Babbage had turned to studying factories as a kind of tonic after suffering a dismal year in 1827, when he was thirty-six. In February his father, Benjamin, died; the generally very kindhearted Georgiana wrote to Herschel that “to feign sorrow on so happy a release would in me be an hypocrisy.”87 Charles inherited an estate worth £100,000, an enormous fortune in those days. Their happiness at this development was short-lived; in July their second son—his namesake, Charles—died at age ten. It was not the only time the Babbages buried a child; five of their eight children would die before adulthood. But even in those days of high infant mortality it was a severe blow to lose a child. Soon afterwards, Georgiana fell ill, while pregnant with their eighth child. Babbage took her to Worcestershire, to the home of her sister and brother-in-law. She died in childbirth there on September 4, aged thirty-five, along with the baby, Alexander.
Babbage was devastated. Herschel rushed to Worcestershire and brought his friend back with him to Slough. Babbage’s mother wrote to Herschel, “You give me great comfort in respect to my son’s bodily health. I cannot expect the mind’s composure will make hasty advance. His love was too strong and the dear object of it too deserving.”88 The depth of Babbage’s feelings for Georgiana may perhaps be plumbed by noting the fact that he never again mentioned her, in any of his letters, in his autobiographical works, or in his travel notebooks. He could not bear to speak of her at all. Reading through the hundreds of letters he wrote during his lifetime, it is clear that after her death his personality changed abruptly—the very tone of his letters is markedly different, becoming more sarcastic, impatient, critical. Jones wrote to Whewell with the news. “Poor Babbage—what an insufferable blow,” Jones commiserated. “I hope he will bear up against it bravely but I feel anxious to hear of him.”89
Herschel whisked Babbage off on a tour of Ireland, where they visited Maria Edgeworth, who had befriended all four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club during her long visits to London. While they were in Ireland, Herschel persuaded Babbage to take an extended tour on the Continent to distract him and help to relieve his sorrow.
Ever mindful of the duties of building his Difference Engine, Babbage first secured permission from the government to suspend his work on the project for a time and leave the country. Babbage put Herschel in charge of the ongoing manufacturing of parts for the machine, giving him an additional £1,000 as an advance on Clement’s charges. The children were left with relatives. Babbage left for Europe in October with one of his workmen, Richard Wright, as a traveling companion.
For over a year the two men toured Europe, roaming through Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. They visited tourist sites, factories, workshops, and universities. Babbage would often leave Wright behind to dine with the intellectual and social elite. In Italy he was introduced to members of the Bonaparte family, exiled from France; he already knew Napoleon’s brother Lucien, who lived in Worcestershire, but in Rome he met one of Lucien’s sons and his daughters Lady Dudley Stuart and the Princess Gabrielli. In Bologna he was introduced to Lucien’s stepdaughter, the Princess Ercolani.90 In Florence, Babbage visited with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, who received him “with a kindness and consideration which I can never forget.”91 In Vienna, Babbage ordered a four-wheeled, horse-drawn “caleche” of his own design, in which he could sleep, with many of the conveniences of a modern recreational vehicle: a lamp for cooking breakfast, large flat drawers in which he could store papers, underclothing, and dress coats, and hanging pockets for keeping different currencies, books, and telescopes and other instruments. At the end of his journey he sold it for half the price he had paid to have it constructed.92
During his trip, Babbage received a letter from his mother with happy news: he had been appointed the Lucasian professor at Cambridge. G. B. Airy, Babbage’s nemesis, had been appointed two years earlier (while Whewell was considering the position), but had just resigned to take up the Plumian Chair in Astronomy, a better-paid professorship.
Herschel and Whewell had canvassed hard for Babbage to receive the appointment, believing that holding the position would help him recover from his wife’s death. Babbage gratefully wrote Herschel, “The unceasing exertions of your friendship have become so habitual to me through life that I could not for a moment doubt the prime mover in an event which I look upon with feelings of the highest pride and gratification.”93 He would later report, with more than a little bitterness, that this appointment was the only honor ever bestowed upon him by his country. Babbage held the chair until he resigned it at the end of 1838. The duties were not onerous—the Lucasian professor was not even required to give lectures, though some previous holders of the chair did so. Babbage annoyed Whewell by never delivering one lecture, even though Whewell had promised the electors that Babbage would not hold the position as a mere sinecure. Babbage did at least appear at Cambridge annually when it was time to examine candidates for the Smith’s prize in mathematics.
When he returned from Europe, Babbage began to focus attention on the manufacturing system, and on political economy in general. Echoing the work of his friends, Babbage called for a reform of the method used by political economists to reach their conclusions. Economists should not be “closet philosophers” who theorized in the absence of facts. Rather, they should turn to the factory owners for information about manufacturing processes.94 By visiting factories throughout the world, he advised, the economist could learn the facts needed to make proper inductive inferences to economic theories. Babbage’s own study had led him to the conclusion that the English economy had begun to depend more on factory manufacturing than on agriculture, against Ricardo’s expectations. Adam Smith had made agriculture in general the cornerstone of Britain’s wealth; Ricardo had focused on corn—that is, the agricultural staples; but it was Babbage who placed the factory at center stage.95 Political economy as a science had not, until Babbage, kept pace with the Industrial Revolution.
In his book, Babbage rhapsodized on the global effects of England’s manufacturing economy: “The cotton of India is conveyed by British skill in the factories of Lancashire: it is again set in motion by British capital; and, transported to the very plains whereupon it grew, is repurchased by the lords of the soil which gave it birth, at a cheaper price than that at which their coarser machinery enables them to manufacture it themselves.”96 Even in Kozhikade, India, known to Europeans as “Calicut” (from which the cloth called calico derived its name), they now bought cloth made on British looms. While Karl Marx—who recorded seventy-three excerpts of Babbage’s book in 1845, as he and Engels sat in the Cheetham Hill library working their way through the British political economists—would later see something obscene in this destruction of the Indian cotton-weaving trade, Babbage saw it as part of a technological revolution that would benefit the whole world.97 After all, the Indians could buy better cloth at lower prices, thus freeing up their capital for other economic ventures. Babbage saw globalization as not only inevitable but desirable.
Babbage’s book provided an answer to what was being called by other writers on political economy “the machinery question”: Would the new labor-saving machines—mechanized weaving looms; machine tools such as the lathe, the planing machine, and the shaping machine; the threshing machine—reduce the demand for manual labor? By 1821 Ricardo had come to believe that the answer was yes; this was one reason for his pessimistic view of the future of the laboring poor. Babbage saw, correctly, that the answer was no—that workers would actually benefit from the mechanization of labor, just as mathematicians would benefit from a calculating machine. Many economic historians today believe that the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution were unskilled laborers: they were able to purchase a wider assortment of manufactured goods at lower prices, and their labor remained invaluable. As today, there were many tasks that could not be performed by machines, especially those requiring dexterity or “social intelligence,” the ability to interact with others.98 And machines
still required workers to run and maintain them.
Babbage dissented from Ricardo’s claim that the interest of the worker and that of his or her employer were opposed.99 In 1832, when he ran for a seat in Parliament as a liberal reformer for the borough of Finsbury (he was roundly defeated), Babbage told the voters that a member of Parliament should be able to explain “the complicated relations which bind in one common interest the various classes of a great community.”100 Because their interests were bound up with their employers, workers should not fear new machinery. Indeed, Babbage reassured the worker, what generally happens is that while human labor in one type of work might be displaced, other needs are opened up and new work can be found in another employment. So, for example, when the crushing mill superseded the labor of young women who had worked hard in breaking ores with flat hammers, no distress followed, because the women were soon engaged in dressing the ores (separating the valuable minerals from the rest), which was more skilled, better paid, and less physically demanding work.
Babbage sternly reprimanded those who harbored the Luddite impulse to break machinery. It was not possible to escape the future; causing harm to factory owners would only wreak havoc on the lives of the workers. Lord Byron, in his maiden speech before Parliament in 1812, had decried the dehumanizing effects of technology, pleading the plight of the workers in the lace mills of Nottingham. With the benefit of hindsight, Babbage more pragmatically pointed out that when the workers rose up and destroyed the lace frames, the factory owners simply moved their manufactories to Devonshire, leaving heavier unemployment behind (no doubt many of those unemployed lace makers ended up in the workhouse at Upton).101 At the same time, however, Babbage urged factory owners to consider enacting various profit-sharing schemes to give the workers a financial stake in increasing productivity; similar systems were in place in the mines of Cornwall, as Whewell had reported to him, as well as on whaling ships in America, where every member of the crew, from the captain to the cook’s assistant, held some share in the eventual profits at the end of the journey.
“Knowledge is power,” Babbage wrote, parroting Bacon and Herschel, but exemplifying the point in steel and steam: “Knowledge … is itself the generator of physical force. The discovery of the expansive power of steam, its condensation, and the doctrine of latent heat has already added to the population of this small island, millions of hands.” The government must fund efforts to generate scientific knowledge, because such knowledge was needed for the economic good of the nation. Even in his book on political economy, Babbage was canvassing the government for money to build his engine.
At the same time, he was giving the government free advice. Babbage recommended that Britain introduce the “penny post,” in which a letter’s postage was paid in advance by the sender, and a fixed amount was charged for any distance within Britain. Under the current system at the time, postage was paid by the recipient based on how far the letter had traveled. Babbage calculated that the cost of sorting the mail and determining the appropriate postage cost more than what the postal service earned by the extra postage. Eight years after Babbage’s book was published, Britain took up his suggestion and instituted the penny post.
Jones whispered to Whewell—just “entre nous”—that he was disappointed with the manuscript, which Babbage had sent to him for his comments. Although Babbage had described it to him as a book “like Herschel’s” Preliminary Discourse, Jones believed it to be a mere “bagatelle,” “full of ingenuity, precision and acuteness, and a strange collection of facts taken from his common place book—some striking and valuable—some trivial and uninteresting.”102 A look at the chapter headings of Babbage’s book confirms Jones’s impression of a private commonplace book, chock-full of wide-ranging, unrelated facts: “Employment of materials of little value—Goldbeater’s skin—horny refuse—old tinware … Most advantageous load for a porter … Tags of bootlaces … Evaporation of water of brine springs … Bleaching linen … Deepening of rivers in America … Spinning cotton … separation of dense particles by fluid suspension.…” Whewell agreed with Jones’s assessment, telling him that when Babbage compared his book to Herschel’s, Whewell “could not quite suppress an internal smile.” But Whewell still believed that “there is a great deal of ingenuity in his speculations.”103
“YOU AUTHOR YOU!” Whewell crowed with pride to Jones when his book finally appeared in February of 1831.104 Babbage was excited as well; recalling their discussions of economics during their philosophical breakfasts at Cambridge, he told Jones that he “recognize[d] the fruit and spirit of the undergraduate concerns of the good old set in every page.”105 Herschel praised Jones for finally making political economy “a rational enquiry … treated on broad inductive principles.”106
Jones opened his Essay on the Distribution of Wealth with a plea for an inductive method in political economy. Both Bacon and Herschel, true experts in the natural sciences, had given all men of science the proper method to use—Jones even printed excerpts from Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse in an appendix to the book. Yet political economists had diverged from this true path. Jones especially complained about Ricardo: “Mr. Ricardo was a man of talent, and he produced a system very ingeniously combined, of purely hypothetical truths; which, however, a single comprehensive glance at the world as it actually exists, is sufficient to shew to be utterly inconsistent with the past and present condition of mankind.”107 He did not take account of the way the world is, or how real, live human beings in the world actually do behave.
By ignoring the evidence, Ricardo was led into various absurdities, Jones insisted. Foremost was Ricardo’s claim that the rent relationship between a landowner and his tenant could be described by a single definition covering all places, at all times. Jones had found that, on the contrary, throughout history and across the globe there had been five different kinds of rent relationships. This was important because Ricardo used his assumption of a single definition—that which actually applied only at that specific time, in England, Holland, and parts of the United States, but nowhere else—to conclude his “repulsive” doctrine that the interests of the wealthy landowner are always opposed to the interests of everyone else. Ricardo’s claim that only the landlord benefits when the price of corn is high did not apply to most countries at that time, or to any place in the past, where landlords and farmers had different arrangements. In systems where the farmer is paid by a share of the crop, for instance, he, too, benefits when the price of corn is high, and so the landlord and tenant farmer share an interest in expensive corn.
Further, even in England where Ricardo’s definition of the rent relation did apply, Jones argued, the facts did not bear out the conclusion that the interests of the landowner and the other classes of society were opposed. Jones claimed instead, using all the evidence that he and his friends had painstakingly gathered from old pamphlets, tracts, and their travels, that the interests of all classes of society are intertwined—so that it is always in the interest of the upper classes to improve the situation of the lower classes.108 Farm owners, for example, benefit when they provide education and medical care to their laborers. As Whewell would put it in his review of Jones’s book, “The moral and social elevation of the lowest orders are inseparable conditions for any considerable and permanent prosperity of the highest.”109
Malthus’s population principle was wrong as well, Jones pointed out. He had not taken account of new technologies that increased the amount of food that could be grown on a given amount of fertile land: the mechanized plough, the seed drill, the threshing machine. In countries like South America, where there were enormous tracts of untilled fertile land, “how long might they go on increasing their food in geometrical progression!”110 Neither was the population principle an accurate description of England’s own history. Jones compared the present state of the population and food supply with that of pre-Elizabethan times in England, showing that it was not true that the population had grown geometrically while the
food supply had grown only arithmetically.111
Malthus was also wrong to suggest that population growth could not be controlled.112 Jones claimed that the desire for luxuries inevitably tends to lead men and women to limit the size of their families by sexual abstinence even within marriage—they realize that they must have fewer mouths to feed if they want excess money to spend on consumer goods. Although Jones allowed that the higher classes might exercise this restraint more often, he argued that the lower classes do so as well. (A recent book claims that during those years the poor actually limited the size of their families even more than the rich.)113 Jones tested this hypothesis by examining different classes in Ireland: agricultural workers, small shopkeepers and tradesmen, professionals, and finally high society, finding that at all levels a voluntary restraint on family size was used to raise the standard of living.114
The Philosophical Breakfast Club Page 16
