British Social Work in the Nineteenth Century

E.T. Ashton, A.F. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136239663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

First published in 1998. An examination of the main branches of social work in Great Britain and their development from their confused beginnings to the state they reached by the nineteenth century. Also discussed are the material changes in the conditions of life that took place in the century, and a brief appraisal of the philosophical and religious ideas that influenced people's minds and affected their attitude to the poor and their approach to social work.

PART ONE

IDEAS WHICH INFLUENCED THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL WORK

CHAPTER 1

INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT

IT is the opinion of Trevelyan that one of the outstanding features of the nineteenth century was the very great advance made in the sentiment and practice of humanity.¹ He claims that our modern love of liberty, justice and humanity comes to us direct from the Victorian age. It is the purpose of this brief survey of the social conditions and mental climate of the early Victorian period to determine why, in view of this growth of human feelings, organized social work took more than half a century to develop from the haphazard charity and philanthropy of earlier times.

Examples of what could have been done had been set by Chalmers. There were well-meaning people of high character, intelligence and ample leisure. Money was available, and was being spent lavishly on charitable enterprises—and not always wisely! Thus the Report on Mendicity in the Metropolis, 1816, mentioned the numerous beggars who had large sums of money in their pockets, gained by a variety of dubious practices.² The needs of the people were grave. The necessity for a revolutionary approach to mass misery was proved by the widespread interest in the reform of the Poor Laws. The people themselves, in all kinds of movements, newspapers, pamphlets, protests and violence itself were asking for help in pitiful terms. They had supporters from among all social classes, political parties and religious creeds. Some of the greatest men of the age, Owen, Cobbett, Disraeli, Dickens, Shaftesbury, Carlyle, to mention only a few, were demanding mitigation of the dismal fate of the poor. As early as 1796 Matthew Martin had begun an enquiry into misery in the metropolis. He had received support from the ‘Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor’ and had indeed received also £500 from the Treasury to pursue his enquiries. His work was fully described before the Committee in 1816.¹ Why was it then that not till much later in the century were large-scale efforts made to deal realistically yet sympathetically with the manifold problems of individual distress?

The answer must undoubtedly be looked for in the climate of the times, in the social and material conditions, and in the habits of thought which moulded men’s outlook at that period. There were not many realistic observers such as Colquhoun, whose treatise on Indigence² shrewdly examined the cost to the country of widespread poverty. He estimated the burden of poor rates as £4

millions. This was for a population of 8,872,980, out of whom over one million were rate-aided in 1803. To the £4

millions poor rates had to be added, he claimed, another £3

millions of private charity. Later in another work he estimated that in 1812 the number of paupers had increased to 1

millions.³ Their income was £9

millions, two-thirds of this coming from parish rates. As Colquhoun estimated the annual national income as £430 millions at that time, it can be seen that about one-eighth of the population was receiving only one-forty-fifth of the increasing national income. His figures also showed that taking the working classes as a whole, they, representing 65 per cent of the population, were receiving 37 per cent of the national income.⁴

1 CONDITIONS

Conditions were altering very quickly in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is arguable that neither before nor after did social change reach the alarming momentum of 1800–50. It is possible only to outline some of the conditions of life in one arbitrarily chosen period. The year 1832 seems one that can well be chosen from which to survey the England of Wellington, Peel, Jeremy Bentham and Jane Austen. Particularly relevant to our purpose is an estimate of the extent to which the sentiment of humanity showed itself in practice during this period.

Woodward considers there had been an improvement in the attitude of the rich to the poor since the beginning of the century. Yet in 1832 there was still ‘a certain callousness, an indifference to suffering and in some respects an invincible blindness’.¹ This was still an aristocratic age, despite the attempts of the middle-class to break into the ranks of aristocracy. It is necessary therefore to understand the attitude of the upper classes to the masses of the poor.

It was not altogether blindness that characterized their attitude, for many forces were at work to open their eyes. It was not so very long since the French Revolution. People in 1832 could well remember 1793, as many of us in mid-twentieth century remember Russia in 1917. Less than twenty years earlier many large country houses had kept cannon ready in case the mob attacked. The claims of the early socialists, the wide public that read Tom Paine, the desperate attempts of the pioneering Trade Unions to survive made the upper classes all too aware of the situation. Their reaction was fear … and fear bred repression.

Even the humanitarians of the time feared the poor. Shaftesbury was intensely hostile to any sort of radicalism: Bright was equally opposed to factory reform. Lack of understanding led to contradictions and confused counsels. The French Revolution had come as a shock to complacency and paternalism alike. Fear still reigned where there should have been pity, if not justice. It led to the firm belief that any concession to popular claims would open the floodgates to revolt.

Before passing to examine the actual conditions of the working classes and the protests that they made, it is worth enquiring whether it was revolutionary ideas, or the suspicion that such ideas existed, that had caused such a disastrous gap between governors and governed. The answer is that never before had the upper classes been so directly confronted by the might of the mob. The population of the country had doubled between 1801 and 1850. This, as much as the Industrial Revolution, had led to the deplorable conditions of the poor. In a generation great industrial populations grew up; the proletariat that Marx was soon to idealize was coming into existence, and long before Marx, was becoming self-conscious and vocal. The Chartist movement, following the great mass Trade Union movement of 1832–4, was soon to make the aristocrats fancy that their worst foreboding had come to pass. It may be true that ‘the key to the Victorian age was the achievement of social peace’.¹ But this was in the future, and after a stormy twenty years. Social peace looked a long way off to the upper classes in 1832.

There were many who did not want a social peace based on the apathy and despair of a servile population. Carlyle thundered against the evils of the time. Cobbett whipped his readers into frenzy by reminding them of the old days when men had minds and souls of their own. The poor felt that everything was conspiring to lower their standards of life and to worsen their condition. The more fortunate of them had tried to gain security through Friendly Society membership. Colquhoun showed that 704,350 people, i.e. one-twelfth of the population, belonged to 9,672 Friendly Societies in 1803. These are striking figures but the mass of the poor nevertheless had not even enough coming in to pay the very moderate Friendly Society dues. The Luddites in 1812 had struck out blindly at new machinery; Peterloo was the culmination of several years of threatened insurrection. In the meantime the Industrial Revolution was developing and extending on all fronts. It is true that the process was by no means completed in 1832. Many parts of England had hardly been touched by the Industrial Revolution. Railways and joint stock companies were in their infancy; the handloom weavers and other remnants of the domestic system still fought a losing battle against inevitable trends.

Already workers in mill and factory, mine and workhouse, felt that overwhelming forces were pushing them ever downwards. As the Hammonds insisted,² their protests were not merely against the new machinery, but against the inhumanity of the new order, the new discipline and relentless factory timetable, the fines and regulations. Their customs, family ties, dignity as human beings, their very freedom seemed in peril. The main achievement of the industrial progress of which Macaulay boasted seemed to be the organization of the discomforts of poverty into a rigid system. Modern scholars have somewhat modified the picture of the Industrial Revolution given by Toynbee, Marx, Engels and later the Hammonds. Dorothy George, for instance, suggests that the Industrial Revolution was not entirely harmful to the workers.¹ She points out, among other instances, that even in the first years of the nineteenth century, health conditions were improving and machinery already easing many types of hard manual work.

Nevertheless the Industrial Revolution deserves this title on two grounds—(a) because the great manufacturers were daring innovators, (b) because the workers were in revolt against the novel conditions of labour that the factory system necessitated. The factories contained large numbers of workers, among whom two classes were clearly discernible, the small class of highly paid technicians and the larger mass of the unskilled. Conditions were bad enough under the domestic system, but at least no worker was subject to the whips of the overseers, the endless fines, the inhuman discipline.

Particularly had the women and children suffered from the introduction of the factory system. Their fate had been vividly described in the enquiries in 1816, 1832 and 1833.² They increasingly took the place of men, particularly in the textile factories of the north, as it was realized that with nimble fingers they could do the work more quickly than men.

The workhouses of the south sent their pauper children north to work in the mills. The factories were often dirty, dangerous, insanitary; the children in all too many cases were treated abominably, flogged, mutilated and degraded. Richard Oastler, in his letters on Yorkshire Slavery, 1833, asked the leaders of the movement for the abolition of Negro slavery what they were going to do about ‘the little white slaves of the factories’. The Commissioners of 1833 found that children started work at nine, sometimes eight, and even six or seven years of age; they worked fourteen hours a day, starting at four or five in the morning. By 1833 direct cruelty, according to the Commissioners, was diminishing but overwork all-pervasive. The richer classes of the towns did not choose to concern themselves with the sufferings of the factory children; they were mostly indifferent, for that matter, to the conditions much nearer home of the little climbing boys who swept their chimneys.

The new towns, as the Hammonds showed so vividly, symbolized the helplessness and misery of the masses. Often they were more like filthy barracks than centres of community life. Edwin Chadwick said of them, ‘their condition in respect of cleanliness is almost as bad as that of an encamped horde or an undisciplined soldiery’.¹ It must be admitted that efforts were being made in several quarters to improve housing conditions. The housing provision made by some employers such as Owen, Oldknow and Lowther was a decided improvement over many rural homes. Chadwick himself gave instances of five-roomed houses, including three bedrooms, that showed evidence of enlightened thought on the subject. Illustrations are included in his report of new cottages in the Northumberland industrial area. They were clearly a big improvement on the old rural cottages illustrated for contrast. Yet it is obvious that these must have been exceptions. The new wealth was largely going into new factory plant and large-scale communications. As in Russia today, housing had to give place in early nineteenth-century England to the urgent demands of mechanization and industrialism generally.

It is difficult for us to realize quite how barbarous were conditions of life for the poor in many big cities and how uncouth, ignorant and depraved were big sections of the population. In London particularly many of the evil conditions of the age were most evident. It is true that London was not typical of the Industrial Revolution as a whole, for it was in the North that the new industrial towns had sprung up. But London was growing rapidly in size; it was already overpopulatcd, it had a housing situation that was desperate and sanitary arrangements that were primitive. The submerged tenth of its citizens presented grave problems of vice, poverty, ill-health and delinquency, particularly in the districts where Irish immigrants lived. The evidence of Montague Burgoyne before the 1816 Committee on Mendicity, for example, vividly described the appalling housing conditions of the Irish in the Marylebone area.

One of the main causes of the deplorable state of the working classes was the neglect of national education. England in the 1830’s was far behind several other parts of Europe in elementary education. It is true that in some areas a surprising number could read. Thus the Minutes of Evidence before the Select Committee on The State of Children in Manufactories in 1816 showed that in Manchester 529 out of 793 children under ten could read, the figure for those between ten and eighteen being 4,522 out of 5,460.¹ Yet almost alone in Europe, England left the training of her children to Sunday Schools and Charity Schools. Such working-class education as there was remained in the hands of two great religious societies—the ‘National Society’ and the ‘British Society.’ The weekday education given at the schools of these societies was a development of the work of Sunday Schools, in which children were taught to read the Bible. The aim of the two societies was not so much to encourage education as such, but to promote religious sentiments among the poor. They were to be trained in Hannah More’s words, ‘in habits of industry and piety’. It is fair to add that true charity was the motive of the philanthropists who ran the schools, a genuine concern to relieve misery; but a lively fear of a large, ignorant proletariat was never absent from their minds. The education given therefore was to be strictly limited.

Hannah More wanted the poor to read the Bible and her religious tracts, but they should not be taught to write, as that might be dangerous. The subject of working-class education was surrounded with prejudice and indifference. The minority of middle-class and upper-class people who supported the idea yet had no real notion of the value to the community of having at least minimally educated citizens. ‘Educational reform was expensive,’ says Woodward, ‘it brought no immediate results and was concerned with values which could not be expressed in commercial language.’ The new manufacturers were enthusiastic about new mechanical contrivances. Their human material was of less interest to them than their expensive machinery. It is true that by mid-century Mechanics’ Institutes sprang up in the North country to meet the need for skilled artificers: in 1851 there were 600,000 members of 610 such institutes. But on the whole the masters did not see the advantages of an educated working class until forty years later. Forster, in his speeches for the 1870 Education Act, showed what a lead Germany was beginning to gain in world trade through having higher educational standards in state schools. That any popular education existed at all was due to the rivalry between the Established Church and the Nonconformists. Neither could afford to leave the other alone in the field of educational endeavour; yet their mutual hostility was for many years to be as big an obstacle to educational progress as were prejudice and indifference on the part of the middle classes. The existence of a large semi-literate mass of town-workers, only too open to emotional appeals from demagogic tub-thumpers, was a menace to industrial progress, as it was a danger to the established order. Few workers approached the standards of civic awareness, and intelligent interest in social matters, that would have justified ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Ideas Which Influenced the Development of Social Work
• Part Two Main Branches of Social Work
• Epilogue
• Index