DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Frock-Coated Communist

The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Tristram Hunt author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:29th Apr '10

Should be back in stock very soon

The Frock-Coated Communist cover

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.

Beautifully written and consistently engaging * Independent *
An excellent book ... Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought -- Robert Service * Sunday Times *
Thoughtful and engaging * Telegraph Review *

  • Winner of Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography 2010

ISBN: 9780141021409

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 21mm

Weight: 343g

464 pages