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The Frock-Coated Communist
  • Published: 10 June 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141926865
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

The Frock-Coated Communist

The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels



Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels's era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy. Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England - of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes - it is a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal.

  • Published: 10 June 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141926865
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

About the author

Tristram Hunt

Tristram Hunt is one of Britain's best known young historians. Since 2010 he has been the MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, and in October 2013 was made Shadow Secretary of State for Education. He is a lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London, and has written numerous series for radio and television. He is also a regular contributor to the Times, Guardian and Observer. His previous books include The English Civil War at First Hand, Building Jerusalem, and The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, which was published in more than a dozen languages.

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