Late Victorian Britain 1875-1901

J.F.C. Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415058704
• eBook ISBN: 9781136116520
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Drawing heavily on the recollections and literature of the people themselves, Harrison places late Victorian Britain firmly in its social and political context.

I

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The Victorian Achievement

1

Progress and Poverty

In December 1881 there appeared in London a book with the challenging title Progress and Poverty. It was written by an American, Henry George, and proceeded from the observation that in the midst of the most bounteous material conditions the world had ever seen there remained widespread want. Steam, electricity, and labour-saving machinery promised to usher in the golden age of which mankind had always dreamed. Yet poverty, unemployment and a fierce struggle for existence were the reality for the majority of Britons. The association of poverty with progress was the great enigma of the times. George was preoccupied with propounding a remedy for the poverty of the working classes; but his title neatly encapsulates both the late Victorian achievement and its limitations. A deep belief in the reality of progress in all aspects of life continued in most quarters until the end of the century, despite doubts and questionings. The constituents of this progress will therefore be our point of departure; from which the working-out of the logic of mid-Victorianism will follow.

We shall begin with demographic progress. During the previous hundred years the population of Great Britain had been increasing rapidly, and this growth continued during the last quarter of the century. A high birth rate of over 30 per thousand throughout the nineteenth century and a steadily falling death rate (from 22 per thousand in 1871 to 16.1 in 1901) ensured that Britain became ever more crowded, despite considerable emigration to America and Australasia. Between 1871 and 1901 another 10 million was added to the population, making a total of 37 million for Great Britain. Before the end of the century, however, there were signs that the rate of growth was slackening. The birth rate, which had reached a maximum of over 35 per thousand in the 1870s, began to fall, and after 1900 declined rapidly. Nevertheless the effects of this fall were not perceptible for some time, and each year the population of the British Isles (with the exception of Ireland) was larger than ever before. In this primary sense late Victorian Britain continued to be an expanding society.

Beyond the broad contours of population change the census figures can be made to yield other clues of social significance. The fall in fertility rates, for example, resulted in smaller families. Marriages in the late 1860s produced an average of 6.16 children; by 1881 this had fallen to 5.27, and in 1914 to 2.73. Put another way, 43 per cent of the women married in 1870–9 had between five and nine children and nearly 18 per cent had ten or more. Thirty years later this pattern had changed dramatically, and the trend towards the one- or two-child family soon became established. Within these overall fertility figures there were important social differentials. The decline in fertility and therefore in size of families began amongst the middle and upper classes and reached manual workers later. In 1900–9 the average miner or labourer had almost twice the number of children as the average professional man. Twenty-five years is too short a period for the assessment of long-term demographic change, and the true significance of the years 1875–1901 can be seen only in comparison with what came before and after. Table 4 shows changes in the life cycle over a period of one hundred years. By comparing the profile of an average person born in 1850 with someone born in 1950 the late Victorian years fall into perspective. Nevertheless, although the full implications of the decline in fertility were not apparent until after World War I, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century some of the effects were already beginning to be observable in changes in the family and in social structure, occupational patterns, and ways of living.

The census of 1851 had shown that for the first time just over half the population of England and Wales was living in urban areas (that is, in towns of 20,000 people or larger). Early Victorian Britain had become the world’s first urbanized society. In the last thirty years of the century this progress (if progress it was) towards general settlement in what the early Victorians called ‘large towns and populous districts’ continued; by 1901 the proportion of population classified by the census as urban had risen to three-quarters. Traditionally ‘Town’ meant London, since it was the only very large town in Britain. At the end of the century, with a population of over 4.5 million, it was still unique. But between 1871 and 1901 a group of great towns increased considerably in size. Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham grew to between 500,000 and 800,000 apiece; Leeds, Sheffield and Bristol had populations of 300,000 to 500,000; and the total number of towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants increased from 37 to 75 (see Table 7). The fastest rate of growth in this period was exhibited by towns like Leicester, Nottingham, Hull and Bradford, which in 1871 had populations of between 50,000 and 200,000. By 1901, 45 per cent of the total population of England and Wales was living in London and the 74 large towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants.

This urban transformation in late Victorian Britain had important social ramifications. First and most obviously, the increase in population resulted in an increase in population density, especially in the largest towns. This can perhaps be measured more usefully in terms of overcrowding than as persons per square mile. Taking the definition of overcrowding as more than two persons per room, the 1901 census reported that 8.2 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in an overcrowded environment. Within this overall figure, however, were considerable variations, ranging from Gateshead with 35.5 per cent and Newcastle with 30.5 per cent to Leicester (1.0 per cent) and Bournemouth (0.6 per cent). London as a whole had 16 per cent overcrowding, but the figure for Finsbury was 35.2 per cent. Secondly, the development and reluctant acceptance of the megalopolis marked a new stage in Victorian consciousness of progress and poverty. The early Victorians had thought of the city as a problem. Although they were aware of the relationship between mortality and environment, attempts to improve the living conditions of the urban poor were defeated by poor housing, impure water and a lack of open space. However, the final great cholera epidemic happened in 1866, and the high rate of urban infant mortality finally began to fall at the end of the century. But the improvement in public health was not matched by success in tackling the more intractable problems of housing and poverty. To many late Victorians the industrial city seemed essential for the progress of society and yet dangerous for civilization, about which they talked much.

Just as the population continued to increase but at a decreasing rate during the last third of the century, so the economy continued to grow but unevenly and at a slower pace than formerly. Indeed, so marked was the change in economic tempo that economic historians have called the years 1873–96 the Great Depression. In fact it was not a depression of the magnitude of those of the 1830s and 1840s or the 1930s, but was rather a recognition that a new phase in the development of the economy had been reached. Something akin to stagnation, compared with the previous tremendous advance, seemed to have set in. Prices, interest rates and profits fell or remained at a low level. To the articulate middle classes and the farming community this amounted to a depression; though for working people the fall in prices meant a rise in wages in real terms. The Victorian belief in virtually unlimited progress was for the first time checked by serious doubts and questionings. With hindsight we can see that what had happened was that the world monopoly position of British industrial capitalism had come to an end, and the long lead of the world’s first industrial revolution was no more; bullish, competitive, young industrial nations had caught up.

The British industrial revolution had been built on textiles, coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding and machinery; and the economy was geared to selling these products cheaply to a worldwide market. Production continued to expand throughout the later nineteenth century. Coal output rose from 110 million tons in 1870 to 225 million tons in 1900 and 287 million tons by 1913, and exports of coal also increased. Iron and steel production grew from 6 million tons in 1870 to 10 million tons in 1913. In 1880 John Ruskin lamented ‘the ferruginous temper’ of the age which had ‘changed our Merry England into the Man in the Iron Mask’. Between 1880 and 1900 the value of exports of iron, steel, machinery and coal doubled to £95 million. Textiles were not so buoyant and their traditionally dominant share of the export trade declined from 55 per cent in value in 1870 to 34 per cent in 1909–13. Nevertheless the total output and value of textiles was maintained, and in some sectors, including cotton, it increased. The years 1875–1900 were, overall, a period of economic progress, with rising productivity and national income (see Table 8).

But whereas hitherto Britain had had virtually no rivals, after 1870 other nations, especially America and Germany, began to overtake the level of British production and pioneered new areas. For instance, in 1880 Britain produced one third of the world’s steel. By 1902, despite an almost fivefold increase, this proportion had shrunk to one seventh of the world total, and both Germany and the USA produced more than Britain. Similarly, although Britain remained the world’s greatest trading nation, the value of her exports increased by only 6.4 per cent between 1880–84 and 1894–1900, whereas in the same period German exports rose by 23 per cent and the United States’ gains were 42.8 per cent. Critics argued that the British economy had lost its earlier dynamism and speculated as to why this should be so.

To some extent of course Britain was paying the price for being first in the field. When larger nations followed the British example and industrialized it was inevitable that they would surpass her in certain respects. Moreover the phenomenal rate of growth of British industry, especially textiles, in the middle years of the century could not be sustained indefinitely. Even if the late Victorians had adopted new techniques more energetically than was in fact the case, they could not have hoped to match the growth rate achieved by their fathers. There was also the burden of established and tried techniques, entrenched attitudes and heavy investment to be borne. Why re-equip with new technology if the old could be made to last a little longer? It was a temptation to which older manufacturers might succumb, for in the short run it was cheaper and easier than root-and-branch innovation. This was not by any means an unreasonable response. It made good economic sense in that it minimized costs and maintained profits, at least for the foreseeable future. Nineteenth-century machines were often superbly built and, with occasional replacement of worn parts, could last a long time – witness, for example, the pumping engines at waterworks, now preserved as museums but still in full working order a hundred years later. Furthermore, Britain had the advantage of a large and skilled industrial labour force and an established dominance in world shipping. As the winds of competition blew keenly after 1870, and the more recently industrialized countries erected tariff barriers to keep out foreign goods, the vulnerability of an economy so dependent on exports began to appear. There was no inherent reason why Britain did not respond more vigorously and successfully to this challenge of competition, she simply did not.

The failure to innovate and the consequent falling behind America and Germany in industry after industry exposed weaknesses in the British economy. Iron and steel provide a classic example. All the great innovations in steel making were developed in Britain: Bessemer’s converter (1856) made mass production possible, the Siemens-Martin open-hearth furnace (1866) greatly increased productivity, and Gilchrist-Thomas in 1879 solved the problem of how to use low-grade phosphoric ore. Yet after adapting to the converter British steelmakers made relatively little use of the other inventions, which were enthusiastically taken up in Germany and France. Again, the first aniline dye was discovered in 1859 by a British chemist, W. H. Perkin. Yet although Britain had the world’s largest textile industry and therefore the largest market for dyes, the development of the dye industry was left to Germany – which also took the lead in the general production of chemicals. Similarly in the case of the electrical industries, British pioneers like Faraday and Clerk-Maxwell had laid the foundations, but American and German firms developed the technology and provided the investment. When the London underground railway was electrified in 1900–14, the process relied heavily on American expertise and finance. The British economy neither kept abreast of the development of new industries nor adopted new techniques in the older industries to the same extent as her competitors.

The reasons for this failure are complex, and no single-cause explanation seems adequate. Failure is, in any case, a relative term. It can be employed usefully only when measured against some attainable goal, which in this instance could not be a repetition of the early Victorian industrial achievement. In the later stages of development in an industrial economy, the tertiary or services sector tends to grow more rapidly than manufacturing, and such a structural shift may result in lower growth rates, since productivity is not usually so high in the tertiary sector, which tends to be more labour-intensive. Trade, banking, insurance and finance expanded during this period; capital was exported in great quantities; and a favourable balance of trade (exports over imports) was maintained by ‘invisible’ exports such as shipping and profits from investments abroad. Nevertheless the deceleration of the rate of industrial growth after 1873 caused concern to contemporaries, and its explanation has been much debated by historians. The subject has a particularly modern relevance if the events of the late nineteenth century are seen as the beginning of a process extending over the next hundred years, for then the roots of today’s economic problems can be traced to choices and decisions made in late Victorian times. It would be easy, for instance, to blame management and attribute the shortcomings of the economy to a lack of enterprise among businessmen. This certainly seems to have been a factor in some of the new industries requiring much research and development, such as chemicals and electrical engineering. But in the basic heavy industry of shipbuilding British efficiency was unchallenged; and in light industries and processing, like pharmaceuticals and brewing, British entrepreneurship was second to none. It was in this period that firms such as Beecham, Lever, Rowntree, Cadbury, Guinness, Bass, Coats, Lipton, and Lyons became household names.

The doubts about late Victorian entrepreneurship, however, can be extended beyond purely economic evidence to wider, cultural factors. It has been argued that the dominance of aristocratic values and styles of life, which the English middle classes increasingly aspired to emulate, was inimical to dynamic economic progress.¹ Gentlemanly ideals, which denigrated trade and industry, became accepted among the children of successful businessmen, and there was a similar ‘gentrification’ among the upper echelons of the professions. A new, homogeneous elite of landed aristocrats, industrialists, financiers, civil servants and professional men was forged by a common education in the public schools and ancient universities. This education, heavily biased towards classical and literary studies and against science and technology, inculcated attitudes which were unfavourable to industry and commerce. British economic endeavour was thus hampered by a prevailing system of social values which was at odds with those qualities most requisite for business success.

The paradox of a non-, or even anti-, industrial cultural establishment being present at the core of the world’s most intensely industrialized country has not gone unnoticed. Fifty years ago the social historian G. M. Young remarked how ‘in a money-making age, opinion was, on the whole, more deferential to birth than to money, and … in a mobile and progressive society, most regard was had to the element which represented immobility, tradition, and the past.’² By the last quarter of the nineteenth century this attitude was reflected in families where the second or third generation of mill owners deserted their industry, the source of their wealth, for the life of country gentry, as with the Marshalls of Leeds, whose wealth from flax-spinning enabled them to become Yorkshire squires and intermarry with the aristocracy. Within industry the liberal education which the sons of industrialists received in public schools fitted them for leisure, public service and gentlemanly pursuits, rather than for the hurly-burly of mill and marketplace. A hierarchy of status among businessmen is perceptible by the end of the century, with those engaged in finance and commerce, centred on London, regarded as superior to the manufacturers of the Midlands and the North. The Victorians’ neglect of technical and scientific education, particularly when compared with Germany, was frequently commented on by contemporary critics. But as long as engineers and industrialists were regarded as inferior in prestige and status to the gentry and the gentrified professions, little change was to be expected. This was in sharp contrast to the situation in America, and Germany. Whether this elitist cultural conservatism is the crucial factor in the explanation of Britian’s economic decline is difficult to determine. At the least such attitudes did nothing to assist – and may well have hindered – Britain’s adaptation to the economic realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Yet whatever status landowning conferred it did not bring much economic prosperity in late Victorian Britain. As industrialization proceeded apace, the relative importance of agriculture declined. From being the framework of the whole economy it shrank to just one sector of production, albeit still a very large one. In 1851 one fifth of the gross national income came from agriculture; by 1891 this figure had fallen to one thirteenth. Until 1873 farming enjoyed its full share of mid-Victorian prosperity, with high prices and an expanding demand for food. The Great Depression marked an end to this golden age: wheat prices tumbled, rents fell, and small farmers and agricultural labourers left the land. A flood of cheap food imports, aggravated by a series of poor harvests in the late 1870s, was unchecked by tariff protection. As the vast new arable lands of the American and Canadian prairies came into production, British cereal farming was badly hit. The effect of this was to force a shift in agricultural production from arable to livestock, from wheat and barley to cattle-raising and dairying. In late Victorian Britain the economic basis of agriculture was gravely weakened and therewith the age-old dominance of the landed interest.

Material progress as a whole continued to be made in the later years of the nineteenth century. Britain was still one of the wealthiest countries in the world and the national income increased year by year (see Table 8). Nevertheless this progress was criticized as deficient in two respects: first, the rate of increase was slower than previously; and secondly, the wealth was not spread sufficiently widely among all classes. The failure of late Victorian society to remedy the effects of the poverty and gross inequalities whose existence had been acknowledged fifty years earlier raised doubts about the economic and social changes claimed as progress. Was progress always to be accompanied by (perhaps even conditional on) poverty, as unavoidable as the reverse side of a coin? Such disturbing thoughts were later to fuel movements for more radical change.

When Victorians talked about progress they usually had in mind more than economic growth and an increase in material comfort, though these were always the most obvious and most readily measurable benefits. Moral progress, the progress of the race, and the progress of civilization were also compelling issues for thousands of the Queen’s subjects. In the sphere of politics progress was generally perceived to be dependent on a widening of the boundaries of democracy. Chartism had failed in its imme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I The Victorian Achievement
• Part II Social Structure
• Part III Perceptions and Values
• Part IV Processes of Change
• Part V Epilogue
• Notes
• Tables
• Further Reading
• Index