The scale and setting of mill buildings, whether in rural river valleys or crowded industrial cities, startled visitors. British poet laureate Robert Southey wrote that the approach to the New Lanark mills reminded him “of the descent upon the baths of Monchique,” built by the Romans in southern Portugal. Like many other observers, Southey searched for precedents to understand the novelty he confronted. The view, he wrote, surprised him because there was “too a regular appearance” of the buildings, which “at a distance might be mistaken for convents, if in a Catholic country.” Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited Manchester in 1835, likened mills to “huge palaces,” a common comparison in a world with few secular structures of such scale. One German visitor to northern England wrote that he “might have arrived in Egypt since so many factory chimneys . . . stretch upwards towards the sky like great obelisks.” “Just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,” Marx wrote three decades after Southey visited New Lanark, “precisely in such period of revolutionary crisis,” people “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.”49
Even more than mill buildings themselves, the machinery they contained mesmerized visitors. In Michael Armstrong, Trollope wrote of visitors being given a mill tour: “It is the vast, the beautiful, the elaborate machinery by which they were surrounded that called forth all their attention, and all their wonder. The uniform ceaseless movement, sublime in its sturdy strength and unrelented activity, drew every eye, and rapt the observer’s mind in boundless admiration of the marvelous power of science!” Trollope bemoaned the visitors’ inattention to the child laborers nearby: “Strangers do not visit factories to look at them; it is the triumphant perfection of British mechanism which they come to see.” French socialist and feminist Flora Tristan wrote of a steam engine she saw in England: “In the presence of the monster, you have eyes and ears for nothing else.”50
The modernity of the mills dazzled observers. To lengthen hours of operation, in the early nineteenth century mill owners began installing gaslights, a spectacle that drew visitors from near and far. In Hard Times, Dickens described morning in “Coketown” as “The Fairy palaces burst into illumination.” The size of the mills and accompanying warehouses even made possible new types of entertainment. Sam Scott drew an immense Manchester crowd in 1837 when he leapt off the roof of a five-story warehouse into the River Irwell, surviving to repeat the stunt in Bolton. Another daredevil, James Duncan Wright, attracted even larger crowds in the 1850s with his act of using a pulley to slide down ropes attached to mill chimneys, which he claimed made him the fastest man alive.51
Debating the Factory System
For all the wonder of the buildings and the machines, though, it was the broader social innovation—what came to be called the “factory system”—on which discussion, debate, and conflict centered during the first half of the nineteenth century. An imprecise term, the “factory system” generally referred to the whole new mode of production that came with the factory, including the workforce that had to be assembled, the conditions of labor and of life for those workers, and the impact of the factory on economic and social arrangements. Cooke Taylor, allied with the new manufacturers, recognized that because England was “already crowded with institutions,” the rapid development of mechanized factory production “dislocated all the existing machinery of society.” “A giant forcing his way into a densely-wedged crowd,” he wrote, “extends pain and disturbance to the remotest extremity: the individuals he pushes aside push others in their turn . . . and thus also the Factory system causes its presence to be felt in districts where no manufactures are established: all classes are pressed to make room for the stranger.”52
For many of its critics, and even some of its supporters, the exploitation of labor, particularly of child labor, became their focus in judging the new system. Though underutilized agricultural workers were a draw for manufacturers, the scale of the factories made recruiting and retaining a workforce a challenge, especially in the countryside. Many local men proved reluctant to take mill jobs, unwilling to submit to the unaccustomed close supervision and discipline that came with them. In any case, mill owners did not want adult men for most positions, preferring women and children whom they could pay less and who did not have the sense of pride and craft that came from apprenticeship training. Mechanical power eliminated the need for most heavy labor, especially in spinning. Instead, the new yarn-making equipment largely required constant monitoring to look for broken threads, full bobbins, and other problems that needed to be quickly addressed, work that necessitated nimble fingers and alert minds but not strength. So mill owners recruited a workforce that was young and primarily female. In 1835 Ure estimated that a third of cotton mill workers in England were under twenty-one; a half in Scotland.53 Many were very young; at Cromford, some employees were only seven years old (though the firm preferred to hire workers starting between ages ten and twelve). In some spinning mills, virtually the only adults present were overseers. Today, in the United States, factories are associated with masculinity, but in their early days they were spaces largely occupied by women and children.54
Conditions for mill workers were harsh. Entering a factory for the first time could be a terrifying experience: the noise and motion of the machinery; the stifling air, full of cotton dust, in many mills kept oppressively warm to reduce breakage; the pervasive stench from the whale oil and animal grease used to lubricate the machinery (before petroleum products were available) and from the sweat of hundreds of laboring people; the pale countenances and sickly bodies of the workers; the fierce demeanor of the overseers, some of whom carried belts or whips to enforce their discipline. In weaving rooms, the deafening clatter of scores of looms, each with a shuttle being batted back and forth some sixty times a minute, made it impossible for workers to hear one another.
Figure 1.3 Carding, Drawing, and Roving, a somewhat idealized 1835 illustration of English factory life.
In the early decades, mill owners generally ran their factories day and night, with two twelve- or thirteen-hour shifts (including an hour break for dinner), following the schedule pioneered by the Derby Silk Mill. Children worked both shifts. With Sunday the only day off, workweeks of over seventy hours were normal. To keep exhausted children awake and working, supervisors and adult workers hit them with straps, hands, and even wooden poles (though there was much debate about how common such abuse was).55
Perhaps not surprisingly, early mill owners often found themselves unable to fully staff their mills with willing workers. So some turned to unwilling workers. Workhouses—the prisonlike residences of last resort for orphans and the destitute—were tapped for child workers, whom parish officials apprenticed to mill owners, giving them full legal authority over their charges and making it a criminal act for the children to run away. In Yorkshire, it was not uncommon for 70 percent or more of a mill’s workforce to be parish apprentices. At New Lanark, before Robert Owen took over management, some of the apprentices were as young as five years old. Ordinary apprentices, signed up by their parents, also could be jailed for running away. So could workers who signed fixed-term contracts if they quit before their termination date. Further, an 1823 law made any worker who left his or her job without notice liable to three months imprisonment. Thus the power of the state helped assemble and keep in place a workforce for the new factory system. What’s more, it was not uncommon for the state and an employer to effectively be one and the same, since mill owners sometimes served as magistrates who judged cases of desertion involving their own workers.56 Legally unfree labor, not only in the growing of cotton but in the mills themselves, played an essential role in the early decades of the factory system.
Today, in popular discourse and mainstream ideology, the Industrial Revolution is ofte
n associated with individual liberty and what is called the free market.57 But in the early years of the factory system, it was as likely to be dubbed a new form of slavery as a new form of freedom. Joseph Livesey, a well-known journal publisher and temperance campaigner, himself the son of a mill owner, wrote of the apprenticed children he saw in mills during his childhood, “They were apprenticed to a system to which nothing but West Indian slavery can bear any analogy.”58 In The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, Trollope wrote that apprenticed paupers suffered “miserable lives, in labour and destitution, incomparably more severe, than any ever produced by negro slavery.” In its structure, Michael Armstrong is a version of the slave rescue narrative, recounting the frustrated efforts of the heroine, the rich daughter of a factory owner, to liberate Armstrong from his villainous apprenticeship at an isolated factory and his ultimate escape.59
The metaphor of slavery for factory labor no doubt reflected the intense debate over slavery itself during the early decades of the nineteenth century, leading up to emancipation in the British Empire in 1834. Still, it was a measure of how horrifying factory labor was seen to be that so many observers equated it with chattel slavery. One self-described “Journeyman Cotton Spinner” wrote of the terrible heat in spinning rooms, where workers had no breaks: “The negro slave in the West Indies, if he works under a scorching sun, has probably a little breeze of air sometimes to fan him; he has a space of ground, and time allowed to cultivate it. The English spinner slave has not enjoyment of the open atmosphere and breezes of heaven.” Engels, writing of English textile workers just a few years after Trollope, believed “Their slavery is more abject than that of the negroes in America because they are more strictly supervised.” He also bemoaned that, as in slavery, the wives and daughters of workers were forced to gratify the “base desires” of manufacturers. Elsewhere, Engels compared workers under the factory system to “the Saxon serf under the whip of the Norman baron.” Similarly, in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or the Two Nations, one character pronounces that “There are great bodies of the working classes of this country nearer the condition of brutes than they have been at any time since the Conquest.” Richard Oastler entitled his 1830 letter in the Leeds Mercury, which launched the Ten Hours Movement to reduce factory working hours, “Yorkshire Slavery.”60
For Robert Southey, the association of slavery with the factory system did not stem from particular abuses but from the nature of the system itself. Calling the New Lanark mills under Owen, who even before his radical turn was known for his humane treatment of workers, “perfect of their kind,” he nonetheless felt that “Owen in reality deceives himself. He is part-owner and sole Director of a large establishment, differing more in accidents than in essence from a plantation: the persons under him happen to be white, and are at liberty by law to quit his service, but while they remain in it they are as much under his absolute management as so many negro-slaves.” The factory system, Southey believed, even at its best, tended “to destroy individuality of character and domesticity.” At its worst it was outright devilish; after visiting a Manchester cotton factory, he wrote “that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.”61
Some critics of the factory system—and some defenders of slavery—questioned the very distinction between free labor and slavery, given the circumstances in which mill workers lived. British laborers were “slaves of necessity,” wrote Samuel Martin in 1773, unable to “mitigate their labours” or “increase their wages.” Owen asked of factory operatives, “Are they, in anything but appearance, really free labourers? . . . What alternative have they or what freedom is there in this case, but the liberty of starving?”62 Here lay a critique that went to the very heart of the spread of market relations, part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution.
Besides the ill-treatment of labor, environmental despoilment figured heavily in critiques of the factory system. Over and over again, accounts of Manchester and other industrial centers noted the darkness and foul air. Scottish geologist Hugh Miller wrote of Manchester in 1845: “One receives one’s first intimation of its existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that overhangs it.” Similarly, Cooke Taylor wrote, “I well remember the effect produced on me . . . when I looked upon the town . . . and saw the forest of chimneys pouring forth volumes of steam and smoke, forming an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the entire place.” The air was so polluted, Taylor observed, that everyone who could live outside Manchester proper did so.63 Major General Sir Charles James Napier, appointed in 1839 to command the northern district of England, which included Manchester, described the city as “the entrance to hell realized,” with its rich and poor, immorality, and pervasive pollution; the whole city, was “a chimney.”64
Water pollution was as severe as air pollution. Hugh Miller recounted the befouling of the River Irwell from cloth dyes, sewage, and other waste, so it resembled “considerably less a river than a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies.”65 Maybe the most impressive aspect of Sam Scott’s leap was not the five-story drop but his surviving the toxic brew into which he plunged.
The environmental damage of cotton manufacturing extended far beyond mill sites themselves. Cotton growing required deforestation and it rapidly depleted soil, one reason why in the United States it migrated (along with its slave labor force) from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi Valley. Coal mining polluted rivers and scarred the landscape.66
Figure 1.4 Cotton Factories, Union Street, Manchester, an 1835 engraving showing the proliferation of factories in England and resulting pollution.
Perhaps the most famous critique of the factory system—at least the most remembered in our era—captured its despoilment of nature in just a few words, William Blake’s decrying of the “dark Satanic Mills” that blotted England’s “mountains green” and “pleasant pastures,” in an 1804 verse that formed part of the preface to his long visionary poem Milton. Set to music in 1916 under the title “Jerusalem,” Blake’s words today are sung throughout the English-speaking world, in churches and soccer stadiums alike. At least in part, Blake seemed to be reacting directly to the smoke-blackened sky that was becoming a feature of urban English life. Near his home in London, a large, steam-powered grinding mill operated until consumed by fire in 1791 (by some reports as a result of arson by angry workers). Yet for Blake, it was not just smoke that made mills “Satanic.” For the great mystical poet, the mill symbolized a spiritual descent from a preindustrial England on which God had smiled, a metaphor for a whole way of life Blake was determined to overcome in order to build a new Jerusalem “In England’s green & pleasant Land.”67
Urban poverty was often portrayed as another form of despoilment, another fall from grace. The mechanization of the cotton industry brought an enormous increase in the population of the districts in which factories were located. The population of Lancashire almost doubled, from 163,310 in 1801 to 313,957 in 1851. “What was once an obscure, poorly-cultivated bog,” Engels wrote in 1845, “is now a thickly-populated industrial district.” Factory towns, like Manchester, Glasgow, Bolton, and Rochdale, “experienced a mushroom growth.” Manchester and adjacent Salford more than tripled in population, from 95,000 in 1800 to more than 310,000 in 1841. In Lancashire alone, in 1830 there were more than 100,000 cotton mill workers.68 Rural migrants from elsewhere in England made up much of the new industrial workforce, as did newcomers from Scotland and Ireland, where rural poverty pushed thousands upon thousands to emigrate.69
The densely packed working-class neighborhoods that sprung up near mills were in their own way as novel and disturbing as the mills themselves. The congregation of so many workers in one place was unprecedented. Taylor wrote “The most striking phenomenon of the Factory system is, the amount of population which it has suddenly accumulated on certain points.” “[H]ad our ancestors witnessed the assemblage of such a multitude as is poured forth every eve
ning from the mills of Union Street [in Manchester], magistrates would have assembled, special constables would have been sworn, the riot act read, the military called out, and most probably some fatal collision would have taken place.” What was so frightening to Taylor were not just the sheer numbers but the fact that the factory workers were new creatures, an unknown and uncontrolled breed, “new in its habits of thought and action, which have been formed by the circumstances of its condition, with little instruction and less guidance, from external sources.”70
Writing at almost the same time, Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, provided some of the most graphic descriptions we have of the miserable living conditions of English factory workers: their destitution, the meagerness and filth of their dwellings, their tattered clothing, the awful smell of their homes and the streets they lived on. (Manchester’s assistant poor-law commissioner described streets “so covered with refuse and excrementitious matter as to be almost impassable from depth of mud, and intolerable from stench.”) Like Blake, Engels compared life under the factory system to an idealized vision of preindustrial life, the “idyllic” world of cottage textile workers, who “vegetated happily,” self-sufficient if outside the realm of intellectual or political consciousness. For Engels, it was not just the poverty of the new working class that appalled him, but also the work itself, the machine-paced production, the “iron discipline” demanded by overseers, the “endless boredom.” “No worse fate can befall a man than to have to work every day from morning to night against his will at a job he abhors.”71
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