Friedrich Engels

Born in 1820 to a wealthy Prussian textile family, Engels shed their Pietist faith early and drifted into Young Hegelian circles during military service in Berlin. His father dispatched him to Manchester in 1842 to manage a cotton mill investment; what he saw in the factories became The Condition of the Working Class in England. He met Marx in Paris in 1844, and the partnership stuck. They co-wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, fought in that year's revolutions, and fled to England when the barricades fell. For two decades Engels lived a split existence - respectable merchant by day in Manchester, funneling profits to Marx's cramped London household by night. He retired in 1870, moved to London, and after Marx died in 1883 spent his final years editing Das Kapital's unfinished volumes and writing the texts that carried Marxism into the mass movements of the Second International. He died of cancer in 1895 and asked for his ashes to be scattered at sea.