SOURCE: “Frederick Engels,” in Labour Monthly, Vol. 17, No. 8, August, 1935, pp. 498-505.

In the following essay, originally published in 1895 and reprinted in 1935, Lenin offers a brief overview of Engels' life and works and praises Engels' contribution to socialism.

Oh, what a lamp of reason ceased to burn, What a heart had ceased to throb?(1) 

In London, on August 5, 1895, Frederick Engels breathed his last. After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the most remarkable scientist and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. Ever since fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the lifework of both friends became their common cause. To understand, therefore, what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one must clearly master the significance of the work and teaching of Marx in the development of the contemporary labour movement. Marx and Engels were the first to show that the...