too uncritical about the less admirable aspects of Engels's behaviour. He was, whatever else, something of a sexual predator, although by way of an offset, he pretended for years that Marx's illegitimate son Freddy Demuth was his own. Engels emerged from Marx's intellectual shadow when Marx died in 1883, and he became the custodian of Marx's ideas and political strategy. Hunt rejects the suggestion that Engels coarsened Marx's ideas; there is a telling remark Engels made to Werner Sombart: 'Marx's whole way of thinking is not a doctrine but a method.' As the cotton manufacturer's son might have said, it offers you a thread through the labyrinth, not a road map. Nor were Engels's politics those of Lenin, let alone Stalin. He always held that top-down revolutions were doomed to turn into dictatorships. What Engels, like Marx, got wrong was, oddly enough, underestimating the productivity of capitalist industrialisation. The rich could afford to be taxed to avoid insurrection, and welfare-state liberal democracy has bought off the class war in ways they never imagined possible. But as Tristram Hunt reminds us, this is only a partial truth; if you want to see the world described in Engels's masterpiece as a contemporary reality, take a look at the working poor in newly industrialising societies.

Alan Ryan is Warden of New College, Oxford and the biographer of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey.