Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, The.
Translated By Florence Kelley
Kelley, Florence, translator. Engles, Frederick. The Condition of the Working Class in England In 1844. New York: John W. Lovell Company, (1887).
8vo.; brown wrappers; worn with a few markings; light edgewear; spine heavily chipped, exposing signatures. In a specially made cloth box.
First edition, exceedingly scarce wrappered issue (one of only two to appear in commerce in recent memory) of the first English translation of this canonical work, to which Engles generously contributed a new preface concerning the social conditions of America. The copyright was issued under Rachel G. Foster, a friend of Kelley’s, through whose efforts this translation was originally published in 1887 by New York Socialists.
A leader in the enactment of protective labor legislation for workers, Florence Kelley was born in 1859 to a large Philadelphia family rich in the tradition of public service. Her father, William Kelley, with whom she had a close relationship, was a longtime member of the House of Representatives and a Republican organizer. Ambitious and erudite, Kelley enrolled at Cornell, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1882; she then set her sights on receiving a law degree. While on a tour of Europe in 1883, she enrolled in the University of Zurich, one of the few institutions on the continent that then accepted women. During her studies, Kelley met a young Russian medical student, Wischnewetzky, whom she married—this book was published under her married name; their seven-year union produced three children.
Kelley’s interest in Engles initially began during her studies at the University of Zurich, where she joined the Socialist party. Her work on The Condition of the Working Class in England led to a ten-year friendship with Engles, who encouraged her development of socialist politics. Kelley returned to America in 1886, a year before the publication of this translation, and became a leading activist in the labor movement and social reforms of the early 20th century.
Kelley’s participation in social reform began in 1886, at the age of twenty-four, when she returned to America with her children, settling in Chicago. There she worked in Jane Addams’s Hull House settlement, which served as housing for the poor and as a center for social activism; she also began her research of sweatshops in depressed urban districts. As chief factory inspector for the state of Illinois, Kelley was responsible for implementing the first anti-sweatshop bill, which banned child labor and limited women’s work hours.
Although she achieved enormous success as a labor activist in Illinois, Kelley relocated with her children to New York in 1899, taking up residence in the Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement, a famous settlement house designed to provide in-house nursing care for the poor. She was appointed executive secretary of the National Consumer’s League, where she fought to instill ethical practices in consumer marketing and manufacturing. Kelley held this position for 33 years, until her death in 1932 (HAWH, p. 303). Kelley achieved considerable notoriety in 1914 due to her involvement in the “Brandeis brief.” She and League member Josephine Golmard persuaded Louis Brandeis, then a labor attorney in Oregon and later a Supreme Court Justice (1916-1939), to defend a ten-hour workday for women using medical and sociological data generated from studies on the effects of extensive labor, as forensic evidence in his defense. The employment of such data revolutionized the use of evidence in the judicial system.
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