Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  24. Life in the Industrial City

  ALONG WITH THE treatment of children in factories, the appalling living conditions in early industrial cities remain central in our collective memory of industrialisation. There are enough accounts of the filth, overcrowding and destitution experienced in these cities to fill this volume and several more. Many writers focussed on endemic diseases: ‘In one place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for the dwellings of human beings. Not one house of this street escaped the cholera.’1

  The lodging homes, near the extremities of the town, produce many fevers, not only by want of cleanliness and air, but by receiving the most offensive objects into beds, which never seem to undergo any attempts towards cleaning them, from their first purchase till they rot under their tenants . . . The horror of those houses cannot easily be described; 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.2

  In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville gave his impression of Manchester: ‘A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays. Under this half-daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work.’3 And Friedrich Engels described housing in the central London district of St Giles: ‘The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description.’4

  In the mid-nineteenth century Angus Reach visited the wool towns of the West Riding: ‘Conceive acre on acre of closely built and thickly peopled ground, without a paving stone upon the surface or an inch of sewer beneath, a deep trodden-churned slough of mud forming the only thoroughfares . . . Conceive, in short, a whole district to which the above description rigidly and truthfully applies and you will, I am sorry to say, have a fair idea of what constitutes a large proportion of the operative part of Leeds.’5

  And so on and on. A picture of wretchedness continues as if a malign force of nature was let loose, with everyone and anyone helpless to do anything that would help. The result of the brilliant, ground-breaking innovations of Newcomen, Hargreaves, Cort, Watt and Trevithick was, it seems, to bring humanity into a catastrophically worse state of existence. Was this what industrialisation was to offer the world?

  Why then did this happen; why did the emergence of industry based on steam power lead to such a degradation of urban life? The underlying force was the unprecedented increase in population, but we also need to put life in industrial cities into its historical context. Cities were continually overwhelmed by sheer numbers of inhabitants but, from the late seventeenth century onwards, people began to understand the problems of urban life and to take measures to overcome them. This was a historic change from the fatalism of earlier times and led eventually to cities coping adequately and even triumphantly with vast populations. The first clue to this change lies in the contemporary accounts. The lack of clean water, fresh air, light, the disposal of sewage, clean bedding, proper housing and decent food were all pointed out because they were important to human health. This all seems like common sense but writers, physicians and campaigners were pointing out the lack of these basic requirements precisely because they had not previously been considered. The call for clean bedding, for example, went against an old belief that covering the sick in clean linen would draw out their vital energies, while the build-up of waste and filth in yards and alleys was previously disregarded. In the early sixteenth century the Dutch writer Erasmus wrote to Cardinal Wolsey about the reasons the English suffered from the sweating sickness and bouts of plague: ‘The floors are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, which are occasionally renewed, but underneath lies unmolested, an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments of fish, spittle, the excrement of dogs and cats and everything that is nasty.’6

  The growing towns and cities of the late eighteenth century carried over habits that were unchanged for centuries: a gutter running down the street would act as a water supply and sewer; narrow streets cut off supplies of air and light; animals were slaughtered in the streets and timber houses were continually vulnerable to fire. Diseases that we associate with the tropics, including cholera, typhus and plague, were rife, and malaria was endemic in areas of Britain. But as the cities grew, so too did the realisation of the dangers of open sewers, lack of air and light, filthy clothing and foul water. The old recourse to seeing sickness and death as the will of God, or simply part of nature, gave way to a desire to know practical cause and effect.7 The impulse to improve urban conditions was given impetus by the Great Fire of London in 1666, after which the 13,200 wooden houses that had burnt down were replaced by 9,000 brick dwellings. The London Rebuilding Act of 1667 formalised this rule and, at the same time, alleys were cleared and streets widened. In 1766 an Improvement Act saw the Fleet ditch covered in, drains and sewers installed and streets paved with large stones; the City of London was expanded, as was Westminster, so that there was more room between streets. William Hutton, visiting from Birmingham in 1783, wrote ‘the stranger will be astonished at the improvements which have been introduced in the last 35 years and how money could be procured to complete them . . . every street and passage in the whole city, and its environs, has been paved in one regular and convenient stile’.8

  Between 1785 and 1800 Parliament passed 211 Acts allowing different bodies to raise taxes for paving and other parochial improvements. In 1776 a Street Improvement Act was passed for Manchester: while in 1775 Methodist minister John Clayton wrote that the streets of Manchester were ‘no better than a common dunghill . . . our very churchyards are profaned with filth’, by 1786 a Mr Henry reported to the Manchester Lit and Phil that ‘Within these few years also the great alterations that have been made in the town by widening and providing for the ventilation of the streets, together with the commodiousness of our modern houses etc., may have contributed to restrain the increased mortality which might otherwise have been apprehended from its enlargement.’9

  As fast as improvements could be made, there were more people to accommodate. Nevertheless in 1780 the quantity and quality of Manchester’s water supply was increased, and in 1791 an Act of Parliament granted funds and gave authority for the lighting and policing of the town, including a twice-weekly removal of waste and cleaning of the streets. In 1816 a water company began supplying piped water through iron pipes (for those who could afford to be connected). In the 1820s Manchester gained gas street lights. In 1786 an Improvement Act granted Liverpool £150,000 to widen its streets; in this great port the wealthy Corporation lavished money on public buildings but was tardy in improving the living conditions of its people, including the notorious cellar dwellings. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did Liverpool gain a decent clean water supply. Improvements, it seemed, depended on local authorities seeking powers to act. Birmingham was more enlightened; here an Act of 1769 allowed the widening of the streets and gave permission for a levy to be raised for scavenging the streets of waste; further powers were granted in 1773 and 1780. By the 1790s Bristol was similarly improved, with the streets cleaned twice a week and further wooden buildings prohibited.

  The curse of malaria was finally removed from Portsmouth when the town was paved and drained in 1769 with similar actions and effects in nearby Southsea in 1793. Locks on the River Ouse enabled York’s sewage to be washed away where ‘Before the river was frequently very low, leaving a quantity of sludge and dirt in the very heart of the city, also the filth of the common sewers which it was unable to wash away [whereas now] the lock kept the river high, broad and spacious.’10

  Medieval towns were built on or near natural sup
plies of water, but, as they expanded, systems of cisterns, pumps and pipes had to be installed. New houses with large windows gradually replaced wooden hovels; coal-fired heating allowed warmth, better cooked food, hot water for washing, and therefore clean clothing. This may not have been sophisticated medicine but it was certainly a better approach than the bloodletting, patent cures and spa waters that had preceded it.

  As people understood the virtues of well-built houses and clean streets, they reported the squalid conditions of the shanty towns, but they also gave praise where it was due.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, in some districts at least, building had caught up with population increase: ‘The houses inhabited by the factory hands of Huddersfield consist in most cases of a large parlour-kitchen opening from the street, with a cellar beneath it, and either two small bedrooms or one large one above. In some instances a scullery is added to the main apartment . . . and a plentiful supply of water is in general conducted into every house.’11

  By the standards of modern Europe early industrial towns were overcrowded, smoky, and vulnerable to infectious disease, but they were no longer simply carrying on where medieval towns had left off. People understood the need to have good living conditions, and urban authorities tried, for the most part, to bring these about. They were, though, victims of their own success; better living conditions brought more people and more potential overcrowding and this could never be completely solved, only ameliorated. Nevertheless there was a deeply significant alteration in human conception; as one historian has put it: ‘Cleanliness may be next to godliness but it is often its rival; we have built drains instead of cathedrals.’12

  One effect of larger cities was the separation of the social classes. In late medieval towns the wealthy had to live cheek by jowl with the poor, often sharing the same streets, churches and public spaces in something of a jumble. But the expansion of towns allowed districts to become separated, particularly into working-class and middle-class districts.

  Industrial towns were dirty and unhealthy, but city life was liberating and exciting; you could even, within limits, choose your employer; you might be able to buy an education through evening classes, and you could certainly find entertainment and companionship. And while towns might have seemed soulless places to begin with, a sense of community developed around workplaces, Friendly Societies, chapels and later trade unions, as well as neighbourhoods. Private space was more confined in cities but public space was more available to all. As cities improved, parks, gardens, squares, meeting rooms, inns and shops became places of social interaction and enrichment. The industrial city gradually learned how to serve its people.

  * * *

  The Population Paradox

  The sustained increase in the world’s population from around 1 billion in 1800 to 6.5 billion today began in the industrial towns and cities of Britain. The population of England in 1750 was 5.7 million, a 10 per cent increase over the previous century, but the next fifty years saw an increase of over 50 per cent to 8.6 million, while the following fifty years saw a doubling to take the population to 16.7 million by 1851. From 1750 onwards Britain appeared to break out of the ‘natural’ limits to population growth predicted by Malthus and population increase became sustainable over the long term. For the first time in history an increase in population was generated from within a long-existing economy and was sustained. The process clearly began at the same time as the Industrial Revolution, but how did it come about and how was it connected to industrialisation?

  The growth of urban centres, initially aided by migration of people from the countryside, rapidly became self-sustaining. Towns and cities grew because more people were being born and slightly fewer people were dying prematurely.13 More children were being born because women were marrying earlier and because the proportion of stillbirths went through a dramatic decrease. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, England’s estimated stillbirth rate was around 80 to 90 per 1,000 births; by the mid-nineteenth century this had fallen to around 40 per 1,000.14 Close analysis of the reasons for infant mortality presents another factor. The proportion of infants who died from so-called endogenous factors – i.e. weakness and frailty at birth – also fell from 88 per 1,000 in the late seventeenth century to 33 per 1,000 in 1825–37; however, infant deaths from so-called exogenous factors – i.e. disease – rose from 88 to 111 per 1,000 over the same period.15 Meanwhile average life expectancy increased by about three years to 40.8 years from 1800 to 1831; by 1871 it had only reached 41.3 years.

  What do these figures tell us? Most importantly, the number of babies being born in a healthy condition was increasing and this increase was enough to overcome the rise in childhood diseases, while the small increase in life expectancy was a minor factor.16 So, why did this happen and why did the consequent rise in population become sustainable? The overwhelming reason for both was improved nutrition. In the second half of the eighteenth century mothers were eating better and therefore carrying more pregnancies to successful term, while also giving birth to infants with a better chance of immediate survival. However, the population increase did bring about pressures which acted in the opposite direction. Overcrowding in cities was undoubtedly responsible for the rise in infant deaths caused by disease and infection, which also held the average life expectancy down – local figures indicate that life expectancy in some inner cities plunged to as low as twenty-eight years. In that sense a Malthusian limit was coming into play as disease bore down on crowded populations.

  Nevertheless the increase in population was sustained over the medium and long term for the same reasons we have seen elsewhere in this book. The increasing use of coal for energy accompanied by notable increases in agricultural productivity allowed Britain to feed a growing population; there were difficulties along the way, but the population increase that began in the late eighteenth century was sustained through the nineteenth century with Britain able to feed millions more people. This remarkable achievement was possible because, as we have seen elsewhere, a coal-powered energy economy freed up more land for food production and, at the same time, vastly increased the productivity per acre by putting energy in the form of fertilisers, transport and machinery into agricultural production.

  As well as increasing food production, coal energy allowed living conditions to improve through brick housing, iron bedsteads and bigger glass windows, while steam power brought employment and wages that could be spent on better nutrition and housing. Industrialisation made possible a better life, but the possibilities took time to be realised, and in the meantime people suffered a serious deterioration in living conditions.

  * * *

  Epilogue: Britain in the 1830s

  By the 1830s the British were, with some exceptions, convinced that they had created a new world that was of immense benefit to the country and to humankind. Steam-driven mills, factories and workshops had grown up, employing hundreds of thousands of workers and producing seemingly endless amounts of everything that humanity could possibly need, while the problems of slums and child labour were recognised, if not yet fully addressed. In 1830 Thomas Macaulay declared: ‘We might with some plausibility maintain that the people live longer because they are better fed, better lodged, better clothed, and better attended in sickness, and that these improvements are owing to that increase in national wealth which the manufacturing system has produced.’1

  Fifteen years earlier Patrick Colquhoun had given this paean to British industry:

  It is impossible to contemplate the progress of manufactures in Great Britain within the last thirty years without wonder and astonishment. Its rapidity, particularly since the commencement of the French revolutionary war, exceeds all credibility. The improvement of the steam engines, but above all the facilities afforded to the great branches of the woollen and cotton manufactories by ingenious machinery, invigorated by capital and skill, are beyond all calculation; and as these machines are rendered applicable to silk, linen, hosiery and various ot
her branches, the increased produce, assisted by human labour, is so extensive that it does more than counter-balance the difference between the price of labour in this, and other countries.2

  And in 1835 Edward Baines pointed to the specific contribution made by the cotton industry: ‘Each workman performing, or rather superintending as much work as could have been done by two or three hundred men sixty years ago . . . When it is remembered that all these inventions have been made within the last seventy years it must be acknowledged that the cotton mill represents the most striking example of the dominion obtained by human science over the powers of nature, of which modern times can boast.’3

  The opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway in September 1830 was perhaps the event that publicly sealed the arrival of the new steam-powered age, but by then the textile and other trades showed that the basic technologies required to convert Britain from an organic to a coal-based economy were in place. Atmospheric steam engines were being superseded by high-pressure engines that could drive locomotives and ships as well as powering factories and pumps; inventors had devised ways of powering almost every aspect of manufacture; iron was cheap and plentiful and was replacing wood and brass in machine components, rail tracks and even ships’ hulls.