In 1844, Friedrich Engels, the son of a German textile merchant who had lived in Manchester during the early 1840s, published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (originally in German), in which he presented a very pessimistic analysis of the “standard of living” of English laborers at the time. Because the book was initially written for a German audience, he often made comparisons with the – in his view – more favorable position of the German population. “But far more demoralizing than his poverty in its influence upon the English working-man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a proletarian of him. The smaller peasants in Germany are usually poor, and often suffer want, but they are less at the mercy of accident, they have at least something secure. The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being.”

To this stark assessment was added a wealth of information about the crime rate (which was rising rapidly), health care (death rates in the big industrial cities were much higher than elsewhere), the poor state of the education of the proletariat, and the harmful effects of child and female labor – all leading up to the conclusion that the workers in England were worse off than they had been in the past, or than their counterparts in Germany.