Again in 1769, at a time when the political world was exercised by ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’, Josiah Wedgwood opened his vast pottery works of some 350 acres beside the Trent and Mersey Canal in Staffordshire and named it Etruria in homage to its classical predecessors; thus the factory could be given the illusion of a picturesque past, even if its principles were thoroughly modern. Wedgwood effectively inaugurated the age of beautiful china in England. It was he who introduced neo-classicism to the English consumer and customer. This was one of the more aesthetic consequences of industrial change, but one which had taken place without any great technological innovation.
Two years after the establishment of Etruria Richard Arkwright built a factory at Cromford in Derbyshire to accommodate his newly invented machinery, and then constructed a village to house his hundreds of workers, men, women and children. The water-frame itself, built in units of 1,000 spindles, created the first pure English cotton cloth. As a result cotton became the paramount product of the textile industry. By the early nineteenth century cotton was king. An anonymous poem, The Temple of Nature, published in 1803, celebrated the mighty change:
So Arkwright taught from cotton-pods to cull,
And stretch in lines the vegetable wool;
With teeth of steel, its fibre knots unfurl’d
And with the silver tissue cloth’d the world.
If the Dutch could erect a statue to the man who taught their nation how to cure herring, it was asked, surely a statue might be raised for the creator of a great national manufacture and manufacturing system?
Some observers, however, tilted at the first factories in the manner of Don Quixote riding at windmills. They were compared to workhouses, which indeed in certain respects they resembled; workhouses themselves were known as ‘houses of industry’, and the first factory for the production of steam engines was known in 1702 as a ‘workhouse’. There was a connection perceptible to contemporaries between the forced regulation of the poor and the treatment of industrial workers. The manufactories were also compared to army barracks, with the same emphasis on strict timing, order and efficiency.
The new industrial system, still in its very early stages of growth, came out of a practice that has become known as ‘proto-industry’ or ‘primitive capitalism’. It centred upon domestic labour, whereby agricultural workers and their families spun and wove as well as worked the land. Daniel Defoe described it well in the course of his tour of Britain when he crossed the Pennines. He visited the premises of a large clothier and found ‘a house full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, some dressing the cloth, some in the loom’. In the immediate area were innumerable cottages ‘in which dwell the workmen who are employed, the women and children of whom are always busy carding, spinning etcetera’. Any child over four years old was gainfully employed.
It was in a literal sense a cottage industry with a small merchant, or small capitalist, putting out the raw material for spinning or weaving to the families of agricultural workers before collecting the finished yarn or cloth at a stated time. The farmer’s wife, and the farmer himself, would work the loom at all hours; the carding, spinning and weaving took place at the same time as the harvesting of wheat, peas and beans. The independent cottagers might sell socks and cheese, hogs and cloth. In Lincolnshire cow dung could be used to make fuel, while hog dung was used as a bleaching agent for cloth; hence the saying about Lincolnshire, ‘where the hogs shit soap and the cows shit fire’.
Cloth-making was ill-paid labour, dependent upon seasonal change, and generally took place in cramped and filthy conditions. The cottagers worked through the night, and in darkness, because they were too poor to own a light. They worked through the frost and cold, when the fields yielded nothing. The weavers and tailors called the summer ‘cucumber time’, because that was all they could afford to eat. Industrialism did not seem at the time to be the greater evil.
The origins of industrialism are hard to find precisely because they are ubiquitous. Some say that the small merchants who became ‘putters out’ to the agricultural workers in time became master manufacturers by bringing twenty or thirty looms within one building. Others say that the pressure of an ever-growing population led ineluctably to cities and to mass employment in the industry of cities. Between the years 1760 and 1830 the population grew from 6.1 million to 13.1 million; it had in other words more than doubled in size. The land did not need the people. So they gathered in urban conurbations where employers were happy to use cheap labour on a larger and larger scale. Other consequences inevitably followed; more houses had to be built, and transport improved.
Some say that technical change and innovation were the spark of industrialism, an incremental process sometimes interrupted by giant leaps forward like the introduction of the steam engine or of complex and efficient textile machinery. It was often claimed, in this context, that the British were in any case a thoroughly empirical and practical people, free of the French and German predilection for theory; that is one generalization which has in fact been accepted over time. Louis Pasteur once remarked that ‘chance favours only the mind that is prepared’. It was said that every factory had its own inventor.
Others say that industrialism was fuelled by cheap credit and that its rapid growth was prompted by the abundance of capital combined with an interest rate of approximately 3 per cent. England was a rich country, made evident in the subscriptions to the Bank of England and the myriad ‘bubbles’ on the Stock Exchange. An opportunity had now come to invest in industries that had an illimitable future. The remarkable increase of foreign trade in the last six decades of the eighteenth century has also been invoked as the motive for further industrialization.
Another incentive came from the absence of government intervention; it cleared the ground a little, with low interest rates, but it did not attempt to direct industrial policy. There was no active opposition to technological change or improvement, and what obstruction there was came from irate workers who found their livelihoods being taken away by machines. The government did nothing.
Other causes for the speed of industrialism have been adduced. There were no wars on home soil; the political system remained infinitely adaptable, and there was no revolution like that within France. Politics is only part. The factories encouraged economies of scale but, more importantly, they increased specialization of labour.
The power of science, and rational calculation, mightily impressed the commercial classes; watches, clocks and precision instruments, like lathes and planing machines, were the appurtenances of the age. It was not unusual to see microscopes and telescopes in the grander homes; the barometer became a conversation piece. From 1675 to 1725, the proportion of richer London homes with clocks on display rose from 56 per cent to 88 per cent. By 1800, 8,000 men worked on watches in Clerkenwell, each with his own particular speciality. John Harrison, the man who solved the problem of longitude in 1759, fashioned the chronometer that Captain Cook took with him on his voyages around the world.
One other, perhaps more spiritual, cause may be mentioned for radical industrial change. The ubiquity of dissent among experimentalists and innovators, and the role of the dissenting academies in training young men in practical skills, has led many to conclude that the Protestant spirit of independent thought and practice had been a contributing fact to the rise of industrialism. The Catholics were believed, quite unfairly, to be incapable of facing new frontiers. It would be unwise to pick out any one of these putative causes or themes, however, as the most significant. If we may steal from Romans 8:28, all things worked together for good, at least for those who considered it good.
The nature of the change has also been interpreted in a hundred different ways. It is now described as ‘the Industrial Revolution’, but the phrase was never used at the time. It was coined by a French socialist, Auguste Blanqui, in 1837 and was then taken up seven years later by Friedrich Engels in an essay entitled ‘The Condition of England’. It was then widely publicized by Arnold
Toynbee in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England, published posthumously in 1884. If this indeed were a revolution there was nothing sudden or shattering about it. It can best be seen as part of a cycle that lasted for approximately a hundred years. The increase in national growth seems to have started in the 1740s, and then made rapid advances in the 1780s and 1790s, with a further increase in the 1830s and beyond.
If the term did not exist, how was the reality to be interpreted by contemporaries? Were they even aware that something surprising or unfamiliar was happening all around them? Arthur Young in his Political Arithmetic, published in 1774, asked his readers to ‘consider the progress of everything in Britain during the last twenty years’; the sentiments were repeated two years later in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations where he contemplated ‘the natural progress of England towards wealth and improvement’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of the same period noted that ‘the discoveries and improvements’ of the age ‘diffuse a glory over this country unattainable by conquest or dominion’. The solid foundations of the change were also understood. In 1784 it was reported that ‘Britain is the only country hitherto known in which seams of coal . . . iron ore and limestone . . . are frequently found in the same fields and in the neighborhood of the sea’. So the observers of the time were aware of a decisive change in the state of the nation.
What became clear was the sheer continuity of change, bolstered by one innovation following another in an almost evolutionary form. Periods of social or technical change had at some stage, in preceding centuries, reached an equilibrium; but in the latter part of the eighteenth century there seemed no end to the process of innovation. E. J. Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire, published as late as 1968, remarked that ‘no change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialization’.
The most profound, and most elusive, manifestations of change can really only be seen in retrospect. Perhaps it did not occur to inventors, engineers, or scientists that they were seeking power over nature. It might have seemed blasphemous. Yet that power was indeed the result. The substitution of coal for wood provided what seemed at the time to be an inexhaustible source of supply. The soil that had previously been devoted to growing timber could now be harnessed for the supply of food. When the forests and woods had been cleared for fuel, there was a biological limit to the period of their renewal; with the source of power under the ground, the problem no longer arose. As a result of the country’s natural resources, the scale of energy available to Britain was for a crucial period greater than that of any other European economy. This is one of the keys to industrialism.
It has been estimated by the celebrated historian of the Industrial Revolution, E. A. Wrigley, that the output of 10 million tons from the coal industry in 1800 provided energy equivalent to that produced by 10 million acres of land. The escape from the limits of an organic economy meant in turn the escape from the constraints upon growth. No more time and tide, no more wind and water. The coal was to all intents and purposes limitless, incalculable, mineral ‘gold’ packed to blackness within caverns measureless to man. England had once been known as a land of woods and forests; now it had become a realm of coal.
The improvement, however, was slow and imbalanced. While some parts of the economy, such as iron-smelting, textiles and mining, experienced rapid change, much of Britain’s work and workforce remained in the traditional economy for a further hundred years. Bakers, millers, blacksmiths and tanners stayed essentially in the mid-eighteenth century well into the reign of Victoria. Many workshops were still in the seventeenth century. Different levels of time, and experience, existed simultaneously.
The increase in the production of coal was gradual but inexorable; in the course of the eighteenth century the output rose from 3 million tons to 10 million tons before rising fivefold between 1800 and 1850. As a result the landscape was changed for ever. The Birmingham Mail recorded that ‘blue skies change to a reeking canopy of black and grey smoke. The earth is one vast unsightly heap of dead ashes and dingy refuse. Canals of diluted coal dust teach how filthy water may be and yet retain fluidity. Tumbledown houses, tumbledown works, tottering black chimneys, fire-belching furnaces, squalid and blackened people.’ The same Sisyphean vision of sublimity or horror is recorded by Charles Dickens in his study of the midlands in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).
When Little Nell and her grandfather pass through the region they see ‘paths of coal ash and huts of staring brick . . . trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour which hung in a dense ill favoured cloud above the housetops and filled the air with gloom’. The two pilgrims are taken into an ironworks ‘echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingling with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard before’. The wild imagination of the novelist is as powerful as his observation, but he was right in at least one respect; such noises had never been heard on earth before, except, perhaps, during a volcanic eruption.
Dickens describes the iron workers as ‘moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires’. Some slept among the ashes and cinders while others drew out the glowing sheets of metal ‘emitting an insupportable heat, and a dull deep light like that which reddens in the eyes of savage beasts’.
Yet heat and light represented more, much more, than the conditions of a working life. It was the manifestation of a great change. Coal could not simply be used to fashion metal. It could create iron. The centre of that alteration was the vale of Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire. Nowhere could look less like a vale of pastoral verse.
A Quaker iron-master, Abraham Darby (the first of three), settled in Coalbrookdale where in 1708 he leased an old blast furnace with some attendant forges. Within a year of his arrival in this vale of unhealth he became the first man to produce pig iron of quality smelted with coke. The area had numerous advantages, among them the fact that it harboured coal with fewer sulphuric impurities than elsewhere, thus improving the quality of the iron manufactured by its means. Darby fed his furnaces with coal, and with the coke produced the iron for casting pots. Coke out of coal took the place of charcoal out of wood. The making of iron was no longer dependent upon the life and death of organic things. These were the procedures that would lead in time to the bridges, the railway engines, the pipes, the cylinders, the cannon, the shot, and the machine parts that would create the life of the nineteenth century.
The first iron rails were cast at Coalbrookdale in 1767. The technology of the time was now entering an expansive and self-sustaining phase that would never pause or rest. In the course of this history we will come to remark upon the stunning interdependence of techniques and inventions; all things seem to come together, so that one cannot exist without the other.
The significance of the change was not immediately realized; Abraham Darby himself was of a modest and quiet nature, and his Quaker brethren seem happy to have kept the new technique within the religious family. But to their credit the Darby family never took out a patent, unlike most of their colleagues, on the grounds that it would be wrong ‘to deprive the public of such an acquisition’.
The possibilities of the human sublime are nowhere more evident than in Philip Loutherbourg’s painting Coalbrookdale by Night (1801), where sulphuric flames belch into the night sky only faintly illuminated by a pale moon. It is a landscape of fire in which the only source of light is the inferno; it is apposite that one of the names for this manufactory was ‘Bedlam’. Yet the spiritual connotations of the flame and fire do not impede the recognition that this is also a place of industry and production; in the foreground horses are pulling away a filled wagon while a dog trots beside them.
Turner’s Limekiln at Coalbrookdale (c.1797) is also ra
vished by light, with a white, blue and orange glare drawing the attention to the left side of the painting; a small line of light travels down the hillside, illuminating two workers with horses, while an arch into the kiln itself reveals fire and shadow as if it were some enchanted cavern. This was the significance of the beginnings of what became known as the Industrial Revolution. It was a time of vast possibility, not unlike that suggested by the alchemical magic of the sixteenth century, whereby the womb of the earth might bring forth new life. In The Old Curiosity Shop one old worker, tending the furnace, remarks to Little Nell that ‘it’s my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life’. The fire would never go out.
The steady progress of industrialism was itself bound by the unwritten laws of mutual interdependence. Examples of simultaneous invention and change are suggestive. It so happened, for example, that in the summer and autumn of 1815 George Stephenson in Newcastle upon Tyne and Humphry Davy in London both hit upon the construction of the safety-lamp for miners; one of Stephenson’s collaborators conceded that the two men ‘were original and separate discoverers of the principle’. Clusters of inventions with similar purposes occurred within a matter of years or even months. The ‘puddling’ of iron, allowing bar iron to be made without charcoal, was developed within months both in South Wales and in Fontley near Plymouth; neither inventor knew of the other. Was this more than a happy accident?
Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4 Page 25
