At Home - Bill Bryson [226]
In practice, the workhouses could only hold so many people—no more than about a fifth of England’s paupers at any one time. The rest of the nation’s indigent survived on “outdoor relief”—small sums to help with rent and food. Collecting these sums was sometimes made almost impossibly difficult. C. S. Peel notes the case of an unemployed shepherd in Kent—“an honest and industrious man, out of work through no fault of his own”—who was required to make a round trip of twenty-six miles on foot each day to collect paltry relief of one shilling and sixpence for himself, his wife, and five children. The shepherd made the trudge daily for nine weeks before eventually collapsing from weakness and hunger. In London, a woman named Annie Kaplan, left to bring up six children after her husband died, was told that she could not support six children on the meager sum she was to receive and was instructed to nominate two children to send to an orphanage. Kaplan refused. “If four’ll starve, six’ll starve,” she declared. “If I have a piece of bread for four, I’ll have a piece of bread for six.… I’m not giving anybody away.” The authorities entreated her to reconsider, but she would not, so they gave her nothing at all. What became of her and her children is unknown.
One of the few figures who actively sympathized with the plight of the poor was also one of the most interestingly improbable. Friedrich Engels came to England at the age of just twenty-one in 1842 to help run his father’s textile factory in Manchester. The firm, Ermen & Engels, manufactured sewing thread. Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman—eventually he became a partner—he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London.
It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club—in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.
Engels’s patient support for Marx was little short of wondrous. In that milestone year of 1851, Marx accepted a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but with no intention of actually writing any articles. His English wasn’t good enough, for one thing. His idea was that Engels would write them for him and he would collect the fee, and that is precisely what happened. Even then, the income wasn’t enough to support his carelessly extravagant lifestyle, so he had Engels pilfer money for him from his father’s firm. Engels did so for years, at considerable risk to himself.
In between running a factory and supporting Marx, Engels took a genuine interest in the plight of the poor in Manchester. He wasn’t always terribly open-minded. As we saw in Chapter XVI, he didn’t think much of the Irish and was always prepared to believe that the poor were responsible for their own sad fate. Yet no one wrote with more feeling about life in Victorian slums. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, he described people living in “measureless filth and stench” amid “masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth.” He related the case of one woman whose two little boys, freezing and on the brink of starvation, had been caught stealing food. When a policeman took the boys home, he found the mother with six other of her children “literally huddled in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup and