Industrialisation and Society

A Social History, 1830-1951

Eric Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134660971
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Indusrialisation and Society provides an essential introduction to the effects of industrialisation on British society, from Queen Victoria's reign to the birth of the welfare state in the 1940s.
This book deals with the remarkable social consequences of the industrial revolution, as Britain changed into an urban society based on industry. As the first nation to undergo an industrial revolution, Britain was also the first to deal with the unprecedented social problems of rapid urbanisation combined with an unparalleled growth in population.
Industrialisation and Society looks at contemporary ways in which the government and ordinary people tried to cope with these new pressures, and studies their reactions to the unforseen consequences of the steam revolution. In particular, this indispensable book considers:
* the Victorian inheritance
* Edwardian England and the Liberal reforms
* the two world wars
* the Welfare State.

1 The Victorian inheritance

DOI: 10.4324/9780203130896-2

Generations of students studying the subject of the Victorian inheritance have been concerned to assess the significance of the new electoral system brought in by the Reform Act, 1832, the reform of the old poor law in 1834, the evangelical revival, and the increasing controversy over the corn laws which culminated in their repeal in 1846. These are the familiar contours of the political landscape in the years just before and then following Victoria’s accession in 1837. One can add other developments such as the influence of Benthamism and the growth of the Chartist movement, which sit rather awkwardly with the other changes, but may all be conveniently assumed to represent aspirations for reform. The Victorian inheritance may therefore be simply conceived to be principally about reform in a variety of guises. This, it might be said, is what those in power were all about: this was their real business. They were basically reformers. It is to be noted that Volume XIII in the Oxford History of England is appropriately entitled The Age of Reform 1815–1870.

In fact, though this approach with its emphasis on political matters has much still to recommend it, there is the danger of failing to penetrate to the deeper truths of the social problems inherited by the Victorians. True enough, they had to address the demands for constitutional reform from the Chartists, and to decide whether to repeal the corn laws. Of at least equal importance, however, were the fundamental issues arising from a profound change in the country’s economic system. These had begun to manifest themselves originally in the eighteenth century, accompanied by an unparalleled increase in population. These twin forces of industrialisation and population growth were of ever-increasing significance after the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the 1830s, they could no longer be ignored and were demanding positive action. The influence of these great forces may be seen in many aspects of social life: for example, working conditions, the home environment, the relief of the poor, religious observance, and class relationships. In this introductory chapter, it is proposed to discuss each of these aspects of social conditions in turn, and then to survey some current attitudes and beliefs.

In general terms, industrialisation meant a change from an economy based on agriculture to one based on industry and commerce. ¹ This is not to say that there was litde or no industry or commerce in Britain before the coming of the Industrial Revolution – of course there was; British industry was perhaps the most active in Europe, and her commerce was already worldwide. But it was all subsidiary to agriculture, and as Professor Mathias has put it, ‘the greatest single flywheel of the economy was the land, the greatest source of wealth in rent, profits, and wages, and the greatest single employer’. ² Moreover, agriculture was closely connected with many subsidiary industries, such as brewing, milling, leatherworking, and the weaving of woollen cloth. The coming of fundamental change in industry was to alter all this. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been calculated by Lindert and Williamson (1983) that the numbers of families engaged in industry and building were already well ahead of those in agriculture. The figures for 1801–3 are given in Table 1.1. ³

Table 1.1 Family involvement in the main areas of occupation, 1801–3

Families in commerce	205,800
Families in industry and building	541,026
Families in agriculture	320,000

It is not proposed to rehearse here in detail the full extent of technological change which had taken place by 1837 – they are all very well known – but some indication of their impact in the first half of the nineteenth century may help to supply a perspective. Of the staple industries of the time, the textile industry was pre-eminent, being based increasingly on factory production employing steam-driven machinery; the import figures tell their own story. The consumption of raw cotton rose from 52 million pounds (lb) in 1800 to 588 million pounds in 1850, while raw wool imports, which totalled 1,571,000 pounds in 1772, by 1824 had reached 23,849,000 pounds. Cotton exports increased in value from £6.941 million in 1801 to £37.269 million in 1829. As for the other great industry, coal mining, output figures soared from about 5.23 million tons in 1750 to 30.86 million tons in 1830, reaching a five-year average by the midnineteenth century of 68.4 million tons. In the iron industry the production of pig iron, which was about 28,000 tons in the mideighteenth century, had leapt to 200,000 tons by 1801. ⁴

As might be expected, all this expansion of production did not occur in each industry at an even and uniform pace. In the textile industry, for example, the new cotton industry became mechanised faster than the old-established woollen industry; yet even in cotton there still remained some 40,000 handloom weavers in 1850. The steam power that became so extensively used in the cotton industry did not replace water power till the 1820s, and even in such an important industrial centre as Birmingham, steam power was not adopted on any significant scale until after 1830. ⁵ In the Black Country to the west of Birmingham, the manufacture of iron was carried on in large-scale foundries, but alongside them existed innumerable small-scale coal pits, and myriads of small metalware workshops producing nails, chains, and many kinds of hardware right up to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. Thus, there were large industrial works side by side with small workshops, many still of a domestic nature, and characteristic of a small master economy. ⁶ This extraordinary mixture of the old and the new was to be found elsewhere in industrial Britain, and serves as a warning against any assumption that mechanisation had triumphed throughout industry by 1851. In that year, those working in the principal nonmechanised industries (about 5.5 million workers) outnumbered those in the mechanised industries, even when coal is included in the latter (1.75 million), by three to one. ⁷ Moreover, it has for some time been commonplace to observe that the pace of economic growth during the Industrial Revolution was far slower than had been thought previously. ⁸ There were no overnight changes, and old production methods died hard even in the revolutionary cotton industry where the pace of change was greater than elsewhere.

Nevertheless, given these qualifications, by the time of Victoria’s accession, significant and far-reaching change in industry had taken place, and the lives of the nation’s working population had been affected as a result. A simple example of this is provided by the government’s increasing awareness of the effect of variations in trade in an economy which was becoming more and more industrialised. In 1830, the Select Committee on Manufacturers’ Employment, which had been appointed to investigate this subject, reported that ‘fluctuations in employment frequently occur in manufacturing districts [and are] productive of great distress’. ⁹ Their solution to the problem was remarkably advanced for the time in that they advised the setting up of unemployment fund societies into which all workmen would be made to contribute regularly – a project which only came to fruition ninety years or so later with the enactment of a limited scheme of unemployment insurance in 1911.

It was in the 1830s, of course, that the drive to steam-powered production in the cotton industry was intensified, with the result that the numbers of handloom weavers who were put out of work increased rapidly; their numbers fell from nearly 250,000 in 1820 to the 40,000 in 1850 mentioned earlier. There were hardly any left at all by 1860. ¹⁰ Parliamentary commissioners reported on their distressed state in 1839, 1841, and 1845. ¹¹ Meanwhile, the growth of industry in the towns was driving increasing numbers of workers from the countryside into the fast-growing cities and towns of the Midlands and the north. The Boulton & Watt steam engine had made it no longer necessary for heavy industry to go into the countryside in search of water power; the steam engine could be sited anywhere convenient for the supply of coal and available transport facilities. So the towns expanded mightily, but not without a growing middle-class concern for the working conditions of very young children and women in the new textile factories. A succession of poorly enforced factory acts were passed, starting in 1802. In 1833 there was enacted the first effective factory act (effective because it provided for the appointment of government inspectors), but the campaign for a shorter ten-hour day continued until the passing of the Ten Hour Act in 1847. ¹²

It is not surprising that the expansion of industry should have led to an increase in labour disputes, and to greater efforts of the industrial working classes to protect their interests at work. In the 1830s these endeavours grew in scale. Combinations in trade (that is, trade unions) were not unknown in the eighteenth century among the skilled working classes; they were disliked by many employers, and always open to prosecution under the law of conspiracy, and in some trades were even prohibited by act of parliament. Following a panic about revolutionary conspiracies at the end of the 1790s, they were declared illegal by the Combination Acts, 1799, 1800, but were made legal again when these acts were repealed in 1824 and 1825. By the 1830s the trade union movement was growing. Its roots were still in the skilled trades, and it was by now especially active in the cotton industry in Lancashire, where the factory system made recruitment easier. John Doherty, a former Irish spinner, was the one permanent official (he was paid £1.13.0 a week) of a Manchester union with over 2,000 members in 1829; in that year, the union called its members out on a strike against wage cuts which lasted six months.

Subsequently that year Doherty attempted to form a national union of cotton spinners (the Grand General Union of Cotton Spinners, 1829) and then, even more ambitiously, tried to set up a national trade union for all trades, the National Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL), 1829. It lasted about two years before collapsing. As a pioneering effort, its fame has been overshadowed by a much better-known union, the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union (GNCTU). This union of all trades in fact lasted only six months or so, but its greater fame is partly because Robert Owen became associated with it at the end of its short life, and partly because of the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, 1834. This notorious incident concerned six Dorsetshire agricultural labourers who tried to set up a branch of the GNCTU. In doing so, they used a simple initiation ceremony designed to impress on new members that they must be resolute against their employers. They were prosecuted for swearing illegal oaths under the half-forgotten Illegal Oaths Acts, 1797, directed originally against revolutionary conspiracies, and they were sentenced to seven years’ transportation. After a considerable outcry, and protest marches in London, the six labourers were pardoned in 1836, and brought back home by 1838. ¹³

There is another reason why the GNCTU has been given rather greater prominence than perhaps it deserves. This is that the earlier historians of trade unionism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, greatly overstated the membership of the GNCTU at half a million or so. In reality, the paid-up membership was only 16,000. In fact, both the NAPL and the GNCTU tried to do too much: the problems of national organisation were far too great, especially the difficulties of national communication before the national network of the railways had been built, and before the institution of the penny post. ¹⁴ Even today there is no one union including all trades on a national basis. But in the early 1830s, when the nation’s constitution was being reformed, culminating in considerable national turmoil in the passing of the Reform Act, 1832, perhaps all things seemed possible; and in 1836 a further reform organisation was established, the London Working Men’s Association, which was to lead to the national reform movement known as Chartism.

However, the Tolpuddle Martyr case had only a marginal effect on trade unionism – it was certainly not a major cause of the collapse of the GNCTU – and unionism continued as before in the major towns and cities, especially among the skilled trades. There were large-scale strikes among the Preston spinners in 1836, among the Staffordshire potters in 1834–5, and in 1837 in Glasgow among the cotton spinners. In this last city, the strike among the cotton spinners resulted in much violence, and five spinners were put on trial for conspiracy, intimidation, and murder. As a result, a select committee on trade unions was appointed in 1838. The evidence given before this committee is remarkable for showing how strong unionism could be among skilled workers, and how much antagonism there could be between workers and employers, with violence on both sides. Nevertheless, the evidence given related mainly to two well-known trouble spots, Glasgow and Dublin. In other parts of the country, hostility to trade unions appears to have been much less, for many employers thought it better to work amicably with unions than (literally) be at daggers drawn. Some certainly regarded unions as something like a necessary evil, a growing product of increased industrialisation. Employers of this way of thinking no doubt thought it better to attempt to work with them on a peaceful basis than to be in a state of constant warfare over wages and working conditions. Few would be likely to dispute that by the 1830s, trade unions had come to stay.

So far, this chapter has concentrated on industrial change and its consequences for working conditions. We turn now to living conditions. Here the scene is dominated by the immense increase in population which began sometime in the eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth century. Roughly speaking, the population of England and Wales increased by about 50 per cent between 1750 and 1801, that is, from about 6 million to 9 million; between 1801 and 1911 it increased again about four times, from 9 million to 36 million. The causes of this vast expansion have been debated at length by historians. Some time ago the most popular theory was that it was caused by a fall in the death rate. More recendy, this interpretation has been challenged: there might indeed have been a fall in mortality rates, but the more important cause, it is now argued, is the lowering of the age of marriage which itself led to a rise in the birth rate. ¹⁵ This view is still largely accepted, though the alleged cause (a rise in real wages) has been disputed.

The consequences of this explosion in population were extraordinary. If there had been no Industrial Revolution, it is a reasonable assumption that the towns of the nineteenth century in England would have expanded fourfold in line with the national increase in population; but with the growth of industry, many expanded far beyond this. Preston, for example, increased by about six times between 1801 and 1851, and Bradford by eight times between the same dates. Other industrial towns grew as shown in Table 1.2. ¹⁶ The results of such expansion were unprecedented for the towns concerned, and will be examined in more detail in the following chapter. For the present, it is sufficient to say that many industrial towns were faced with great problems of housing, water supply, sanitation and drainage, as multitudes of newcomers poured in from the countryside. Yet many towns had only the most rudimentary forms of local government to tackle the new challenges presented by urban growth. At the accession of Victoria, it seems fair to say that the most immediate and pressing problem on the domestic front was the state of the towns. They were fast becoming the place where most of the nation lived, and the standard of life in them was causing increasing concern (‘a mean and grovelling mode of existence’, one observer called it). Here the most immediate results of industrialisation confronted the visitor, greatly intensified by the sheer press of numbers.

Table 1.2 Population growth in industrial towns, 1801–51

	1801	1851
Birmingham	71,000	233,000
Glasgow	13,000	104,000
Leeds	53,000	172,000
Liverpool	82,000	376,000
Manchester	75,000	303,000
Sheffield	46,000	135,000
W...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Tables
• Introduction
• 1 The Victorian inheritance
• 2 The mid-century years
• 3 After equipoise
• 4 Industrial change and the countryside, 1830–1951
• 5 The challenge from the left
• 6 Edwardian England and the Liberal reforms
• 7 The Great War, 1914–18
• 8 The inter-war years, 1918–39
• 9 War and the coming of the Welfare State
• Envoi
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index