Left-Hand Man

By R. Z. Sheppard

ENGELS, MANCHESTER, AND THE WORKING CLASS

by STEVEN MARCUS 271 pages. Random House. $8.95.

The English factory town of Manchester might be called the cradle of the Industrial Revolution were it not that more than half the working-class children born there a century ago died before the age of five. Under Manchester's pall of smoke, pale families shuffled away their lives between cotton mill and hovel. Bad air, bad food, bad laws, monotony and danger were the workers' common lot. The din of machinery was a ceaseless taunt that whatever skill remained in their hands was irrelevant.

The city, then, was a must stop on the mid-19th century thinking man's tour. Charles Dickens, himself marked by his celebrated childhood stint in a blacking factory, put his observations of Manchester misery into Hard Times. Alexis de Tocqueville took a look and with a philosophical shrug scooped Norman O. Brown with what may be the first excremental view of modern capitalism. "From this foul drain," he said, "the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world."

By far the most important visitor Manchester ever had was the son of a German textile manufacturer named Friedrich Engels. He arrived in the city at the age of 22 to complete his business education at a plant partly owned by his father. Instead, he spent most of his time gathering a mountain of facts, figures, impressions and personal experiences for his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. It synthesized the studies of history, economics and political institutions and drew conclusions that helped lay the foundations of modern socialism.

The rest is familiar history. Engels used his capitalist lucre to support the firm of Marx & Engels, tireless designers of revolutions, tailors of socialist theory, collaborators on scholarly books and pamphlets, including a long-term bestseller called The Communist Manifesto. The sullen, tobacco-stained genius Karl Marx and the buoyant, optimistic and modest Engels combined to make one of the most influential partnerships of all time. Marx supplied the creative thought, and Engels produced the human evidence, provided the money, and cleaned up Marx's turgid prose for the world to read. Although he was hesitant to admit it, Engels wrote most of the second and third volumes of Das Kapital from Marx's notes.

Needless to say, Engels made a major contribution to one of history's most hair-raising political adventure stories. Cast of millions. Final scenes yet to be written. Were he an American phenomenon, Engels would undoubtedly already have co-starred with Marx in a socialist version of a musical like 7776. In stead, he remains largely in the hands of ideologues, well-intentioned academ ics like Steven Marcus, professor of Eng lish at Columbia and author of a study of Victorian sexuality, The Other Victorians. In the first half of his Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, Marcus does an excellent job describing the rise of industrialism in England. Yet the book is a kind of Jekyll and Hyde.

When it is good, it is very good. When it is bad, it is horrid.

One of Marcus' avowed aims is to apply the formal techniques of textual analysis to Engels' Condition of the Working Class, "to ascertain how far Literary criticism can help us understand history and society." The answer seems to be not very far at all. The half of his book that analyzes Engels' writing bogs down in the sort of overexplication of the obvious that has so often given literary criticism a bad name.

Even when he develops a good point -- the influence of Hegeli an philosophy in Engels' thoughts and methods, for example -- it is offered in unnecessarily academic jargon. The ironic effect is to transform the hard-eyed yet heart felt observations in Engels' book into anemic abstractions.

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