The Manchester School
I wish to contrast the “facts” of Gradgrind with the research drive of Engels, seen in his opening to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. As already noted, this 1845 book was a source and guide for Marx in his chapter on The Working Day. A contrast can be made between how Engels uses Government reports, including the Blue Books, as waste-paper from commissions of inquiry, with Gradgrind. Even though Engels has fun pretending he will give up on champagne, in this long quotation he also sets out his credentials as a researcher, as participant-observer, seeped in conversation with informants from the factories. Worth reading in full, he introduced his book to his German readers with the following: …show more content…
Many years later, in 1892, he will not revise his book on the occasion of its English-language publication because he says, Marx had effectively updated “the thing” in his chapter in Capital, entitled “The Working Day”, with a more “urgent sense of class struggle”. With Engels’ comment in mind, but also remembering the trajectory of Scrooge or Gradgrind, we should watch how this sense of class struggle emerges over the course of “The Working Day” chapter. While keeping the persona of the author-researcher in mind, I also want to show the staging of voices in literary form, with pointed and intended, class struggle characteristics. The chapter moves from the monologue voice of the single worker (personification, stylized voice) to the final paragraph’s ‘zusammenrotten’ (gang together, pejorative voice) of the organised workers as a group. Here, we think there is a lesson in how Marx himself does research; how he looks at those factories through the eyes of Engels, of Horner, and of his daughters reading for him (Linebaugh 2014, 70), always keeping in mind those troublesome questions about how the workers might be represented, both back then in Dickensian London, and now, -when everything is still not yet ok even if the nice philanthropic capitalists have been so charitable and yet everything is no longer grim up north, and all this is just history and academics and novels. In the footnotes of Marx’s chapter we can find Thomas Macaulay, and we should recall this fine talker was considered a child prodigy at age 8 when he asked if the smoke from the factory chimney’s came from the fires of hell. We will see that this mouth of a babe turns into a Gradgrind
I wish to contrast the “facts” of Gradgrind with the research drive of Engels, seen in his opening to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. As already noted, this 1845 book was a source and guide for Marx in his chapter on The Working Day. A contrast can be made between how Engels uses Government reports, including the Blue Books, as waste-paper from commissions of inquiry, with Gradgrind. Even though Engels has fun pretending he will give up on champagne, in this long quotation he also sets out his credentials as a researcher, as participant-observer, seeped in conversation with informants from the factories. Worth reading in full, he introduced his book to his German readers with the following: …show more content…
Many years later, in 1892, he will not revise his book on the occasion of its English-language publication because he says, Marx had effectively updated “the thing” in his chapter in Capital, entitled “The Working Day”, with a more “urgent sense of class struggle”. With Engels’ comment in mind, but also remembering the trajectory of Scrooge or Gradgrind, we should watch how this sense of class struggle emerges over the course of “The Working Day” chapter. While keeping the persona of the author-researcher in mind, I also want to show the staging of voices in literary form, with pointed and intended, class struggle characteristics. The chapter moves from the monologue voice of the single worker (personification, stylized voice) to the final paragraph’s ‘zusammenrotten’ (gang together, pejorative voice) of the organised workers as a group. Here, we think there is a lesson in how Marx himself does research; how he looks at those factories through the eyes of Engels, of Horner, and of his daughters reading for him (Linebaugh 2014, 70), always keeping in mind those troublesome questions about how the workers might be represented, both back then in Dickensian London, and now, -when everything is still not yet ok even if the nice philanthropic capitalists have been so charitable and yet everything is no longer grim up north, and all this is just history and academics and novels. In the footnotes of Marx’s chapter we can find Thomas Macaulay, and we should recall this fine talker was considered a child prodigy at age 8 when he asked if the smoke from the factory chimney’s came from the fires of hell. We will see that this mouth of a babe turns into a Gradgrind