A CLASSY LIFE OF ENGELS

Tristram Hunt is already well known as an accomplished urban historian and broadcaster. With his third book, “The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels”, he also proves to be a first-rate biographer. Forever framed in Marx’s shadow, Engels is an inspired choice. Militant teenage atheist, bon viveur with an appetite for lobster salad as well as revolution, rider to hounds in Cheshire: this is a human portrait of an exceptional thinker, the first since Gustav Mayer’s seminal study of 1934.

Hunt is no hagiographer—he shows that Engels’s egalitarian communism did not extend to equality for women or homosexuals—but he is sympathetic, resoundingly absolving his man of begetting the crimes of Stalin, Mao et al: Engels had come to favour “the peaceable, democratic road to socialism through the ballot-box”. He offers a biographer plenty of contextual meat, with first-hand experience of the 1848 Prussian revolutions, the Paris Commune, the start of the British labour movement, and the Chartists in Manchester. Hunt shows how Engels’s early theories were lent weight by his acute observations of the squalor and exploitation in the north-east of the 1840s—long before George Orwell set foot in Paris and London.

Marx wrote of how his friend’s ideas made the audience feel they would “become hard facts if not tomorrow then […] the day after”. Even if Hunt is a little too keen to remain a believer—and his references to today’s economic meltdown feel tacked-on—he gives us ample reason to reposition Engels on the frontline of modern history.

~ JAKUB FIGURSKI

"The Frock-Coated Communist", Allen Lane