Georg Weerth is one of the lesser-known authors of the Vormärz period. However, the poet, journalist, internationally active merchant, and socialist is recognized as a friend of Marx and Engels. This study addresses the question articulated in the field of literary economics and in current Weerth and Vormärz research regarding the conceptual and social constitution of a collective known as 'the working class' in the birthplace of industrialization. Marx and Engels already pointed out that this class was internally differentiated in the Communist Manifesto with their reference to the 'lumpenproletariat', the non-working lower class, and Marx in 1867 in Capital with the term 'labor aristocracy'. Weerth finds a vivid representation of the dynamic internal differentiations of the working class in his sketches (1843-1848): in the allegory of the tree of English happiness, he depicts the social metabolism in capitalist modernity based on the model of a botanical organism. He addresses social issues in a literary manner using a modern collage technique and describes the working class emphatically not only in terms of material conditions but also through cultural and ethnic distinguishing features against the backdrop of poverty caused by 'starvation wages'.