The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Such reports may overstate the state of deprivation of the working class. According to two economists, by the 1880s consumption of meat, at least in the big cities (Paris, Lyon, and Grenoble), was not uncommon even among the lower income groups.61 Still, in spite of the economic progress of the next fifty years, even in the mid-1950s many working-class French households had no water, no gas, no inside toilets even on the outskirts of Paris.62

  In pre-industrial Britain wages and living standards among workers were among the highest in the world, and, by the mid-nineteenth century, the situation was significantly better than on the continent.63 Friedrich Engels, writing in the 1840s in what was far from being an uncritical account of the benefits of British capitalism, explained: ‘The better paid workers, especially those in whose families every member is able to earn something, have good food as long as this state of things lasts: meat daily and bacon and cheese for supper.’64 This was probably better than the diet of most French or German workers, though a French report published in 1840 suggests that among workers in Nor-mandy, Lyon, and Reims it was not uncommon to eat meat along with la soupe grasse and white bread.65

  Nutrition might have been better among English workers than elsewhere, but Engels had no doubt that, from the perspective of both health and ecology, cities – London in particular – were a disaster:

  the atmosphere of London can never be so pure, so rich in oxygen, as the air of the country; two and a half million pairs of lungs, two hundred and fifty thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to four miles square, consume an enormous amount of oxygen, which is replaced with difficulty, because the method of building cities in itself impedes ventilation … The lungs of the inhabitants fail to receive the due supply of oxygen, and the consequence is mental and physical lassitude and low vitality.

  He added:

  The filth and stagnant pools of the working-people’s quarters in the great cities have, therefore, the worst effect upon the public health, because they produce precisely those gases which engender disease; so, too, the exhalations from contaminated streams. But this is by no means all. The manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society today is revolting.66

  Other foreign visitors were equally alarmed by the conditions of British workers. In De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (1840), Eugène Buret, while extolling the wealth of Britain (‘One cannot fail to be impressed by the opulence of this nation; wealth is unveiled in thousands of ways before the astonished traveller … material life has reached the pinnacle of refinement’), noted that such extreme wealth coexisted with the ‘most terrible misery … Not far from the monuments to British opulence are the sad monuments to its poverty.’67 Visiting Shoreditch and Bethnal Green in East London, he noted the horrible shacks where people live amid dirt, stink, and ‘moral turpitude’ (infamie). There is no sewage, no rubbish disposal, no lighting: ‘it is the most absolute laissez-faire one can imagine’.68 And, Buret added, all the English can say is ‘That’s the Irish for you’, since a significant proportion of the slum dwellers were Irish immigrants. French cities may not be as elegant and clean as English ones, he continued consolingly, but at least we are spared the horrors of English poverty, since the poor, he added, are not as miserable in France as they are in England.69 Such poverty was not caused by the employers, Buret concluded, but by the system, by the puissance des choses, the power of things – an idea approvingly cited by Marx in one of his early writings.70 Buret himself was not above some racist blame-mongering since he believed that most ‘mobile’ wealth was in the hands of the Jews, ‘these clever usurpers of the wealth of nations! One sign from them, a furrowed brow, is sufficient to cause turmoil in all the markets of the world.’71 Such remarks were not unusual even a few decades later. In 1885, T. H. S. Escott, editor of the Fortnightly Review, noted that ‘English society, once ruled by an aristocracy, is now dominated by a plutocracy. And this plutocracy is to a large extent Hebraic in composition.’72 Yet the conditions of the Jewish immigrants in London’s East End were dire. One in three, according to the Spectator (23 April 1887), was on poor relief and their mortality rate was higher than that of the long-standing resident.73

  Hippolyte Taine, who had written a five-volume history of English literature, was shocked by how boring London was. In one of the opening pages of his Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872) he wrote:

  A rainy Sunday in London: shops closed, streets almost empty; it looks like a huge and clean cemetery. The few passers-by, beneath their umbrellas, in this desert of squares and streets, are like returning anxious ghosts; it’s horrible.74

  Later on, encountering young prostitutes near Haymarket and the Strand, he wrote:

  Every hundred steps one encounters some twenty girls; some ask for a glass of gin; others say, ‘Sir, it’s for paying the rent.’ It’s not an exhibition of debauchery but misery, and what misery! … it breaks the heart; it was like observing a procession of the dead. This is a plague, the true plague of English society.75

  A Belgian journalist and social reformer, Édouard Ducpétiaux, writing five years after Buret, in 1845, noted how miserable were the working classes in prosperous Belgium and how their children were as cruelly exploited as in Great Britain, punished for the smallest fault and deprived of the most elementary education. The miners did not save any of their earnings, because ‘most of them fear to die without having spent all they had earned’.76

  Writing about the conditions of the urban poor was then an even more popular genre than it is now. In the 1830s the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques asked Dr Louis René Villermé and his colleague Benoiston de Chateauneuf to examine the conditions of workers in French factories. Villermé concentrated on textile works in the north and east of the country, textile manufacturers being then by far the largest employers in the country. He was particularly alarmed by the conditions of children and their high mortality rate. Half of them die, he wrote, before reaching the age of two.77 Villermé’s investigations, which took four years to complete, took him to factories where he noted down everything he saw, enabling him to establish, for the first time, that the working classes endured very long working days and lived in extreme poverty.78

  Villermé was probably influenced by the report of Dr James Phillips Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, on the conditions in cotton manufacturing in Manchester (1832), which Engels quotes approvingly. Kay confirmed that Manchester workers ate meat three times a week, though ‘the quantity consumed … is not great’.79 But the situation was grim anyway. ‘The population,’ Kay explained, ‘is crowded into one dense mass, in cottages separated by narrow, unpaved, and almost pestilential streets; in an atmosphere loaded with the smoke and exhalations of a large manufacturing city.’ None of this, he added, could possibly be the result of the ‘commercial system’, as capitalism was often then called. The strife between capital and labour is ‘unnatural’ since ‘capital is but accumulated labour’. These evils result not from the ‘commercial system’, which ‘promotes the advance of civilization’, but from ‘foreign and accidental causes’, from alcoholism, from the ‘absence of religious feeling’, and, above all, from the Irish, who brought with them ‘the contagious example of ignorance’, and whose ‘barbarous habits and savage want of economy, united with the necessarily debasing consequences of uninterrupted toil, have demoralized the people’.80 He seemed to ignore the fact that children employed in Lancashire textile mills were regularly beaten.81 In 1849, James Kay was made a baronet.

  Of course, worse than being employed, even in these conditions, was being unemployed. In that case, in Britain as elsewhere, the situation was dreadful. On 5 April 1867 the London Standard, a conservative London newspaper, in an article approvingly quoted by Karl Marx in Capital, reported:

  A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did not parade with their black flags en masse
, the human torrent was imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer. They are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of them … In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed – next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-starving, they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell us from their miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless for them to beg.82

  And, as Gladstone himself had admitted as a young MP twenty-four years earlier in the House of Commons (13 February 1843), even those in employment consumed less while the rich got richer:

  It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country, that we see, beyond the possibility of denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase of the pressure of privations and distress – there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment, which, however satisfactory it may be as affording evidence of the existence and abundance of one among the elements of national prosperity, yet adds bitterness to the reflections which are forced upon us by the distresses of the rest of our fellow countrymen …83

  The urban workers in Britain were doing poorly, but that was still better than others elsewhere in Europe. In the 1870s, Pasquale Villari, an Italian historian and politician who knew England well, and whose wife, Linda White, was English, wrote that however immense the misery in London, ‘anyone who claims that the London poor are worse off than those of Naples, either does not know the former or does not know the latter’.84

  Some compared the conditions of the English poor not to Naples but to darkest Africa. With, perhaps, some excessive emphasis, the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth (not to be confused with the sociologist of poverty, Charles Booth) – having read Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878) – wrote in In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890):

  But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? … May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?85

  Drawing a parallel between England and ‘darkest Africa’ was a common trope. The socialist and feminist novelist Margaret Harkness had done the same in her novel In Darkest London (1889).86

  In his path-breaking survey of 1889 on the London poor, Life and Labour of the People of London, Charles Booth divided the population into eight classes. The bottom four, the poor, including ‘the lowest’ class, ‘the occasional labourers, loafers, and semi-criminals’ (class A), the casual earners (‘the very poor’ – class B), and the ‘poor’, who either had ‘intermittent earnings’ (class C) or ‘small regular earnings’ (class D). He estimated that in East London 35 per cent of the population could be described as poor or very poor.87 The life of class A was:

  the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional excess. Their food is of the coarsest description, and their only luxury is drink … They render no useful service, they create no wealth … They degrade whatever they touch.88

  In the Whitechapel district of East London, almost 2,500 people belonged to this class, out of a total of just over 73,500.89 The four categories of the poor were, between them, almost 40 per cent of the total – yards away from the City of London, then, as now, the financial centre of the world.

  The East End was poor but even poorer, according to Charles Booth’s classification, was Holborn, where almost 50 per cent lived in poverty. Holborn was followed by various East End districts, but even Westminster had a 35 per cent level of poverty, while Islington was at 31 per cent. Chelsea, with 24 per cent, was in those days on a level with Hackney and Stoke Newington (23 per cent). Best of all was Hampstead with a poverty level of only 13.5 per cent.90 The ‘poor’ Booth was describing were the ‘working poor’ or the ‘respectable poor’, not his ‘class A’ feckless poor. Nor were they the small underclass of the extremely poor of the 1840s described by Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor (1851), the bottom fortieth of society. Booth’s ‘working’ and ‘respectable’ poor were the true victims of the Industrial Revolution, yet they were also poised to derive increasing benefits from it in the course of the successive century, inhabiting Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, and industrial Scotland.91 This dismal view of London was enhanced by Jack London’s popular The People of the Abyss (1903), based on several months’ stay in the East End, where he contrasted ‘hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery’ to the life of ‘a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London’s golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king’.92

  Everywhere distinctions were made between respectable workers and casual labourers. In 1901, in Italy, there were, according to the census, one million casual labourers in the north alone. They were regarded as a dangerous class and described in police reports as if they were aliens: one is described as having thick eyelashes, the face of a ‘cretin’, and the women are described as promiscuous.93

  Most British people were not poor, but a minority were. Thus under the headline ‘The Unemployed’, the Hampshire Chronicle of 16 January 1904 intoned:

  Never a winter passes without this melancholy title for a record of want and suffering appearing daily in our journals. It is a pitiable thing, an evil that the wisest statesmen and the richest and most generous philanthropists at their best seem only able to alleviate.94

  Much of the scandal about living conditions of the poor was because the poor were a minority. Consumption of food increased regularly in the United Kingdom in the years 1860 to 1913 (see Table 5).

  Table 5 Weekly Per Capita Consumption, 1860–1913

  1860 1909–13

  Meat and bacon (lb) 1.8 2.5

  Fresh milk (pint) 1.75 3.2

  Sugar (lb) 0.7 1.4

  Tea (oz) 0.8 2.1

  Butter (oz) 2.7 4.8

  Source: Mary Mackinnon, ‘Living Standards, 1870–1914’, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700, vol. 2: 1860–1939, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press 1994, p. 279.

  By the beginning of the century, however, in Britain, very nearly all households had a diet that provided sufficient energy for sustained work, though perhaps not much more than that.95 London was a paupers’ paradise compared to St Petersburg, according to the statistically based study by Dr G. I. Arkhangel’skii, editor of Archiv sudebnoi meditsiny i obsh-chestvennoi gigieny (Archive of Forensic Medicine and Social Hygiene), a medical journal founded in 1865 that discussed regularly and consistently the health problems of the lower classes of St Petersburg.96 It was, wrote Arkhangel’skii, ‘the most deadly of all major European cities’. The causes were the usual ones: overcrowding and poor hygienic conditions to which was added an unusually high level of alcoholism.97

  Americans were probably already better off, on average, even than those in the more prosperous European countries. They were eating meat regularly even at the height of the Civil War, and the European immigrants who arrived in the 1880s found that they could afford to buy food that, in Europe, was available only to the more prosperous.98 Peter Maretich, a Croatian immigrant to the United States, explained that, back in the old country, at the end of the nineteenth century, they were lucky to eat meat once a week; their breakfast consisted of corn meal with milk, and their dinner of potatoes or noodles, with a little bread but no butter, ‘But when we get to this country we had meat every day if we want
to.’ When asked why they had left Croatia, Maretich replied that hunger had forced them out.99

  In 1875 in Massachusetts, a family of seven (parents plus five children ranging from one to twelve years of age) would have had a varied diet that included the occasional fish and meat, as well as butter, gingerbread, molasses, and tea. The father, an unskilled labourer of French-Canadian extraction, would earn $385 a year supplemented by the $145 earned by the oldest son (a 12-year-old) and $120 by the second son (10 years old). The mother stayed at home to care for the children. Although far better fed than their European counterparts, the family did not live well; they spent well over half their income on food; they dressed poorly; and the children were pale.100

  The Jews who crowded ‘Jewtown’ in the Lower East Side in New York were certainly better off than they had been in the Tsarist Empire – and there were no pogroms. But they were far from thriving. As the journalist and photographer Jacob A. Riis reported in How the Other Half Lives (1890):

  Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease, and Jewtown is no exception. It could not well be otherwise in such crowds, considering especially their low intellectual status. The managers of the Eastern Dispensary, which is in the very heart of their district, told the whole story when they said: ‘The diseases these people suffer from are not due to intemperance or immorality, but to ignorance, want of suitable food, and the foul air in which they live and work.’101

  Perhaps Riis saw only the poverty, or matters had improved remarkably in the following twenty years, because there were, by 1913, in the 57 blocks that made up the Jewish Lower East Side, 112 candy and ice-cream stores, 78 barbers, 93 butchers’ shops, and 43 bakeries.102