Yet almost any kind of work was preferable to the kind of life to which a man might be reduced had he to depend upon a local authority for his livelihood. At Andover in 1847 paupers were put to bone-crushing: they were so ill fed that they fought each other for the putrid gristle from the horses’ bones.12
53 ‘No One Knows the Cruelty’
After 1842 women and children under ten years of age were by law excluded from underground mining. Yet for many years thereafter both were still to be found working underground, just as they were still to be seen working in other places equally unpleasant. The Children’s Employment Commission discovered innumerable examples of children working full-time in industry at four or five years old in the 1860s; and, when they worked at home, they were put to their tasks as soon as they could be taught to use their fingers and for as long as they could be kept awake.
The commissioners reported cases of small boys and girls working for as little as 1s 6d a week in the pottery factories of Staffordshire, and working extremely hard, in fearfully hot temperatures and in ‘the poisoned atmosphere of the dipping house’. They were required to ‘come in before the men in the morning to light the fires in the stoves and to stay after the men have done work to sweep out the shops’. The commissioners also found little children working in match factories where the smell was ‘quite suffocating and one would think unendurable for any length of time’.
A wretched place, the entrance to which is through a perfectly dark room [reported a witness of one typical match factory]. Outside at the back the arrangements are even worse. There is a water-butt with a little tub of sickly green water in it. Here, I was told, the children wash. Beyond this is the yard … a few feet wide, filled in the middle with a stagnant gutter … Here the children eat their meals … At the end of this yard, with an open cesspool in front of it, is a single privy, common to all and in a very bad state.
There were children, too, in boot factories, where they had to sit so close together at work that they ‘not frequently’ struck each other in the face or eye with their needles: ‘many have lost an eye in this way’. Children were also employed in milliners’ factories like the one in Manchester in which they were kept at work, so an inspector of factories reported, for ‘unreasonably long hours’, in rooms heated by steam ‘almost to suffocating point and sc impregnated with gas that most of the young creatures complain almost continually of sore throats, loathing of the stomach, dizziness or vertigo and headaches’. Many other children worked in steel- and ironworks such as John Brown and Company’s in Sheffield where upwards of 6000 persons were employed, many of them ‘exposed to considerable heat and to the dangers from flying flakes of masses of red hot metal’. Yet others ground cast metal, ‘the unhealthiest kind of grinding known’, work which – without a fan – ‘almost certainly doomed them to much suffering and early death, probably at latest by the age of 30, perhaps much earlier’. That climbing boys still suffered as horribly as they had in the eighteenth century was made all too clear by the evidence the commission collected from master sweeps. One from Manchester deposed:
In learning a child, you can’t be soft with him, you must use violence. I shudder now when I think of it. I myself have gone to bed with my knee and elbow scraped and raw, and the inside of my thighs all scanned. We slept five or six boys in a kind of cellar with the soot bags over us, sticking in the wounds sometimes. That and some straw were all our bedclothes … Dozens die of consumption … They are filthy in their habits. Lads often wear one shirt right on till it is done with. I have been for fifteen months without being washed except by the rain. Why I have been almost walking away with vermin.
The usual age at which boys begin now is from six upwards [another sweep reported]. I began myself at a little over five. They are generally the children of the poorest and worst-behaved parents who want to get rid of them and make a little bit of money by it as well. It is as bad as the Negro slavery, only it is not so known … The use of boys for climbing seems to harden the women more than the men. Only lately [1863] a woman who had put her child to a sweep followed me and threatened to pull my hair for speaking against having climbing boys … I had myself formerly boys as young as 5½ years, but I did not like them. They were too weak. I was afraid they might go off … They go off just as quietly as you might fall asleep in the chair, by the fire there … I have known eight or nine sweeps lose their lives by the sooty cancer. The [private] parts which it seizes are entirely eaten off. There is no cure for it once it has begun.
At one time the number of climbing boys was brought very low [according to the vivid account of George Ruff, master-sweep of Nottingham]. But lately they have been very much increased … The law against climbing boys is a dead letter here. At first a paid agent was employed by some ladies and gentlemen in the town to watch the sweeps, but he was given up … The use of boys is much encouraged by the fact that many householders will have their chimneys swept by boys instead of by machinery … I have been sent away even from magistrates’ houses, and by some cases even by ladies who have professed to pity the boys, for refusing to use them …
No one knows the cruelty which they undergo in learning. The flesh must be hardened. This is done by rubbing it, chiefly on the elbows and knees with the strongest brine, as that got from a pork-shop, close by a hot fire. You must stand over them with a cane, or coax them by a promise of a halfpenny, etc. if they will stand a few more rubs.
At first they will come back from their work with their arms and knees streaming with blood, and the knees looking as if the caps had been pulled off. Then they must be rubbed with brine again, and perhaps go off at once to another chimney. In some boys I have found that the skin does not harden for years.
The best age for teaching boys is about six. That is thought a nice trainable age. But I have known two at least of my neighbours’ children begin at the age of five. I once saw a child only 4½ years in the market-place in his sooty clothes and with his scraper in his hand …
Nottingham is famous for climbing boys. This is on account of the chimneys being so narrow. A Nottingham boy is or was worth more to sell.
A boy of about 7 or 8 was stolen from me once. As he was in the street a man seized him in his arms, carried him off to a lodging-house, and stupefied him with drugged tea. After the tea the child fell into deep sleep and lost all his appetite. An inspector and I traced him to Hull. The boy was so glad to find that ‘master’ had come. The man had said that if they had got him to France, they should have had £10 for him.
Formerly the sweeps, as they said themselves, had three washes a year, viz. at Whitsuntide, Goose Fair [October], and Christmas. But now they are quite different. This is owing a great deal I think to a rule which we brought about of taking no orders after twelve midday, and washing then. The object of this was to let boys go to school in the afternoon.
At first most did, but they do not now. A lady complained to me because she could not get her chimney done, and said, ‘A chimney sweep, indeed, wanting education! what next?’
The day’s work here generally begins at about 4 or 4½ a.m., and lasts for 12 hours, including going round for orders. A man and boy together will earn in a fair full day 6s, but perhaps one day they may sweep 20 chimneys, another half-a-dozen.
The younger boys are more valuable, as they can go up any chimney. When they get too big to climb, which in town chimneys is about 15, or 16, in the large country chimneys a few years older, they are unfitted for other employments.1
There were few occupations in which children, and their parents, did not incur some kind of danger to limb or health. Most dippers in the Potteries sooner or later suffered from painter’s colic or paralysis and many were crippled at an early age; workers in match factories contracted diseases of the lungs or lost their jaws, some as early as eleven or twelve years old; turners in the ribbon trade in Coventry ‘suffered in the brain and spinal cord, and some have died of it’. Newspapers were full of reports of accidents in factories, many of them fatal.
In a matter of a few summer weeks of one year the Manchester Guardian, in addition to various other serious injuries, recorded several deaths in Lancashire factories; one boy died ‘from lockjaw after his hand had been crushed by the wheels of a machine’; three days later another ‘youth died of dreadful injuries after being caught in a machine’; soon afterwards an ‘Oldham girl died after being swung round fifty times in machinery belting, every bone in her body being broken’; three days after this ‘in Manchester a girl fell into a blower [a machine used in preparing raw cotton] and died as a result of serious injuries’.2
As for deformities and diseases caused by excessive labour in factories, a Leeds surgeon testified to the Factories Enquiry Commission that among hundreds of working children he had examined, distortions of the spine, knock knees, fallen arches, varicose veins, leg ulcers and chronic dyspepsia were all common.
Innumerable cases of scrofula, affections of the lungs, mesenteric diseases have also occurred [he said]. Asthmatic cases, and other affections of the lungs, particularly of those who are employed in the dusty parts of the mill, not infrequently occurr … The nervous energy of the body I consider to be weakened by the very long hours and a foundation laid for many diseases … The general appearance of the children in Leeds immediately struck me as much more pallid, the firmness of the fibre much inferior … and [their size] more diminutive … than the children of the adjacent country.3
It would be natural to draw the conclusion that these poor children, like their parents, must of necessity be ‘badly nourished’ and ‘badly clothed’, Friedrich Engels wrote.
And there is ample evidence, to bear this out. The vast majority of the workers are clad in rags. The material from which the workers’ clothes are made is by no means ideal for its purpose. Linen and wool have practically disappeared from the wardrobes of both men and women, and have been replaced by cotton … Even if the workers’ clothes are in good condition they are unsuitable for the climate … The heavy cotton, though thicker, stiffer and heavier than woollen cloth … of which gentlemen’s suits are made … does not keep out the cold and wet to anything like the same extent as woollens … The growing habit of going about barefoot in England has been introduced by Irish immigrants [there were so many of these that by 1871 there were no less than 567,000 Irish-born people living in England and Wales, almost 200,000 of them in Lancashire]. In all factory towns we can now see, particularly women and children, going about barefooted and this custom is gradually being adopted by the poorer class of English.4
From the inadequate clothes of the poor in the industrial towns of the north, Engels turned his attention to their food and found that equally unsatisfactory:
The workers only get what is not good enough for the well-to-do. The very best food is to be had in all the big towns of England, but it is expensive, and the worker, who has only got a few coppers to spend, cannot afford it. The English worker is not paid until Saturday evening. In some factories wages are paid on Fridays, but this desirable reform is far from general. Most workers can only get to market on Saturdays at four, five or even seven o’clock in the evening, and by that time the best food has been purchased in the morning by the middle classes. When the market opens, there is an ample supply of good food, but by the time the worker arrives the best has gone. But even if it were still there, he probably could not afford to buy it. The potatoes purchased by the workers are generally bad, the vegetables shrivelled, the cheese stale and of poor quality, the bacon rancid. The meat is lean, old, tough and partially tainted. It is the produce either of animals which have died a natural death or of sick animals which have been slaughtered. Food is generally sold by petty hawkers who buy up bad food and are able to sell it cheaply because of its poor quality …
Both producers and shopkeepers adulterate all foodstuffs in a disgraceful manner, with a scandalous regard for health.5
Engels’s strictures may have been partisan but they were not unduly exaggerated. The Liverpool Mercury provided numerous examples of the ways in which butter was adulterated, sugar mixed with pounded rice, cocoa with fine brown earth, tea leaves with ‘sloe leaves and other abominations’, pepper with dust, flour with chalk. Shopkeepers and tradesmen were regularly prosecuted – in 1844 eleven butchers were punished for selling tainted meat – yet ‘the impudent and dangerous practices continued’.
‘Is it your opinion that adulteration is very prevalent?’ an expert witness, a doctor, was asked by a Parliamentary committee in the 1850s.
‘I find adulteration to be very prevalent [he replied]. It may be stated generally that it prevails in nearly all articles which it will pay to adulterate … The adulterations practised are very numerous … Bread is adulterated with mashed potatoes, alum and sometimes with sulphate of copper … coffee with roasted wheat … saw dust, mangel-wurzel and a substance resembling acorns … flour with alum … milk with water and annatto [a cheap fruit juice] … tea with … sycamore and horse chestnut leaves … vinegar with sulphuric acid … Most of those articles are not simply adulterations of an innocuous character, but they are many of them injurious to health, and some of them even poisonous. I think there can be no question but that is the case.’6
Towards the end of the century, however, adulteration of food seems to have presented less of a problem, and the diet of most working people began to improve. Certainly there were improvements in factory conditions, and in the lot of women and children as the Factory Acts were extended and more and more trades were brought under government control. After 1868 it was illegal to employ children under eight in agricultural gangs; after 1870 it was required that all children under ten should go to school; in 1874 it became illegal to employ children younger than that full-time. By the time the 1881 census was taken there were appreciably less children in regular work than there had been twenty years earlier.
At the same time working hours were growing shorter. Operatives in the textile industries had, after a long struggle, been granted a sixty-hour week in 1850; and in 1874 this had been lowered to fifty-six and a half hours’ work, ten hours from Mondays to Fridays and six and a half hours on Saturdays. These shortened hours of labour, as well as Saturday half holidays, were thereafter gradually extended to other industries also. By the Bank Holiday Acts of the 1870s further holidays were given for most though by no means all workers on Boxing Day, Easter Monday, Whit Monday and the first Monday in August.
Work also began to be less dangerous. In the 1870s 1000 miners were still being killed every year in underground disasters, and many more were being injured; almost as many railway workers were losing life or limb: no less than 767 were killed in 1875 and nearly 3000 injured. Before the campaign of Samuel Plimsoll, brewery manager turned coal merchant, resulted in the implementation of the Merchant Shipping Acts, countless numbers of sailors lost their lives at sea through the overloading of vessels. But by the time the century came to an end, government intervention, a more enlightened approach to their workforces on the part of masters and managers, and improved safety measures had combined to ensure that the horrifying figures of earlier years had been greatly reduced.
54 Middle Classes and Class Distinctions
Writing in 1887, the year of the queen’s jubilee, the novelist and historian of London, Sir Walter Besant, whose life almost exactly spanned the Victorian age, suggested that in any useful study of the times in which he was living ‘the great middle class’, which was ‘supposed to possess all the virtues [and] to be the backbone, stay and prop of the country’, ought to have a chapter to itself.
Besant himself had been born in 1836 in a middle-class home in Portsmouth, the fifth of the ten children of a moderately prosperous merchant and, looking back to the days of his youth, he described how different the middle class was then from what it had since become.
In the first place [he wrote], it was far more a class apart. In no sense did it belong to society. Men in professions of any kind (except in the Army and Navy) could only belong to society by ri
ght of birth and family connections; men in trade – bankers were still accounted tradesmen – could not possibly belong to society. That is to say, if they went to live in the country they were not called upon by the county families, and in town they were not admitted by the men into their clubs, or by ladies into their houses … The middle class knew its own place, respected itself, made its own society for itself, and cheerfully accorded to rank the deference due.
Since then, however, the life of the middle classes had undergone great changes as their numbers had swelled and their influence had increased. Their already well-developed consciousness of their own importance had deepened. More critical than they had been in the past of certain aspects of aristocratic life, they were also more concerned with the plight of the poor and of the importance of their own values of sobriety, thrift, hard work, piety and respectability as examples of ideal behaviour for the guidance of the lower orders. Above all they were respectable. A French schoolmaster, Paul Blouet, recorded that while staying with an English family, one of the sons offered to accompany him on a Sunday morning walk. As they were leaving the house Blouet picked up his walking stick. ‘Take an umbrella,’ the young man advised him. ‘It looks more respectable.’1
There were divergences of opinion as to what exactly was respectable and what was not: in some families drinking in moderation and going to dances and the theatre were considered perfectly acceptable activities, in others ‘fast’. There were, nevertheless, certain conventions which were universally recognized: wild and drunken behaviour was certainly not respectable, nor were godlessness or overt promiscuity, nor an ill-ordered home life, unconventional manners, self-indulgence or flamboyant clothes and personal adornments.2 In her remarkable novel The Young Visiters, the alarmingly observant Daisy Ashford shows how, even at the early age of nine, a Victorian girl understood the importance of clothes in the appurtenances of a gentleman. Her hero, Mr Salteena, ‘an elderly man of 42’ who is upon his own admission ‘not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice it’, is even sent a top-hat when he is invited to stay with one Bernard Clark, a friend ‘inclined to be rich’. It is a most splendid top-hat, ‘very uncommon’, Mr Salteena is assured, ‘of a lovly rich tone rarther like grapes with a ribbon round compleat’. Mr Salteena’s own clothes – his ‘white alpacka coat to keep off the dust and flies’, his compleat evening suit (which he wears for dinner at Clark’s ‘sumpshuous’ house, Rickare Hall, because he believes it ‘the correct idear’), not to mention the ‘ruby studs he had got in a sale’ – are quite put in the shade by it. At the Crystal Palace, where it is hoped Mr Salteena may grow more gentlemanly and seemly by mixing with the earls and dukes who have ‘privite compartments’ there, his clothes are examined with distaste by the Groom of the Chambers, Edward Procurio. This very superior servant, who smiles upon Mr Salteena ‘in a very mystearious and superier way’ when he carries in his early-morning beverage, continues to smile to himself as he pulls up the blinds:
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