Much the same thing happens all through arable agriculture – from the hoeing to the threshing – a troop are wanted one day, scarcely anybody the next. . . . It is not the ‘pranks’ of the farmers that have caused emigration, or threats of it. The farmer is unable to pay high wages, the men will not accept a moderate reduction, and the idle crowd, in effect, tread on each other’s heels. . . .
Let the months roll by and then approach the same village along the same road under the summer sun. The hedges, though low, are green, and bear the beautiful flowers of the wild convolvulus. Trees that were scarcely observed before, because bare of leaves, now appear, and crowds of birds, finches and sparrows, fly up from the corn. The black swifts wheel overhead, and the white-breasted swallows float in the azure. Over the broad plain extends a still broader roof of the purest blue – the landscape is so open that the sky seems as broad again as in the enclosed countries – wide, limitless, very much as it does at sea. On the rising ground pause a moment and look round. Wheat and barley and oats stretch mile after mile on either hand. Here the red wheat tinges the view, there the whiter barley; but the prevailing view is a light gold. Yonder green is the swede, or turnip, or mangold, but frequent as are the fields of roots, the golden tint overpowers the green. . . .
Come again in a few weeks’ time and look down upon it. The swarthy reapers are at work. They bend to their labour till the tall corn overtops their heads. Every now and then they rise up, and stand breast high among the wheat. Every field is full of them, men and women, young lads and girls, busy as they may be. Yonder the reaping machine, with its strange-looking arms revolving like the vast claws of an unearthly monster beating down the grain, goes rapidly round and round in an ever-narrowing circle till the last ears fall. A crowd has pounced upon the cut corn. Behind them – behind the reapers – everywhere abroad on the great plain rises an army, regiment behind regiment, the sheaves stacked in regular ranks down the fields. Yet a little while, and over that immense expanse not one single, solitary straw will be left standing. Then the green roots show more strongly, and tint the landscape. Next come the waggons, and after that the children searching for stray ears of wheat, for not one must be left behind. After that, in the ploughing time, while yet the sun shines warm, it is a sight to watch the teams from under the same ash tree, returning from their labour in the afternoon. Six horses here, eight horses there, twelve yonder, four far away; all in a single file, slowly walking home, and needing no order or touch of whip to direct their steps to the well-known stables. . . .
Yet what a difficult problem lies underneath all this! While the reaper yonder slashes at the straw, huge ships are on the ocean, rushing through the ocean to bring grain to the great cities, to whom – and to all – cheap bread is so inestimable a blessing. Very likely, when he pauses in his work and takes his luncheon, the crust he eats is made of flour ground out of grain that grew in far distant Minnesota, or some vast Western State. Perhaps at the same moment the farmer himself sits at his desk and adds up figure after figure, calculating the cost of production . . . Then a vision rises before him of green meads and broad pastures slowly supplanting the corn; the plough put away, and the scythe brought out and sharpened. If so, where then will be the crowd of men and women yonder working in the wheat?
Richard Jefferies, Hodge and his Masters (1880)
FIVE
The Labouring Nation
The condition of the working class is the condition of the vast majority of the English people.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845)
In 1867, a Victorian statistician estimated that 11.4 per cent of the population comprised ‘higher skilled labour’, earning £73 to £60 a year; 38.8 per cent were ‘lower skilled labour’, earning £52 to £46; and 28.9 per cent were agricultural and unskilled labourers, earning £41 to £20. While constituting 79.1 per cent of the whole, clearly there were considerable divisions between the upper and lower strata of the working class, ‘so great,’ wrote Mayhew, ‘that it seems as if one were in a new land and among another race’.
The technological inventions of the late eighteenth century made the nineteenth-century industrial revolution possible; former farm-workers, their wives and children provided much of the workforce, as mechanisation was introduced only slowly: they were cheaper and more flexible than machines, and could be got rid of when not needed. Hours were very long, work wearisome, monotonous and strictly disciplined, wages poor, health and safety generally neglected. Workhouses sent pauper children to northern factories and mills as ‘apprentices’ (i.e., time-limited slaves), and six-year-old children could work for more than twelve hours a day. Enforced improvements in conditions, opposed and evaded by employers, came slowly. The Factory Act of 1809 set a minimum working age of nine and limited under-sixteens to a twelve-hour day, but this applied only to cotton mills; the 1833 Act introduced inspectors, compulsory schooling (of sorts) and limited under-eighteens to a twelve-hour day; the Ten Hour Act of 1847 limited women and young persons to a ten-hour day, but employers worked them in shifts to fit in with men working a fifteen-hour day. Acts in 1850 and 1853 limited the hours of all textile workers, who did ten and a half hours daily and seven and a half hours on Sunday. By the later 1870s, hours were generally further reduced, with many men not working on Sundays or Saturday afternoons.
In the mines, before 1842, boys between five and ten could work twelve hours a day, operating ventilation doors before graduating, like women, to dragging basket-loads of coal by chains attached to waist-belts. Bodies were distorted by hard labour in cramped conditions, and lung diseases were common. Above ground, boy chimney-sweeps might be bought for £5, working from the age of five for twelve to sixteen hours a day, acquiring ‘sooty warts’ or ‘sooty cancer’; not till 1875 was this stopped.
In pottery factories, boys worked twelve to fifteen hours daily, alternating between heated rooms and the open air, receiving perhaps 2s 6d a week, stunted growth, rheumatism, ‘potter’s asthma’ and lead or arsenical poisoning. Girls, bent over lace-making in poorly-ventilated, poorly-lit, overcrowded rooms developed short sight and chest diseases; others, making ‘lucifer’ phosphorus matches, developed ‘phossy jaw’, in which the jaw slowly rotted and was eaten away before an early death. Thousands of homeless or destitute children worked the streets as scavengers, crossing-sweepers or horse-holders; older girls went on to prostitution. Other young women, more fortunate, went into domestic service to provide the status requirements of middle-class wives obliged to be idle.
It is not clear that, by the 1840s, the working classes were gaining significantly from the industrial revolution, with poor working conditions, and with wives and children forced to work, while housing was often disgracefully inadequate – indeed, often life-threatening (in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, 50 per cent of children died before the age of five). Some employers set up model industrial settlements: W.H. Lever’s Port Sunlight, Salt’s Saltaire, Cadbury’s Bournville and the Rowntrees’ New Earswick. During the second half of the century, housing improved in quantity and quality, and mortality and birth rates declined.
Workers were by no means wholly submissive (though not revolutionary): trades union membership increased unstoppably, there were widespread engineering strikes and disputes in 1851–2, a major textile dispute in Preston in 1853–4, strikes and disputes in the Yorkshire and Staffordshire mines in 1864, a great wave of industrial unrest in many trades in 1871–3. Eventually, pay and conditions improved.
Overall, it appears that while there were only limited improvements for the poorer before the 1840s, there were significant improvements in wages and standards of living from the 1860s onwards. Industrialisation, for all its early inhumanities, made the working classes (like the rest) generally better off than they might have been otherwise (as comparisons with non-industrialised countries suggest), and working-class standards in Britain were generally higher than elsewhere in Europe. A vigorous, urban workin
g-class culture developed, its members, while still hard-worked and not well housed, healthier, more educated and confident, by no means ‘umble or repressed.
It’s the same the ’ole world over,
It’s the poor wot gets the blame,
It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure,
Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame!
Anon., music-hall song, late Victorian
* * *
‘THE SONG OF THE LOWER CLASSES’
We plough and sow – we’re so very, very low,
That we delve in the dirty clay,
Till we bless the plain with the golden grain,
And the vale with the fragrant hay.
Our place we know, we’re so very low,
’Tis down at the landlord’s feet:
We’re not too low the bread to grow,
But too low the bread to eat.
Down, down we go, we’re so very low,
To the hell of the deep sunk mines,
But we gather the proudest gems that glow,
When the crown of a despot shines.
And whenever he lacks, upon our backs
Fresh loads he deigns to lay:
We’re far too low to vote the tax,
But not too low to pay. . . .
We’re low, we’re low, we’re very, very low,
Yet from our fingers glide
The silken flow, and the robes that glow
Round the limbs of the sons of pride.
And what we get, and what we give,
We know, and we know our share;
We’re not too low the cloth to weave,
But too low the cloth to wear. . . .
Ernest Jones, Chartist (c. 1848)
THE BENEFITS OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM
This island is pre-eminent among civilised nations for the prodigious development of its factory wealth, and has therefore been long viewed with a jealous admiration by foreign powers. This very pre-eminence, however, has been contemplated in a very different light by many influential members of our own community, and has been even denounced by them as the certain origin of innumerable evils to the people, and of revolutionary convulsions to the state. If the affairs of the kingdom be wisely administered, I believe such allegations and fears will prove to be groundless, and to proceed more from the envy of one ancient and powerful order of the commonwealth towards another suddenly grown into political importance, than from the nature of things. . . .
The constant aim and effect of scientific improvement in manufactures are philanthropic, as they tend to relieve the workmen either from niceties of adjustment which exhaust his mind and fatigue his eyes, or from painful repetition of effort which distort or wear out his frame. At every step of each manufacturing process described in this volume, the humanity of science will be manifest . . .
In my recent tour, continued during several months, through the manufacturing districts, I have seen tens of thousands of old, young, and middle-aged of both sexes, many of them too feeble to get their daily bread by any of the former modes of industry, earning abundant food, raiment and domestic accommodation without perspiring at a single pore, screened meanwhile from the summer’s sun and the winter’s frost, in apartments more airy and salubrious than those of the metropolis, in which our legislative and fashionable aristocracies assemble. In those spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials, and assigns to each the regulated task, substituting for painful muscular effort on their part the energies of his own gigantic arm, and demanding in return only attention and dexterity to correct such little aberrations as casually occur in his workmanship. The gentle docility of this moving force qualifies it for impelling the tiny bobbins of the lace-machine with a precision and speed inimitable by the most dexterous hands, directed by the sharpest eyes. Hence, under its auspices, and in obedience to Arkwright’s polity, magnificent edifices, surpassing far in number, value, usefulness and ingenuity of construction the boasted monuments of Asiatic, Egyptian and Roman despotism, have, within the short period of fifty years, risen up in this kingdom, to show to what extent capital, industry and science may augment the resources of a state, while they meliorate the conditions of its citizens. Such is the factory system, replete with prodigies in mechanics and political economy, which promises, in its future growth, to become the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globe, enabling this country, as its heart, to diffuse along with its commerce, the life-blood of science and religion to myriads of people still lying ‘in the region and shadow of death’. . . .
The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans. On the handicraft plan, labour more or less skilled was usually the most expensive element of production – Materiam superabat opus; but on the automatic plan, skilled labour gets progressively superseded, and will eventually be replaced by mere overlookers of machines. . . .
Steam-engines furnish the means not only of their [workers’] support but of their multiplication. They create a vast demand for fuel; and, while they lend their powerful arms to drain the pits and to raise the coals, they call into employment multitudes of miners, engineers, shipbuilders and sailors, and cause the construction of canals and railways; and, while they enable these rich fields of industry to be cultivated to the utmost, they leave thousands of fine arable fields free for the production of food to man, which must have been otherwise allotted to the food of horses. Steam-engines moreover, by the cheapness and steadiness of their action, fabricate cheap goods, and procure in their exchange a liberal supply of the necessaries and comforts of life produced in foreign lands.
Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835)
THE WORKERS’ LIFE
Any man who has stood at twelve o’clock at the single narrow doorway which serves as the place of exit for the hands employed in the great cotton-mills must acknowledge that an uglier set of men and women, of boys and girls, taken them in the mass, it would be impossible to congregate in a smaller compass. Their complexion is sallow and pallid, with a peculiar flatness of feature, caused by the want of a proper quantity of adipose substance to cushion out the cheeks. Their stature low – the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times and at different places, being five feet six inches. Their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully. A very general bowing of the legs. Great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures. Nearly all have flat feet . . .
The mode of life which the system of labour pursued in manufactories forces upon the operative, is one singularly unfavourable to domesticity. Rising at or before daybreak, between four and five o’clock the year round, scarcely refreshed by his night’s repose, he swallows a hasty meal, or hurries to the mill without taking any food whatever. At eight o’clock, half an hour, and in some instances forty minutes, are allowed for breakfast. In many cases, the engine continues at work during meal-time, obliging the labourer to eat and still overlook his work. This, however, is not universal. This meal is brought to the mill, and generally consists of weak tea, of course nearly cold, with a little bread; in other instances, of milk-and-meal porridge. Tea, however, may be called the universal breakfast, flavoured of late years too often with gin or other stimulants.
At twelve o’clock the engine stops, and an hour is given for dinner. The hands leave the mill and seek their homes, where this meal is usually taken. It consists of potatoes boiled, very often eaten alone; sometimes with a little bacon, and sometimes with a portion of animal food. This latter is, however, only found at the tables of the more provident and reputable workmen. If, as it often happens, the majority of the labourers reside at some distance, a great portion of the allotted time is necessarily taken up by the walk, or rather run, backwards and forwards. . . .
As soon as this is effected, the family i
s again scattered. No rest has been taken; and even the exercise, such as it is, is useless, from its excess, and even harmful, being taken at a time when repose is necessary for the digestive operations.
Again they are closely immured from one o’clock till eight or nine, with the exception of twenty minutes, this being allowed for tea, or baggin-time, as it is called. This imperfect meal is almost universally taken in the mill: it consists of tea and wheaten bread, with a very few exceptions. During the whole of this long period they are actively and unremittingly engaged in a crowded room and an elevated temperature, so that, when finally dismissed for the day, they are exhausted equally in body and mind.
It must be remembered, that father, mother, son and daughter are alike engaged; no one capable of working is spared to make home (to which, after a day of such toil and deprivation, they are hastening) comfortable and desirable. No clean and tidy wife appears to welcome her husband – no smiling and affectionate mother to receive her children – no home, cheerful and inviting, to make it regarded. On the contrary, all assemble there equally jaded; it is miserably furnished, dirty and squalid in its appearance. Another meal, sometimes of a better quality, is now taken, and they either seek that repose which is so much needed, or leave home in the pursuit of pleasure or amusements, which still further tend to increase the evils under which they unavoidably labour. . . .
Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times Page 18