Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  The growth of manufactures and the extension of the transportation system required an increase in labour that could not simply be satisfied with an expansion in population; so general complaints were made about workers leaving the land, and domestic servants abandoning their former employment, to make up the deficiency. Corbyn Morris, a customs administrator and economist, noted in 1750 that farmers throughout the kingdom were complaining ‘of the excessive increasing prices of workmen, and of the impossibility of procuring a sufficient number at any price’.

  The increase in wages implied a rise in living standards. The roughest estimates, the only ones possible, suggest that in the 1760s and 1770s, home consumption increased at a faster rate than exports and that between 1784 and 1800 the increase in demand for mass commodities, such as soap and printed fabrics, tobacco and beer, was twice the rate of population growth. It has been calculated that as a result of these changes, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, industrial output was almost twice that of 1770.

  Many workers enjoyed the benefit of tied cottages, schools and hospitals provided by the management. But of course conditions were attached to this apparent beneficence. Henry and Edward Ashworth, two mill-owners of Turton in Lancashire, told a government enquiry that ‘we exercise a control or superintendence over them, for their moral and social improvement . . . at frequent and irregular intervals visits are paid to every workman’. The rooms should be clean; the beds and children lice-free; their joint incomes, and their general habits of life, were recorded in special accounting books.

  Josiah Wedgwood described the state of the Potteries after he had, as it were, colonized the neighbourhood. In a small pamphlet, ‘An Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery’, he celebrated the new conditions with ‘the workmen earning nearly double their former wages – their houses mostly new and comfortable, and the lands, roads and every other circumstance bearing the most evident marks of the most pleasing and rapid improvements . . . Industry has been the parent of this happy change.’ William Radcliffe, the author of the Origin of the New System of Manufacture (1828), described in glowing terms the weavers under the patronage and control of Samuel Oldknow, cotton manufacturer, with ‘their dwellings and small gardens clean and neat – all the family well clad – the men with each a watch in his pocket . . .’.

  We may of course turn to conflicting testimony. A surgeon, asked to recruit working men into the marines, noted that ‘the mechanics are shorter, more puny, and altogether inferior in their physical powers. Many of the men presented for examination are distorted in the spine and chest, which witness attributes to the confined position in which they work.’ The risks of disease and illness were infinite. The supposedly happy potters of Staffordshire, men and boys, often worked continually for twelve hours in temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The fork-grinders of Sheffield worked in an atmosphere of stone and metal particles, where lung disease was endemic; the plumbers, who used lead, were slowly poisoned; the hatters, who employed mercury, suffered from nervous debility; the cotton workers contracted byssinosis. Leather workers died of anthrax and lung disease struck down those who worked with wool. Grinder’s rot and bricklayer’s elbow, potter’s rot and miner’s phthisis were some of the occupational hazards. Tailors and seamstresses often lost their sight. Even as late as 1842 a Manchester labourer had a life expectancy of seventeen years, and a Leeds operative of nineteen.

  Industry could not exist without misery. One traveller, William George Maton, observed in the copper manufactories that ‘some of the poor wretches who were ladling the liquid metal from the furnaces to the moulds looked more like walking corpses than living beings’.

  Industrial victims of another kind were also evident. The hand-loom weavers of Lancashire and elsewhere lost their occupations, as new weaving technologies made their skills redundant; a report on the textile settlements by Angus Reach concluded that they ‘are a wretched and hopeless set’. They were joined in their suffering by southern agricultural labourers who had been used to increase their incomes with industrial labour in the wintry seasons, until the factories had left the south. They were also threatened by agricultural change that encouraged more enclosures and more scientific land use.

  The infants were not far behind. The children at work in the mills were reported as suffering from extreme debility, fatigue and deformations of the body. One famous observer, Friedrich Engels, described various children as manifesting ‘pain in the back, hips and legs, swollen joints, varicose veins and large persistent ulcers in the thighs and calves’. If Engels might be considered a less than reliable witness his testimony is confirmed by a Manchester doctor who wrote that:

  I stood in Oxford Road, Manchester, and observed the stream of operatives as they left the mills at twelve o’clock. The children were almost universally ill-looking, small, sickly, barefoot and ill-clad. Many appeared to be no older than seven. The men, generally from sixteen to twenty-four, and none aged, were almost as pallid and thin as the children . . . it was a mournful spectacle.

  The children, then, may become a true test of the industrial system. The life of what became known as ‘the factory child’ was a symbol of the age. One operative, Charles Aberdeen, who had begun work as a boy, told a committee: ‘I have seen the race become diminutive and small: I have myself had seven children, not one of which survived six weeks; my wife is an emaciated person, like myself, a little woman, and she worked during her childhood, younger than myself, in a factory.’

  The benefits of child labour, however, were deemed to be considerable. Children had, after all, worked from a very early age in the fields, in the shops and in domestic dwellings. They were no strangers to hard labour. It was considered to be good for them. It inculcated obedience and discipline. It added to the family purse. It was of value to the nation and of infinite advantage to the poor themselves. Defoe had commented, in his travels around the country, that in Norwich ‘hardly any thing above four years old but its hands are sufficient to itself’. The unspoken proverb here is that the devil makes work for idle hands. In Norwich, too, he commented that ‘the very children after four or five years of age, could every one earn their own bread’. As late as 1796 Pitt informed the Commons that ‘experience had already shown how much can be done by the industry of children’. So there was no outcry against the employment of very young children in the mills and factories; there was no outrage. They helped to keep wages down. They supported their families. What was wrong with that?

  It was customary in the more populous parishes of London to send their children on poor relief to the proprietors of the cotton mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire; they were sent by the wagon-load as a welcome deduction from the poor rate. Many of the pauper children were collected from the workhouses of London and Westminster and transported north in large groups. One London parish negotiated a bargain with a Lancashire mill-owner that it could send one idiot child with twenty sound children. It is not at all clear who was paying whom. In the beginning the authorities paid a nominal sum to the mill-owners for taking their children off the rates, but there were also many reports of the factory-owners paying the parish for what was essentially slave labour.

  The parents had no voice in the matter since they, too, customarily relied upon parish relief. And so the children were dispatched with as little care as if they were being shipped to the West Indies. When one slave-owner from that region heard that the children were worked at the cotton mills from five in the morning to seven at night, he observed that ‘we never in the West Indies thought it possible for any human being to be so cruel’. Children were also engaged in night work when the pressure of demand required it.

  The conditions in which they worked were uniformly deplorable. They were unprotected from the grind of machinery, and there are many reports of fingers being cut off or limbs crushed in the wheels. One boy who worked in a cotton manufactory for twenty years remarked that ‘I got deformed there; my knees began to bend in when I was fifteen; y
ou see how they are.’ He was part of what Engels called ‘a crowd of cripples’. The ceilings were low, the windows narrow and generally closed. In this unventilated state epidemic disease was rife, with ‘factory fever’ first coming out in 1784. The food was often rancid, with porridge and black bread as staples. Some of the children had to raid dust heaps or fight with the pigs to get into their troughs. Discipline was considered to be essential in such conditions. It was normal for a sleepy or slow child to be hit with a whip, cane, or clenched fist; if any tried to escape they were put in irons. For serious offences the child might be suspended in a ‘cage’ or basket from the ceiling. There is no doubt that some of the overseers were brutish, with a predilection for giving pain to infants. One factory in Manchester was known as ‘Hell’s Gate’.

  Nevertheless the children were very useful. They were generally docile and uncomplaining. To whom, in any case, could they complain? They were quick and nimble, small enough to insert themselves into the machinery where required. Some machinery was constructed with child operatives in mind; the spinning jenny had a horizontal wheel best handled by children aged from nine to twelve. One observer, Samuel Schroeder, noted that ‘a small boy makes the blanks red-hot in a small furnace. Another boy puts them under the punch, one by one. The third picks them out of the punch and greases the upper mould between each punching with a greased brush. All this goes quite quickly.’

  The children were also very cheap, some of them earning nothing more than their food and lodgings. The age of their labours began at four or five. Pin-makers, for example, began at five, and it was said that going into their workshop was like entering an infants’ school. Jedediah Strutt of Belper explained to a Commons committee that he would take children at the age of seven but preferred those between eleven and twelve. There can be no doubt that these factory children were the least favoured, and least protected, group in eighteenth-century society.

  There were occasions when an adult male was given work only if he also sent his children to the mill. Thus there grew up ‘families’ of operatives. Secure work for husbands, wives and children could thereby be gained. The adults were better able to look after their children, at least in theory, and their joint earnings were larger than the average.

  Natural exaggeration cannot be discounted in the more appalling accounts, and of course the horrors of the workhouse were not visited upon all the children. The dire conditions afflicted the majority, but some escaped them. The more enlightened employers, such as the Arkwrights and Oldknows, for example, tried to mitigate the hardships of the children’s condition; schools were established, and special ‘apprentice houses’ were built; the boys and girls (specially segregated) were sometimes allowed to play in the fields. But this only put a gloss upon their misery. Robert Owen explained in A New View of Society (1813) that David Dale of the New Lanark mills paid particular attention to the health, cleanliness and diet of the children in his employ; it was reported that ‘the rooms provided for them were spacious, always clean and well ventilated; the food was abundant’. Nevertheless they were employed from six in the morning to seven in the evening, winter and summer; it was observed that ‘many of them became dwarfs in body and mind, and some of them were deformed’. It was concluded that the kind intentions of David Dale were ‘in their ultimate effect almost nugatory’.

  Women as well as children provided the human energy of the Industrial Revolution. They too were considered to be docile, nimble and cheap. They also had to be resourceful in a world where they could be employed among the machinery as well as earning their livings as gun-makers, blacksmiths, pin-makers, armourers, or chimney sweeps. William Hutton travelling through the north country in 1741 noticed, with an attempt at irony, that in some of the factories ‘I observed one, or more females, stripped of their upper garment, and not overcharged with their lower, wielding the hammer with all the grace of their sex. The beauties of their face were rather eclipsed by the smut of the anvil . . .’

  There is a suggestion of sexual licence here that other observers had already taken up as one of the evils of industrialism. One factory reformer, Michael Sadler, observed: ‘I never did hear it denied that many of the mills, at least those in which night work is pursued, are . . . little better than brothels.’ A Children’s Employment Commission, established a few years later in 1842, reported that the factories were characterized ‘by the practice of gross immorality, which is prevalent to a great extent, in both sexes, at very early ages’. Some of the female workers complained that their male colleagues often resorted to drink and other stimulants to counter their fatigue, and in a general atmosphere of heat and monotony the results were inevitable. So the industrial age promoted promiscuity.

  The women were particularly sought out, however, for delicate repetitive tasks such as painting on pottery or polishing in the japanning trades. It was thought that they would not ‘combine’ in the manner of their male colleagues, and would be more tractable in matters of hours and subsistence wages. In the mills and factories, young women in fact comprised the majority of the employees. Women made up the bulk of the textile trade and were most heavily employed in those industries which favoured technical innovation. This relatively new workforce could be exploited more easily, and could be used to bypass traditional rules and work regulations.

  One recognizable group of people has been left out of this survey of early industrialism, and they are the industrialists themselves. In these first years they had to be at the same time adventurers, entrepreneurs, salesmen, managers and, if possible, inventors. Some of them had been drapers or shopkeepers, part of that ‘middling’ class which was even then struggling to find its voice. Others had been apprentices ready to exploit their training. Yet not all of them had to rise entirely by their own efforts; some of the most successful industrialists were of the second generation, with fathers or even grandfathers ahead of them in the trade, But they might also be the sons of farmers, yeomen, gentlemen and physicians. They might acquire their education in dissenting academies, in technical schools, in private schools that specialized in mathematics and geometry, or in the lectures arranged by the learned societies of their neighbourhood. There was also a plethora of technical literature from pamphlets and manuals to encyclopaedias.

  Some had been mill-wrights who had constructed and designed machinery. One of the most famous of them, Sir William Fairbairn, recalled that ‘a good mill-wright was a man of large resources; he was generally well educated, and could draw out his own designs and work at the lathe; he had a knowledge of mill machinery, pumps and cranes, and could turn his hand to the bench or the forge with equal adroitness and facility’. Such a man could quite easily turn industrialist.

  Others had been merchant-manufacturers who saw the value of expanding their trade. Others were by training scientists or engineers eager to put their expertise to practical account; there were few factory managers who were not interested in scientific and technical change. That was the key to their enterprise. Josiah Wedgwood established an ‘experimental company’ while Matthew Boulton set up a ‘research assay office’.

  The history of successful industrialists is instructive. William Radcliffe wrote that

  availing myself of the improvements that came out while I was in my teens, by the time I was married [in 1784 at the age of twenty-four] with my little savings and a practical knowledge of every process, from the cotton bag to the piece of cloth, such as carding by hand or by the engine, spinning by the hand-wheel or Jenny, winding, warping, sizing, looming the web, and weaving either by hand or fly-shuttle, I was ready to commence business for myself; and by the year 1789 I was well established and employed many hands both in spinning and weaving, as a master manufacturer.

  So a beginner, with the help of a little capital, could progress by degrees to become a master manufacturer. This is the human face of industrial change.

  Peter Stubs of Warrington, a master file-maker, was also an innkeeper and brewer when he began his business. T
here were times when he had difficulty in recruiting youth to his workshops; the mother of Edward Lancelot of Liverpool wrote that ‘I hope you will excuse mee for not sending my son. The reason is I ad no shoes.’ Yet he prospered, and in various stages of his business career he was selling cast-iron bookcases and glass cylinders as well as potatoes and coconuts. His company still survives and remained in private hands until the 1960s.

  Jedediah Strutt of Belper invented a stitching machine known as the ‘Derby rib machine’ that manufactured ribbed stockings, with which he gathered fame and prosperity. Part of the epitaph he wrote for himself affords a good if idealized description of the eighteenth-century industrialist who ‘without having wit had a good share of plain common sense – without much genius enjoyed the more substantial blessing of a sound understanding – with but little personal pride despised a mean or base action . . .’.

  Samuel Oldknow of Stockport was the first to manufacture muslin in England. He established an industrial centre, with a steam-powered manufactory, a bleaching plant, finishing factories and warehouses; he also had a zeal for organization, and decided to develop a community of workers on the site. A thousand weavers were employed in the immediate area of the manufactory, while another 1,000 worked in related factories in the same neighbourhood. Another aspect of industrial change can be seen in Oldknow’s enterprise; six of his employees eventually set up in industrial business on their own account.

  There was almost a religious zeal in this propensity for progress. One merchant, Samuel Salte, told Oldknow, that ‘you must both have the perseverance of saints and the resolution of martyrs’. Charity, too, could also be found. One mechanic, Laurence Earnshaw, devised a machine that could spin and reel cotton in one operation; but then he destroyed it for fear that it would take bread from the mouths of the poor.