Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  The elements of reciprocity are everywhere apparent. The technique of boring cannon, for example, was used for the making of steam-engine cylinders; the invention of a coke-blast furnace led to cast iron; cast iron led to Newcomen’s first steam engine; the steam engine then permitted the large-scale production of iron. When it was discovered that a steam engine was too powerful for wooden machinery, iron machinery was for the first time employed in its place; this allowed for the construction of heavier machinery which in turn demanded a more powerful engine. Everything worked together, pushing on the rate and nature of technological change. Machines were employed to make larger and better machines. We may be reminded of the development of robots.

  The growing demand for steam, at the forge and the factory, helped to create more efficient steam engines. The use of iron rails for the wagons carrying coal, to the furnaces at Coalbrookdale, had a direct influence upon the first railway lines. The mass manufacture of pottery pipes played an important part in the sanitary provisions of the nineteenth century; more importantly, perhaps, it allowed the proper drainage of fields, which in turn increased the yield of the land. The increase in agricultural production in turn supported a larger and larger industrial population. The massive increase in the manufacture of cloth made it vital to devise a new form of rapid bleaching; so the chemists turned their attention to oil of vitriol, or sulphuric acid, rather than the chimerical elixir vitae.

  Machine production ensured large-scale manufacturing which in turn encouraged wider and wider markets; so does mass production lead to popular consumption, or consumption encourage production? It is a familiar dichotomy. Other questions arise. How was it possible, for example, that two entirely different industries, cotton manufacture and iron-making, could advance simultaneously? It resembles some of the problems of natural evolution, as if machinery itself had the characteristics of a biological entity. We may even begin to parrot Darwin’s theories of organic evolution to account for the slow, gradual and inexorable process of the ‘Industrial Revolution’.

  None of these developments would have been possible without the diffusion of what might be called the scientific attitude, descended directly from the example of Isaac Newton who in the previous century had been an instrument-maker as well as a theoretician; at the age of twenty-six he constructed his own telescope, and made its parabolic mirror from an alloy of tin and copper that he himself had devised. As president of the Royal Society he emphasized the central roles of reason and experiment that would become crucial in the industrial world of the next century. By the early eighteenth century scientific lectures, under the aegis of the Royal Society, were being heard in London and elsewhere complete with ‘barometers, thermometers and such other instruments as are necessary for a course of experiments’. A disciple of Newton, the Reverend John Harris, delivered lectures on mathematics at the Marine Coffee-House in Birchin Lane ‘for the public good’. John Theophilus Desaguliers, a British natural philosopher, lectured on experimental philosophy but included a disquisition on an early steam engine that ‘was of the greatest use for draining mines, supplying towns with water, and gentlemen’s houses’. By the 1730s the magical properties of electricity were being thoroughly examined.

  One group of scientists and industrialists formed a club in which to converse and to share their experimental learning. The Lunar Society of Birmingham had first been established in the late 1760s by a group of innovators, radical in politics and religion as well as in science. Among them were botanists, manufacturers, philosophers, industrialists, natural scientists and geologists eager to harness the unrivalled curiosity and experimentation of the period. The members included Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Joseph Priestley; industrialists, iron-masters and men of science exchanged information on matters of practical technology as well as more intellectual concerns. It was a forcing house for change, a collective endeavour in the application of science. Most of the members owned laboratories for their enterprises and Wedgwood, for example, was intent upon mineral analysis and the chemistry of colour.

  Matthew Boulton at the age of eighteen created a technique for inlaying steel buckles with enamel, but he also cultivated what he called the ‘philosophic spirit’; in his notebook he jotted down entries on the human pulse and the movement of the planets. This was the spirit of enterprise which drove the scientific culture of the eighteenth century. No human knowledge was alien to the inventors. Joseph Priestley has been awarded the palm for identifying ‘phlogiston’ or oxygen and for discovering photosynthesis; Boulton prompted and assisted Watt in the construction of the steam engine.

  The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce had been established in 1754 as a sure token of the advance in national understanding. It was designed, in the words of its charter, ‘to embolden enterprise, to enlarge science, to refine art, to improve manufacture and to extend our commerce’. It established premiums as an award for mechanical invention, as well as artistic enterprise, confirming the general movement of innovation; art and science were not considered to be necessarily separate activities, and in the notebooks of the society are minute investigations into blue cobalt and red madder. Those constituents could also be used in industrial dyeing. So once again everything came together.

  It has been described as an aspect of the ‘Enlightenment’, although that essentially European movement of thought did no more than touch English shores. It was clear, however, that in Walpole’s words ‘natural history is in fashion’. The figure of the virtuoso, and assemblies of virtuosi discussing such matters as human anatomy, were noted in the Spectator not without mild irony. Jonathan Swift satirized the tendency in ‘A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan’, the third part of Gulliver’s Travels written between 1706 and 1709, when he describes ‘the grand academy of Lagado’ where its experimenters are engaged in such pursuits as extracting sunbeams from cucumber, transforming ice into gunpowder, and reducing ‘human excrement to its original food’.

  Yet the new spirit of scientific change could not be denied in areas such as mechanics, metallurgy and industrial chemistry. An experimental coal-gas system for public lighting was ready by 1782. The emphasis was always upon industry and commerce, and Adam Smith believed that those engaged in industry were ‘the great inventing class’; we may include among them the chemists and the new professions of electricians and engineers. Samuel Smiles wrote at a later date that ‘our engineers may be regarded in some measure as the makers of modern civilisation’.

  The level of inventiveness may also be gauged by the rise in the number of patents applied for and granted. Before the middle of the century approximately a dozen patents were issued each year; the number reached 36 in 1769 and 64 in 1783. In 1792 it reached 85. The inventions ranged from newly designed pumps to the process whereby alkalis might be derived from salt; shaving materials, false teeth, fire alarms and washing machines, burglar alarms and water closets were among the items proposed for patenting. The saving of labour and, more importantly, the saving of time were the results intended. Greater efficiency, accuracy and uniformity were also the goals of the patentees; in that sense they reflect the spirit of industrial change itself.

  It may be termed the age of improvement but the word of the day was innovation. ‘The age is running mad after innovation’, Samuel Johnson said, ‘and all the business of the world is to be done in a new way . . .’ Incremental change of a practical kind was the soul of eighteenth-century endeavour. ‘Almost every master and manufacturer’, Dean Tucker wrote of Birmingham operatives in 1757, ‘hath a new invention of his own, and is daily improving on those of others.’

  The awareness of progress was nowhere more apparent, perhaps, than in the changes in transport. The state of the old roads was considered to be a national disgrace. Daniel Defoe reported that in Lewes a lady went to church in a coach drawn by six oxen, since no horses could manage the stiff and deep mud. Many of the roads had not been repaired for
fourteen centuries, ever since the Romans first built them. The main road of a parish was often a mere horse-track, but the mud was so soft that the horses sank to their bellies. Even the road from Kensington Palace to the centre of London was a treacherous gulf of mud, with ruts and potholes and loose stones. It took a week to travel from York to London, and one Yorkshireman made his will before venturing on the journey. Arthur Young, in his Northern Tour of 1771, said of the roads to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne that ‘I would advise all travellers to consider this country as sea, and as soon think of driving into the ocean as venturing into such detestable roads.’

  The remedy lay in private improvements on a local scale, with the profit motive well in evidence. A series of ‘turnpike trusts’ was established, by which the members were charged with the duty to construct and to maintain a certain stretch of road; to recuperate their costs, and any loans they raised, they were permitted to collect tolls at either end of their route. Some said that there was no discernible change and others complained that the tolls were extortionate but, slowly and haphazardly, the roads improved. They were of course helped enormously by engineers such as Telford and McAdam who rivalled the Romans in their genius for road-making.

  In Richard Graves’s Columella, a novel of 1779, a character asks, ‘Who would have said that coaches would go daily between London and Bath in about twelve hours, which, twenty years ago, was reckoned three good days’ journey?’ In 1763 six stagecoaches made the journey from London to Exeter; ten years later, there were four times that number. An advertisement promised that ‘however incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in four days and a half after leaving Manchester!!’ Some passengers grew sick with the speed; it was called ‘being coached’. As a result the mail posts became quicker and more frequent, shaping the ambience of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary fiction. Everything went faster, from the carriage of grain or coals to the improvements in agriculture.

  Other advances in transportation occurred at the same time. In the early decades of the eighteenth century there was a concerted effort to improve the rivers of the country by widening and deepening their channels and by strengthening their banks. They were joined from the mid-eighteenth century by the network of canals that created one great transport system; between 1755 and 1820 3,000 miles of canal were constructed. In 1755 the first industrial canal, the Sankey, was carved from the River Mersey to St Helens; three years later the duke of Bridgewater created a canal between his coal mines at Worsley to Manchester, a distance of 7 miles; the fact that the price of coal in Manchester was halved as a result concentrated the industrial mind wonderfully. Between 1761 and 1766 another canal was completed from Manchester to the Mersey above Liverpool. By the last decade of the eighteenth century London, Birmingham, Bristol, Hull and Liverpool were all joined together with innumerable smaller destinations. The artificial rivers carried coal, iron, wood, bricks and slate; they transported cotton, cheese, grain and butter.

  The economic activity of the country was transformed, and Adam Smith noted that ‘good roads, canals and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town’. Local and regional centres came together to create a national market, which in turn helped participation in international markets. Another consequence followed. The fact that various regions of the country were now brought in closer communion, one with another, helped to sustain the burgeoning national consciousness of the people in times of war and foreign revolution.

  23

  Having a tea party

  In the spring of 1773 the administration of Lord North was moved to pass a Tea Act which allowed tea to be sold directly to the Americans by the East India Company, but with a duty of threepence per pound that had first been introduced six years before. Tea was still much cheaper in America than in England but for the colonists this was tantamount to a direct tax imposed by parliament, arousing all the old fears of imperial dictation. It was considered by some to be a scheme to erode American liberties. The Boston Gazette of 11 October, serving the port to which most of the tea was shipped, urged that the commodity be sent back as a mark of ‘the yoke of slavery’. The first of the tea ships, the Dartmouth, arrived at Boston Harbor on 27 November, and two days later a mass meeting of Bostonians resolved to take charge of any others that docked. The activists became known as ‘the Body’.

  On 16 December a group of Bostonians, disguised as Mohock Indians, approached the door of the local assembly and gave a ‘war whoop’ which was answered by some in the building itself. They then made their way to the wharf where three tea ships now lay and began the systematic destruction of their cargo, with 342 chests of tea thrown overboard.

  The question was now one of power, and the challenge to parliament could not be ignored or evaded. Lord North laid the matter before the House of Commons on 7 March 1774, and demanded that the port of Boston be closed. A number of other measures were passed by parliament, principally to teach the rebellious Americans a lesson. They came to be known as the ‘coercive’ or ‘intolerable’ Acts. The Boston Port Act closed the port and customs house; the Massachusetts Charter Act was designed to curb the elected legislature; the Justice and Quartering Acts were introduced to impose order upon the populace. Lord North declared that ‘convince your colonies that you are able, and not afraid to control them, and, depend upon it, obedience will be the result of your deliberations’. It seems that the majority of the population was behind him, and Edmund Burke reported that ‘the popular current, both within doors and without, at present sets strong against America’.

  Burke himself will reappear in this history as the exponent of conservatism and tradition in the face of innumerable challenges; he was an Irishman with the gifts of a supreme advocate for the preservation of the principles of the past which emerge from ‘the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation and improvement of property’. Institutions and customs were rendered sacred by longevity and continual use. It was a uniquely reassuring doctrine for those opposed to change or frightened of chance.

  The response of the Americans to the ‘intolerable’ Acts was perhaps inevitable. In early September 1774 a congress of the old colonies was held in Philadelphia, and became known as the First Continental Congress; in the following month it proposed a bill or declaration of rights to the effect that American assemblies had the right and duty to determine legislation in all domestic matters without the intervention of the English parliament. The delegates declared that Americans ‘were entitled to their life, liberty and property’. George Washington wrote that ‘the crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us’. By the end of the year local associations or revolutionary committees were piling up supplies of arms and gunpowder while at the same time enforcing what were now called ‘the laws of congress’. Imports from Britain and its colonies were prohibited. The prospect of outright war, and of a trade embargo, seemed to paralyse the English merchant class who wavered between the desire for uninterrupted trade and the instinct of national loyalty.

  The call to arms gathered strength, and bodies of volunteers became known as ‘minute men’ for the speed with which they could muster with their rifles. Meanwhile 10,000 fresh British troops disembarked on American soil. If they had struck at once they might have done considerable damage; instead under the command of General Gage they rested. It was the Americans who acted first. This was the moment that heralded serious conflict.

  In America local committees and hastily called provincial congresses began to plan for military action, and groups of citizens took matters into their own hands. At the beginning of April 1775, the commander of the English forces in Boston received orders from London to suppress what were called the rebels. The main supply of American weaponry was stored in Concord, 16 miles from Boston, and the English advanced upon it. They were stopp
ed by militiamen at Lexington Green, where eight Americans were killed. The English kept on moving towards Concord but the fire of the militiamen, hiding in houses or concealed behind trees and hedges, scattered them. They retreated in haste to Boston but by the time they had reached the relative safety of that city 273 of their number were dead. The god of war had risen once again, calling for more blood.

  Some colonists, as they were still called, were alarmed by the violent turn of events, and urged restraint while others distrusted the calls for independence. It might be a step too far. But the more committed and the more passionate of the members of the Second Continental Congress, called at Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, overwhelmed the more moderate voices. It was resolved that an army, representing the ‘united’ and ‘confederated’ colonies, should be established; a Virginian gentleman, George Washington, was granted the command. He was reticent and not a good public speaker but he was resourceful and methodical; he had an innate dignity which, combined with moderation and self-control, could make him a master of men. He took the command itself with extreme reluctance, but a sense of duty and of his own honour persuaded him. Even at this stage he was not at all convinced that he could win the war against the English redcoats or, as they were known, ‘lobsters’.

  On the night of 16 June – the night following the first day of the congress – a contingent of Americans silently and stealthily took occupation of Breed’s Hill, a prominence beside Bunker Hill overlooking Boston on a peninsula north of the River Charles. On discovering their presence a battery of six guns opened on the insurgents from an English vessel, and a detachment of redcoats was ferried across the River Charles to reach them. As the English forces climbed Breed’s Hill, they were met with prolonged and accurate firing from the entrenchments; many of them fled back to their boats. At this juncture Gage and a group of other officers crossed the river and rallied or forced them to climb the hill again. The soldiers were confronted by the same onslaught of bullets but bravado or good fortune forced them forward. The Americans then fled towards Bunker Hill, but not before inflicting severe casualties; more than 1,000 soldiers and officers lay dead or wounded, while the American losses were in the low hundreds.