KARL MARX

112 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Engels was two years younger than Marx, born on 28 November 1820,
the eldest child of a large family of rich industrialists in Barmen (now
called Wuppertal), a few miles east of Diisseldorf, near the Ruhr. His
great-grandfather had founded a lace factory which prospered sufficiently
to enable the family to claim its own coat of arms. Friedrich Engels
senior diversified the business by associating with Peter Ermen to found
an extensive cotton-spinning enterprise based in Barmen and Manchester.
Engels' mother came from a family of Dutch schoolteachers. Business
and Church were the twin pillars of the Engels household and Engels
senior expected his son to take both to heart. Young Engels was an
excellent pupil at school, particularly in languages; but he left before his
final year and entered his father's factory to gain practical experience. He
spent all his spare time, however, writing large quantities of poetry - even
more than Marx - and by the time he was dispatched to Bremen in 1838 to
gain further business experience, he already had several small anonymous
publications to his credit. Although he was lodged with a clergyman's
family, the atmosphere in the city of Bremen was very different from the
biblical, puritanical and intransigent form of Christianity that imbued his
family back in Prussia.
During his three years in Bremen he struggled hard to rid himself
of his fundamentalist upbringing, and particularly of the notion of
predestination. 187 Strauss's Life of Jesus made a strong impression on him
and, through Schleiermacher, he made a swift progression to Young Hegelianism.
Berlin was the obvious place to pursue his literary interests and
he willingly underwent his military service - as an artilleryman in a
barracks on the outskirts of the capital, arriving a few months after Marx
had left. He gravitated quickly towards the Freien, composed a striking
pamphlet against Schelling and wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung. When
his year in the army was finished, his father sent him to work in the
Manchester branch of the firm. On his way he passed through the Rhineland,
had a lengthy meeting with Hess from which he emerged 'a firstclass
revolutionary'. 188 He also called on the editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung-, Marx, however, received Engels 'coldly', seeing in him an emissary
of the Freien with whom he had just severed all contacts. 189
In Manchester, Engels wrote for Owen's New Moral World and got to
know several leading Chartists, particularly George Julian Harney. He
also continued from Manchester to write for the Rheinische Zeitung and
sent two pieces to the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. a critique of Carlyle's
Past and Present-, and the essay entitled Outlines of a Critique of Political
Economy 190 whose stark and clear prediction of the impending doom of
capitalism caused Marx to revise his opinion of Engels with whom he
began to correspond. Already, from his observation of conditions in Man-