Engels was born in 1820 in Barmen, in the Rhineland, the eldest son of a prosperous mill owner whose father and grandfather had also owned textile mills. This was unusual in Germany--Barmen was one of the first areas in Germany to undergo thorough industrialization. Thus Engels was never unfamiliar with industrial life. His parents were strict Calvinist Pietists and Engels rebelled against their religion and way of life. It is recorded that as a child he often gave his savings to the poor. He attended a gymnasium but not university (the reasons for this are debated), and worked for his father’s firms in Barmen from 1837-38, and then for three years worked in an office in Bremen. Engels and his father were deeply opposed, yet Friedrich spent his life working in the Engels and Ermen cotton mills, and although his parents were outraged by his views they never ceased their financial support.
Engels displayed an early interest in literature, writing stories and poems which frequently included some reference to commerce. His first published writings were a series of “Letters from the Wuppertal” which appeared in 1839 in the Telegraph fur Deutschland; these anticipate several features of The Condition of the Working Class (Marcus, 77). Yet the “Letters” were largely devoted to attacking the middle class rather than describing the conditions of laborers; by the Condition the proportions had shifted. In 1841 Engels served for a year in the Prussian army, enabling him to live in Berlin and meet the Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, where he listened to the lectures of Frederich Schelling, an anti-Hegelian philosopher, who also influenced Carlyle as well as Kierkegaard, Henry Burckhardt, and Bakunin. Engels wrote pamphlets attacking Schelling’s views and read Feuerbach’s Essences of Christianity, a socially liberal atheistic critique of Hegel, which along with Hegelian philosophy was to be a major influence on his ideas. During this period he was also influenced by Moses Hess, a member of the Left Hegelians who felt the study of French socialism and English economic theory was the next important requisite for political thought, and who prophesied that the social revolution would first occcur in England. (Engels did pursue the studies Hess suggested, and eventually he moved to England).
During this period Engels contributed articles to the Rheinische Zeitung (ed. Karl Marx) and Deutsche Jahrbucher. He first met Marx briefly in Cologne in 1842 en route to his father’s Manchester firm, where he lived for approximately two years working and collecting facts for The Condition of the Working Class. His Manchester Irish common-law partner Mary Burns was useful in aiding him in collecting material; he supported several members of her family and lived with her until her death in 1863. He returned to Barmen to write Condition, which was published in Germany (in a German- language version) in 1845. While in England he had actively joined Socialist activities and written numerous articles for several German and English periodicals, including that of Marx. In 1844 he again met Marx in Paris, and in 1845 he joined him there to begin what would be a life-long collaboration between Marx the post-Hegelian theorist and Engels the pragmatist, journalist, fact-gatherer and humanitarian. In 1845 he had written “Outline of a Critique of Political Economy,” an important article summarizing his reading in British economists and, of course, indicating their deficiciencies. Marx and he thus held very similar views before they began to collaborate.
Between 1845 and 1848 they wrote The Holy Family, first entitled A Critique of Critical Criticism, 1845, and The German Ideology (1845-46), and in 1848 they issued The Communist Manifesto. The first two of these were unpublished in their lifetimes but they continued undiscouraged, and seem never to have doubted the eventual efficacy of their labors. On behalf of the Brussels Correspondence Committee Engels visited Paris in 1846 and London in 1847, and during the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 and 1849 was active wherever an insurgence occurred, and was evicted from several European countries. He even took part in the abortive Baden rising of 1849. His constant travel during this period contrasts with the twenty quiet years he spent after this in Manchester with his father’s firm. The end of the period of revolutions was a great disappointment for Engels, and all his life he awaited a recurrence of revolt.
Engels began work in his family's firm in part to support Marx’s family. Engels had read Carlyle’s Chartism and Past and Present (1847), and wrote a review essay on Past and Present. He was favorably disposed toward Carlyle since the latter served as a bridge between German and English literature (331 Condition, 105 Marcus, 109 ff.)
1851-52 wrote for New York Tribune
1860 father died
1864 became partner in firm Ermen and Engels
1864 establishment of First International in London
1867 first volume Das Kapital published
1869 Engels retired, lived in London until his death in 1895
1878 Anti-Duhring
1882 death of Karl Marx
1884 Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, major
socialist-feminist text
1885 vol. II Das Kapital published
1887 edited English translation of Das Kapital, vol. I
1888 visited U. S. with Avelings (Eleanor Marx and her husband)
1893 honorary president of International Socialist Congress held at Zurich,
visited Vienna and Berlin
1894 vol. III Das Kapital
1895 died
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