Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class

Steven Marcus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412856690
• eBook ISBN: 9781351311748
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Friedrich Engels' first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, has long been considered a social, political, and economic classic. The first book of its kind to study the phenomenon of urbanism and the problems of the modern city, Engels' text contains many of the ideas he was later to develop in collaboration with Karl Marx. In this book, Steven Marcus, author of the highly acclaimed The Other Victorians, applies himself to the study of Engels' book and the conditions that combined to produce it.

Marcus studies the city of Manchester, centre of the first Industrial Revolution, between 1835 and 1850 when the city and its inhabitants were experiencing the first great crisis of the newly emerging industrial capitalism. He also examines Engels himself, son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer, who was sent to Manchester to complete his business education in the English cotton mills.

Touching upon several disciplines, including the history of socialism, urban sociology, Marxist thought, and the history and theory of the Industrial Revolution, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class offers a fascinating study of nineteenth-century English literature and cultural life.

1

Historical Prologue*

All other things being equal, the government under which, without external aids like naturalization and immigration, the citizens increase and multiply most, is infallibly the best government. That under which the people diminishes and wastes away is the worst. Statisticians, this is your problem: count, measure, compare.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter 9

Manchester, the virtual if not the nominal capital city of the county of Lancashire, is located some two hundred miles to the northwest of London. It is about thirty miles from Liverpool, the chief port on the western coast of Britain. During the first half—and perhaps more—of the nineteenth century it was, after London, the most important city in England in almost every sense; it was certainly the most sensational. Manchester could be, and was, pointed to as the living embodiment of what was happening in and to the modern world. It was the principal site of what was rapidly coming to be thought of as the Industrial Revolution, and was widely regarded as the ur-scene, concentrated specimen, and paradigm of what such a revolution was portending both for good and bad.

Although there is no one place designated as a starting point for an account of how things had gotten to where they were, historians nowadays tend to begin by calling attention to the schedules, rates, and indices of demography. In this as in so much else Manchester has to be regarded as undergoing a development that was typical for many other centers of change in England, and for England as a whole. Sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, an unprecedented growth in population began to occur; the reasons for this sudden surge remain complex and obscure, but what had been an almost static or stagnant population in England and Wales, estimated at between 5.8 and 6 million people for the years 1700–1740, suddenly began to increase, and at increasing rates. By 1780 the population was about 7.5 million; by 1801, the year of the first census, it had grown to about 9 million; fifty years later the population had doubled to 18 million. The rates of increase followed a similar course, rising from an estimated 3.5 percent for the decade 1741–1751, to about 7 percent for 1751–1771, to 10–11 percent for the following twenty years, and continuing their rise to a peak of 16 percent for the decade 1811–1821.

Much of this phenomenal growth was concentrated in the towns, and Manchester was a representative instance. In 1773 the township was estimated to contain 24,000 people; the first census in 1801 listed a figure of 70,000. By 1831 this had doubled to 142,000; 1841 posted a figure of 217,000; and in 1851 the population stood at 250,409. The highest rate of growth was reached in the decade 1821–1831, when Manchester’s population increased by almost 45 percent; and the rate in its twin community, Salford, on the other side of the Irwell, was for that same ten-year period even higher, 55.9 percent. By the middle of the 1840’s, if one took the conurbation of Manchester-Salford and the built-up areas contiguous to it, one had an essentially unbroken urban space containing upwards of 400,000 people. The dates are significant as well, for what was additionally revealed in the census of 1851 was that slightly more than 50 percent of the population of Great Britain was now constituted of city dwellers, the passage of a historic and, for the foreseeable future, probably irreversible point of development.

This population was stratified in a number of ways. The chief of these was economic. Of all the towns in its district, Manchester had the largest middle class, since it was a commercial and financial as well as an industrial center. One estimate for the mid-1830’s judged that 64 percent of Manchester’s population were working-class wage earners; Salford was estimated to have 74 percent; and outlying industrial towns went up to 90 percent. Another line of demarcation had to do with the national origins of part of that working-class population; in 1840 about 20 percent of Manchester’s working class were Irish, typically employed at the bottom of the heap, or underemployed, or unemployed—and living in circumstances that corresponded to their place in the economic scale of things. A third distinction had to do with industrial occupation. The cotton industry dominated Manchester, and one estimate held that about 30 percent of the town was directly engaged in the production of cottons.

This phenomenal development had been as unforeseen, unplanned and unregulated as it was unexampled and apparently unaccountable. As a result of a number of those peculiarities out of which social history is made, Manchester had almost no local government to speak of, and what little there was had almost no pertinence or meaning to the modern world. For more than five hundred years Manchester had remained as a manor, and was in one part of its legal existence “governed” more or less as a feudal estate, or personal holding—which meant in effect that it did not go through a legal evolution, into a municipality with municipal institutions, which corresponded in any real sense to its actual evolution, into an unmistakable super-modern urban center. It was neither a corporate town nor a town returning burgesses to Parliament—neither, that is to say, a municipal borough nor a parliamentary borough. Its judicial-administrative structure was utterly archaic: the Court Leet or heritable manorial court—with its officers of boroughreeve, Constables, etc.—remained essentially intact and in the hands of a traditional, compact Anglican Tory oligarchy until the middle of the nineteenth century. Although local government was supplemented in the late eighteenth century by the institution of a number of Police Commissioners, there was no adequate police or policing (in the extended sense of the term), and there was little machinery for providing the expanding town with what it most needed, modern forms of administrative organization. Not until the reforms of the 1830’s did things begin substantially to change; yet by then Manchester had long since become one of the most famous and wealthy places in the world, even though it did not have the right to run itself as a city. As a result of the Reform Act of 1832, Manchester for the first time became a borough returning two members to Parliament, Salford also returning one member of its own. In 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act permitted the beginnings of substantive urban administrative reorganization, and in 1838 Manchester was at last incorporated. The first Borough Council—of Mayor, Alderman and Councillors—met in that year, and during the 1840’s large-scale local reforms of police, sanitation, and other administrative institutions began. Finally, in 1845, the town itself bought up the manorial rights from the Mosley family for the sum of £200,000, emancipating itself yet further into the ardors of self-government.¹ Such symbolic status was additionally enhanced in 1847 when Manchester was granted a bishopric, and this led in turn to its becoming at last in 1853 a city, a legal term reserved in England for incorporated towns that are or have been a bishop’s see.

Paradoxically, it was these absurd and archaic institutional structures that had permitted, at least in part, the development in Manchester of the newest, most free and most modern kind of industrial economy. For it was precisely the absence of the monopoly privileges and prescriptive rights exercised by the more “advanced” medieval city corporations and their associated burgesses that allowed or stimulated the growth of new commercial and industrial communities in areas beyond the confines of the traditional “city economy.” There, and elsewhere in England, a series of interlocking and mutually enhancing changes and developments, beginning at various points in the past, but noticeably accelerating after 1780, produced that Industrial Revolution which seems to be the only really permanent revolution. The process is too well known to need and too complex to allow anything but the most summary of glances. Changes in colonial holdings and trade fed into a rapidly opening and expanding market economy, which fed back in turn into the system of foreign trade. Both of these were connected with changes in agriculture: with the beginnings of a new agricultural technology, with changes in land tenure such as enclosures and consolidation of holdings, and with the increasing capitalization of a farming economy in which, for the first time in European history, the peasant had disappeared. Such developments naturally had their resonance in the demographic upheaval already mentioned: everything was beginning to move toward lift-off. There were also coinciding and reinforcing developments in commerce and finance, and in the systems of transportation, that were by no means negligible. Yet the place in which the entire process broke loose into open visibility, the locus of revolutionary change, accelerated growth and ever increasing direct and subsidiary demand, as a world market for the mass production of goods for mass consumption was first brought into being, was one industry—cotton. And cotton meant Manchester.

Cotton also meant overseas trade, since in contrast to the older dominant textile industry of wool, the raw material could not be grown at home. At first cotton was imported from India in two forms: as raw yarn to be combined with flax to make fustian, the preindustrial predecessor of modern cheap cotton goods; and as woven calicoes which were also to be replaced by machine-made cloth. It meant overseas trade as well, in the sense that at the next stage of the process it was inseparably connected with the African slave trade and the slave plantations of the West Indies; these plantations became for a while the chief suppliers of the raw material, and after 1790 it was the slave states of the American South that became the major producers for Lancashire’s mills. They were important consumers as well, as were the other “underdeveloped” parts of the world. Indeed, the market for a time seemed limitless—particularly since for part of the period England had a virtual monopoly not only on the means of production but over trade in large areas of the world. Under such conditions, and with the additional circumstance that the new technologies in cotton were relatively inexpensive and thus did not require heavy outlay in original capital investment, the rates of profit were astronomical and were only equaled by the rates of growth in production. By the middle of the century billions of yards of cotton cloth were being produced each year. As a final historical irony, India, the original supplier and manufacturer of the material, was methodically de-industrialized and became in turn one of the great overseas markets for Lancashire’s “new” cloths.²

The new inventions that pushed the cotton industry into revolution were relatively simple; a number of them were contrived in the vicinity of Manchester itself. The two major operations into which the manufacture of cotton can be divided are spinning and weaving (for the sake of simplicity, two others, carding and printing, are overlooked here). In the middle of the eighteenth century handloom weaving was more efficient than hand spinning—and the adoption of the flying shuttle kept it so for some years longer. The first great innovations occurred in spinning, and their homely names—the spinning jenny and the mule, for instance—suggest the modesty of their origins. The mechanization of spinning increased the production of yarn stupendously, and as a result toward the end of the eighteenth century there was a large demand for handloom weavers. Handloom weaving still largely went on under the domestic or putting-out system of production; it could be pursued at home, at the workingman’s own pace, within the rhythms of the traditional organization of domestic economy, and it paid well besides. The fate of the handloom weavers in the decades that followed 1815, when power looms came inevitably to displace them, is one of the most famous, as well as one of the earliest, of technological horror stories. Before that, however, it was in spinning that the drama was to be observed. With the increased mechanization of the spinning processes, the work of spinning was further rationalized by having the machines driven by mechanical rather than human power. Water power was first utilized, but with the invention of the steam engine, everything was lifted up in scale again. Although James Watt took out his patent in 1769, it was in 1784 that he perfected the first rotary steam engine, and so gave to the modern world its most important single invention—a mechanical and thus controllable source of what was for practical purposes limitless power. This power, a central source of mechanical energy, brought men together around it, ran machines attached to it at a uniform speed, integrated the activities of the spinners who tended the machines, and made them into part of the larger complex machine itself. These immense cotton spinning factories or mills of the late eighteenth century were something new in the world. After 1815 weaving was increasingly brought into factories as well, and within a short time cotton became the first industry in which production was wholly mechanized. The next step was to adapt the men, women and children who worked at the machines to the unvarying requirements of those instruments; and this too was achieved, although the adaptors ran into some resistance on the part of the adaptees. By the mid-1830’s it was estimated that about a million and a half people were directly and indirectly dependent on employment in the production of cotton. Out of those at work in the factories themselves, almost half were women and nearly 15 percent were children under fourteen. The census of 1851 revealed that the number of men and women who worked as domestic servants was twice as large as the number of those who worked directly in cotton. Yet it was cotton that, along with agriculture, dominated the national economy.³ That domination was expressed in various other figures, one of them, for example, showing that by the 1830’s the cotton industry was producing nearly one half of all British exports.

The historical experience of industrialization is not to be separated from that of urbanization. The two tended to occur together and reinforce one another, the reciprocating effects of each upon the other being further intensified by the demographic escalation that continued throughout the period. All three were riding the same exponential curve. The industrial disciplines, the conditions of work, terms of employment, continual insecurity and continual competition are not to be segregated, in their effects as formative experiences, from the conditions of living in the new industrial towns, from the housing, sanitary provisions—or lack of them—institutions of relief or welfare—or lack of them—from all the new densities and stresses of existence in these unparalleled circumstances. The working men and women who came out at the other end of this process were the first to go through what we now understand as a world-historical experience. As a group they bore the marks of survivors; they bear those marks to this very day.

It is not to be imagined that all this was taking place in some remote urban-industrial Lancashire vacuum. It was, to say the least, a period of lively activity. The first half of it comes to an end in 1815 and is overshadowed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The second half, which closes somewhere around 1848 or shortly thereafter is a period of unprecedented social change and social crisis in modern British history. Unrest was widespread and was thought by many to be nearing revolutionary proportions. It rose from many sources, manifested itself in a variety of movements and activities and was dealt with, or not, in a multitude of responses and adaptations. I can only touch most briefly on a few of these.

One of the chief preconditions for all such movements was the state of the national economy itself. After a period of rigorous deflationary “readjustment” following the cessation of international hostilities, the economy entered upon a series of what were later to be understood as general cyclical movements occurring with what appeared to be periodic regularity: throes of boom were followed by convulsions of bust. The intervals of deepest depression and economic crisis were 1825–1826, 1836–1837, 1839–1842, 1846–1848. The question of whether these murderous yo-yo-like ups and downs were either aberrancies of a self-acting, self-regulating system, or altogether alien to it and caused by outside and accidental influences, or whether they were integral to the workings of such an economy at this stage in its development, began, as the period moved on, to surface as a subject for argument.

Although the attention of the nation as a whole—by which one must essentially mean those in command of power—was before 1815 chiefly directed upon international events and war, this does not mean that all internal agitation and protest disappeared. The character of such activity, however, was continually shifting, as the example of turbulent Manchester readily demonstrates. At the beginning of the French Revolution, radicalism in Manchester was most prominently associated with a group of middle-class Dissenting manufacturers who led an agitation for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which discriminated against them on religious grounds, and for parliamentary reform. They also formed the Manchester Constitutional Society, which supported the Paris Jacobins—by sending greetings to them. Chief among these reformers was Thomas Walker (radical, manufacturer, but Churchman rather than Dissenter) who brought out Part I of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791. All this was too much for the ruling Anglican Tories, who formed a rival Church and King Club and in December 1792 raised a “loyal” Manchester mob to stone the offices of the Manchester Herald, the reformers’ newspaper, and to attack the house of Walker himself. The point to be noticed here is that at this juncture popular sentiment was on the side of the traditional ruling group and could be enlisted to act in traditional ways in its behalf. When war was declared against France in 1793, popular support for it was spontaneous and enthusiastic. By 1795, however, the dislocating effects of the war upon economic conditions began to be felt in rising prices, selectively falling wages, and hunger. Food riots broke out in 1797 and 1799, and from this time forward there was a steady stream of industrial protest from among the distressed working people and a gradual shifting of popular opinion toward political reform.

On the other side, government and the upper and middle classes in general were intensely fearful of English Jacobinism in any form and had more or less declared a moratorium on reform for the duration (which endured in the event for forty years). In 1799 and 1800 Combination Acts were passed prohibiting trade unions in any form in all industries (earlier in the eighteenth century particular industries had been singled out for prohibition). Although the working people of Britain, including the then relatively small group of factory workers, were certainly not yet organized as a class and even more certainly did not consciously think of themselves as a class—with everything that such an identification implies—the statutes themselves were a significant straw in the wind. Moreover, many working people tended not to get the message, and both illegal combinations and various subterfuges were resorted to.⁴ In 1810 in Manchester the first great strike of factory workers took place; several thousand cotton spinners walked out in a concerted effort, and organized their activities on remarkably modern lines—weekly strike pay, for example, was raised and distributed. And from 1811 to 1813—and in minor outbursts for three or four more years—framework knitters in the midlands, woolen croppers in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and handloom weavers in Lancashire rose up in riot to break the new machines that were being installed by forward-looking masters to produce cheaper cloths more efficiently. This epidemic of violence against property was responded to with due savagery by legally constituted authority, and, their criminal phase of existence having come to an end, the Luddite Riots, as they were called, passed into history where they persisted as a cardinal illustration of useless and purely expressive irrationality on the part of men who were unable to understand the superior rationality by which, for example, they were to be replaced by machines. Recent research, however, has suggested quite persuasively that they were much more than this: that their irrationality was irrational only on certain assumptions; that they were connected with a native radical tradition (which had largely gone underground after the 1790’s) as much as they were with the older communal economy that was rapidly going into extinction; that they were consciously organized movements of protest with filiations both with an old tradition of machine-breaking and riot and with the still-to-be-b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• New Introduction
• 1 Historical Prologue
• 2 The Town
• 3 Friedrich Engels from 1820 to 1845
• 4 The Condition of the Working Class (1)
• 5 The Condition of the Working Class (2)
• 6 In Place of a Conclusion
• Bibliographical Note
• About the Author
• Index