Book review: The Frock-Coated Communist

Half fat-cat, half revolutionary, Friedrich Engels was his very own one-man class struggle," said Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday.

The co-author, with Karl Marx, of the Communist Manifesto, Engels was also "the efficient manager of his family cotton business in Manchester". As Tristram Hunt explains in this "crisp and stimulating biography", while promising that the workers would one day control the means of production, Engels grew very rich on their labour in the meantime; he dressed fashionably, drank expensive wine and pilsner, and rode to hounds with the Cheshire hunt. Despite condemning prostitution as "the most tangible exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie", he was himself an enthusiastic brothel-creeper. Yet he brushed off accusations of hypocrisy as the bleatings of the "petit bourgeois".

Despite all this, Hunt's "timely and very readable" life paints a picture of Engels "as a man it would be difficult not to like", said Martin Jacques in the Guardian. Born to a well-to-do Rhineland family in 1820, he met Marx while he was doing military service in Berlin, as a young man "already rejecting religion and writing about the iniquities of industrial capitalism".

Soon after, he served his apprenticeship at a branch of the family textile firm in Manchester, which was then the crucible of the first industrial revolution. He spent much of his time there with factory workers, and his stay bore fruit in the form of his "remarkable" study The Condition of the Working Class in England. He then returned to the Continent, chasing the tail of the great 1848 revolutions - fighting on the barricades against the Prussian military in Cologne, and meeting Marx again in Paris. There, Engels recognised the other man as his intellectual superior, later writing: "Marx was a genius: we others were at best talented." When the revolutions of that year failed, Engels returned to Manchester, "to earn sufficient money to keep not only himself but Marx and the entire Marx family". Such was his dedication that when Marx fathered a son with his own housekeeper, Engels claimed him as his own.

Hunt has written an "excellent book", said Robert Service in the Sunday Times, which shows a "mastery" of 19th-century British culture and European political thought. "Perhaps, though, the author could have given us a little more on the question of Engels' responsibility for the later oppression in the USSR."

The Frock-Coated Communist by Tristram Hunt, 464pp (Allen Lane, £25). The Week Bookshop £22.50 (incl p&p) ·