The British Working Class 1832-1940

Andrew August

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317877967
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this insightful new study, Andrew August examines the British working class in the period when Britain became a mature industrial power, working men and women dominated massive new urban populations, and the extension of suffrage brought them into the political nation for the first time.

Framing his subject chronologically, but treating it thematically, August gives a vivid account of working class life between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, examining the issues and concerns central to working-class identity. Identifying shared patterns of experience in the lives of workers, he avoids the limitations of both traditional historiography dominated by economic determinism and party politics, and the revisionism which too readily dismisses the importance of class in British society.

PART ONE

1832–70

Introduction: Britain in 1832

In 1834 a distressed Salford clergyman complained that industrial development had ‘drawn together a most heterogeneous population, consisting in no small degree, of the unsettled, the discontented and the depraved; so as to render our trading districts … the moral sewers of the community – a confluence of the scum and the offscouring of society’.¹ This man’s anxiety reflects the disorienting pace of change in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The British population soared and cities stretched and strained to accommodate new residents. Industrialization brought upheaval in work and its organization. These transformations created new social conditions in cities and towns, a growing and affluent commercial and industrial elite alongside widespread misery and discontent. Decades of war with France helped forge Britain into a nation, but it was a nation divided by religious differences, regional identities and resentments, and fears about social conditions and political power.

During the first three decades of the nineteenth century the British population grew at an astonishing rate. Between 1801 and 1831 the population of England and Wales expanded by 56 per cent, while that in Scotland rose by 50 per cent.² According to one estimate, nearly 60 per cent of the English population in the late 1820s were under the age of 24.³ In 1801 London stood as the lone British city with over 100,000 residents. By 1831 six more had crossed this threshold.⁴ Some cities, particularly northern textile centres, experienced spurts of dizzying expansion. In the 1820s Manchester grew at a 3.9 per cent annual rate, while Bradford’s growth reached 5.9 per cent per year.⁵ From 1810 to 1850 the population of Bradford increased from 16,012 to 103,778.⁶ Glasgow housed 77,000 residents in 1801, but reached 275,000 some 40 years later.⁷ It is little wonder that observers like the Salford clergyman were shocked by such transformations.

Industrialization provided the motor for much of this change. In 1811 1.7 million workers laboured in industrial occupations, and this rose to 3 million (40 per cent of all workers) in 1841. Cotton manufacture stood out as the leading industrial sector of the first half of the century. In 1830 more than 400,000 workers processed cotton.⁸ Cotton mills multiplied rapidly. For example, Manchester housed only three cotton mills in 1794, but there were 66 in the town by 1821.⁹ The factory contributed to the sense of rapid change that created anxiety, as in an 1832 complaint about factory discipline in the Poor Man’s Advocate: ‘We have exchanged … occasions of innocent enjoyment and recreation for one continued round of gloomy, unceasing, and ill-requited toil’.¹⁰ Across the economy, though, factories remained rare in the early 1830s, and even in cotton, non-factory workers including hand-loom weavers outnumbered those in the mills.¹¹ Nearly three-quarters of the British population depended on manual labour for their survival, and only a small fraction of these worked in factories in the middle of the nineteenth century.¹²

Popular discontent and political contention added to the sense of anxiety in the first third of the nineteenth century. George Macaulay fretted in 1828 that Britain faced ‘another crisis analogous to that which occurred in the seventeenth century … It remains to be seen whether two hundred years have made us wiser’.¹³ Extraordinary mass movements around the Catholic question and in favour of parliamentary reform caught the attention of the powerful in Westminster, leading to the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the 1832 Reform Act. The latter eliminated some of the most egregious biases in the electoral system, for example by abolishing representation for dozens of boroughs that had been under the direct control of private individuals. It also established the £10 borough franchise, making all adult men who occupied a house of that annual value eligible to vote. As the limitations of the 1832 Act came into focus, though, they became as significant as its achievements. Four out of five adult men remained unable to vote. As the Whig leader Grey commented in 1831, ‘there is no one more decided against annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the [secret] ballot, than I am. My object is … to put an end to such hopes and projects’. In the minds of many, the 1832 property qualification marked out the distinction between the working class and the middle class.¹⁴

In the popular struggle for political reform in the early nineteenth century, radicals appealed to a growing sense of British patriotism. The massive mobilization and enthusiastic patriotism evident during the wars against France morphed into claims for active citizenship in the following decades. Reformers adopted the mantle of true patriots, striving to rescue the nation from corrupt politicians. At a huge reform gathering in 1819, brass bands accompanied the 60,000 marchers with repeated choruses of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’.¹⁵ In 1820 support for the spurned Queen Caroline tapped into popular patriotism and hostility to the new King, George IV. The Queen’s detractors were painted as foreigners, while she adopted the mantle of Britannia. In one pamphlet illustration, English, Scottish and Irish men, united in their British identity, supported the Queen’s crown.¹⁶ Despite this image, the Irish were not integrated into British identity in the way the English, Welsh and Scottish were. In the three nations a strong sense of Britishness developed alongside regional and local ties.¹⁷ Neither these more narrow affiliations, nor frustration with a particular monarch undermined the pervasive loyalism and British identity among working men and women in England, Scotland and Wales. Similarly, these identities coexisted with the growing sense of class among the manual labouring populations of British cities and towns.

Notes

1 M. Hewitt, The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester, 1832–67 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 26.

2 C. Cook and J. Stevenson, The Longman Handbook of Modern British History 1714–2001, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 2001), 151.

3 E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 217; L. Colley, ‘Whose nation? Class and national consciousness in Britain 1750–1830’, Past and Present 113 (1986), 103.

4 F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 28.

5 J.G. Williamson, Coping with City Growth during the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 223.

6 T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79.

7 W.W. Knox, Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800–Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 40.

8 Thompson, Rise of Respectable Society, 23, 25.

9 M. Harrison, Crowds in History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 97.

10 J. Belchem, Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience 1750–1900 (Portland: Areopagitica Press, 1990), 45.

11 Thompson, Rise of Respectable Society, 25, 31–2.

12 H. Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy: Britain 1832–1918 (London: Longman, 2001), 20, 24.

13 K. Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (London: Longman, 1998), 147.

14 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1966), 811; L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 346–9, 362; P. Harling, ‘Equipoise regained? Recent trends in British political history, 1790–1867’, Journal of Modern History 75 (2003), 893, 897–8; Thompson, Rise of Respectable Society, 16.

15 Colley, Britons, 337; T. Koditschek, ‘The making of British nationality’, Victorian Studies 44 (2002), 393–4.

16 R. McWilliam, Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1998), 8–11.

17 L. Colley, ‘Britishness and otherness: an argument’, Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 314.

CHAPTER ONE

Forming the urban working class

In the 1850s a young stonemason, Henry Broadhurst, found himself out of work in his Oxfordshire birthplace and decided, ‘to seek my fortune further afield’. Thus began a period of years in which ‘I was like Cain, A wanderer on the face of the earth’. After numerous short stops in various towns and a six-year stay in Norwich, he finally settled in London.¹ Broadhurst’s experience, leaving his place of birth, moving from town to town, and joining a growing urban population, was characteristic of working-class life in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Broadhurst recalled, ‘the changes and chances of commercial life and the caprices of fashion keep a large army of working men in a state of motion, sometimes over short distances, sometimes from the southern counties to the western, or the eastern to the northern. Few men escape this experience’. Like Broadhurst, though, most eventually settled in a city or town, and these migrants joined those already working in the cities to form the mid-Victorian working class.

Migration

The mid-nineteenth-century British working population was a mobile one. One study found that 52 per cent of urban dwellers in 1851 were not living in their birthplace. But this includes large numbers of young children, and three-quarters of 65–74-year-olds lived some distance from their birthplaces.² Some towns had particularly high concentrations of migrants. In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One 1832–70
• Part Two 1870–1914
• Part Three 1914–40
• Conclusion: Change and continuity
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index