Enigmatic Engels – the leveller who loved the high life

Cynics say scratch a socialist and you'll find a capitalist, but even cynics would have a tough job explaining Friedrich Engels.

The theories of Engels and the friend he idolised, Karl Marx, may in the end have been responsible for untold misery, yet the man who co-authored the Communist Manifesto was in reality a party animal who made lots of money. As Craig Brown says in The Mail on Sunday, reviewing The Frock-Coated Communist by Tristram Hunt, "the timeworn clich 'to have your cake and eat it' might have been invented for Engels".

Born in 1820, the man who coined the phrase "Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains" became an efficient manager of his family's cotton-spinning business in Manchester, earning, in today's terms, more than £100,000 a year. "In truth," says Brown, "he seems to have had no qualms about having his cake and eating it, while promising, between mouthfuls, that at some point in the not-too-distant future the workers could all enjoy their fair share of the crumbs."

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