Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Why had this social revolution happened in England rather than in France or Austria? It may be related to Defoe’s dictum that England had by the early eighteenth century become ‘the most flourishing and opulent country in the world’. In France, for example, raw materials were scarce and the possibilities of investment few; the traditions of the country also favoured small-scale enterprise in a manner which the larger farmers of England soon abandoned. In England, too, there was virtually no state or bureaucratic control to guide the process of change; instead, by a series of statutes, the administration actively assisted those who were willing to break up the customary traditions of industry and manufacture. The decay of ‘custom’, as it was known, really meant the end of the old order. Popular traditions were denounced as immoral and popular beliefs were derided as superstition; the familiar perks of the daily job, such as the odd piece of cloth or metal, were now considered to be theft.

  The history of patents, as we have seen, exemplifies a prolonged period of inventiveness and ingenuity in the later part of the eighteenth century which may be related to the natural pragmatism and practicality of the English. Science and manufacture were closely aligned in the period, with institutions such as the Lunar Society bringing together manufacturers and experimentalists. From their collaboration came much of the machinery of change. The individual entrepreneur was also free to assert himself, with the spirit of competition and acquisitiveness all around him. Contemporaries noted in fact that the English, of all people, were possessed by the spirit of gain and were characterized by aggression and ruthlessness in its pursuit. All things worked together.

  The industrial towns represented some of the most evident signs of the new order. Some of them, Wigan, Bolton and Preston among them, were known as mill towns. They were anomalies. They had no corporate structure for the most part, and were singularly free of churches and hospitals. They were just planted when industrial conditions were suitable and to a certain extent resembled the towns of the ‘gold rush’ of 1849 in California. The lead mills of Sheffield provoked one visitor to note that the houses were ‘dark and black, occasioned by the continual smoke of the forges’. It was written of Barnsley, known as ‘Black Barnsley’, that ‘the very town looks as black and smoky as they were all smiths that lived in it’. From Rochdale to Wigan, from Bury to Preston, the dark stain grew and grew. In 1753 Bolton was little more than a village with one street of thatched houses and gardens; twenty years later its population had risen to 5,000; within a further sixteen years it had risen to 12,000 and by the beginning of the nineteenth century to 17,000.

  The dwellings of the manufacturing towns were largely back-to-backs with one room on each floor; it was common for the houses to be occupied by more than one family, and many residents dwelled in the cellar which consisted of two rooms under the ground with a small window in the ceiling. Since there was no administrative control of the building trades, the houses were generally narrow, dark and unhealthy. Even the once-affluent dwellings had degenerated into slums, and workshops were built over the gardens. This was a world of small courts, alleys and tenements, generally with one outside privy for four families. The new streets, so quickly knocked up, were without drains, pavements, or public lighting. Everything seemed temporary, makeshift, haphazard, testifying to the distress and uncertainty of this new world of work.

  A medical report, compiled in 1793 by Doctor Ferriar for a police committee in Manchester, states that ‘in some parts of the town the cellars are so damp that they are unfit for habitation . . . Fever is the usual effect.’ Large masses of people were streaming towards specific areas of cheap and dangerous housing. In Lancashire many thousands of cottages were built, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to accommodate a labour force of some 170,000 people. This was a measure of the change from what had once been a predominantly agricultural region. Ferriar also reports that ‘a lodger fresh from the country often lies down in a bed filled with infection by its last tenant, or from which the corpse of a victim to fever has only been removed a few hours before’.

  Harsh conditions, however, may serve to bring people together. Over time the residents of what were once little more than shanty towns developed a strong sense of community, in some sense equivalent to the ‘combinations’ of the industrial workers and others. People sought out their kin, and also others who had originally come from the same rural neighbourhoods. Neighbours themselves were the first line of defence against sickness and unemployment; there was no benevolent state to assist them.

  In 1807 the poet Robert Southey visited Birmingham:

  A heavy cloud of smoke hung over the city . . . the contagions spread far and wide. Everywhere around us . . . the tower of some manufactory was seen at a distance, vomiting up flames and smoke, and blasting every thing around with its metallic vapours. The vicinity was as thickly peopled as that of London . . . Such swarms of children I never beheld in any other place, nor such wretched ones.

  The city expanded at an enormous rate, year by year, and an observer wrote that ‘the traveller who visits her [Birmingham] once in six months supposes himself well acquainted with her; but he may chance to find a street of houses in the autumn, where he saw his horse eat grass in the spring’.

  Mr Pickwick in the course of his perambulations took in this ‘great working town’ with all ‘the sights and sounds of earnest occupation’, where ‘the streets were thronged with working people. The hum of labour resounded from every house, lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attick storeys; and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls.’ This was not the harsh music of London with which Dickens was familiar; this was more intense, and more concentrated. These were streets filled with ‘working people’, not with the motley London citizenry in all its variety. You would not find here the dandies or the actors or the ‘shabby-genteel’ or the madwomen who appear in Dickens’s novels; these had all been elbowed aside in the rush for work and trade.

  Birmingham had become the toy shop of the world, when a ‘toy-maker’ was a manufacturer of buckles, trinkets, small arms, locks, buttons, tweezers, snuffboxes and a multitude of other small metal goods. Hundreds of workshops were locked in a cycle of manufacture whereby various small parts of each device were cast eventually to form a whole, a sprocket-wheel here and a strap there. The guns were passed from shop to shop in the course of their construction, and were handled by specialized operatives at every stage of the procedure. This was what was generally perceived to be the real Industrial Revolution. Matthew Boulton’s Soho works were 2 miles from the centre of the town, with his thousand workers providing the fuel that fed the flame of commerce. By 1775 Birmingham was the largest industrial centre outside the capital. The rolling mill and the rotary steam engine were the future.

  The people of Birmingham had dirty faces and no names, according to one contemporary, but some of them at least were fired by an enthusiasm for making. William Hutton, the first proper historian of the city, wrote in 1741 that ‘I was surprised at the place but more so at the people. They possessed a vivacity I had never beheld. I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake. Their very step along the streets showed alacrity. Every man seemed to know and prosecute his own affairs.’ So the disparate reports conjure up images of energy, determination, eagerness, industry. It may have been the air of Birmingham, therefore, that created the conditions for the emergence of dissent and radicalism as the two significant elements of city life. Dissenters played a large part in the corporate life of the town and the Lunar Society, with its fair share of free-thinkers and dissenters, was established in Birmingham. They represented the richer citizens who funded a town hall, a corn exchange, a theatre and a new market hall as well as the ‘improvements’ of New Street. Of course it was unwise to ignore the sheer determination and contrariness of what was known as ‘the bunting, beggarly, brass-making, brazen-faced, brazen-hearted, blackguard, bustling, booby Birmingham mob’. Soon enough th
ey would take their revenge upon some of the dissenting elite in the town.

  Manchester also arose in the time of industrial change. Robert Southey again deplored the conditions of the people who were fed into the machine, whose ‘health physical and moral alike is destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms’. A foreign contemporary observed that there was no sun in Manchester; only a dense cloud of smoke that covered the bright orb. The only light came from Vulcan, the god of fire and of metal-working, and from his monstrous furnaces.

  Its major trade was in cloth, and, in particular, cotton, but it contained twelve iron foundries as well as numerous tin-plate workers, braziers and lock-makers. It was, in other words, a prodigious industrial town. A rapid increase in new housing occurred in the 1770s, and within ten years more than a third of all new dwellings had been erected. Such was the demand that many of the houses were occupied even before they were finished.

  The new streets were narrow and badly lit, if they were lit at all; the land was so valuable that courts and lanes and alleys were crowded together at the expense of light and air. In a city of almost 100,000 people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was not a single public garden. This is what was meant by the truism that England had changed from a rural to an urban civilization. Joseph Kay, a barrister, was at a slightly later date delivering a speech to the Manchester Statistical Society in the course of which he stated that ‘in no former era and under no former phase of national life has anything at all similar been witnessed’. This was true enough. The impact of Manchester upon political and economic life would be immense.

  Other cities had other histories. Newcastle upon Tyne was of course dominated by its coal trade, and the deliveries of its ships kept the hearths of London burning with what was known as ‘sea coal’; the cheap fuel encouraged the growth of brewing, dyeing, glass-making and soap-making. It was the fourth largest town in England and as such dominated the economic and social life of the north-east. It was also a centre of printing, and in the eighteenth century published more books than any other city except London. It supported three newspapers, three circulating libraries and seven subscription libraries. The men of business took a keen interest in public affairs, and it has been estimated that there were more than fifty clubs of Whig or radical tendency. This is the other face of the industrial change, when the men of wealth and influence no longer necessarily took the side of established power and authority.

  An American businessman, Louis Simond, approached Leeds at night, and saw a quintessential industrial nightscape where ‘from a height, north of the town, we saw a multitude of fires issuing, no doubt, from furnaces, and constellations of illuminated windows (manufactories) spread over the dark plain’. In more placid style John Dyer, in ‘The Fleece’ (1757), noted the growth of ‘busy Leeds’ where:

  Some, with even line,

  New streets are marking in the neighb’ring fields.

  The most evocative literary description of an industrial town comes later in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, where his love of darkness and decay, of stunning contrasts and of reality touched by stage fire, found its true subject. ‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.’ The horrid vista is presumably based upon Preston, which Dickens had just visited, but it could be an emblem of any mill town of the period.

  Amid this gloom and blackness and soot and grime, however theatrically elaborated by Dickens into a vision of hell, there was much industrial misery. The factory system often represented a sentence of death. In addition the industrial towns had many paupers, debarred from work by sickness and injury, who huddled together in the poorest districts. Even the labourers still in employ were often in some way deformed with swollen limbs or unsteady legs.

  Yet this picture of unrelieved misery, so much emphasized by social historians of the twentieth century, is incomplete. Could a country be racked by manifold suffering on such a scale without visible revolt? Other developments must be cast in the opposite scale. By the early years of the nineteenth century industrial wages were keeping pace with the cost of living, and industrial change itself was providing the necessities of the labouring classes. Cottons and woollens, food and drink, were now more amply distributed, and it was believed that the diet of the workers had greatly improved. Wheat replaced rye, and meat became a staple dish. Cheaper and better-distributed coal provided heat for the hearth. The rise in family earnings and the greater regularity of pay in the industrial districts were also not insignificant benefits. In 1830 Macaulay observed that ‘the laboring classes of this island . . . are on the whole better off as to physical comforts than the inhabitants of any equally extensive district of the old world . . . The serving man, the artisan and the husbandman, have a more copious and palatable supply of food, better clothing and better furniture.’ But of course, as a result, examples of comparative suffering and real poverty were ‘more acutely felt and more loudly bewailed here than elsewhere’.

  The industrial system itself led to manifest improvements. The employment of female workers gradually helped to establish the social and economic independence of women, while the scandal of child labour provoked such outrage that it promoted attempts at some form of primary education by charitable institutions; the ‘ragged schools’ began their long life in 1818, while the charity schools of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster had already created ‘the steam engine of the moral world’. The combinations of the workers led in turn to friendly societies, savings banks, mechanics’ institutes and of course trade unions. The ills of life were to be remedied rather than endured.

  Long and complex arguments have been made ever since about the relative rise or fall of the ‘standard of living’. Since the measure or index of such an impalpable entity seems to vary with each debate, it becomes a nice question. It is not practicable, for example, to compare a modest rise in wage rates with the manifestly unhealthy and even mortal conditions of the new cities. Does the spread of cholera balance the lower cost of bread? Cheaper clothing cannot compensate for overcrowding. Yet one statistical measurement may be granted without much objection. The average height of the population deteriorated in the second half of the eighteenth century, and continued to decline through the first half of the next century. This was most obvious of course in the vast difference between the poor and the rest of the population; agricultural distress and industrial decline in certain areas led to a class of people living in what Charles Booth later called ‘chronic want’.

  The worst cases of economic failure must be set against evidence of falling mortality. The absence of epidemic plague and the increased attention to sanitation and hygiene may help to explain the improvement, and one influential London physician, Doctor Lettsom, remarked that the people ‘have learnt that most diseases are mitigated by a free admission of air, by cleanliness, and by promoting instead of restraining the indulgence and care of the sick’. Not everyone cared for the new methods. In 1768 a hospital for inoculation was burnt down by a mob in Peterborough.

  The number of infants who died shortly after birth in the British Lying-in Hospital, in Holborn, fell from 1 in 15 in the 1750s to 1 in 118 by the turn of the century. In the course of his travels in the 1770s John Wesley observed the crowds of young children that seemed to populate the towns and villages. In 1726 life expectancy was put at a meagre twenty-five years; by the 1820s it had risen to forty-one years. The length of life, however, remained very low in the newly industrialized cities.

  It is perhaps impossible, therefore, to gauge the general effects of industrial change in the eighteenth century. It represents a complex of so many particular forces and events that it might best be treated as a natural phenomenon with all the random and inexplicable details that surround such an event. Yet some tentative conclusions may be advanced. The peo
ple, according to Thomas Hardy, now served smoke and fire rather than frost and sun. They became accustomed to the machine and to the clock; they worked for a wage rather than for subsistence, and they had no essential stake in the objects they produced. The nature of the family and household was wholly changed.

  England was no longer predominantly an agricultural society, a state in which it had remained for approximately 10,000 years. It was no longer plausible to propound a natural hierarchy of power based upon land; the twin imperatives of custom and deference began to disappear. The powers of patronage began subtly to change as the ‘middling classes’ aspired to more political and economic power. The abolition of the laws of apprenticeship, and of the assize of bread where that commodity was granted a ‘fair’ price, marked the onset of an economy that was based upon competition and self-interest.

  That was why the labouring masses, the working people, soon became a class apart. It was considered as impossible to mix the higher and lower classes as to mingle oil and water. One employer, quoted by Arnold Toynbee in his lectures on the Industrial Revolution, stated that ‘there can be no union between employer and employed, because it is in the interest of the employer to get as much work as he can, done for the smallest sum possible’.

  The professional artisan, too, began to separate himself from manual labour and from too close an involvement with the working men; in the previous dispensation a metal manufacturer might spend the day with his employees, superintending and assisting them, but that collaboration was now coming to an end. Samuel Courtauld was considering a career in engraving at his family’s silk mill but his father told him that ‘you seem to forget that mere manual labour – though of the higher class – is very rarely indeed so valuable as a business – as those modes of trade or manufacture which allow us a profit from the labour of many persons’.