Engels (and Marx) on Ireland, Nationalism and the Peasant Question

Frederick Engels became acquainted with Irishmen as workers in cotton textile factories, when he went there to manage a joint enterprise of his father in Manchester. His guide to the city and especially its working class quarters, was Mary Burns, his common law wife of Irish origin. And it was through his classic account, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), that Karl Marx got to know much of the condition of English workers (and workers in general) whose present circumstances and future potential became life-long preoccupations of both Marx and Engels. However, this close observation by Engels, son of a prosperous factory owner, of living conditions of workers in England was not the first one of workers he had made.