"The most learned man in Europe"
The young Friedrich Engels, born 200 years ago on 28 November 1820, was a troublesome youth for his parents. He persisted in arguing for the rights of the poor, attending meetings of the radical Young Hegelians and contributing to a journal based in the Rhineland edited by an obvious troublemaker called Karl Marx. In 1842 he met Marx for the first time. A deep lifetime friendship would soon evolve. In the same year his exasperated father packed him off to England, to work in the family firm of Ermen and Engels in Manchester, at that time the industrial heart of Victorian Britain. A dose of...