Get your frock-coat on for the Burns sisters

It was my birthday last week. A belated gift arrived and it was this. Considering Tristram Hunt delivered the 2007 Engels Memorial Lecture at Urbis, I’m looking forward to reading it. Engels’ figure is an important one for Manchester, and we tour guides meet him every time we deliver our Radical City, Medieval Manchester and Suffragette City tours. Yes, even Suffragette City. It was the Burns sisters who gave the young Engels access to the slum districts of Manchester – areas that a well-to-do German businessman (or any outsider) would enter at their peril. During the years 1843-4, when Engels was writing the Condition of the Working Class in England, Mary Burns escorted Engels through the working districts of the city. This was the material fuel for his writing. Without this first-hand experience and insight into the horrific living conditions of the working class it is unlikely Engels’ writing and theory would carry the same weight. As Hunt writes, “Mary helped to provide Engels with the material reality for his communist theory”.

Yet, the Burns sisters are largely forgotten. There is little historic documentation relating to them and they are left uncredited by Engels despite their influence. Engels, of course, wanted to keep his “free union” with both Lizzie and Mary as low-key as possible. Our Suffragette City tour begins with the Burns sisters as examples of politically active and influential women in Manchester who have been historically neglected. A biography as extensive as Hunt’s on Engels, should shed some further light on them.

Add comment July 20th, 2009