Chapter 45: Faith, Fashion, Food, and Football
The second of two episodes devoted to the cultural changes underway in the 18th and 19th Centuries, thanks (at least in part) to the Industrial Revolution. First we’ll explore the so-called Second Great Awakening, which spurred a diversity of religious traditions in the United States. Then we’ll discuss the impact of industrialization on fashion trends (and vice versa). Next, we’ll talk about the changing diets of ordinary people in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Finally, we’ll wrap up with the history of football.
Sources for this episode include:
Brekke, Linzy A. “The ‘Scourge of Fashion’: Political Economy and the Politics of Consumption in the Early Republic.” Early American Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2005, pp. 111–139.
“The Burned-Over District.” (Two Hundred Years on the Erie Canal.) New York Heritage. https://nyheritage.org/exhibits/two-hundred-years-erie-canal/burned-over-district
Clark, Gregory, et al. “A British Food Puzzle, 1770-1850.” The Economic History Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 1995, pp. 215–237.
“A Critical Inquiry into Fashion.” Fashion Myths: A Cultural Critique (Translated by John Irons), by Roman Meinhold and John Irons, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2013, pp. 9–36.
Eden, F.M. The State of the Poor. Volume I. A Facsimile of the 1797 Edition. Frank Cass & Co. LTD. 1966.
Finley, James Bradley. Autobiography of Rev. James B. Finley; Or, Pioneer Life in the West. Edited by W.P. Strickland. Cranston and Curts. 1853.
Glancey, Jonathan. “A History of the Department Store.” BBC Culture. Mar 26, 2015. http://www.bbc.com/culture/bespoke/story/20150326-a-history-of-the-department-store/index.html
Goldblatt, David. The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer. Penguin. 2006.
Griffin, Emma. “Diets, Hunger and Living Standards During the British Industrial Revolution.” Past & Present, vol. 239, no. 1, May 2018, pp. 71–111.
The History of Football: The Beautiful Game. Directed by Hereward Pelling, performance by Terence Stamp. Fremantle International Distribution. 2002. BBC One.
“The History of Lawn Mowers.” Robomow. Sept 20, 2015. https://www.robomow.com/en-GB/history-lawn-mowers/
Horrell, Sara and Deborah Oxley, “Bringing Home the Bacon? Regional Nutrition, Stature, and Gender in the Industrial Revolution.” The Economic History Review, vol. 65, no. 4, 2012, pp. 1354–1379.
“Introduction to 19th-Century Fashion.” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/i/introduction-to-19th-century-fashion/
Jackson, Peter. “How did Quakers conquer the British sweet shop?” BBC News Magazine. Jan 20, 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8467833.stm
Kitchiner, William. Apicius Redivivus: Or, The Cook's Oracle. Samuel Bagster. 1817.
Komlos, John. “Nutrition, Population Growth, and the Industrial Revolution in England.” Social Science History, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 69–91.
Madison, James. “Fashion.” National Gazette. Mar 20 1792. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-14-02-0231
Munich, Adrienne. “Late Early Moderns or, the Victorians.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, 2013, pp. 72–75
“Religious Transformation and the Second Great Awakening.” U.S. History Online Textbook. https://www.ushistory.org/us/22c.asp
Scott, Donald. “Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening.” National Humanities Center. October 2000. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm
Sheridan, Richard B. “Changing Sugar Technology and the Labour Nexus in the British Caribbean, 1750-1900, with Special Reference to Barbados and Jamaica.” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide, vol. 63, no. 1/2, 1989, pp. 59–93.
Shipps, Jan. Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. University of Chicago Press. 1987.
Smith, S. D. “Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in Historical Perspective.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 27, no. 2, 1996, pp. 183–214.
Vile, John R. “Established Churches in Early America.” The First Amendment Encyclopedia. 2009. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/801/established-churches-in-early-america
“William Miller: American Religious Leader.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Feb 26, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Miller
Zakim, Michael. “Customizing the Industrial Revolution: The Reinvention of Tailoring in the Nineteenth Century.” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 33, no. 1, 1998, pp. 41–58.
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Full Transcript
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In 1801 (219 years ago this week), a crowd of up to 20,000 people descended on the Cane Ridge Meeting House in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Over the course of six or seven days, they listened to a series of preachers sermonizing, singing, leading prayers, and more. Led by the local Presbyterians, it was an interdenominational gathering, which included Baptists and Methodists as well. Usually there were several preaching at once, at different corners around the meeting house grounds.
Among the attendees was one James Bradley Finley, who grew up in a frontier family and had briefly lived in this part of Kentucky. He was intrigued that such a tent revival would be taking place in these backwoods and wanted to see it for himself. He was a rationalist – not particularly religious – and he went into the event determined not to be overtaken with emotion. But when he got there, he was overwhelmed by what he saw.
“The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm... Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy in the most piteous accents, while others were shouting most vociferously... At one time I saw at least five hundred swept down in a moment, as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them, and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens.”
Finley was converted that day and in time became an evangelical Methodist minister.
Last time, I described the Romanticism movement as a “crisis of the European conscience” – a reaction to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, which sought to fill the new spiritual and emotional voids left unfilled by material progress. Well, a similar phenomenon was playing out in the United States. But while Romanticism had touched the eastern seaboard of the new country, it was religious fervor that was having that effect in the interior.
It was the so-called Second Great Awakening.
America had long been a magnet for Europe’s strongest religious adherents. While plenty of Europeans passively accepted the role of the official state churches, others chaffed under religious authorities they disagreed with. It’s what drove the Puritans to settle in New England, where they set up the official church they wanted. And religiously tolerant colonies like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania attracted an array of believers, including Quakers, Baptists, Anabaptists, Lutherans, even some Catholics and Jews.
So perhaps it’s not too surprising that, at the onset of the industrial age, Americans were pretty receptive to this evangelism. The Anglican Church had abandoned the former colonies after independence. The dominant Congregationalist Church of New England was considered stale and out of touch. And as white Americans moved out into the woods of Appalachia and the Midwest, there were no churches established yet to serve them. So, to fill the vacuum came the most missionary denominations: the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. Employing itinerant preachers, they made the rounds on horseback to the new communities popping up in the interior, preaching to and shepherding the new wave of American Protestants.
The founding fathers may have been a mix of Deists and Puritans, but they set up a country that was primed for evangelical fanaticism.
This fanaticism often took the form of camp meetings like the one at Cane Ridge in Kentucky. Thousands would gather and get whipped up into a frenzy – screaming, weeping, jerking, fainting. It was a pretty surreal scene. And while such revivalist preaching continued now and again into the 20th Century and even to today, it’s never really captured the imagination of Americans like it did in the early decades of the 1800s.
One of the reasons this movement was so successful was that it preached a theology that contradicted Calvinism. Whereas the nonconformist Protestants of old believed there was a heavenly select pre-destined for salvation, these preachers taught that anybody who accepted Christ could receive God’s grace. And with that, traditional Calvinism pretty much died in America during these years. In a nation that held freedom and individualism dear to their hearts, a theology of free will was much more appealing.
Within the American interior, no region is better known for this movement than the so-called “Burned-Over District” in western New York State. With the Erie Canal linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River (shout out Chapter 33) these counties opened up for development. And as they did, revivalist camp meetings were held again and again and again, until the region was “burnt over”, in the words of the Presbyterian evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. (In other words, the people there were burned out from revival after revival.)
Now, subsequent research has shown that this district really wasn’t any more burned over than other parts of the American interior. The mass gatherings were pretty common everywhere. But what did make the Burned-Over District unique was all the new and often times peculiar religious movements that were thriving there.
Among them were the early Spiritualists, led by Leah, Maggie, and Kate Fox, who claimed they were able to communicate with the dead. They enlisted some radical Quakers they knew and began conducting public séances. Then there was the Oneida Society, which built a Utopian community designed to perfect humanity in anticipation of Christ’s second coming. They practiced communal living, group marriage, and something akin to ritualized tantric sex. (Among their followers was the guy who assassinated President James Garfield later on.)
In fact, Millennialist groups like the Oneida Society were pretty common. A Millennialist sect which broke away from the Quakers in England back in the 18th Century flourished in the Burned-Over District. The Shakers (who still exist today in very limited numbers – maybe as few as three total), practiced communal, industrious living with strict celibacy.
But the Millennialist with the most lasting legacy was a Baptist preacher in eastern New York named William Miller.
Born in western Massachusetts in 1782, Miller actually considered himself a Deist for most of his early life. But after returning home to the farm following his service in the War of 1812, he started to grow pretty concerned about his inevitable mortality. He started attending a Baptist church and, in an effort to reconcile his Deist beliefs with his newfound Baptist beliefs, Miller took to studying scripture.
As he obsessively read the Bible, Miller slowly became convinced that the holy book was full with clues about the return of Christ. Most important among them was a verse from the Book of Daniel. As Miller tried putting the pieces of this puzzle together, he came to the conclusion that the Second Coming would take place around 1843 or 1844.
Now, this was as early as 1818, but for a while he held this belief pretty close to his vest. But by the early 1830s, he decided to start spreading the word, writing newspaper articles. Shortly thereafter, he was flooded with letters from readers seeking more information. He started printing pamphlets, delivering lectures, and building a movement of Millerites. They held there own camp meetings and even purchased the largest tent in America for their tent revivals.
By the early 1840s, Millerism had grown from an bizarre campaign into full-blown national movement, with possibly as many as 100,000 or even half a million believers. As possible dates for the Second Advent came and went, Miller kept recalculating the clues based on different historical calendars. At last, it was determined the final date would be October 22nd, 1844.
With heightened expectations, the Millerites stayed up all night to welcome back their savior. And when the sun came up on the 23rd, they were all greatly disappointed. No, really, this was dubbed the “Great Disappointment.”
Miller was disappointed too, but was still convinced the advent was nigh, even on his deathbed in 1849. But while most followers left the movement disgruntled, a few hung on, reinterpreting what had happened. The origins of the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses are traced back to the Millerites.
Another modern religious movement can be traced back to these years in the Burned-Over District, where a farmer in Palmyra, New York, claimed to have been led by an angel to a set of golden plates buried in a nearby hill. And, you guessed it, his name was Joseph Smith.
Joseph Smith had been born in Vermont in 1805 to a family with divided religious beliefs. His father’s family apparently practiced some kind of old folk religion that involved magic powers to decipher divine messages in stones and find treasures. When they moved to upstate New York, Smith also encountered the frequent revivalist camp meetings of the itinerant preachers coming through.
He had first found the plates when he was 15 years old. Seven years later, he began his own religious movement. According to Smith, the angel instructed him not to show the plates to anyone, but to translate them and publish the translation. In 1830, it was released under the title, “The Book of Mormon.” According to this new scripture, the lost tribes of Israel had made their way to the western hemisphere, and these became Native American tribes. Also, Christ had visited their temple in the New World after His resurrection.
With this theology, Smith began baptizing his new church members, dubbing them “Latter Day Saints.”
But for understandable reasons, most of the surrounding community considered this guy a big ole’ con artist who was grifting the gullible. After getting arrested and receiving death threats and at one point facing a giant mob ready to attack him, Smith decided to move his church to Ohio. There they set up their own bank which got Smith in trouble for bank fraud and so then they had to move again, this time to Missouri. There mobs attacked his Mormons and Smith was arrested and put on trial for treason. He then bribed his guards with whiskey and escaped jail, making his way to the new Mormon settlement in Nauvoo, Illinois. At this point, he started preaching stuff like posthumous baptism and plural marriage. He was again arrested and, this time, an armed mob got into the jail and murdered him.
In his life, Smith had recruited tens of thousands of members to his church. Already rife with political infighting, the church was already fractured by the time of the Nauvoo settlement. But the most prominent faction, led by Brigham Young, decided that settled America was no longer safe for them. They abandoned Nauvoo to the benefit of Étienne Cabet and his Icarians (shout out Chapter 42) and made their way to present-day Utah.
So, the Industrial Revolution took a pretty weird turn in America. But in many ways, the Second Great Awakening laid the foundations of progressive reforms. For example, many of the tent revival preachers invited women – just like men – to take an active role in religious life. This played a major role in developing women’s empowerment. And it is not a coincidence that the first Women’s Rights Convention took place at a Methodist chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, in the Burned-Over District. The Second Great Awakening also helped expand the abolitionist movement in the lead-up to the Civil War.
But what Americans might be most surprised to learn about the Second Great Awakening is that it actually ended official state religion in the United States. “But wait,” you’re saying to yourself, “The First Amendment did that, surely.” Well, no, actually. The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” but it didn’t say anything about the states. In fact, if the Bill of Rights had prohibited established religion outright, it’s doubtful many New England states would have ratified it. (It wasn’t until the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education that the U.S. Supreme Court applied the establishment clause to the states, using the 14th Amendment.)
Now, most of the southern states and New York had disestablished the Church of England as the official church following the American Revolution. But the Congregationalist Church remained the official church of New Hampshire until 1817, Connecticut until 1818, and Massachusetts until 1833. With all the new and diverse religious denominations on the rise, an established church just didn’t make sense anymore.
Many of the cultural changes that took shape during the First Industrial Revolution did not last forever. But as we saw last time, as we see now with America’s religious landscape, and as we’ll see more here in this chapter, the impact of this period still heavily informs our broader culture to this day.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 45: Faith, Fashion, Food, and Football
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In the early years of the new United States, then-Congressman James Madison wrote an article in the National Gazette titled “Fashion”.
“Of all occupations those are the least desirable in a free state, which produce the most servile dependence of one class of citizens on another class...Where the wants on one side are the absolute necessaries; and on the other are neither absolute necessaries, nor result from the habitual economy of life, but are the mere caprices of fancy, the evil is in its extreme; or if not, The extremity of the evil must be in the case before us, where the absolute necessaries depend on the caprices of fancy, and the caprice of a single fancy directs the fashion of the community.”
Madison was going on a tirade over some news about how the Prince of Wales had started wearing shoelaces in place of shoe buckles. But his point was this: The prince was (like it or not) a trendsetter. And the trend he just set would now throw thousands of shoe buckle makers out of their jobs.
This was actually part of the broader war of ideas opening up between the Democratic Republicans (including Madison and Thomas Jefferson) on one side, and the Federalists (including Alexander Hamilton) on the other. (Shout out Chapter 20.)
To the former party, fashion represented the perverse, anti-egalitarian nature of public-facing luxuries. They believed these were unhealthy to the republic, which needed to rely on the virtues of simple farmers in order to remain truly free.
But to the latter, fashion represented a means to economic expansion and, thus, national stability. When Benjamin Franklin was asked his thoughts about American spending on such luxury goods, he told a story about how his wife knitted a fine cap for the daughter of a friend of theirs in New Jersey. The cap came to be much admired by the friends of the girl. This gave her the credibility of being a fashionista, which (their friend explained) she used to start knitting fashionable mittens for others in the town. In other words, fashion could boost production – and thus, incomes. That cap was the catalyst for some small-scale economic growth.
Because the First Industrial Revolution was so concentrated in the textile industry, it should come as little surprise that modern fashion is so rooted in this period.
But perhaps first we should define fashion.
In its narrowest sense, fashion is a form of self-expression through one’s choice of clothing, accessories (such as jewelry), and perhaps stuff like hairstyles if you want to expand the definition. To make this form of self-expression is really only possible when there is a variety of clothing options to choose from. Perhaps because a key trait of self-expression is to demonstrate independence from one’s parents, a common observation about fashion is how prevailing styles change from generation-to-generation.
Fashion can be found throughout history, but in Europe, it had sort of died down in the Middle Ages. It was during the Renaissance that we see fashion re-emerge. By the 17th Century, fashion trends are something people are beginning to identify and talk about.
Christian Garve was perhaps the first thinker to formulate a theory of fashion, in his 1792 essay “On Fashion”. As he put it:
“I believe that the age in which everlasting and non-changing fashions are invented will come to pass much later than that in which philosophers can agree on universally viable and unchanging principles of metaphysics and morals.”
Madison, Franklin, and Garve were formulating their ideas at a rather interesting time. These were, after all, the very early years of the Industrial Revolution. And with industrialization came the increasing availability and affordability of fabrics – including color-retaining cotton. More efficient means of producing accessories, like buttons and jewelry, were being developed as well. All of this created something scholars call the “democratization” or “proletarianization” of fashion. Before it was the wealthy who could afford to be fashionable. Now it was everybody.
In this way, we see fashion as the first example of modern consumerism – the use of trends to sell new goods; the “witch-hunt for the ever-new” as the Austrian economist Friedrich Kleinwächter put it.
But, of course, this was a long process which, in many ways, didn’t pick up in earnest until the 20th Century. How did it play out in our period of focus?
Well, beginning in the early 19th Century, men from the upper and middle classes began scrapping their knee breeches in exchange for trousers – that is, the garment of farmers. In this way, they sought to demonstrate the virtue of work, as opposed to a life of leisure. Along with dark coats (which also now had higher cuts in the front), it was the advent of the modern suit. These suits included linen and woolen fabrics, with a crisp, tight fit.
It was the opposite for upper- and middle-class women, who sought to demonstrate the virtue of their not working. (Shout out Chapter 41.) For them, dresses became more elaborate. They further exaggerated the hour-glass figure made possible by the corset. While the waist remained tight, it was lowered, while the size of the dress (both below the waist and in the sleeves) became much larger. The skirts got bigger and, by mid-Century, needed to be held up by heavy materials, weighing as much as 90 pounds. Also in contrast to the dark colors worn by their husbands, these women would wear a variety of bright colors in their dresses. These included some linen and woolen fabrics, but also silks and furs.
I have to note though, not all women’s fashion choices were upholding the patriarchy. Shortly after the end of the First Industrial Revolution came a then-mind-blowing fashion trend: Bloomers – dresses that included silk leggings under a shorter-skirt, allowing for greater mobility and comfort. Named after American women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer, these dresses became a worldwide craze during the early 1850s.
Contributing to the expanding market of fashion were the new department stores. Among the first (if not the first) was Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine on Pall Mall in London. Opened in 1796, it provided a space for upper- and middle-class women to spend time together, browsing and shopping, outside the company of men and children. Many of these stores were founded by drapers and cloth merchants who not only understood the tastes of middle-class women, but also their growing market power.
By the mid-19th Century, the department stores were expanding not only in square footage and variety of products, but also in terms of reach, with the publication of catalogs. With all the advancements in papermaking and lithographic printing, these catalogs allowed shoppers to peruse the carefully constructed advertisements of the latest fashions.
For the working class, meanwhile, such suits and dresses were not an option, financially. Even one’s Sunday best probably wasn’t going to be as fine as the weekday clothes of the bourgeoisie. Men would often wear ill-fitting woolen trousers held up by leather britches. Women would often wear simple dresses. And their dresses -- and men’s shirts -- were increasingly made of cotton.
But it wasn’t just the demand-side that was influencing fashion trends – the supply-side did too. Increasingly, clothiers were producing ready-made garments, rather than custom-order garments.
Now, for most of the First Industrial Revolution, this was the exception, rather than the rule. Tailors were able to do well selling custom-order clothing as opposed to ready-made, successfully implying that the traditional way of fitting was both a more skilled craft and more in keeping with the individuality of the customer. It was easy to say, “Well, look at that sloppy buttonhole. Look how poorly that fits around your chest. That’s what you get with cost-cutting. You get what you pay for.”
Workers could get by with cheap, ready-made clothes, but gentlemen required shirts, trousers, and coats that were specially fitted to them. Ironically, it was the bourgeoisie, introducing the means of mass production, who rejected it in their own fashion choices.
But by the 1820s, this was beginning to change, especially in the United States. First, the introduction of penny press advertising (shout out Chapter 38) helped proliferate information about different tailors and shops and their prices. It created what economists call “market symmetry”, where consumers have access to a great deal of information that usually only producers are privy too. As a result, tailors began advertising lower and lower prices in a race to the bottom. So, consumers became more and more accustomed to shopping for the best deals on clothing.
To account for the falling prices, master tailors created economies of scale by introducing divisions of labor, hiring hundreds (sometimes thousands) of journeymen to perform repetitive tasks cutting and sewing fabrics. To these ends they also introduced something called the “drafting system”, which allowed them to take measurements from a customer and then compare them to a table of similar measurements that would likely be proportional. (This is when tailors start to use inch tape measures.) This way, they could mass-produce enough cuts while still claiming custom fits. The end result wouldn’t be perfect but it would be acceptable. And this transition from artisanal craft to deskilled labor led to several strikes by journeymen tailors in the early 19th Century.
Then came the sewing machine.
As I mentioned in Chapter 39, the adoption of the sewing machine in factories allowed for the mass-production of reasonable-quality, ready-made clothing. As a result, by the late 19th Century, the low prices of ready-made clothes made them just such a better deal that tailor-made clothing began to decline.
I suppose this will be just sort of a common theme on this podcast – the decline of quality in exchange for quantity. And when we talk about declining quality and increasing quantities in the First Industrial Revolution, oh boy, we need to talk about food.
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In 1797, Sir Frederick Morton Eden, 2nd Baronet, published a pioneering study called The State of the Poor. As he writes about the poor English laborer…
“if he does not reap the full reward of his labour…it is because, either through ignorance, custom, or prejudice, he adheres to ancient improvident systems in dress, in diet, and in other branches of private expenditure. If, for instance, it could be demonstrated…that the sum which he appropriates to the purchase of cloaths, would procure handsomer, warmer, and in every respect better apparel, than that which he usually provides; or that the vegetable or animal productions, which constitute his ordinary diet, instead of being prepared the way he has been accustomed to have them prepared, might, with equal ease, be so combined as to reduce the expence of his food one half, without rendering it less palatable, less nutritious, or less wholesome; -- it might, with the greatest propriety, be urged, that, in this man's case, his shilling did not produce his shilling’s worth.”
Do you remember that news story a few years back about McDonald’s trying to help their employees, not by raising their wages, but by trying to train them how to budget their wages better? Yeah, this is like the late 18th Century version of that.
“Instead of the ill-grounded complaints, which have been so often reiterated by writers on the Poor, that the wages of industry are in general too inadequate to provide the labourer with those comforts and convenencies which are befitting his station in the community, they would better serve the cause of the industrious peasant and manufacturer, by pointing out to them the best means of reducing their expences… by suggesting and explaining the mode of preparing cheap and agreeable substitutes for those articles of diet, which, in times of scarcity and distress, exhaust so much of the daily earnings of a working man...”
Starting around 1600, we see gradual improvement in the English diet. This accelerated after around 1730, as the British Agricultural Revolution set in, increasing the amount of food (and thus, the number of calories) that the English could consume. Diets also became better balanced among various nutrients (especially protein), and folks in Britain and British North America grew taller.
But after 1770, this started to peter out. By 1800, caloric intake was actually down a little bit. Agricultural production had increased, but so too had the population. And as more of the surplus population was moving into cities to produce textiles rather than food, the distribution of calories among the population started thinning. So, it’s no wonder why our old friend, Thomas Malthus, was so influential going into the 19th Century.
And this is where Eden’s The State of the Poor comes in. Now, there’s no doubt that his classism and paternalism are troubling. But he was on to something. In fact, when it comes to his ideas of optimizing one’s nutritional intake to meet his specific needs, Eden was way ahead of his time. Even today, who among us can honestly say we are getting the right balance of, say, produce to, say, junk food?
More importantly for us, though, Eden’s research serves as an excellent resource to learn what the people of various parts of England and Wales were eating in the 1790s. In all, he investigated 156 parishes across 42 different counties, and in addition to researching the food and clothing of working class families, he also took notes of their fuel and shelter. (But we’ll just focus on the food here.)
Eden found that diets varied a lot across the kingdom, but generally – and I need to stress the word generally here, because there were plenty of exceptions – he found that laborers in agricultural southern England were more likely to live off an inefficient diet than those in the industrializing north.
In the south, the working family lived off a diet of wheaten bread, cheese, and tea. Occasionally they could afford meat, but they would roast it, which Eden found totally inefficient compared to boiling and using in a soup. In the north, meanwhile, the working family would consume brown bread, barley, oatmeal, potatoes, milk, cheese, butter, and bacon.
By cutting out the high-price wheat and tea, Eden believed, these northerners were getting a lot more bang for their buck, consuming more calories and a better balance of nutrients. And for what it’s worth, he was right about that. (Although he kinda glosses over how it was in the south they were growing wheat and in the north there were a lot more cows – and there were no refrigerator cars yet on the still-to-be-built railroads – but, anyway...)
What’s important to remember though, is Eden is mostly reporting on the rural poor. Britain is still a fairly rural and agricultural country at this point, in 1797. But by the mid-1830s, that has changed. The percentage of Brits employed in agriculture fell from roughly 50% in 1801 to 25% just a half century later. The population of major towns and cities doubled. Few of those 42 counties still had populations that were more than half rural.
Many of the new factory jobs didn’t require the same daily calorie consumption that farming jobs did. For the factory workers, per capita food consumption may have increased, but, if it did, not by that much. Standing at and occasionally moving a machine was fairly easy. You didn’t need as much food for fuel when a coal-fueled steam engine is doing much of the moving and lifting for you.
For other industrial jobs, though, calorie consumption was quite high. Miners back then had to eat roughly 20% more than we do nowadays. And my friend Chris Fernandez-Packham over at the Age of Victoria podcast noted in a recent episode that railroad builders had to consume a whopping 5,000 calories per day to dig earth, lift and lay tracks, and hammer spikes. (After all, this is before powered hammers and cranes and so forth.) And do you remember how the French were convinced the only reason the English were so good at railway building was because they were just inhaling roast beef and beer? (Shout out Chapter 31.)
But you know who wasn’t eating more? Women. Not because they were watching their figures or anything like that. (Well, at least not at first.) It was because, typically, their labor at home wasn’t generating income, and thus (it was supposed) they didn’t need as many calories as their husbands. Contemporary writers note the difference between the men’s diet and the woman’s diet as a perfectly normal fact of life. But it’s important to remember that this was a calculated decision. Maybe the working class families of the time wouldn’t have understood all the fancy economic language I’m about to use, but they were deliberately practicing this intra-family discrimination in order to optimize their aggregate productivity and, thus, their household’s total utility.
Now, as more workers moved from the countryside into the cities for industrial jobs, their incomes grew. And as incomes grew, so too did the demand for higher-end, but often times lower-calorie food products – especially mood-altering beverages: alcohol (obviously, as we have seen time and time again) and hot caffeinated beverages: coffee and tea.
Thanks to the European colonial order of the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain, the Continent, and the United States were able to import huge amounts of tea from China and coffee from the cash-crop plantation economies of the tropics. And I’ve seen it suggested that this caffeine literally made the Industrial Revolution possible. Because waking up at 4:00 AM to go start a 14-hour shift down at the factory, day after day, is very difficult if you don’t have a little pick-me-up to get going. Outside the cities and mining villages, hardly anybody drank coffee. But within the factory districts, for example, more than three out of four households were buying it regularly. The price of coffee nearly tripled between 1820 and 1840 as demand soared.
But, of course, in Britain, tea was even more popular. More than 16 million pounds of tea (pounds as in weight) were imported to England and Wales between 1785 and 1787 alone, compared to only a million pounds of coffee.
Part of the reason why had to do with the sense of ritual and sophistication of drinking tea. Europeans had heard exotic stories about tea ceremonies in East Asia and basically tried replicating them, with women leaning over to serve hot tea to men. This was their idea of kinky in the 18th Century. During the Industrious Revolution, one of those fancy new products coming on the market – in addition to, you know, plates and chairs – were tea sets. And this market is what drew our old friend, Josiah Wedgwood, into mass producing such fineries.
Of course, to go along with the tea or coffee, there was one other colonial import growing in popularity: sugar.
By the time of the Industrial Revolution, sugarcane plantations were all around the world – Brazil, the Caribbean, Indonesia, and more. Largely cultivated by forced labor, this crop was practically incapable of meeting Europe’s insatiable sweet tooth. (Not to mention the growing love of rum.)
And as the demand grew, innovations were made to try to meet it. New plantation mills were built and new techniques were invented for crushing, curing, distilling, and more. From 1802 to 1852, Boulton and Watt sold 65 steam engines to planters in Jamaica, helping crush the cane faster and more consistently than wind or water. Steam technology soon spread to Java too. Before long, the price of sugar was cut in half. Sugar consumption in Britain increased at least 44% between 1770 and 1849.
Booming sugar imports also led to some of the first mass-produced food products in the UK. For whatever reason, a lot of English Quakers began experimenting with cocoa. Among them was a coffee and tea house owner named John Cadbury, who – after selling a little hot cocoa as an alternative to the caffeinated beverages – formed a partnership with his brother Benjamin in 1847. Inspired by another Quaker firm called Fry’s, the Cadbury Brothers began making some of the world’s first chocolate bars.
Sugar is one of those food products that the working class was buying that drove Sir Frederick Morton Eden absolutely nuts. But it demonstrates the growing, if still young, prioritization of taste in diets. The days when food was just something to keep you alive were numbered. More and more, people wanted their food to be something they enjoyed – something that gave them pleasure.
This was helped along by those new technologies we’ve talked about in recent months: papermaking machines and hyper-efficient printing presses. These gave way to the proliferation of the recipe book.
Among these cookbooks was Apicius Redivivus: Or, The Cook’s Oracle, published in 1817 by the English doctor and polymath William Kitchiner. Providing both an education of the fundamentals of cooking as well as recipes for hundreds of dishes, the book made Kitchiner something of a celebrity chef in his day.
Some of his recipes included fried meats and vegetables, soups, and sauces – so many sauces – including 11 different recipes for ketchup. So, if you ever want to learn how to make walnut ketchup, for example, check out Apicius Redivivus.
Among the many potato recipes, meanwhile, there are instructions for frying really thin shavings of potatoes – a creation called crisps. And it is believed this is where they come from.
However, there’s also a famous legend that they were invented at a restaurant at Saratoga Spring, New York, when our old friend, Cornelius Vanderbilt, walked in and ordered fried potatoes. The cook made him some, but Vanderbilt sent them back, complaining they were too thick. The cook scoffed, but made some thinner ones. Again, they were sent back. Finally, out of frustration, the cook fried the thinnest shavings of potatoes he could, until they were basically just gristle, as a sort of “screw you, dude.” But Vanderbilt loved them. And the restaurant started selling them as a specialty, which they called “potato chips.” (And this would explain why Americans call them chips while the British call them crisps.)
Frying meats and vegetables was becoming more and more popular, in large part because animal fats were much more widely available. The production of fats like lard was getting much more efficient, and as a result, they were getting cheaper. And, of course, fried food is delicious. (I mean, that’s just a fact.) It should come as no surprise then, that it’s also circa the 1830s that the British delicacy of fish and chips becomes a thing.
Of course, none of this suggests that food was really getting healthier. And in addition to all these factors, food adulteration also became widespread during the Industrial Revolution. You know how there’s more anonymity in the big cities? In a lot of ways it’s nice to not know all your neighbors by name. But one definite drawback is that people don’t feel quite as bad about ripping you off when they don’t personally know you. Merchants would add alumn to flour. Butchers would sell meat that was so old it was ready to start rotting. Bartenders would water down beer – beer for God’s sake!
Add all this up, and you see nutritional outcomes fall a bit in the Industrial Revolution – not exactly what you’d expect. People weren’t eating the most fulfilling diets.
Now, I should point out that the United States is sort of the exception here. Americans were, for instance, taller than their European counterparts, suggesting much better nutrition. Being a very, very large country (geographically) compared to those in Europe, it had a great deal more land for all the nation’s agricultural needs. And as we saw back in Chapter 33, places like Cincinnati became fantastically efficient in food processing and distribution over America’s canals and navigable rivers.
But the same couldn’t be said of the comparatively small Britain. From 1750 to 1850, agricultural productivity doubled, but it wasn’t always for food that was healthy or affordable, and the population had grown 165%, so maintaining the caloric needs of the nation required food imports too. This was why liberal bourgeois capitalists and Radical Proletarian workers alike all agreed that Britain needed to repeal those damn Corn Laws.
The British did have one foreign source of food that was easy to tap though: Ireland.
Ever since the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the British had started colonizing their neighbors to the west. In fact, it’s in Northern Ireland where the first British plantations are established (like, anywhere). Over these 200 years, the English gentry gradually took control of the land across Ireland. In a repeat of the enclosure movement back in Britain, the lords closed off much of these Irish lands from their traditional crop cultivation and converted them to pastures. Now, this is going to lead to a very big problem in the 1840s (and perhaps you can guess what) but we’ll get to that in a future episode.
With all this pasture land, livestock boomed in Ireland. And as it did, British imports of Irish pork, beef, and butter increased dramatically.
So, Britain is importing a lot of its food from Ireland and its colonies, which only picks up after the Corn Laws are finally repealed. All the while they are exporting textiles and finished goods all around the world, often undercutting other countries which can’t compete. They are winning the industrialization game. They have become what our old friend David Riccardo had long hoped: The Workshop of the World.
But one of their most lasting exports was a cultural one – a game, in fact.
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In 1830, an Englishman named Edward Beard Budding received a patent for a new invention. He had been inspired to create it after seeing a machine in a cloth mill called a “wheel of knives”, which was used to process cotton before it could be spun. He realized the same design could be adapted for the purpose of cutting grass. By introducing wheels and a handle, he invented the mechanical lawn mower.
With the lawn mower, a new era of sports was made possible – including, for our story today, football.
Now, when I say the word “football” in this episode, what game am I referring to? Because I have a lot of American listeners, and a lot of British listeners, and a lot of Australian listeners, and in all these places, when you say the word “football”, the people there are going to have a different game in mind.
So let me clear this up right now. I am referring to… all of these games. Because, here’s the thing: They all stem from broadly the same game. But as we’re about to see, it was the Industrial Revolution which took football and broke it up into different games – each, now, with distinct sets of codified rules.
Humans have played games with balls for thousands of years. In Han-dynasty China, a game called cuju had been played since probably 300 BCE or so. Using a stitched leather ball, two teams would handle and kick it up and down the field, avoiding tackles by their opponents, trying to put the ball through one of the two crescent-shaped goals, made up of a hole in a silk sheet hung between bamboo posts.
Cuju appears to have spread to Japan, where the rules changed a bit and morphed into a game called Kemari. The ancient Greeks and Romans had ball sports of their own too. But none of these were ever popular sports in any of these civilizations. In fact, they appear to have been used mostly for military purposes, to get soldiers physically fit and working as a team. But in Europe, as a result, such games spread across the Roman Empire.
We don’t know if these games had any real impact on what was to come. But we do know that, by the Dark Ages, a number of games like these were widely played by the Celtic peoples of Britain, Ireland, and Northern France. In the province of Brittany it was La Soule. In south Wales it was Knappen. Up in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, it was Ba. But generally, the games were called football.
Celtic football was steeped in ancient pagan traditions and played during religious festivals. The legend is that the first balls were human heads.
Now the way football was played varied from town to town, village to village, county to county. Usually two villages would play each other, or it would be the country folk versus the town folk, or maybe married men versus bachelors. Instead of a manicured field, you would play in the streets or the common of a town or parish. The “goals” would be local landmarks.
The number of players could be in the hundreds. People would push each other in a massive crowd all trying to get the ball. If you managed to pick up the ball, you could run with it to the goal. But in the violent scrum, it was easier (or at least safer) to kick the ball with your foot. And, yes, this was an incredibly violent game, which often led to serious (sometimes even fatal) injuries.
As the Anglo-Saxons and then Normans came in, they would at best tolerate football. But they were so appalled by the violence of it that edicts were passed by at least six different English kings banning the sport. Countless additional bans were also passed by local magistrates over the centuries. Due to its pagan history and the fact it was being played on the sabbath and on holy days, the Puritans also hated football.
One observer described it as, “A game I say abominable enough, and in my judgment at least, more common, undignified, and worthless than any other kind of game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident, or disadvantage to the players themselves.” But folks just kept playing it – ignoring the edicts and the warnings and the dangers.
By the 18th Century, the most popular sports in Britain were definitely boxing and horse racing. Several ball games had also been formalized by this point, including golf, cricket, and tennis. (Although all of these games would be transformed by industrialization later on, thanks in part to new materials and processes for making balls and equipment.)
But with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, a critical blow was made to football. As folks left the country villages for the growing cities, they were forced to leave their beloved ancient game behind. The industrialists who were hiring them (many of whom were descendants of Puritans, remember) believed the game undermined labor discipline. If workers were getting hurt or destroying property during play, well, that was just bad for public order. The Derbyshire Council described football as “the assembly of lawless rabble, suspending business to the loss of the industrious, creating terror and alarm to the peaceable, committing violence on the person and damage to the properties of the defenseless poor.” The 1835 Highways Act allowed local authorities to ban football in the urban streets. In some places, the Riot Act was used to break up games.
As a result of these efforts, the traditional version of football was being successfully suppressed for the first time. But in these same years, new versions of the game were taking shape. Not among the lower classes, but among the very upper classes.
Thomas Arnold was born on the Isle of Wight in 1795. He came from a middle-class family with some relations to the aristocracy, but they themselves weren’t really a part of it. He received a grammar school education and wound up attending university at Oxford, studying the Classics and eventually becoming a fellow of Oriel College. With this education, Arnold pursued a career in… education. He first took a job at a village school near London and then was appointed headmaster of the Rugby School in 1828.
Rugby was among England’s elite public schools. Now a “public school” in England basically means a boarding school, not a state school. The term “public school” wasn’t actually formalized yet, but these were the schools across Britain that took in the boys of the aristocracy – and increasingly, those of the especially rich bourgeoisie – to educate them before sending them off to Oxford or Cambridge. The most famous public schools were Rugby, Harrow, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester, and most famous of all, Eton.
During the early 19th Century, these public schools were pretty violent, archaic, and upside-down institutions. The pupils were the social superiors of their instructors, and oh, did they know it. The instructors mostly taught them (or tried to teach them) subjects like Latin, Greek, and Theology. And these rich, bored teenage boys – also raging with hormonal adolescence – would blow off steam by bullying the weakest amongst them, torturing animals, and starting fistfights with the local inhabitants of the town. And this was the chaotic environment that Thomas Arnold found himself walking into at Rugby.
Arnold took it upon himself to transform Rugby, and it’s pupils, through a program of discipline, prayer, and rational learning. He was on the forefront of movement to mold these privileged little s***s into the Christian gentlemen of the Victorian empire. Although it was only a minor component of the program, one of the ways he did this was by encouraging formalized team sports – including that beloved game of the commoners: football. As he saw it, the boys could either play the violent game in the streets with the locals or they could play a more refined version of it on the grassy pastures on the school’s property.
Little did Arnold know the impact this policy would have. The staff loved it, as it allowed them to assert themselves at the top of the social hierarchy by coaching and refereeing the boys in play. It also gave the boys the space to burn off their testosterone in a way that wasn’t cruel toward others. And when the staff went on to become headmasters of their own schools, they took this philosophy of team sports with them.
Now, here’s the thing: Depending on what school they went to, the way these kids played football had to vary. At Westminster, the space for such games was small and enclosed, so the focus was placed on dribbling. At Winchester, the field of play was long and narrow, and so kicking and chasing the ball was the key to the game. And at Rugby and Shrewsbury, there was more emphasis on picking up the ball and running with it. Rugby formalized their rules in 1845 and, throughout the 1850s, the others schools followed. (The exception being the Eton Field Game, which had been more or less codified in the mid-18th Century.)
These football games were so popular that the boys wanted to continue playing them when they got to Oxford and Cambridge. Helping this along was the development of world-class sporting facilities at these universities in the 1830s and 40s, including fields manicured by lawn mowers. Except, now these young men would be playing against young men from other public schools, and the rules didn’t line up.
As one Shrewsbury alumn described a game at Cambridge in 1846:
“An attempt was made to get up some football… But the result was dire confusion, as every man played the rules he was accustomed to at his public school. I remember how the Eton man howled at the Rugby man for handling the ball.”
And football continued to spread. Graduates of the public schools serving in the Crimean War played it and ran into the same difficulties. Then it filtered to the grammar schools and other schools of the kingdom, as well as to the local parish churches. And as boys became men, they began establishing football clubs to keep playing. And then they’d go to play other football clubs and “oh no, nobody is playing the same game!” Usually what they’d do – and I’m not making this up – was play by one set of rules in the first half and switch to another set of rules in the second half.
And then there were the possibilities opened up with the construction of the railways.
It’s almost impossible to imagine the modernization of sports without the railways. They allowed distant public schools and football clubs to start playing each other for the first times, as teams could now travel many miles to play a game over the weekend. Whereas once football might have been a way for a bunch of guys to goof around together, now it was becoming a very serious and competitive hobby.
By 1863, it was decided that the hodgepodge of rules would no longer do. A meeting was held at Freemasons’ Tavern in Lincoln Inn Fields, central London, that November. Attending the meeting were representatives from a number of clubs and public schools. As it turned out, it would be the first of many sit-downs to bang out a single set of rules for the game they loved.
First, they needed to decide if this game was going to be about catching and carrying the ball, or if it should be about kicking and dribbling. And as it turned out, this was not a difference that could be reconciled. The catching-and-carrying representatives would eventually leave and, in 1871, create their own set of rules. Modeling it on the game from the school transformed by Thomas Arnold decades earlier, they established the Rugby Football Union.
The other group established themselves as the Football Association, or “FA” for short. The rules they settled on created the game we know as “association football” – or as we Americans call it, soccer. (And Patreon supporters will learn the complicated reason why “association football” gets called soccer in the footnotes today.) And sorry, most of the world, I am going to keep calling it soccer from here, to keep it separate from everything else.
I should point out that soccer in the 1860s did not look like the soccer of today. Not only were the shoes, uniforms, balls, and equipment quite different, but even the field would be unrecognizable to us today. There was not a white outline painted on the grass; just four flags in the corners. There was no penalty box that the goalkeeper had to stay in to touch the ball, and penalty kicks hadn’t been introduced yet anyway. There was no upper crossbar on top of the goal posts nor a net inside the goal.
And those are just the fundamentals. The strategies employed by the players were hilariously rudimentary. Rather than pass up and down the field, a team would mostly keep close together in a horizontal line running up the field. Crossing the ball from the wings of play wasn’t even considered, thus, neither were headers. In fact, most players wore hats while playing. So, yeah, a lot of developments were still to come.
Nevertheless, both soccer and Rugby soared in popularity. And critical to making this happen was the rise of industrial labor.
With the prosperity, but also drudgery, of factory life came the need for some action from time to time. Traditional football had been taken away from the people, but it had now been replaced by Rugby and soccer. The regularity of the work week in industrial cities, with pay days at the end of the week, helped these new games – especially soccer – become a fixture of Britain's working class culture. Getting out of the mill early on Saturday meant you could head down to the local field and take in a match.
In time, workers started establishing their own football clubs to compete not only with each other, but with the aristocratic clubs too. And as they did, differences of opinion – along regional and class lines – popped up in both the association game and the Rugby game.
In the association game, the crisis was averted. The upper-class, London-based FA and the more working-class, northern Sheffield FA sorted out their differences with a compromised revision of the rules. In the Rugby game, however, the working-class Northern Rugby Football Union split with the Rugby Football Union to create the Rugby Football League. (And today, Rugby Union and Rugby League are fairly distinct games.)
As football gained momentum in England, it was also spreading across the world.
Soccer was picked up, first and foremost, in Scotland, where the aristocracy was already very interwoven with the English aristocracy. The first ever international match was played between England and Scotland in 1872. It also spread to the Continent, where it quickly snowballed in popularity from the 1860s to 1880s. And from there, it was spread across the planet.
But because of it’s popularity in England, soccer struggled quite a bit in the United States, which didn’t want to just follow the new fads from the old mother country. But it wasn’t just the U.S. – soccer struggled across the British Empire. In the Caribbean and India, folks seemed to prefer Cricket. And in all of Britain’’s white, English-speaking territories, the locals preferred catch-and-carry versions of football.
In Ireland, nobody outside the British-dominated northern counties and Dublin had much interest in the English game. Instead they promoted a game called Gaelic Football. In Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and among the Boers of South Africa, Rugby was preferred. Also, the Australians invented something called Aussie Rules Football (which from what I can tell does not, in fact, have any rules) but we are not going down the rabbit hole of that crazy game.
In North America, meanwhile, Americans and Canadians took the old Celtic football games they had been playing for decades, applied some Rugby rules, and invented a few new rules of their own. These games gradually morphed into American football and Canadian football, which evolved even further into the 20th Century. (And while there are some notable differences, American and Canadian football are pretty similar games.)
But despite England’s cousins all wanting to differentiate themselves from her, England had successfully spread its beloved games across the world. Just like the sun never set on the British Empire, today the sun never sets on football-loving peoples.
Now, any discussion of the British Empire, just like any discussion of the Industrial Revolutions, needs to include some time devoted to the woman for whom the era was named – and, for that matter, to her husband as well. Victoria and Albert: Next time, on the Industrial Revolutions.
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As always, thank you to everyone who is supporting the podcast on Patreon. Special shouts outs go to new patron Jeppe Burchhardt, as well as John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Tara Carlson, Molly Des Jardin, Herbyurby, Eric Hogensen, Peter Kirk, Brian Long, Kristian Sibast, Brandon Stansbury, Ross Templeton, and Walter Torres. Thank you!
(Please excuse any typos in this transcript. I’m pretty sure I missed some.)