1790–1842
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business into which young Friedrich, eldest son, was expected to follow his father, without question. Confirmed in the Elberfeld Reformed Evangelical Church in 1837, the child Engels was hand-reared on evangelical fire and brimstone. He was browbeaten into theories of Calvinist predestination in which God’s very precise criteria for the pre-selection of the saved and the damned favoured the wealthy, successful and socially elevated. But his mother and her culture-loving father, Gerhard von Haar, an affable unreformed priest, tempered his severe upbringing by introducing him to classical mythology, poetry and novels. When he started school at the Gymnasium in Barmen he showed early flair for languages, history and the classics. Fascinated by German romanticism, he was drawn into the literary revival of German nationalism. Nationalist romantic legends were the theme of his schoolboy verse, including a piece entitled ‘Siegfried’, after the swashbuckling hero of the Song of the Nibelungs, lord and master to the trusty and valiant Dwarf Albericht. To Eleanor, the little girl who was to become his surrogate daughter, Engels would carefully pass on the poetic charms of legend and classical literature that made up the imaginative realms of his own youth. Approaching manhood, Engels yearned for a life as a poetjournalist who would support his writing by becoming a lawyer or civil servant. His father was having none of this unprofitable, idle dreaming from his eldest son and heir. Friedrich senior plucked Friedrich junior from school and deposited him into mercantile apprenticeship at the age of seventeen. University was out of the question; he would learn the family business. The following year, 1837, Engels had to accompany his father to England for the first time, where he learned how to trade in the purchase and sale of silk and encountered the great British cities of Manchester and London. The next stage of the young romantic’s very unsentimental education organised by his resolute father was an apprenticeship to a linen exporter in the seaside city of Bremen, where Engels worked as a clerk. The job was dull, but he enjoyed life in a hustling and bustling port and the liberal freedoms of the household with whom he lodged.
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