and the stark contrast between the "spacious and sumptuous houses" of the merchant elite and the poverty of the working class. The family business, Ermen & Engels, which his father co-founded with Dutch partners Godfrey and Peter Ermen in 1837, would later expand to include a major thread factory in Manchester.

Despite the family's strict Pietist and commercial ethos, which valued industriousness and viewed pleasure as a "heathen blasphemy", Engels's home life was not without warmth. His father was a keen musician who played the cello,