by Ben Russell
Gin Lane, 1751, engraved by T. Engleheart in 1833 after an original by William Hogarth. The image came to symbolize the evils of the 18th-century gin craze.
In short, much of the nation sought to be ‘drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence.’11
People’s capacity for drinking was matched by their appetite for violence. In 1770 the Riot Act had to be read to quell rebellious pupils at Winchester College.12 Moritz noted on his travels, ‘We breakfasted at Dartford. Here . . . I first saw (what I deemed a true English sight) in the street two boys boxing.’13 The chances of running into trouble were such that Horace Walpole commented, ‘One is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going to battle.’14 And if violence and drink often accounted for life being nasty and brutish, illness meant that it was frequently short. Complications in childbirth could spell the end for both mother and child. One in three children died before the age of five and life expectancy at birth was about 35 years. Infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, dysentery and typhus cut swathes through the population, and death could come from the most unexpected directions – even the lead used in cosmetics could finish off the fashionable.
Britain in the eighteenth century was, in many respects, a society of extremes. Samuel Pepys may have been an erudite diarist, but thought little of defecating in his own fireplace.15 Marriage was for life, unless curtailed by death – highly likely – or, less likely, you could get a private Act of Parliament to have it annulled. A woman could only make a will with her husband’s permission but he, if he chose, could have it rendered void after her death. In fact, Blackstone’s Commentaries on English law, published between 1765 and 1769, noted pithily that ‘In marriage husband and wife are one person in law, the very being or legal existence of the woman is . . . consolidated into that of the husband.’16 A medical operation could transform genteel appearances into bloody horror. Failure of an erstwhile respectable business could mean financial ruin and destitution – a debtor owing more than 40 shillings could be arrested and imprisoned for up to twelve months purely on the word of his creditor.17 The grim brick back-to-back slums of an industrial town might be punctuated by ‘fine stone buildings with Corinthian columns’, as if comprising ‘a medieval town with the marvels of the nineteenth century in the middle of it’.18 There were few, if any, safety nets to catch those who fell or faltered.
Watt’s early encounters with this world, his upbringing and training in the rudiments of business offer a valuable insight into the infrastructure that facilitated Britain becoming the world’s first industrial nation. Britain in the eighteenth century was an increasingly populous, mobile and highly interconnected society, and this was manifested in a number of ways. The surging population was underpinned by a range of physical networks and institutions. These supported a robust and enduring class structure, and to negotiate their way through this networked, class-conscious world, people had to master the tools of polite commerce. For all its polarities, British eighteenth-century society was a fertile place for young men like Watt to make their way.
It was a world which, broadly, didn’t go hungry: Britain could feed itself. In 1700 only about one-third of Britons worked in farming. That this relatively small group of people could feed the nation suggests they were very productive – in fact, output per farm worker in 1705 was twice that in France, and had increased by 25 per cent by 1750.19 There are many reasons for this. Crop rotation ensured that nutrient levels in the soil were replenished. Communal open fields were replaced by enclosure, consolidating land into bigger farms run more efficiently by a single farmer. And the amount of land actually being farmed grew, from 11 million to more than 14 million acres between 1700 and 1850.20 All this paid dividends: corn output increased by almost half in the eighteenth century, and the number of sheep being reared more than doubled.21 There were some periods during the wars against Napoleonic France when the nation briefly stared food shortage in the face. However, the scenario envisaged by the political economist Thomas Malthus – food supply rising arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) while the population grew geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32) – was averted. Farming held its own and provided a firm foundation for industrial growth.
Britain’s population was also growing rapidly – from about 6.5 million in 1700 to about 10.5 million in 1800 – with growth rates exceeding 10 per cent per decade from 1780 through to the end of the nineteenth century.22 This increase was based on nuptiality, or the propensity for people to get married and the subsequent desire to start a family. The trend towards marrying earlier was based largely on the increasing availability of work opportunities, not just in farming but in new and expanding industries. People felt more secure financially, and because they no longer had to wait for their parents’ demise to inherit their land, they married younger and were fertile for longer. More people meant more demand for products, more workers to be ‘drilled into a supple labour force’ and more people capable of devising new technological ideas.23 All these factors helped sustain population growth once it had begun.24
The growing population was also increasingly mobile. Some people moved around to undertake apprenticeships – William Murdoch later walked from Scotland to Birmingham to join James Watt’s engine making business, for example.25 Others worked seasonally in farming, and navvies hopped from project to project digging canals. American traveller Louis Simond commented:
You meet nowhere with those persons who never were out of their native place, and whose habits are wholly local . . . To go up to town from 100 or 200 miles distance, is a thing done on a sudden . . . In France the people of the provinces used to make their will before they undertook such an expedition.26
And the Romantic poet Robert Southey was struck by how travel ‘is one of the pleasures of the English; and people . . . set out upon a journey of two hundred leagues to amuse themselves’.27 That distance – over 1,000 kilometres – is certainly an exaggeration, but accounts do show that contemporaries thought little of walking tremendous distances. Robert Hamilton, for example, missed his coach from Fenton in Staffordshire to Birmingham one day in May 1796 and walked the 39-mile journey instead; in fact, he regularly walked or rode 20 miles every day around Birmingham and Staffordshire.28
So, eighteenth-century Britain was getting more populous, and its people were increasingly likely to travel in pursuit of work and new opportunities. It was against this background that Watt was born on 19 January 1736, at Greenock, on the estuary of the River Clyde. His father was a merchant, chandler and ship-owner, trading in coal, herring and salt, who built and owned shares in ships for both the ocean and coastal trade. He was also something of a local statesman – ‘a member of the town council, a magistrate and a zealous promoter of the improvements of the town’ – and an occasional inventor, constructing new pulley blocks for ships and Greenock’s first crane for handling bales of tobacco.29 His mother Agnes Watt was from a long-established Greenock family, ‘a fine-looking woman, with pleasing, graceful manners, a cultivated mind, an excellent understanding, and an equal cheerful temper’.30 In all, they were a respectable middle-class family.
Watt was the fourth child for Agnes and James Senior but the first to survive past infancy. Their first child died in April 1730 at only two and a half months. Then at the end of 1732 came a daughter, who died aged just over a year old, and a son who died at fourteen months in August 1734. With this catalogue of infant mortality, his parents must have been continually worried for James, who had a frail constitution as a boy, being troubled by poor health and migraines which made him ‘languid, depressed and fanciful’. He subsequently received much of his education from his mother and tutors – Robert Arrol taught him the basics of Latin, and John Marr mathematics.31 Young Watt absorbed himself in reading. He was fascinated by chemistry and mathematics and scribbled sums in chalk on his bedroom wall when he forgot his slate.32 The breadth of Watt’s reading is demonstrated by a portion of his book collection, which survives in the care of the Science Museum Librar
y. Alongside treatises on chemistry, such as Robert Dossie’s The Elaboratory Laid Open, or; The Secrets of Modern Chemistry and Pharmacy Revealed (1758), Richard Brookes’s The General Practice of Physic (1751) and David Fordyce’s Dialogue Concerning Education (1745), can be found later additions, like John Croft’s Scrapeana (1792), describing itself as ‘A medley of choice bon mots, repartees, &c. to which is added, a large collection of Yorkshire anecdotes’ – a reminder that Watt later became fond of some ‘light amusing reading’.33
As his parents look on, the young Watt experiments with the steaming kettle. Herbert Bourne after Marcus Stone, Watt’s First Experiment, 1879.
But he was not just content to read, and sought to expand from ideas into practice. His study of anatomy was accompanied, rather alarmingly, by being seen ‘carrying off a child’s head that had died of some uncommon complaint’.34 There survives in Watt’s workshop a set of Napier’s bones, a basic calculating device, which was most likely made by Watt as a young man. It is rather crude and is covered with Watt’s practisings of his signature. But it is the practical counterpoint to his book study of mathematics. And because of his father’s profession, Watt would have been surrounded by the stuff of running ships at sea: rigging, sails and sheets, blocks and tackle, capstans and more. He assembled his own set of tools, with which he built a model house and crane, and constructed a small forge for working metal. One acquaintance even recalled Watt retiring to the ‘Old Mansion-house of Greenock’ and there spending hours ‘lying upon his back, to watch through the trees the wondrous movements of the stars’.35 If this presents an image of a rather quiet, solitary boy, we are reminded that he ‘was not wanting in sociability, but frequently entered into all the amusements of his school-fellows’.36 Book learning was matched by a dry sense of humour, and Watt soon had a chance to put both to the test. He stayed in Greenock until April 1753 but, that month, set out for two years work acting as his father’s agent in Glasgow. This was his introduction to the world of commerce.
Moving to Glasgow placed Watt at the commercial hub of western Scotland. The quays lining the Clyde Estuary were crowded with bales of tobacco and boxes of herring, bar-iron, hemp for sails and nets, timber for boats and houses and salt for preserving fish. Greenock became an embarkation place for emigrants sailing to America, and other ships linked the town to Ireland, the West Country and the Highlands.37 Later, in 1790, a canal connected the Clyde to the Forth, linking the region to Edinburgh on a new east–west trade route.38
Watt Senior traded all sorts of goods around the Clyde. A letter he received from his son titled ‘Invoice of goods bought at Glasgow’ records tanned skins, padlocks, a quire of marble paper, two dozen pencils and more.39 Young Watt’s job was to source everything his father needed – from pencils to padlocks – and look out for commercial opportunities in the city. His uncle John Muirheid was on hand to show him the ropes. Perhaps one of the earlier things Muirheid may have taught young Watt was the need to project an air of respectability, and this can be seen in a list of clothes Watt took with him to Glasgow, including ‘almost new’ shoes, ‘rufled’ shirts, a number of Holland nightcaps, stockings, waistcoats, breeches and much else.40 This is very much the wardrobe of a young gentleman about town settling accounts on his father’s behalf, not just a workshop apprentice.41
In fact, his cousin Marion Campbell recalls that while in Glasgow, Watt
met with good society, and formed friendships with several intelligent and well-educated young men; they had frequent evening meetings to give or receive information. These gentlemen acknowledged and appreciated Mr Watt’s superior abilities.42
This image of Watt and his young acquaintances offers a glimpse of the webs of contacts which coalesced in so many places across Britain, often based in the new coffee houses that were springing up everywhere. Watt was using one in Glasgow for his financial dealings in 1756, and London had more than 500 by 1739.43 Their influence endures today: the insurance market Lloyd’s of London started as a coffee house, and the layout of the trading floors remains based on the wooden booths and stools used by its eighteenth-century inhabitants. Luckily for Watt, and for us, the quality of the networks established over coffee was better than that of the coffee itself – Karl Philipp Moritz advised his readers in 1782, ‘I would always advise those who wish to drink coffee in England, to mention before hand how many cups are to be made with half an ounce; or else the people will bring them a prodigious quantity of brown water.’44 More seriously, in Watt’s group we have a microcosm of a whole society which was tremendously interconnected. And this interconnectedness manifested itself in three ways: in the infrastructure of everyday life, in Britain’s social structure and at the level of individuals. To use the analogy of human anatomy, the first comprised the body’s blood vessels and nervous system, the second the skeleton and the third the individual living cells.
Coffee fuelled many commercial and philosophical transactions. In this recreation of a meeting between Watt and his friends in Birmingham’s Lunar Society, the coffee pot sits prominently on the table.
Watt and his acquaintances would have discussed many of the networks which aided and abetted their everyday lives, from the difficulties of travel to local government. Road travel could best be described as problematic. The most useable highways were old Roman roads which still had their original surfaces left, but even these were prone to subsidence, turning into ditches which became morasses of mud. The main road between London and Exeter could become up to a quarter of a mile wide in the winter as traffic took detours around really difficult stretches.45 Others were rivers in all but name – witness the road from Hull to Leeds, which Daniel Defoe recorded as lying in ‘low, flat, miry country’ flooded with rainfall from the surrounding hills which, ‘for want of a proper current to carry such waters off, [inundated a] great part of the road, which is frequently under water’.46
One solution was to build turnpike roads, paid for by users. By 1770 there were 15,000 miles of turnpikes, centred around the most important industrial areas of the time – Shropshire, the West Midlands and the West Country.47 In some places they were unpopular, it being reported that ‘ill designing and disorderly persons . . . in several parts of this Kingdom associated themselves both by day and night, and cut down, pulled down, burnt, and otherwise destroyed several turnpike gate and houses.’48 In fact there were turnpike riots in Herefordshire in 1732 and near Bristol in 1749, and opposition to toll roads around Leeds and Bradford erupted into a full-scale rebellion in 1753 which had to be suppressed by troops. However, improvements to roads profoundly affected communications. Practically nowhere in England could not be reached within four days.49 Stagecoaches carried brief, scribbled ‘intelligences’ of the latest news and local newspapers began to carry the prices in London markets for the benefit of suppliers across the country.50 A mail coach might make the journey from London to fashionable Bath in fifteen hours, and another hour would see it in Bristol.51 By 1756 these unprecedentedly high speeds were being applied to a system of mail coaches to Plymouth and Swansea, and north to York and Newcastle. The emerging road network smoothed the flow of news, people and ideas.
If roads sped the passage of relatively portable things like news or ideas, more bulky items went by boat. By 1750 Britain had 1,500 miles of navigable rivers; by 1830 canals had added about another 2,500 miles and the older regional networks had been joined up by ‘trunk’ routes linking together the Thames, Mersey, Trent, Humber and Severn.52 Well might François de La Rochefoucauld describe ‘the water-circulation in England . . . as abundant as the blood-circulation in the human body’.53 Canals were supplemented by coastal shipping. No part of the country is more than 70 miles from the sea, and the coastal trade became big business: three times more vessels were engaged in the coastal trade than took part in international voyages.54 In 1774, 1,800 vessels hefted coal from Newcastle to London, while 900 more carried other freight – mainly raw materials, grain and other bulky items – and the size
of each individual ship doubled in the 25 years after 1750.55 Adam Smith calculated that up to eight men with a sailing vessel could transport 200 tons of freight which, if it went by road, would need 50 wagons, 100 men and 400 horses and take three times longer.56 Efficient shipping was crucial to the industrializing economy.
Greenock in 1768, by Robert Paul of Glasgow. The town, where Watt was born and spent his early life, was an important port and maritime centre.
Just as roads and ships knitted together Britain’s internal networks, so the principal role of the government was to ensure the security of the whole and pursue expansion overseas. And, just as many British citizens liked a fight, so the country itself was extraordinarily pugnacious. Britain fought seven wars against France alone during the eighteenth century and was involved in overseas military operations for 75 years between 1692 and 1802. The main job of central government was to raise the money to pay for its war-fighting capability: financing war accounted for up to two-thirds of all government spending, and taxes rose eighteenfold in real terms over the course of the eighteenth century for that reason.57 But beyond raising taxes, central government played only a relatively small role in Britain’s domestic economy. As much as possible was administered locally; there were, for example, 23,000 Customs and Excise men keeping the tax revenue flowing to only 43 central Treasury officials.58
The ‘hands-off’ approach of central government was commented on by many overseas visitors, one of whom noted:
the greatest benefit which the government confers . . . is that of doing nothing at all: in the whole of this country there are no regulations . . .and, in the eyes of an impartial traveller, England has the appearance of being a hundred times richer than France.59