It's virtually impossible to avoid subjective bias in writing any kind of work, especially one that deals with contentious political issues. And it's no different with regard to Engels and The Condition of the Working-Class in England. Engels, a radical socialist, is setting out to write an indictment of the appalling treatment of English workers during the Industrial Revolution. In that sense, he's biased, and unashamedly so. He has a political agenda and the book is a means for promoting it.

At the same time, Engels isn't simply engaged in writing a polemic. He wants his work to have objective credibility. To that end, he employs extensive statistics to substantiate his arguments. For example, he shows us the horrendous mortality rates in Northern industrial cities such as Liverpool and Manchester.

Engels believed, as did his friend and collaborator Marx, that socialism was objectively a better system than industrial capitalism. His use of statistics to critique capitalism is an attempt to bolster that claim. Despite The Condition of the Working-Class in England being about the industrial proletariat, its intended audience was of a very different social class. Written in Engels's native German, the book was aimed at educated, middle-class Germans with an interest in social, political, and economic affairs. In particular, it was aimed at radical German intellectuals who would have welcomed an objective treatment of the problems of industrial capitalism.