5
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
In Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby, published in 1844, a character struck by the technological capabilities of the time remarks: “I see cities peopled with machines. Certainly, Manchester is the most wonderful city of modern times.”1 By then, about two-thirds of British cotton production was carried out in factories; steam technology was substituting for muscular power; and the first general purpose railway between Liverpool and Manchester had opened more than a decade before. Modern industry was on the rise. But for all the glory surrounding the city of Manchester and other industrial powerhouses, there was far-reaching concern that the benefits of machines were not being widely shared. The same year that Coningsby appeared, Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. The work was written during a stay in Manchester, yet unlike the contemporaries who were impressed by its armies of machines, Engels believed that machines served only to reduce the incomes of ordinary people, while benefiting a few industrialists: “The fact that improved machinery reduces wages has also been as violently disputed by the bourgeoisie, as it is constantly reiterated by the working-men.… The English middle classes prefer to ignore the distress of the workers and this is particularly true of the industrialists, who grow rich on the misery of the mass of wage earners.”2 The attitudes of laborers and the “middle sort” toward technological progress differed greatly.3 As David Landes writes, the middle and upper classes were convinced that they were living in the best of all possible worlds. To them, technology was a new revelation, and the factory system provided the evidence to justify their new religion of progress. But the working poor, “especially those groups by-passed or squeezed by machine industry … were undoubtedly of another mind.”4 While industrialists marveled at the rise of machines, workers often resisted their introduction and expressed their fear of unemployment in verses like the following one:
Mechanics and poor labourers
Are wandering up and down
There is nothing now but poverty
In country and in town;
Machinery and steam power has
The poor man’s hopes destroyed,
Then pray behold the numbers of
The suffering unemployed.5
The laboring poor surely had much to complain about. The conditions of the working class did not improve before the 1840s, and for many people, living standards were deteriorating. In rapidly growing manufacturing cities like Manchester and Glasgow, life expectancy at birth was some ten years shorter than the national average, which was only forty years anyway. A significant increase in incomes might have compensated for the undesirable side effects of working and living in factory cities, but such compensation was largely absent. Although some evidence suggests that wages in factory cities were higher than in rural regions, compensating in some measure for the dirty and unhealthy conditions, there was no urban wage premium in the north of Britain, when costs of living are factored in as well.6 During the classic years of the Industrial Revolution, output experienced an unprecedented expansion, yet the gains from growth did not trickle down to labor.7 In the period 1780–1840, output per worker grew by 46 percent. Real weekly wages, in contrast, rose by a mere 12 percent.8 Taking into consideration that average working hours increased by 20 percent in the period 1760–1830, it is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that hourly earnings declined in real terms for a sizable share of the population.9 The gains of the Industrial Revolution instead went to the pioneers of industry, as the rate of profit doubled.10 As the capital share of national income expanded, Peter Lindert has calculated that the income share captured by the top 5 percent almost doubled as well, increasing from 21 percent to 37 percent in the period 1759–1867.11
Various definitions and measurements of material standards support the view that many commoners fared worse during the early days of the industrialization process. There is a broad consensus that the average amount of food consumed in England did not increase until the 1840s.12 Beyond food, households reduced their share of expenditures on nonessential manufactured goods. The retrenchment of consumption among the laboring classes meant that the growing demand for such goods came from the middle classes. Indeed, there was rapidly growing inequality in consumption over the classic years. While overall consumption among households increased, the percentage of households that could afford nonessentials declined among factory workers and those trapped in farming over the first half of the nineteenth century.13 Though controversial, biological indicators similarly suggest that overall material living standards declined. Bearing in mind that all other things being equal, people who enjoy better nutrition grow to be taller, adult heights can be used as an indicator of people’s material standards.14 Building on this intuition, scholars have shown that the cohorts born in the early 1850s were shorter than any cohort born in the nineteenth century, and that the levels attained in the first decades of the century were not attained again before its last decade.15 These studies show somewhat different temporal patterns, yet they concur that by 1850 men were shorter than they had been in 1760.
When discussing the decline in biological indicators of material standards, it is hard to separate nutrition from disease and general public health. Poor health was a critical issue during the Industrial Revolution, and its causes were intensely debated among contemporaries. Edwin Chadwick, whose 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain investigated the matter, was of the view that public health was mainly an environmental issue. Industrialization spread disease among the poor because they lived in increasingly unhealthy environments. Solving the public health crisis was thus a matter of coping with the health challenges of industrial towns, such as garbage removal, drainage, and providing clean drinking water. In contrast, William Alison, a distinguished professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, insisted that low wages were a cause of poor public health. Unemployment, disappearing incomes, and poor nutrition, he argued, were critical factors in explaining the health conditions of ordinary people.16
Both explanations have some merit. One consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the rise of industrial centers, which were infamous not only for their lack of aesthetic appeal but also for their overcrowded and unhealthy environments. As incomes vanished and employment opportunities gradually declined in the countryside, workers increasingly moved to urban areas. In the period 1750–1850, the share of the population living in cities with more than five thousand inhabitants surged from 21 percent to 45 percent. Because of the horrendous living conditions in industrial towns, economic historians speak of an “urban penalty” associated with the rise of the factory system.17 Even in 1850, life expectancy in Manchester and Liverpool has been estimated at thirty-two and thirty-one years, respectively—well below the national average of forty-one years.18 But while the view of Chadwick can probably account for much of this difference, vaccination against smallpox was the most dramatic change in the disease environment of the period—which suggests that estimates of the decline in material standards should, if anything, be revised down even further. Moreover, the environmental perspective glosses over the fact that lower incomes also translated into poorer nutrition and shorter people. Even if incomes grew on average, many ordinary citizens saw their incomes vanish while middle-class incomes pulled away, as was also the case in America, where food prices rose more rapidly than the wages of working-class people in the early days of industrialization. A study by the economic historians John Komlos and Brian A’Hearn of the American path to industrialization concludes:
The decrease in nutritional status of the American population during the structural change brought about by the onset of modern economic growth is inferred from the decline in average physical stature for more than a generation beginning with the birth cohorts of the early 1830s. The decline occurred in a dynamic economy characterized by rapid population growth, urbanization, and industrialization. The decline in
nutritional status was associated with a rise in both mortality and morbidity. These hitherto hidden negative aspects of rapid industrialization were brought about by rising inequality and a marked increase in real food prices, which induced dietary changes through the substitution away from edibles toward non-edibles. The implication is that the human biological system did not thrive as well as one would theoretically expect in a growing economy.19
The Conditions of England Question
What caused the misfortunes of the commoner? Even if wages in Britain were higher than in most other places, contemporaries worried that things were changing as machines were depriving people of their jobs. This belief was expressed long before Engels pondered the conditions of the working classes. For example, Sir Frederick Eden’s famous inquiry into The State of the Poor in Britain in the 1790s expressed far-reaching concern that those living in workhouses—which provided employment and accommodation for the poor—were being made redundant by machines. Eden declared:
Many persons complain of the introduction of machines into the woollen manufacture; and are of the opinion, that the engines for spinning, and carding wool, do not only deprive the industrious Poor, here, of employment, but are a great national disadvantage: I confess, that, to me, all the arguments I ever heard on the subject, would go to prove, that the land should be dug by labourers, and not cultivated by plows, and horses.… It is a great national misfortune that the woollen spinner can, by means of machines, do ten times the work he could perform without them.20
As mechanization picked up in industry and agriculture, concerns over the so-called machinery question intensified over the course of the early nineteenth century. Among economists, David Ricardo argued that “the opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy.”21 His famous chapter On Machinery, which asserted that machines reduce the demand for undifferentiated labor and lead to technological unemployment, prompted a number of theoretical approaches to prove that such unemployment was only a short-term problem.22 Yet fear of machines, if anything, picked up over the following decades. Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose writings capture many of the concerns of the time, frequently echoed the sentiment of laborers toward machinery. In Gaskell’s Mary Barton, set in Manchester in the period 1839–42, a character remarks before a Parliamentary hearing in London: “Well, thou’lt speak at last. Bless thee, lad, do ask ’em to make th’ masters to break th’ machines. There’s never been good times sin’ spinning-jennies came up. Machines is th’ ruin of poor folk.”23 Contemporaries also worried about the effects of machines on workers’ wages, dignity, morality, independence, and social status. Dickens, who had visited several Manchester factories in 1839 and had himself suffered poverty and hardship, was appalled by the conditions in which people lived and worked. His novel Hard Times draws upon those impressions. Similar to Marx, who contended that “the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him,” Dickens’s fictional descriptions of the industrial landscape of Coketown, where “the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness,” stress the repetitive aspect of factory work, portraying the worker as enslaved to the mechanical force of the factory.24
Beginning in the 1830s, the machinery question came to form part of the broader debate on the “conditions of England question”—a term first coined by Thomas Carlyle to refer to the conditions of ordinary workers in Britain during the classic years of the Industrial Revolution. Carlyle was a fierce critic of industrialization and believed that machines served only to degrade workers. Other social reformers, like Peter Gaskell and Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, similarly thought that the long hours worked in the factories and the enforced focus of workers on the repetitive motions of machines absorbed people’s attention to such an extent that adverse effects on their moral and intellectual development were inevitable.25 The domestic system was often described in idealized terms in contrast with the factory and was commonly referred to as the golden age of industry. Relative to people residing in industrial towns, it was argued, families in the countryside were protected from any outside influence that might injure their children’s moral development, allowing their parents to guide their thoughts and feelings. And it was widely believed that domestic industry upheld the family structure, while the factory crowded together workers who had previously been scattered over various parts of the country, creating a new socially deprived class.26
Even if the contrasts were exaggerated, there can be no doubt that workers in the domestic system lived lives very different from those of their factory counterparts. In the domestic system, the absence of any clear separation between home and workshop meant that the artisan spent more of his time with his wife and children. The artisan worked according to his own needs, not the needs of any master. Although he had to work long hours, he decided for himself when a day’s work began and when it ended. The repulsion felt by many workers toward the factory is thus easy to understand. To them, the factory, with its enforced hours and lack of freedom, closely resembled a prison. As Landes writes, the factory system “required and eventually created a new breed of worker, broken to the inexorable demands of the clock.”27
Similar to the apocalyptic scenarios painted of the future of artificial intelligence today, people at the time of the Industrial Revolution saw a future in which technology would do more harm than good. Gaskell firmly believed that he was only witnessing the beginning, suggesting that in the future production would be almost entirely automated, with severe adverse consequences for employment:
The adaptation of mechanical contrivances to nearly all the processes which have as yet wanted the delicate tact of the human hand, will soon either do away with the necessity for employing it, or it must be employed at a price that will enable it to compete with mechanism. This cannot be: human power must ever be an expensive power; it cannot be carried beyond a certain point, neither will it permit a depression of payment below what is essential for its existence—and it is the fixing of this minimum in which lies the difficulty.…
The time, indeed, appears rapidly approaching … when manufactories will be filled with machinery, impelled by steam, so admirably constructed, as to perform nearly all the processes required in them, and when land will be tilled by the same means. Neither are these visionary anticipations; and these include but a fraction of the mighty alternations to which the next century will give birth. Well then, may the question be asked—what is to be done? Great calamities must be suffered.28
Gaskell was certainly no revolutionary, but it was his work that inspired Engels to ponder the conditions of the working classes, whose misery he attributed to the factory system. Engels’s compatriot, Marx, with whom he wrote the Communist Manifesto, later expanded on Engels’s work in an extensive chapter on machinery in Das Kapital, arguing that “machinery, when employed in some branches of industry, creates such a redundancy of labour in other branches that in these latter the fall of wages below the value of labour-power.… [N]owhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.”29
Overall, machinery critics of the Victorian Age raised more questions than they answered. Yet they prompted defenders of mechanization—including Charles Babbage, Andrew Ure, and Edward Baines—to make a case for it. Babbage’s On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures presents machines as a helpful complement to the worker’s labor, suggesting that “various operations occur in the arts in which an assistance of an additional hand would be a great convenience to the workman, and in these cases tools or machines of the simplest structure come to our aid.… The discovery of the expansive power of steam [has] already added to the population of this small island, millions of hands.”30 And
in addition to making workers more productive, Ure declared that it was only with the spread of machines that new and better-paying jobs could be created, allowing ordinary people to climb the economic ladder:
Instead of repining as they have done at the prosperity of their employers … good workmen would have advanced their condition to that of overlookers, managers, and partners in new mills, and have increased at the same time the demand for their companions’ labour in the market. It is only by an undisturbed progression of this kind that the rate of wages can be permanently raised or upheld. Had it not been for the violent collisions and interruptions resulting from erroneous views among the operatives, the factory system would have been developed still more rapidly and beneficially for all concerned than it has been, and would have exhibited still more frequently gratifying examples of skillful workmen becoming opulent proprietors.31
This was also the view of Baines, who felt that powerful agitation among workers in industrial cities was chiefly motivated by “imagination and feeling much stronger than their judgement.”32 Like Babbage, Baines viewed machines as complements to labor rather than substitutes for it, and he argued that all classes of laborers employed in aid of machinery are well remunerated for their work. He added: “Instead of workmen being drudges, it is the steam-engine which is their drudge.”33 Examining data on 237,000 workers employed in cotton mills, Baines suggested that their wages were sufficient to buy not only necessities, but also many luxuries. Although his data showed that their nominal wages declined in the period 1814–32, he suggested that improvements in machinery allowed them to buy cheaper goods, compensating for that decline. Nonetheless, Baines observed that hand-loom weavers replaced by the power loom were in a “deplorable condition both in large towns and in villages; their wages are a miserable pittance, and they generally work in confined and unwholesome dwellings.”34
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