9) Why Poverty Exists: With Help From Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Every book written about the Jack the Ripper Murders will refer to just how bad conditions were in the area where the murders took place.
It is an intrinsic part of the story, and, to some extent, it will be offered as part of the explanation as to why the murders happened.
Poverty was not invented in the 19th Century, but it was certainly discussed more extensively in that century.
Middle-class authors like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote novels partly to focus the attention of the rest of the middle class on poverty in the hope that it might be consigned to history.
The man who became Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister wrote a novel that focused a politician's attention on the subject. The novel was Sybil: Or the Two Nations, published in 1845.
Benjamin Disraeli made such a powerful political statement that it still resonates within Britain’s parliamentary Conservative Party. One group within the Tory benches calls itself ‘One Nation Conservatives’.
In the same year, a nonfiction book that looked at the same issues was published. The writer came from the other end of the political spectrum.
The book was The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 by Friedrich Engels.
It was published in Engels's native language, German. The English translation arrived in 1887, one year before the Whitechapel Murders of 1888.
Engels describes a society that was at war with itself. The descriptions occasionally make it seem remarkable that brutal murder wasn’t taking place continually in all parts of the kingdom.
He writes:
“Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society.”
“This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place.”
Obviously Engels is not describing a world in which compassion and consideration will feature strongly.
“As voluntary, productive activity is the highest enjoyment known to us, so is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading punishment.”
“Nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do one thing every day from morning until night against one’s will. And the more a man the worker feels himself, the more hateful must his work be to him, because he feels the constraint, the aimlessness of it for himself.”
Whatever philosophy you espouse, it is hard to argue that such alienation as Engels describes can be conducive to good mental health.
“In this country, social war is under full headway; everyone stands for himself and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes depends upon a cynical calculation of what is most advantageous for himself.”
‘ It no longer occurs to anyone to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a law court. In short, everyone sees in his neighbour an enemy to be got out of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage.”
Would it be surprising in this society to see boys growing up callous rather than compassionate?
If in doubt read what Engels writes about the lot of mothers struggling to survive in this war.
“Women often return to the mill three or four days after confinement, leaving the baby, of course; in the dinner-hour they must hurry home to feed the child and eat something, and what sort of suckling that can be is also evident.”
Engels includes the testimony of several workwomen:
"M. H., twenty years old, has two children, the youngest a baby that is tended by the other, a little older. The mother goes to the mill shortly after five o’clock in the morning, and comes home at eight at night; all day the milk pours from her breasts, so that her clothing drips with it.”
“H. W. has three children, goes away Monday morning at five o’clock, and comes back Saturday evening; has so much to do for the children then that she cannot get to bed before three o’clock in the morning; often wet through to the skin, and obliged to work in that state.”
She said:
“My breasts have given me the most frightful pain, and I have been dripping wet with milk.”
How can anyone deal with conditions such as this?
Well, in the same way, perhaps an impossible situation is borne today.
“The use of narcotics to keep the children still is fostered by this infamous system, and has reached a great extent in the factory districts. Dr. Johns, Registrar in Chief for Manchester, is of opinion that this custom is the chief source of the many deaths from convulsions.”
‘The employment of the wife dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most demoralising consequences for parents as well as children.”
“ A mother who has no time to trouble herself about her child, to perform the most ordinary loving services for it during its first year, who scarcely indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child, must inevitably grow indifferent to it, treat it unlovingly like a stranger.”
“The children who grow up under such conditions are utterly ruined for later family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family in the working-class.”
“ A similar dissolution of the family is brought about by the employment of the children. When they get on far enough to earn more than they cost their parents from week to week, they begin to pay the parents a fixed sum for board and lodging, and keep the rest for themselves.”
“This often happens from the fourteenth or fifteenth year. In a word, the children emancipate themselves, and regard the paternal dwelling as a lodging-house, which they often exchange for another, as suits them.”
In such a world I suggest that middle-aged women forced through abject poverty to sleep in doorways and stairwells would not be safe.
As Elizabeth Gaskell wrote in her novel Northl and South:
“Many in the crowd were mere boys: cruel and thoughtless - cruel because they were thoughtless; some were men, gaunt as wolves, and mad for prey.”
And Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes became that prey. As did even the 25-year-old Mary Jane Kelly.