Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  George Stephenson went on to build engines and railways that formed the foundation of the railway age. Eager railroad builders bought the first engines to be used in the United States from the Stephenson works, while his railway building focussed on the industrial areas of the north of England. Other engineers like Joseph Locke and Isambard Brunel took on the baton, sometimes in competition and occasionally in partnership with Stephenson. His influence established his preferred gauge as the industry standard, while Brunel used a wider gauge on the Great Western Railway, believing his tracks would never be joined to others. When railways in different parts of the country were joined into a national network a commission decided on the narrower Stephenson gauge (4 ft 8.5 in) for all railways.

  Stephenson had shown the way by taking railways out of the collieries and ironworks and into the world of passenger transport. Soon railway travel itself became an enjoyable pastime. One of the first railway excursions was run in 1841 from Sheffield to Derby with fares of 7s for first class, 5s for second class, and 4s for third class who travelled in open wagons. Some 2,000 people embarked on the great adventure with five engines pulling a total of forty-five carriages and wagons. Several hats were lost along the way but the only casualty was a worthy gentleman who in his excitement at arriving at Wicker station stood up and fell overboard.15

  Railways quickly went from private ventures into being the basic infrastructure for the nation’s transport. As they were built and run by individual companies at their own risk, the result was a fairly haphazard network, including many duplications of routes and multiple stations in the same town serving different lines; Rotherham, for example, by the mid-nineteenth century a town of around 40,000, had three railway stations. But while private companies put up the money, the government took an interest from the beginning. In 1838 Parliament decreed that railways should carry the mail and when the telegraph was invented the following year, telegraph wires ran alongside railway tracks. But it was the Railway Act of 1844 that created a national transport system. Parliament obliged every railway company to run at least one train per day with carriages available for third-class passengers. The train should run over the whole of their track in both directions and travel at a minimum of 12 mph; the carriages should have seats and be protected from the weather; and the lowest fares charged should not exceed 1d per mile.

  While the coal industry drove the early development of railways, it was to be the steam railways that drove the expansion of the coal industry through the nineteenth century, consuming huge quantities of fuel and transporting coal easily to other customers. In 1869 railways were using around 2 million tons of coal per annum; by 1900 that had risen to 12 million tons. The number of passengers carried increased from 5.5 million in 1838 to 30 million in 1845 and to 111 million in 1855. The number of miles of railway grew from 500 miles in 1838 to 5,000 miles in 1848 and 10,000 miles in 1860, by which time the basic network of British railways was complete. In 1846, when railway speculation reached its peak, 272 Acts of Parliament giving permission for the forming of railway companies were passed.16

  While railways had begun as carriers of bulk cargo over short distances, long-distance rail now moved coal throughout the country. The figures speak for themselves:

  1834 2,100,000 tons came to London by sea; 2,000 tons by canal.

  1846 3,400,000 by sea; 60,000 tons by canal; 8,000 tons by rail.

  1880 3,700,000 tons by sea; 6,200,000 tons by rail.

  The development of a rail network made it easy to get coal to London from any of Britain’s coalfields; the monopoly enjoyed by the north-east and the east coast shippers was severely eroded. But shipping was the next mode of transport to benefit from the application of steam power – something that had been tried with little success by different inventors in the eighteenth century. The age of ocean-going steamships arrived in 1838 with the launch of Brunel’s Great Western and by the 1870s the screw propellor and high-efficiency compound engines made ocean travel affordable and safe, transporting millions of migrants from Europe to the Americas over the next decades. Steamships also became military weapons of great strategic value.17

  Some have argued that the heroic age of British engineering came to a halt in the 1860s. Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson died in 1859, and the latter was given one of the grandest state funerals of the age. By that time other countries were catching up with British industrialisation, while the nation was beginning to suffer from the ‘English disease’ whereby men who make money from industry and commerce educate their sons to become gentlemen who abhor endeavour, and look down on the artisan skills that enabled their forefathers to shake the world. Few such afflictions hampered German or American engineers, who became expert at the skill that had driven the original Industrial Revolution – the ability to turn ideas about making things into commercial industrial machines and processes.

  VII. Money

  ‘The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach, but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.’

  ADAM SMITH, 1776

  20. Producers and Consumers

  THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION was driven not just by ingenuity, it was also powered by money. Money created demand for goods, it allowed investment in commerce and industry and it changed the ways that people thought about their lives and their work. Since the Renaissance certain parts of Europe – particularly northern Italy and Flanders – had led Europe from a medieval mindset based on faith and tradition towards a commercial culture based on finance, trade and wealth. But it was Britain that was to make the most of this new world, emerging as the richest nation and using its wealth to transform the fate of humanity. We will first see why Britons became the wealthiest people in the world, before examining how they spent their money, and the profound effects that brought about.

  The early modern period had seen a remarkable divergence in the fortunes of European citizens. In 1525 average wages for unskilled workers in London, Amsterdam, Vienna and Florence were roughly equal at around 3 g of silver per day. A century later London and Amsterdam wages had grown to 7 g, while wages in Vienna and Florence stood at 4.5 g. By 1725, the gap between southern and northern Europe had widened further, with London workers averaging around 11.5 g and Amsterdam 9 g while in Vienna and Florence wages had decreased to just 3.5 g per day. In fact, by the eighteenth century workers in southern Europe barely earned a subsistence wage, while in England many workers could expect three to four times the cost of their basic needs.1

  We have seen how this wealth had been created by the English wool trade, the divergence into craft manufacturing and the historic decline of the Mediterranean in favour of the Atlantic as the trading highway of Europe. Investment in a powerful navy, the success of the North American colonies and trading ties with India, combined with military victories over her Dutch and French rivals, had seen Britain dominate Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade.

  While global trade opened up markets and gave access to raw materials, Britain’s existing prosperity, built on the solid economic foundations of the wool industry, saw work, wages and profits distributed throughout its population. And while international commerce enabled Britain to expand its trading base, its economic foundations remained in wool and craft manufacturing. The spread of wealth across the country and through the population gave purchasing power to a large number of people and in the process created a new kind of society and economy. Well, nearly new. In fact, the Dutch had led the way, creating a society with a large middle-class element in the seventeenth century. The population of the Netherlands was much smaller than Britain’s in the following century, but the Dutch example provides striking evidence of a new kind of consumption and a new kind of ‘luxury’. In the seventeenth century ordinary Dutch citizens could buy goods like Delft tiles, cabinets, tables and chairs, as well as tobacco pipes, watches, silverware, tapestries and ceram
ics which had all been produced by local craftsmen. This was not rabid consumerism nor a narrow search for social status; people chose to acquire items of quality from an indigenous craft tradition in order to create a sense of domestic well-being. The burghers of the Dutch Republic were sober Calvinists with a strong puritanical streak, but they had built the first consumer society – albeit in a refined way: they were aware of the dangers of avarice and personal ambition and tended to buy with an eye to the purpose and quality of goods.2

  The British ‘middling classes’ came to consumerism about a hundred years after the Dutch, and their views of what should be bought and why were remarkably similar, at least to begin with. British reflections on luxury were framed by the strong sense of disdain for the immediate past, in particular for the court of Charles II. As the economist Thomas Mun wrote in 1664: ‘The general leprosie of our piping, potting, feasting, fashion, and the mis-spending of our time in idleness and pleasure . . . hath made us effeminate in our bodies, weak in our knowledge, poor in our treasure, declined in our valour, unfortunate in our enterprises, and condemned by our enemies.’3

  Historians therefore talk of the Old Luxury of the Restoration and the New Luxury of the eighteenth century.4 As well as the search for exquisite refinement and status, the key element of the Old Luxury was that it could not be replicated by the lower orders. This followed an age-old pattern in which elites distinguished themselves by acquiring foreign materials and goods that the rest of society could not afford or gain access to. The New Luxury that began to emerge around 1700 was different: this was a leap to a new state of consuming, born out of the wider availability of disposable income. Old Luxury was dictated by the court, New Luxury was generated by urban society, and because the new consumerism aimed to give affordable comfort and pleasure, rather than simply social status, it multiplied and diffused throughout society.

  In the course of the eighteenth century the ability to buy household goods and fashionable clothes spread out from the middle class to all except the poorest in society: shopkeepers, traders, small manufacturers and workers had the means to buy items beyond their most basic needs. By the early decades of the eighteenth century the average unskilled British worker could afford a diet that included bread, meat, eggs and cheese, as well as beans, peas and beer. He or she regularly bought other essentials like fuel for cooking and heating, candles, linen cloth, lamp oil and soap, still leaving enough over for occasional luxury items such as tea, sugar, coffee, chocolate and tobacco.5 Studies of household inventories from 1675 to 1725 show that workers possessed basic items such as tables, benches, cooking pots and pewter vessels, while many also had books, clocks and looking-glasses, curtains, china, and utensils for making and drinking tea.6 At the same time new types of furniture emerged: court and press cupboards, chests of drawers, cabinets, as well as new styles of tables and chairs.7

  Contemporary writers noted the thirst for more goods and luxuries, but belonging to the better classes they often misjudged the motives of those below them and assumed that the poor wished simply to emulate the rich. In 1726 Daniel Defoe declared that ‘The poor will be like the rich and the rich like the great . . . and so the world runs onto a kind of distraction at this time.’8 While in 1714 the philosopher Bernard Mandeville wrote: ‘We all look above ourselves and fast as we can, strive to imitate those that some way or other are superior to us.’9

  Sir James Steuart writing in 1767 hints at other motives: ‘Let any man make an experiment of this nature upon himself by entering into the first shop. He will nowhere so quickly discover his wants as there. Everything he sees appears either necessary, or at least highly convenient; and he begins to wonder (especially if he be rich) how he could have been so long without that which the ingenuity of the workman alone had invented.’10

  The middle classes were not, in general, intent on aping their social betters; instead they were equipping themselves for a more comfortable life, while at the same time expressing their status in an increasingly fluid social environment. In this new world, in contrast to the courtly society of England’s past – a society that at the time still held sway in France, Spain and the Austrian Empire – social standing did not mean ostentation, but expressed itself in taste and the acquisition of high-quality goods. The purchase and possession of goods began to be viewed differently. High-quality items were both a way to a comfortable and decent life by enhancing the home, and a mark of social standing, and so consuming became a social virtue not a vice. Rather than emulating the luxury of the aristocrats, these new consumers were creating a new world. In the telling phrase of one historian these ‘social groups are not so much looking above as they are looking ahead’.11

  Contemporary writers began to see that consumption helped the national economy; the British overwhelmingly bought home-produced goods like furniture, crockery and cutlery rather than imported luxuries like French jewellery or Venetian glass, thereby boosting domestic manufacture and commerce. The philosopher David Hume was one of the first to argue for the virtue of consumption, claiming that acquiring goods ‘improved knowledge and increased sociability.’12 Consumption forced producers to refine and improve the ways of making goods, which would in turn stimulate arts and sciences. The desire to acquire goods, Hume argued, also gave people an incentive to work, which could otherwise only be provided by force.

  The arguments in favour of consumption reached their apogee with Adam Smith, who in 1776 argued that while humans have selfish tendencies, they also take pleasure from seeing others thrive. Smith also argued that humans do not just go out and buy all at once for the present, they consider things in the context of their lives, over time. So they will, if possible, buy goods that are durable in the same way they decide on investment in goods, property, enterprises and education.

  The desire for more comfort was a catalyst for innovative technologies in lighting, heating, furniture, pottery, glass and cutlery. The ability to buy books now extended to working families who were thereby able to provide their children with some basic education. Even the construction of houses improved, making ordinary people even more inclined to furnish their dwellings well. Gilbert White noted in his parish of Selborne in Hampshire in 1788 that mud dwellings for the poor had been replaced by brick and stone houses with ‘upstairs bedrooms, and glass in the windows’.13 Josiah Wedgwood also saw an improvement from the subsistence farming of his youth: ‘the workers earning nearly double their former wages, their houses mainly new and comfortable, and the lands, roads and every other circumstance bearing evident marks of the most pleasing and rapid improvements’.14

  The purchase of clocks and watches in particular revealed both the growing affluence and the care with which people used their money. Considering that the pendulum clock had only been invented by Huygens in 1657, ownership of clocks spread very quickly: 54 per cent of household inventories in Kent listed clocks in the years 1720–49. Pocket watches started to become fashionable around 1700 and by 1775 over 150,000 were being made in Britain every year. Watches were expensive but working people regarded them as status symbols – sailors at the end of a voyage or good fishing trip, farm workers at harvest, inheritors of small amounts of money, all bought watches for themselves and to pass on to their children.15

  So the British consumer on the eve of industrialisation was, for the most part, a sober and discriminating buyer, interested in high-quality goods that would last, give pleasure and comfort for a lifetime, and could even be passed on to future generations. However, in the late eighteenth century that attitude began to change and the most obvious indication of it can be found in the consumption of food. Sir Frederick Eden, writing in the 1790s, cited the example of a forty-year-old gardener who earned 30d a day – a typical London labourer’s wage. He was able to afford one loaf of wheat bread, half a pound of meat, several ounces of cheese, a pint of beer, and some tea and sugar per day, as well as new shoes and clothes from time to time. Two of his four children went to school. He bought coal in the w
inter, and rented a house with a garden where he grew fresh vegetables.16

  Note how the income of a fairly lowly worker brought not only a varied and plentiful diet but also allowed for what would have been regarded as luxury items a century before. Tea, sugar, coffee, chocolate, tobacco and spices were shipped in from foreign parts by the same ships that took British manufactured goods to overseas markets. In the 1630s around 300,000 kg of tobacco was imported annually from North America to Europe, mainly to the Dutch Republic and England. By 1700 consumption was around 35 million kg and by 1790 it had reached 60 million kg. Imports of tea rose from almost zero in 1700 to 1 million kg in 1720 and then 14.5 million kg per annum by the 1790s. Coffee consumption rose too, reaching 50 million kg in Europe in the 1780s – a fifty-fold increase in sixty years.

  Along with tea and coffee came sugar. This was not an inevitable mixing: the Chinese drank tea and grew sugar from the tenth century but never used them together. But Europe got a taste for sugar: around 1650, roughly 20 million kg were imported per year; by 1770 this had risen to 200 million kg, and had doubled again by 1820. In 1797, Sir Frederick Morton estimated that workers in southern England were spending 11 per cent of their wages on sugar, treacle and tea.17

  While these luxuries were becoming standard items, some staple foods were adapted to the changing needs of a society on the move. Bread had traditionally been made from coarse grains, including rye, which would keep well and could be made or bought twice a week. But in the course of the eighteenth century people began to prefer finely ground wheat bread which didn’t keep and was sold fresh and preferably hot as a kind of convenience food. When wheat grain became scarce in 1801 Parliament passed the Stale Bread Act, which temporarily outlawed the sale of fresh hot bread, seeing it as a waste of scarce resources.