Chapter 41: The Lives of Workers
Historians have generally had two very different takes on the Industrial Revolution. One take is that it left workers with a lot of grime, exploitation, and suffering. The other take is that it led to workers realizing greater material well-being, greater opportunity, and greater empowerment.
Today we dig deeper into the lives of workers in the First Industrial Revolution – to tell the whole story. We’ll discuss pay and working conditions, the state of the social safety net, the roles of women and children in the mills and mines, the leisure opportunities available to workers, and the conditions of their homes and neighborhoods in the growing industrial cities.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Engels, Frederick. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Trans. by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1845.
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. Yale University Press. 2013.
Stearns, Peter N. The Industrial Revolution in World History. 4th Edition. Westview Press. 2013.
“The Maudslay forming machine.” BBC: A History of the World. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/EKhHsdgkTsKCOna6rNPNug
Full Transcript
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The expression “industrial revolution” had been used here and there throughout the early 19th Century to describe the rapidly changing social order associated with technological progress. But the man who popularized it (at least in the English language) – who turned it into the term everyone uses today – was the economic historian Arnold Toynbee.
Born in London in 1852, Toynbee graduated from Adam Smith’s alma mater – Balliol College, Oxford – in 1878 and then began teaching there. He died an untimely death by meningitis at age 30, never getting a chance to publish the masterpiece which surely would have been coming. But from the notes his students took during his lectures, we are able to cobble together something like a manuscript. And from that manuscript, we see just how the first economists and historians discussing the Industrial Revolution perceived it.
“We now approach a darker period – a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible because side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of pauperism [and] the degradation of a large body of producers… The steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, the power-loom had torn up the population by the roots… The effects of the Industrial Revolution prove that free competition may produce wealth without producing well-being.”
Toynbee’s understanding of what happened was derived – at least in part – from a rich collection of left-wing history (like Marx and Engels) and romantic art (like Blake and Dickens) reacting to the incredible changes underway in western society. And Toynbee’s views would go on to influence other intellectuals, like the socialist couples Sidney and Beatrice Webb and John and Barbara Hammond. Into the 1950s and 60s, this historical tradition lived on through our old friends Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson.
In this tradition, the Industrial Revolution had swept away an idyllic past and replaced it with grime, exploitation, and suffering. A very small minority of greedy individuals got super-rich while the vast majority became impoverished. Darkly now, workers lost their freedoms as the machines they operated undermined their humanity.
But there were also economists and historians who found an entirely different narrative in the annals of industrialization. Among them was the Austrian Finance Minister Eugen Böhm von Bawerk – known as “Karl Marx for the bourgeoisie”, he actually defended income inequality as a means of raising everyone’s income in the long run. Another was John H. Clapham, a Cambridge professor who turned to statistics to dispel “the legend that everything was getting worse for the working man.” In the mid-20th Century, Ronald Max Hartwell and David Landes came along as counterweights to Hobsbawm and Thompson. They made the view that industrialization had mostly been a good thing a popular one.
As these guys saw it, standards of living had grown significantly, even for the poor. They were better fed, better clothed, (in time) better sheltered. Even if you ignore the improvements of material well-being, the working classes were becoming better educated and better cared for under a social safety net. Opportunities for upward mobility sometimes felt out of reach, but they were way, way more available than they had been before the 18th Century.
How to explain these wildly different explanations of the same history?
Well, for starters, you can look at the history of industrialization in different places at different times. And what you’ll see – no surprise – are very different stories. Britain’s industrial history was different than Germany’s, which was different than America’s, which was different than Japan’s, which was different than Russia’s, which was different than China’s, which was… you get the idea.
The First Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain. And thus, Great Britain gets the bulk of attention when historians try to answer this question. But the mere fact it started earlier in Britain meant it also played out differently there.
By 1848 – which, again, is where I’m marking the end of the First Industrial Revolution – Great Britain was (more or less) the only truly industrialized nation. Only the United States was even anywhere close to achieving the progress the British had made.
So, because we are still talking about the First Industrial Revolution, let’s do what others have done and focus today on the Isle of Albion; glorious Britannia.
What does recorded history tell us about the lives of the working class there during these years? How do the data, and the art, and the workers’ own words inform us? Which narrative tradition really holds water?
Well, in many respects, they both do.
The First Industrial Revolution created a great upheaval in traditional life, creating greater economic uncertainty, drawing in younger and younger child workers, and finding families crammed into dirty, urban squalor. And at the same time, workers flocked to these industrial centers because doing so meant more money, greater life satisfaction, and (in time) greater empowerment.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 41: The Lives of Workers
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Part 1: Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems
If you’ve seen the HBO show Silicon Valley, you get a sense of how the hi-tech space likes to talk about disruption. For the geeks of the South Bay, disrupting old industries with new technologies is an act of proud defiance against tradition in the name of human progress. It’s nothing particularly new, of course, but today it feels like this is happening constantly.
Well, that was also the case in the early 19th Century, as thousands of new technologies were disrupting traditional industries in countless – literally countless – ways.
Let me give you just one example.
In 1810 our old friend, the machine tool inventor Henry Maudslay, built a new device for making rope. This “Maudslay forming machine” could form better, stronger threads much more quickly than the traditional methods employed for centuries. Spinning these threads with recently-invented “closing” machines, the business of rope-making had transformed overnight from a skilled trade to a mechanized process.
William Lovett, from the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn, was just 11 years old when Maudslay’s machine went into operation. His mother had no way of predicting just what was going to happen for him then when she indentured young William in a traditional rope-making apprenticeship. He didn’t even make it the seven years of his apprenticeship before the trade dried up and his master was forced to call it quits.
Lovett was forced to find alternative means of employment. He briefly tried his hand at fishing, then went to work for a carpenter. But he didn’t start over as an apprentice. And that got him into some trouble.
When a couple of carpentry apprentices from nearby Penzance found out, they went to Lovett’s employer and threatened “legal consequences” for hiring an untrained worker.
So unable to find steady employment in Cornwall, Lovett left his home county for London. There he soon found work in a top-tier cabinet-making shop. But once again, his lack of formal training provoked the outrage of his fellow carpenters. They’d come up to him as he was working and put away his tools, damage the pieces he was working on, and find all sorts of ways to annoy him. The goal was to drive Lovett to quit.
Instead, Lovett called a meeting of his co-workers. He explained to them his situation – how he had wasted his youth pursuing a trade that was then mechanized and made irrelevant. He “appealed to their sense of justice to determine whether it was right for them to prevent me from learning another.” Taking pity on him, the men agreed to let him stay at the shop so he could build his new career.
What Lovett had been up against was western civilization’s guild system.
Guilds had existed since antiquity and were refined during the Middle Ages. They were industry-wide associations of merchants and artisan craftsmen in local communities – usually urban communities. There were guilds of all kinds of different metalworkers, leatherworkers, textile workers, tailors, printers, painters, masons, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers – you name it.
What the guilds controlled was knowledge of the craft. So, if you wanted to be a goldsmith, for example, you would go through an apprenticeship with a master goldsmith for seven years of training. This apprenticeship was a period of indentured service where you would be poorly paid for your labor – if paid at all – while you learned the trade. (In fact, often times your parents had to pay the master to take you on, since he’d be lodging and feeding you.)
The apprenticeship was likely to be a pretty terrible period of your life. But when it was over, you became a journeyman. As a journeyman, you were a skilled goldsmith, free to work for the master of your choosing, and he’d pay you a relatively good wage.
After many years as a journeyman and, perhaps, after producing a particularly fine piece of gold artistry (a “masterpiece”), you would be elevated to the status of a master goldsmith in your guild. As a master, you could make some really good money in the trade, and you’d be responsible for training the next generation of apprentices.
The guilds enjoyed a degree of political influence which helped them effectively maintain monopolies over their respective trades. You see, workers were typically prohibited by law or local custom from practicing a trade they were not formally trained in.
But by the late 18th Century, this traditional guild system was unraveling. The terms of apprenticeships were becoming shorter. The prohibitions on trading outside the guild system were gradually coming off the books. In 1814, the last of them were formally abolished.
This was welcome news to liberals, who decried guilds as a barrier to market activity. As Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations:
“The exclusive privilege of an incorporated trade necessarily restrains the competition, in the town where it is established, to those who are free of the trade... It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think proper. To judge whether he is fit to be employed may surely be trusted to the discretion of the employers whose interest it so much concerns. The affected anxiety of the law-giver lest they should employ an improper person is evidently as impertinent as it is oppressive.”
But the liberals were hardly alone in this view. Radicals also hated the guilds because they prevented the lower classes from achieving upward mobility. Because how were you supposed to have a shot at success as a journeyman or a master if your parents couldn’t afford to get you an apprenticeship. Socialist writers continued to voice these sentiments into the later 19th Century. In his Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx famously wrote “guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”
What replaced the artisan guild system was a new, capitalist system of mass production, especially in mills and other factories full of the latest hi-tech machines. Whereas the journeyman would have owned the tools he used in service of a master craftsman, the industrialists owned all the tools in their plant – and, of course, the plant itself. The especially entrepreneurial – like our old friend Josiah Wedgwood – figured out how to arrange their factories in such a way that gave them total control over the workers they employed. And these workers wouldn’t need seven years of training – just a few days to show them how to do one repetitive task over and over. It was the deskilling of labor.
Needless to say, those who had gone through the rigors of the apprenticeship and then spent years working hard as a journeyman did not appreciate the transition underway. In industries from weaving and cobbling to metalwork and shipbuilding, their learned skills were no longer as appreciated, and they struggled to find work.
But for men like Thomas Dunning, the transition provided an opportunity to climb out of poverty. Dunning’s father was a servant to a local aristocrat and made little money. And, like many fathers of this time, he liked to spend what little money he did earn at the local drinking establishment. The alcoholism became such a problem that he started selling off the family’s possessions to keep the habit going. Dunning’s mother had to go back to work to support the family financially.
So, there was no real chance of Dunning getting a good apprenticeship. Instead, at the age of 12, he started begging for food. But when his father died, his mother remarried, this time to a successful shoemaker. She persuaded her new husband to teach Dunning the relatively low-skill trade. Within no time, Dunning had mastered it and then left his step-father’s shop, landing a job making high-quality boots. It required only a little more training in an informal apprenticeship with his firm.
Thomas Carter came from a similar background – his father was an alcoholic day laborer, unable to afford an apprenticeship for his son. Instead, Carter got work as an errand boy for a woolen drape maker. He made sure to get up early every morning so he could assist one of the tailors in the shop, informally learning the skill over the years. It was enough that, as an adult, he was able to set up his own business as a tailor.
Opportunities in the urban labor market – once dominated by guild members – were now more accessible than ever because they were available to unskilled laborers.
The transition came first in those industries where special skills weren’t particularly important. Plenty of folks knew how to spin fibers into yarn, for example. Their families had been doing it in cottage industry settings for generations. When the new cotton mills of Lancashire sprung up, they gradually put these traditional spinners out of business. But many of these spinners could find work in the mills – and they were grateful for it. Sure, they must have hated the noise, the health and safety hazards, the long hours, the draconian rules enforced by the bosses – all of which I’ve described in previous chapters. But in their diaries and memoirs, these workers overwhelmingly express gratitude for the good pay and steady employment of the mills.
Other jobs like ironworking and shipbuilding paid well too. So did mining, where wages were relatively high and periods of unemployment relatively rare. As Thomas Oliver put it, “As a miner, I did very well.” Miners also tended to resist the transition toward losing control of the means of production. They kept their own tools – their picks and shovels – and even paid their own money to have the tools sharpened by local blacksmiths.
Now, if the pay was so good, and the opportunities so plentiful compared to before, why do we remember the Industrial Revolution as an age of crippling poverty? Was it just because of bleeding hearts like Charles Dickens getting an oversized voice in the forum?
No, not really. Poverty increased significantly starting in the early 1700s, thanks to the incredible advancements in British agriculture. (Shout out Chapter 6!) Food was more plentiful than ever, and with more people getting fed, the population grew significantly. Having 10 children used to mean having 3 or 4 who survived into adulthood. Now it was like 8 or 9 of them reaching maturity.
And the population grew faster than all this new opportunity did. Real wages fell from the 1760s up until about 1820. Things started to balance out only after the First Industrial Revolution came to a close. Families started having fewer children, yes. But also, the pace of economic growth picked up to support more and more workers.
Poverty in the First Industrial Revolution was actually much worse outside the cities than in them. Rural workers recounted “starvation wages” and “very narrow circumstances.” Year after year, more and more unskilled laborers – who used to work the fields – poured into the new manufacturing metropolises looking for the jobs of the future. When they found them, they enjoyed greater pay, greater freedom, and a greater sense of self-worth.
Compared to the countryside, the cities had so many good opportunities for work. And so many workers started thinking, “I don’t need to take any **** from my boss. If he gives me any, I’ll go find a new boss!” This ran them into some natural conflict because, as the bosses deskilled labor, they had developed their own attitudes to the effect of, “I don’t need to take any **** from my worker. If he gives me any, I’ll go find a new worker!”
And so, while the First Industrial Revolution surely had many good workers and many good bosses, it also had many terrible workers and many terrible bosses. Both sides, it seems, were feeling out what they could and couldn’t get away with in this new market, where both the supply of and demand for labor were expanding.
Workers would regularly get drunk on the job, fail to show up for shifts, and get into all sorts of arguments with their managers over stuff even they admitted was trivial. In a memoir about his long journey to get and stay sober, Thomas Whittaker describes how he left “profitable employment” in a Lancashire mill in the 1830s because of “a little temper on the part of the master with too much defiance on the part of the servant.”
Floor managers, meanwhile, used violence to enforce bosses’ trivial rules, like “No whistling on the job” or “No wandering into rooms you’re not assigned to.” Workers who didn’t comply with the rules would be fined or chained-up to receive lashings like plantation slaves. Some would get lead weights locked around their necks. Others would get their ears nailed to the wall. And sexual assaults by bosses and managers, targeting female and child workers, were sadly common.
Even with the better employers, workers found themselves in a totally new world in the factory. You had to be there for your shift when the bell rung – otherwise you’d be locked out half the day and lose half a day’s wages. You couldn’t take a break when you felt like it to go chat with your coworker, for if you did your machine would need to shut down. Unless you were a navvy – working on the canals or railroads – a manager was always keeping a close eye on you. The pace and grueling repetition, combined with long hours and constant supervision, must have felt stifling.
The first generation of industrial workers put up with these conditions because of the better pay. The next generations, practically raised in the mills, were more accustomed to these conditions, but they would demand greater compensation.
Why? Because while the expanded labor market of the cities offered more opportunity, it failed to provide the kind of welfare that could once be found in the rural parishes – welfare to the injured, sick, aging, and otherwise struggling.
One William Dodd started his working life at age 6 in a Cumbrian woolen mill. The long hours he spent at his machine in an unnatural posture left him with severely bowed knees. As he put it, he was a “miserable cripple” by adulthood. In his early thirties, unable to keep things going, Dodd quit factory life, disgusted with the expendability of human beings like himself under capitalism.
John Buckmaster had been an apprentice carpenter, but he quit on his master to go find work in nearby Salisbury instead. Then he contracted smallpox. Unable to earn anything, he found himself in over his head when the doctor’s bill arrived.
Workers who lost a limb on the job, or got a cut infected, or started losing their vision or hearing; those who contracted smallpox or typhoid or cholera; often found themselves out of work with few means to pay for food, much less medical care.
Additionally, many of the good new jobs of the Industrial Revolution – shipbuilding, ironmaking, mining – all required a good deal of physical strength. It was a young man’s work. As one 79-year-old London worker put it,
“We try to hide our want of great strength and good sight as long as we can. I did it for two or three years, but I was found out at last and had to go. In most shops, the moment a man puts his glasses on it’s over with him. It wasn’t so when I first knew London. Masters then said, ‘Let me have an old man, one who knows something.’ Now it’s ‘Let me have a young man. I must have a strong fellow. An old one won’t do.”
And even those workers who were young and healthy were not immune to a downturn in the economy. For with the advent of modern finance came the business cycle of boom and bust. Workers were now out on their own when the market caved in.
And cave in it did. Several times, in fact. First there was the great 9-year recession following the Napoleonic Wars, then the Panic of 1825, the severe downturns of 1831 and 1841, and then the Panic of 1847, as famine hit Europe and the railway bubble burst. And every time, capitalists would find themselves unable to pay their workforces. And so, working families who had once enjoyed growing prosperity were suddenly reduced to selling off furniture and rationing food for their children.
And in this age of growing uncertainty – with nothing of the social safety net under them that we have today – workers started getting up-in-arms about their situations.
We saw it with the millers who supposedly burned down the Albion Mills (shout out Chapter 23!), the Luddites (shout out Chapter 24!) and the Peterloo protesters (shout out Chapter 40!). We saw it in the Cambridgeshire riots and Tolpuddle Martyrs (shout out Chapter 6!). We’re going to see a whole lot more of it next month too.
Among the men who beat this drum of radical reform was William Lovett – the ropemaker-turned-carpenter who convinced his coworkers to let him make cabinets despite not having a formal apprenticeship background. Lovett soon rose to prominence as a leader in London’s labor movement. He helped form a cabinetmakers union and then the London Working Men’s Association. He took a leading role in the Chartist movement, which aimed to expand the vote to every man in Britain.
He spent time in prison for his beliefs and, when he got out, he formed the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People – an organization which advocated for greater educational opportunities for working-class children.
It’s difficult to imagine a man like Lovett before the Industrial Revolution – before the advent of capitalism and the disruption of modern technology. And had it not been for his experiences early on, it’s difficult to say whether he’d have had much interest in extending a political voice and educational opportunities for his class.
Like most men throughout history, Lovett had begun his working life as a child. But in the later stages of the First Industrial Revolution, that practice would soon find itself under fire.
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Part 2: Work and the Family
You know those folks who always complain about the decline of the traditional family in modern society?
Well, they’re right. The traditional family has declined in relevance across the world – but it’s a trend that’s been ongoing since the 1700s. Of all the elements of life that the Industrial Revolution changed, perhaps none was more extraordinary than the role of the family.
Even before the Industrial Revolution began, consumer spending trends had been changing. Individuals were increasingly purchasing goods and services for themselves, rather than for their households. The Industrial Revolution accelerated the decline of the family unit as an economic agent.
You see, for most of history, for most families, the household and the place of work were one and the same. Families would go out into the fields together to cultivate crops or graze animals. They’d make clothing and baskets and whatnot in the house, some for the family, some as surplus for the neighbors. In the same calculations of time management, they’d gather wood, tend the fire, cook the meals, etc. The difference between “work” and “chore” wasn’t all that clean cut.
Even for the guild-masters, work was a family affair. Sure, your wife wasn’t working as a goldsmith alongside you, but she’d likely be involved in your sales, distribution, and accounts maintenance.
As income-generating labor gradually left the home – to be found instead in mills, mines, and other industrial work sites – a new division of labor started to take hold. As I explained in Chapter 39, women would stay home to raise the children and tend to the household chores while men would go out to earn an income for the family.
This was especially the case with the new middle class, which could most easily afford to rely on only one income. In fact, many middle-class families could afford to pay for household servants, increasingly furnished their homes with luxuries, and made time for leisure activities. In the past, bourgeois women might have helped with their husbands’ business’s bookkeeping. Now those jobs were being done exclusively by men, and so they took on a new role: Entertaining the family and guests by reciting poetry or playing piano.
Working-class women, meanwhile, found plenty of work to do in the home – especially when it came to organizing family consumption. With the husband gone all day, it was the wives who had to clean their dirty, sweaty clothes. It was the wives who had to go to the markets to make purchases, come home with food and prepare it for meals. This was a critical job because the work of the Industrial Revolution was so physically intensive. High-calorie meals were needed – both for the husbands and the older children – to maintain their stamina day in and day out.
Any time leftover to women could be spent doing other labor. Many would make food for neighbors in exchange for payment, or do laundry for them, or mend shoes for them, or even teach their young children reading or arithmetic in their home “dame schools.”
Women also found themselves stuck with what we now call emotional labor. With men under constant supervision at worksites for more than 12 hours a day, they were no longer able to spend much time maintaining social relationships. Whether it was with their extended families, the neighbors, whoever, this work of continuing communication with them fell almost entirely to women. It’s a legacy that we’re only now starting to confront.
Many women did enter the textile mills of the First Industrial Revolution. But typically, these were young women in their teens or early 20s. Mill owners preferred hiring them because they didn’t need the high wages that a man with a family needed. Once a woman was married and especially once she had children, her mill work was generally abandoned. In the days before running water, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, microwaves, and other time-saving tools for home chores, the family unit really did need someone who could do that labor full-time. And it made sense to them that it would be the family member who was also giving birth every year or two. But even for couples who weren’t having children (or weren’t having as many children), it was still men who sought the income-generating work because they could generally get higher wages – a discrimination which reinforced this division of labor for centuries to come.
There were exceptions, of course. Catherine Groves – the mother of leftist newspaperman George Holyoake – ran a successful business manufacturing buttons. She even employed and supervised several workers in this operation. But such exceptions were very rare. Other married women and mothers went out and got themselves wage-earning jobs. But almost always these were women married to men suffering from some work-debilitating injury or illness. (And, sadly, one of the most common diseases for which this was the case was alcoholism.)
Now, in pre-industrial societies, it wasn’t just the wives working alongside their husbands – it was the children too. And when the Industrial Revolution came, ad men went to find income-generating labor outside the home, their kids didn’t exactly stay behind with their wives.
Now, that’s not to say the fathers and their children would go to work together. Even if they worked at the same factory, it might easily be a different room or different building. A new barrier (a metaphorical barrier) was erected between working fathers and their children, separating work life from family life, as they wouldn’t be around to see each other for most of the day each day – a barrier that still stands for many fathers in the present.
But work the kids did. As soon as they were old enough for someone to want to hire them, their parents were more than happy to push them into the labor force.
But let’s face it, historically most employers wouldn’t be interested in hiring a 6-year-old, for example. 6-year-olds don’t have the physical strength, the power of concentration, or other rudimentary skills that adults have. If you’re paying one, I mean, how much work are you really getting out of them?
So even though child labor was very normal in pre-industrial society, you would be gradually introduced to work which got more serious as you got older. And during the First Industrial Revolution, outside the new industrial cities, this remained the norm. Your work would probably start with household chores or light farm work. It might even be something fun for a child, like bird-scaring. It was about the time you reached age of 10-to-12 you might begin some kind of more formal employment, perhaps as a field laborer or as an apprentice.
10 was the average age of children entering the workforce in Britain during the First Industrial Revolution. Some started much later – as late as their late teens. Other started much earlier, as young as 4 or 5 years old. And among that latter group – younger than age 8 – more than 70% could be found in the growing industrial cities. The average age to begin work in a mill town was 8 ½ years.
For one thing, work was just a lot easier to find in the cities than in the country, and a mill owner wasn’t going to feel as bad about giving a job to a child that could go to a full-grown man as a rural employer might have been. It was usually as simple as parent going to a local mill, factory, or mine, having a quick word with the boss, and – done – their child was hired, starting tomorrow.
For another thing, labor was deskilled enough that even children could do many of the new jobs. And employers figured out how to gradually add responsibility to the positions offered. For example, most young workers would begin as piercers – standing at a machine to repair any broken threads they might see – or scavengers, cleaning under the machines. But as they got older, they could progress to roles like “doffer” or “filler”, removing full bobbins from spinning machines and replacing them with empty ones.
Finally, with all the workers concentrated on the same factory floor, it was easier to keep an eye on all of them. This made it easier to manage child workers, in particular, who would have absolutely preferred to leave the mill and go play outside. The foremen would keep the children in line with physical violence. Beatings and other abuses were common.
Here’s the thing though: In the old days, that kind of punishment was tolerated. In the countryside, it still was. Children who came home with scars from whippings in rural England were likely to find their parents siding with their employer.
But in the new cities, where opportunities were more plentiful, parents were less likely to accept such treatment of their working children. When a 6-year-old John Wood came home from his cotton mill job one night, his mother noticed how discolored his back had become after weeks of floggings. She immediately removed him from employment and sent him to school instead. (Albeit, a school that taught children how to do textile work.)
When a 10-year-old mine worker named Joseph Hodgson came home with a whip-crack along the side of his face, his parents agreed he “should go no more.”
On top of that, industrial work was way more dangerous than agricultural work. There was an alarming number of child worker injuries due to accidents, with machines tearing off fingers or limbs. Long hours were spent standing and moving in unnatural positions, damaging growing bones. Children frequently went deaf in the loud mills. And don’t even get me started with the dangerous mines, where for months on end the children working there would only get one day of sunlight per week. As adults, the former child mine workers recounted stories of how uncomfortable and terrified they were in those mines, working alongside the rough, older men.
Far from being a product of the Industrial Revolution, child labor was more likely a victim of it. It only took a few generations of child labor in factories for the practice to come under attack.
In the early days, there was no real concept of child welfare. Nobody questioned the morality of putting children to work. It was seen as a totally reasonable way for a working family to survive. As Emma Griffin put it in her book, Liberty’s Dawn, “Paid employment gave children the best chance of enough to eat.” For other parents, they worried that their kids’ schooling would get in the way of honest, hard work. Writing how his father perceived his love of books, John Harris wrote he “appeared to dislike it, saying he did not think I should ever earn my living.”
But by the 1840s, a sharp shift had been made in public opinion. Writers, politicians, and labor leaders all began to decry the practice. And, as it happens, advancements in machine technologies were making child labor less necessary anyway.
What’s most remarkable about this process is that many former child workers found themselves struggling to explain their parents’ decisions to put them in the labor force. Usually they chalked it up to poverty, but even those of them still in poverty weren’t keen for their own children to go to work. They had experienced the same shift in values as the rest of the country.
The United States – and, later, Germany – were pioneers in developing the alternative to child labor: Universal (or near universal) education. In fact, in many American states, compulsory education for young white males was the norm by the end of the first Industrial Revolution.
But in the UK, which had a more entrenched class system, the movement to create universal education was slower.
What really kickstarted the movement wasn’t the need to occupy children’s time. Rather, it was a desire by those educated later in life to bring the benefits of education to their kids. As books and newspapers became more affordable – now that they were getting mass-printed on mass-produced paper – they also became more accessible to the masses. And the masses took it upon themselves – with a number of options available at the time – to teach themselves how to read.
Among the resources available to them was a growing network of small, commercial night schools. One William Marcroft – who had started work in a textile mill at age 6 – had never sat inside a classroom until as a teenager when his friend, Jesse, encouraged him to come along to Job Plant’s night school. Another was William Chadwick, who’s family was so poor they could have never afforded schooling for him as a child. But with his earnings in the cotton mills, Chadwick paid for his own education in the night schools.
Then there were the mutual improvement societies – small groups of friends who pooled their resources to buy books, and then read and discuss them together. Many labor leaders, including William Lovett, were self-educated through these societies.
Finally, there was the Sunday School Movement, which had begun as a way to teach religious instruction to children in the Church of England. But the concept spread with nonconformist churches too. It was when the Baptists and Methodists picked up the idea that it expanded to adults as well. And unlike the day schools, which treated students as passive learners to be educated through obedience and repetition, these Sunday Schools were more engaging, especially because the adults who attended them all wanted to be there in the first place.
And when working men took these opportunities to self-educate, they not only achieved what they sought in terms of self-improvement, improved economic opportunity, or means of entertainment – many also discovered political empowerment. Again, William Lovett is a good example, but so too was William Marcroft. He followed his friend Jesse to the night school hoping to acquire the skills necessary to quit manual labor some day. But in the process of learning, he thought more and more about the way society was organized. He started getting involved in the labor movement, joining friendly societies and a union for his trade. Later he helped found several co-operative labor societies, newsrooms, libraries, and schools for “aged men whose education had been neglected.” Like Lovett, he also became a prominent Chartist.
So, it should come as no surprise that it was the Radicals – the socialists – who were among the first advocates in Europe for universal education. Society was undergoing reorganization. By educating more of the next generation from an early age, they hoped to create a more meaningful future than had been made possible for themselves.
But the Radicals weren’t the only ones hoping to bring about the end of child labor. They had some allies in the Tories.
While their liberal Whig rivals were advocating for laissez faire economic principles, the Tories were dismayed by the conditions in industrial mills and mines. As you’ll remember from last time, the Conservative Party was mostly made up of the traditional landed aristocracy. Their “old Tory” style of conservativism was derived from centuries of understanding that they had a role to provide for the masses. During the Middle Ages, lords had a Christian responsibility to care for the people on their lands (at least in theory). In fact, I’ve seen it argued that one reason for the comparative dearth of business regulation and social welfare in the United States is because we never had a formal landed aristocracy here.
Now, this wasn’t about empowering the working class, of course. This was paternalism. But the Tories were genuinely horrified by, what they saw as, the crude exploitation of workers by their bourgeois capitalist masters.
Key among them was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. As a child, Shaftesbury had a difficult relationship with his parents and educators. But he remained, for the most part, a traditionalist and embraced an evangelical brand of Anglican Christianity. And he saw it as part of his Christian duty to improve conditions in these “dark Satanic mills” – especially for the women and children working in them.
Ever since 1819, cotton and woolen mills were legally prohibited from employing children under the age of 9. Now Lord Shaftesbury took government regulation a step further by introducing the Ten Hours Act of 1833. Workers between the ages of 9 and 18 would be limited to 10-hour shifts Monday through Friday and 8 hours on Saturday. Over the next 15 years, he pressed Parliament to do more.
In 1838, a mine in Yorkshire flooded in a freak accident, drowning 26 children who were working inside, some as young as 7. Shaftesbury responded by leading a Parliamentary commission to research Britain’s coal mines. He then released a sensational report, which included engraved pictures printed inside, about girls working half-naked alongside boys because of the intense heat inside the mines. In 1842 then, Parliament passed the Mines and Collieries Act, banning the employment of women and girls in the mines, as well as boys under the age of 10.
Throughout the 1840s, Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative Party led the charge passing numerous pieces of legislation regulating industry – bills that required lunch breaks, clean worksites, and third-party review of records. The state’s bureaucracy expanded to enforce compliance of these measures. These Factory Acts and Mine Acts were among the first efforts of government to improve working conditions in the industrial age.
But it was also outside the factory walls – in the streets of the new industrial cities – that the working class experienced rough conditions. And it’s in these streets where we’re left with some of our most vivid memories of life in the Industrial Revolution.
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Part 3: “Filth and Comfortlessness”
The typical day in the life of a mill or mine worker would begin in the very early hours of the morning. Sometime around 4 AM, a guy would come around to your house and knock on the window with a big stick. He was the local “knocker up” and his whole job was to serve as a 19th Century alarm clock. There were variations of this profession – others would call out for everyone to wake up. However it was done, it was the best way to ensure the new urban workforce – unaided by roosters and forced to rise earlier than the sun – would get up and get to their shift on time.
One Robert Lowery recounted his mornings as a Tyneshire 10-year-old, employed to pick brasses out of coals at the local coal mine.
“I had to rise at 4 a.m. every morning and walk nearly two miles to work, which continued from 5 a.m. until 6 p.m. and well I remember how I longed for the ‘day of rest’, when the voice of the ‘caller’ no longer broke in on the sound slumbers of the morning.”
For most of history, the availability of daylight put limits on what hours you could drive ploughs, pick crops, or do most kinds of jobs. As I mentioned in Chapter 36, candlelight was so expensive / time intensive to create that the labor you could do by candlelight probably wasn’t worth it, from a purely economic perspective. But with breakthroughs in artificial lighting and the productivity gains of industrialization, such natural limits to the workday evaporated. And this created a great strain on the lives of workers – especially child workers.
The decline of leisure time and leisure activities was definitely one of the bleakest aspects of working-class life during the First Industrial Revolution. With what little time was available to you for activities other than working, eating, or sleeping, you were often too exhausted to use it for anything constructive.
What remained of pre-industrial traditions – like village festivals, which included all kinds of sports, games, entertainment, shopping (and, of course, drinking, gambling, etc.) – quickly died out. In part this was because it was difficult to recreate these traditions in large cities full of strangers (many of whom had only recently moved in), but also because employers and local officials actively opposed such activities, believing they ran counter to public order and productivity.
But the working class did manage to carve out some leisure opportunities at the ends of the work week.
For many men, this revolved around the tavern, the pub, the inn, the bar, the local, the alehouse, the watering hole, the saloon. (I mean, isn’t it amazing how many words and phrases we came up with to describe the same thing?) Alcohol consumption offered them an escape from the tedium of their work lives. More importantly, it offered them a rare opportunity for socializing, as many struggled to build social ties in the new and difficult setting of the industrial city. But of course, there were obvious drawbacks, including some rampant alcoholism in the days before people understood the disease, especially with relatively new developments in the production of distilled spirits.
For others, leisure could be found in the Saturday night markets.
You see, many families couldn’t afford the food prices being charged in the big cities, with demand from the thriving middle class driving up prices. But the poor leftovers of food sold in the ritzier neighborhoods, earlier in the day, would wind up in the poorer districts on Saturday nights where you could buy them at discount. And this just happened to be one of the few times some people could get out and go grocery shopping. Saturday shifts tended to be a little shorter than Monday-through-Friday shifts. Plus staying out on Saturday night wasn’t as bad since Sunday – a whole day to rest – was the next day.
As a result, the Saturday night market took on a social function in addition to its commercial one. Musicians and other street performers would entertain. Men could “provide company” to women there (the contemporary expression for dating). Street vendors would sell food and crafts. Merchants would compete with each other to provide the best deals, shouting out their specials. All of it made for a lively atmosphere.
As one observer described a Saturday night market in Manchester:
“Boys and girls shout and laugh and disappear into the taverns together. Careful housewives – often attended by their husbands, dutifully carrying the baby – bargain hard with the butchers for a hay-penny off the pound. The pawnbroker is busy, for pledges are being rapidly redeemed, and flat irons, dirty pairs of stays, candlesticks, Sunday trousers, tools, blankets, and so forth are being fast removed from the shelves. From byways and alleyways and back streets, fresh crowds every moment emerge. Stalls, shops, cellars are clustered round with critics and purchasers. Cabmen drive slowly through the throng, shouting and swearing to the people to get out of the horse’s way, and occasionally perhaps the melodious burst of a roaring chorus, surging out of the open windows of the Apollo Theater, resounds loudly above the whole conglomeration of street noises.”
The working families of these neighborhoods did not live in a vacuum. They understood that incredible social changes were underway, including the rise of a new middle class. Because even though there was immense income inequality, with the bourgeoisie capturing much of the new wealth being created, there was new wealth being created. And with it came greater demand for clothing, furniture, fine food, and new homes. With this growing demand came more business for the producers of these goods, stimulating the further creation of wealth.
Some workers sought opportunities to join the ranks of that rising middle class by going into business for themselves. Specifically, they saw all kinds of market opportunities in filling the needs of the growing urban workforce. All these new people needed to be fed. They needed clothes and shoes. They needed furniture and household products. And so, countless workers decided to become their own boss and set up a small shop.
When George Cooper was blacklisted for his role in the Stockport mill strikes of 1848, he decided to become a grocer instead. One James Croll gave up a life of manual labor to try selling tea. Joseph Livesey, meanwhile, was so taken aback by the high price of cheese at his Saturday night market that he devised a plan to acquire and sell “cheap cheese” to his neighbors, starting out with little more than a borrowed sovereign and a pair of scales.
Plenty more decided to become publicans – bar owners – to fill the urban mass’s seemingly limitless appetite for booze, although typically these individuals struggled to turn a profit, as the appetite for booze they were filling tended to be their own.
And singers, songwriters, actors, playwrights, publishers, and authors of cheap literature found work in the cities too, as demand for entertainment grew with the population.
And then there were the pawnbrokers.
With so many working families in the very early stages of building wealth, pawnbrokers played an important role in the booming British cities of the First Industrial Revolution. They were trusted figures in those working-class communities that were still unfamiliar with banks.
A family would come into the shop to pawn a piece of jewelry or furniture they owned as collateral for a short-term loan. The family would use some of the loan to (say) buy food for the week, and then come back after payday to reclaim their items with their newly earned wages. It was especially common to pawn your Sunday best clothes, since you only needed them on Sunday.
It was also common to pawn items even if you didn’t need the money because – well – the pawnshop had better locks and security than your house did.
For some working families, though, pawnbrokers were not an option. Many employers sought to squeeze as much labor out of their workforce for as little compensation as humanly possible. And to that end, they paid their employees in “truck.”
Now, to pay your workers in truck, you also had to own the stores those workers shopped at. So, some of the industrialists would set up a shop and compensate their employees with tokens that could only be redeemed at said shop. (Americans would later call this “the company store”, but we’ll get to that.) The price for food per hour of labor was of course much higher at these shops than they would be elsewhere. But in smaller mill towns, where one mill was the major employer, the workers would have few other options.
Other employers would open a pub, and they’d make that the place where workers could pick up their pay at the end of the work week. Well, guess what the workers were going to spend it on then.
Another odious thread found across the industrial towns of Great Britain was the state of the slums.
Now, it’s important to remember that, historically, urban areas were always unclean and unhealthy places to live. That’s why most people never lived in them. Trash and sewage would build up, roads and buildings more quickly deteriorated, diseases broke out frequently.
The First Industrial Revolution, however, forced folks to move into urban cores in order to supply their labor – en masse – to the local mines, mills, and other factories. Yet, at the same time, little provision was made for the local water supplies, the building codes, and other important elements of urban planning. Quality of life considerations – like parks, trash pickup, walkability – were not really being considered yet. Policymakers were flatfooted responding to the huge and unprecedented population growth, and it wasn’t until after the First Industrial Revolution that important breakthroughs were made in the study of diseases and the field of urban infrastructure.
Because they were living in the ever-growing cities, workers felt the brunt of environmental problems in the Industrial Revolution: Coal smoke, “king cholera” and other problems with the water supply, sewage everywhere, constant noise pollution that made them go deaf, as well as the myriad of health problems from actually working in the mills.
But the grossest, most memorable examples of these conditions were captured for posterity by a German immigrant, sent to northern England by his industrialist family, who was horrified by what he found there.
His name was Friedrich Engels. (Yes, that Friedrich Engels.)
Born in an industrializing town on the Rhine in Prussia in 1820, Engels was the eldest son of a textile manufacturer – one of the first bringing the advancements of Britain to Germany. His father also expected him to learn the family business to take it over one day, and he always pushed his reluctant son in that direction.
During an apprenticeship to learn the cotton trade, Engels began reading philosophy. And then he got all sorts of ideas about the rise of capitalism being a bad thing. When Engels was 22, his increasingly alarmed parents decided to send him to Manchester to work in the family’s Victoria Mill. But seeing Manchester for himself only increased his radicalization, as it allowed him to witness, firsthand, the situation in the British slums.
Engels began to document what he saw and – in 1845 – published it as a book: The Conditions of the Working Class in England.
Recounting his visit to a neighborhood along the River Irk, he writes:
“[These streets] contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement... Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth... At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream.”
It goes on, and on, and on like that.
Engels notes that many of the houses in this neighborhood were built recently, but were also built so haphazardly that they were already falling apart. And yet, that didn’t stop the landlords from charging exorbitant rents, forcing multiple families to share the same single-family units.
The insulation in these homes was poor. Everything leaked. You could never get sufficiently warm or dry, especially because they weren’t very conducive to stove fires. The occupants frequently suffered from respiratory illnesses.
Among the homes where he observed the worst conditions were those occupied by Irish immigrants, who (because of discrimination) had to accept lower wages than other working families.
“The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture: a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, doorposts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney.”
In other words, the Irish families are literally tearing the house apart just to keep it warm.
We’ll come back to Engels (and his much more infamous associate) later on. But the time has come to discuss the new worldview, the new economic philosophy that they – as well as considerably more moderate thinkers – were developing in response to the Industrial Revolution, in response to the working class conditions they saw, in response to the shortcomings of this new world taking shape.
Socialism: Next time, on the Industrial Revolutions.
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