Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution

Robert Glen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138706354
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This title, first published in 1984, focuses primarily on the early Industrial Revolution (c. 1780-1820) in the Stockport district. As the Industrial Revolution in England was the first instance of successful industrialisation, it can still provide many social and economic lessons and also furnish essential evidence for continuing debate over ideology and theory. Therefore, this title will be of interest to students of both history and economics.

1 Debate over the 'Working Class'

In England, modern society is indisputably most highly and classically developed in economic structure. Nevertheless, even here the stratification of classes does not appear in its pure form. Middle and intermediate strata even here obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere (although incomparably less in rural districts than in the cities) . . Physicians and officials, e.g., would . . . constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords - the latter, e.g., into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries. [Here the manuscript breaks off.] - Marx, Capital, vol. III (1894), last chapter

The old Cheshire saying that 'when the world was made, the rubbish was sent to Stockport' had particular relevance to the period of the Industrial Revolution. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Stockport and its district contained scores of factories, cramped brick houses no longer red but sooty black, innumerable beer shops and pawn shops and, as a final mark of advanced industrialisation, a heavily polluted river system. Having passed through the town on many occasions, Friedrich Engels could write with some authority in 1845 that Stockport was 'notoriously one of the darkest and smokiest holes in the whole industrial area, and particularly when seen from the [railway] viaduct, presents a truly revolting picture'.¹

Stockport thus comprised precisely the sort of industrial setting in which a mature 'working class' might be expected to emerge. Indeed, Engels referred specifically to Stockport as one of a group of medium-sized industrial towns in which occupational stratification was highly visible. When discussing such towns, Engels divided their populations into only three groups: a mass of factory workers, a small number of shopkeepers and a mere handful of factory owners. He further claimed that workers in such towns form an even larger proportion of the total population than in Manchester'. According to Engels, rapid urbanisation of the kind Stockport experienced contributed to the class formation which inevitably accompanied industrialisation.

Urban life tends to divide the proletariat from the middle classes. It helps to weld the proletariat into a compact group with its own ways of life and its own outlook on society. ... In this way the great cities are the birthplace of the working-class movement.²

Whether or not the workers of Stockport and its district comprised this sort of 'working class' will be the subject of detailed investigation in this work.

As a necessary preliminary, the tangle of historiographical, ideological and semantic difficulties inherent in any usage of the term working class must be examined. The literature on these topics is enormous, of course, and only a brief sketch can be presented here.³ For the purposes of analysis it is possible to discuss the emergence of a working class with regard to at least three parameters: (1) the chronology of its appearance; (2) its composition; and (3) what might be called its 'ideological' characteristics, focusing especially on the interrelated topics of consciousness and collective behaviour. A Marxist-Leninist conception of the working class has long pervaded discussions of English labour history. Marx and Engels held that an individual's class was determined by the role he or she played in the productive process, with the fundamental distinction existing between those who owned the means of production and those who did not.⁴ When a new mode of production appeared in the last third of the eighteenth century, Marx believed that there began to emerge new class relationships featuring a wage-earning working class at fundamental odds with those who controlled the means of capitalist industrial production. A characteristic feature of the new system was that workers were subordinated to the monotonous pace of power-driven machines in increasingly large factories which were typically involved (during the earliest years of industrialisation) in the production of cotton yarns and textiles.⁵ This factory proletariat produced ever larger amounts of goods but received minimal and often decreasing amounts of wages in return. The result was expanding profits for the capitalist factory owners and a profound feeling of alienation for the proletariat. 'The object that labour produces, its product, confronts it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer,' Marx believed.

Therefore, [the worker] does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. He is at home when he is not working and when he works he is not at home.

The factory proletariat, in other words, becomes alienated from the goods it produces, from nature, and from itself.⁶

This working-class nucleus continued to grow in size after the onset of industrialisation, Marx argued, due in part to the successive proletarianisation and alienation of shopkeepers, artisans and peasants. Marx's analysis simultaneously described what had happened since the advent of industrialisation and predicted what would continue to occur until the inevitable demise of the capitalist system. In terms of chronology and composition of the working class, therefore, Marx played both the Sociologist and the Prophet and held two related but somewhat incompatible views: one was that the working class appeared suddenly with the onset of the factory mode of production in the 1760s; the other was that the working class evolved slowly towards maturity as it came to incorporate those who were, over time, caught up in capitalist modes of production.

As to ideological patterns, Marx believed that concomitants of class formation included class consciousness and class conflict. 'With its [the proletariat's] birth,' Marx wrote, 'begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.'⁷ But again, Marx linked this remark to an evolutionary viewpoint. Consciousness and conflict take time to mature. Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset have discussed a few of the facets of capitalist industry which Marx believed would promote the maturation process. These include: (1) 'easy communication between individuals in the same class-position so that ideas and action programs are readily disseminated' - this specifically occurring in large factories situated in populous urban centres; (2) 'profound dissatisfaction of the lower class over its inability to control the economic structure of which it feels itself to be the exploited victim'; and (3) 'conflicts over the distribution of rewards between the classes'.⁸ From initial attempts merely to destroy machines, factories and wares which 'compete with their labour', workers become interested in maintaining and advancing wage levels. National trade unions ultimately appear on the scene and objectives become explicitly political. By these criteria, the English working class had not reached maturity by the middle of the nineteenth century: 'as yet in its infancy,' Marx stated, '[it] offers. .. the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.' Or again:'. . the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position. . .' English workers, in other words, comprised a rather passive 'class in itself which occupied a specific socioeconomic position but which possessed little consciousness of an identity of interests and had only rudimentary organisations and theories with which to oppose the bourgeoisie. They had not yet become a true 'class for itself.'⁹ Marx's perplexity and frustration with the lack of solidarity among workers from the late 1840s to the 1880s is well known¹⁰ and suggests that he believed that English working-class formation was still in progress - that is, still incomplete - during those decades.

Lenin closely followed Marx's descriptions of class formation, class consciousness and alienation, and agreed that workers might fall prey to 'false consciousness' of the kind which appeared in the mid-Victorian years and which blinded workers to the true interests they shared with other workers in opposition to their capitalist oppressors.¹¹ Lenin also added to Marx's analysis in a number of ways, one of which has received extended treatment in certain recent commentaries on the English Industrial Revolution. It concerns Lenin's stages of conflict in industrial societies. The initial stage involved only trade union consciousness and did not lead to the dominance of the proletariat. The latter could only be achieved when political or 'mature' working-class consciousness emerged in a succeeding stage under the leadership of a small, disciplined working-class 'vanguard', and a struggle ensued for power in the state. Lenin found true working-class consciousness appearing for the first time in history in the English Chartist movement of the late 1830s and the 1840s.¹²

British labour historians writing during the first half of the twentieth century sometimes used both Marxist and Leninist chronologies without attempting to reconcile possible discrepancies.¹³ On the one hand, it was held that the 1880s marked the onset of sustained political or socialist consciousness. The preceding period included two subdivisions. From 1760 to 1848, sporadic revolts against the industrial system occurred, but during the mid-Victorian years (1848-80) a process of 'acclimatisation' took place in which workers accepted industrialism but were not yet strong enough to make a bid for political and economic control. This view closely follows Marx's chronology, which encompassed his view that the English proletariat was in its infancy in 1848 and was not highly developed during the remaining 35 years of his life. G.D.H. Cole led the twentieth-century exponents of this position, which also gained the tacit endorsement of E.J. Hobsbawm at the outset of his professional career.¹⁴

On the other hand, Cole also sometimes followed Lenin's chronology and argued that full working-class consciousness appeared between 1832 and 1848, a time of heightened urban and rural trade union activity, of anti-Poor Law agitations and of political radicalism under the banner of the People's Charter. Cole agreed that working-class consciousness before the Chartist age had been merely latent.¹⁵ The young Hobsbawm also came to embrace this view. He pointed especially to fundamental divisions between the highly skilled 'aristocracy' of labour and the less skilled workers, and also to the different status levels within these two categories during most of the Industrial Revolution. He concluded that before the 1840s, 'it is . .doubtful whether we can speak of a proletariat in the developed sense at all, for this class was still in the process of emerging from the mass of petty producers, small masters, countrymen, etc., of pre-industrial society, though in certain regions and industries it had already taken fairly definite shape'.¹⁶

Yet even as Hobsbawm was writing these words during the 1950s new scholarly impulses were fostering changes in the Marxist-Leninist formulations and their derivatives. Economic historians, for example, were accumulating increasing evidence which demonstrated that industrial mechanisation and the factory mode of production directly affected only a small percentage of workers before the mid-nineteenth century. Factory workers, moreover, were not continuously in distress but were in fact among the more highly paid workers of the day. The factory proletariat thus came to appear neither so important numerically nor so systematically impoverished as previous commentators had believed.¹⁷

Urban studies provided a second impetus for reappraisals of 'working-class' formation. Asa Briggs, in particular, came to emphasise two distinctive types of urban socioeconomic developmerit. Many cities and towns, including the Midlands industrial giant, Birmingham, continued to produce goods in small artisanal workshops in which masters and men worked side by side. Occupational and social mobility were relatively easy, and there was little control or interference by capitalist merchants, at least during the early decades of the nineteenth century. In urban centres such as this, Briggs found little evidence of class formation and even came to believe that co-operation among different social strata was more typical than class conflict. Factory towns like Manchester and Leeds, on the other hand, did witness class formation and class conflict in the first part of the nineteenth century, much as Marxists and others had long maintained.¹⁸ Briggs' implicit conclusion was that in only a relatively few urban settings of the northern Midlands, Lancashire and the West Riding was there evidence of a working class. Like the work of economic historians on the factory proletariat, Briggs' research in a sense narrowed the boundaries in which discussions of the working class could be carried on. No longer did it appear possible to speak of a national working class in the Industrial Revolution, except of course for polemical effect.

A third impetus came from the oscillation theory of 'working-class' development which became especially popular during the 1950s and 1960s. Hobsbawm dealt with the issue in a brief, early essay and concluded that trade unions advanced in times of prosperity while political agitations (and, to a lesser extent, 'social movements' like Luddism) flourished in times of economic distress.¹⁹ The idea that 'working-class' movements oscillated between industrial and political objectives was reiterated by Briggs and George Rude,²⁰ but received little systematic investigation. By the early 1960s, the precise geographical and chronological extent of these oscillations and the mechanisms by which they promoted 'working-class' formation remained to be determined.

Among those who have addressed themselves to issues such as these over the past 20 years, E.P. Thompson, Harold Perkin and John Foster deserve special attention. In his Making of the English Working Class (1963) and subsequent writings, Thompson has produced a vigorous reinterpretation of Marxist-Leninist approaches to working-class formation. Like Marx, Thompson perceives the onset of class formation at the start of English industrialisation. But Thompson follows the convention of economic historians writing since about 1950 - to the effect that the Industrial Revolution began in the 1780s, not in the 1760s as Marx, Arnold Toynbee, the Hammonds and others had maintained. If the onset of class formation began in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, according to Thompson, it ended in the early 1830s. For Thompson, class formation was 'the outstanding fact of the period'. He does not, in other words, follow Marx and Engels in believing that the formation process was a long-term, cumulative phenomenon which was not near an end by the time Marx died in 1883. Thompson believes quite simply that 'to step over the threshold, from 1832 to 1833, is to step into a world in which the working-class presence can be felt in every county in England, and in most fields of life'.²¹ By including skilled artisans, domestic workers, miners and agricultural labourers in his analysis of working-class formation, Thompson moves his discussion significantly beyond Marx's working-class nucleus (the factory workers) and often beyond those urban centres in which factory workers predominated. He is thus able to surmount certain of the objections which were being raised about Marxist-Leninist formulations during the 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, he attacks such critics on their own territory. 'The Birmingham of 1833 was not the Birmingham of 1831,' he writes, perhaps with Asa Briggs in mind. By the later date, 'the characteristic ideology of Birmingham Radicalism, which united employers and journeymen in opposition to the aristocracy. . was beginning to fall apart.'²²

Thompson does not 'see class as a "structure", nor even as a "category", but s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. Debate over the 'Working Class'
• 2. People and Industry
• 3. Local Governance
• 4. Cotton Workers
• 5. The Skilled and the Unskilled
• 6. The Rise of Jacobinism
• 7. The Handloom Weavers
• 8. The Year of the Luddites
• 9. Weavers, Radicals and the March of the Blanketeers
• 10. The Peterloo Era
• 11. The Fragmentation of Workers' Movements
• 12. Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography of Primary Sources
• Index