Industrial England, 1776-1851

Dorothy Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415381093
• eBook ISBN: 9781136601064
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Dr Dorothy Marshall covers a vital period in English social development, during which the traditional social hierarchy of order and degree was giving place to a class society marked by the growth of a self-conscious working class.

The author shows how, between 1776 and 1851, industrialization brought about major changes in the structure of society, so that by 1851 the outlines of modern urban and industrial society had been irrevocably drawn. She examines the social implications of the Industrial Revolution, referring in particular to the growth of urban society, the repercussions on the rural community and the resulting alterations in the social structure. She examines upper-, middle- and working-class opinions on such topics as religion and education, and traces the effect of the economic and social changes on the constitution and on political life. In the final chapter Dr Marshall describes the way in which the abuses of the new society brought about the demand for parliamentary legislation to deal with the injustices of the Poor Law, the factory system, and the problem of sanitation. This fascinating book was first published in 1973.

Chapter 1

The Economic Framework

English society in the closing decades of the eighteenth century can be likened to a traveller whose journey had taken him through foothills, across valleys where rivers had varied from turbulent torrents to broad and gentle streams, and over mountain ranges. Sometimes his journey had been hard and exhausting, sometimes pleasant and easy. But though there had been variety, the type of terrain that he had had to face had always been familiar, plains and rivers, foothills and mountains. He could rely on past experience. There had always been time to draw breath and readjust his technique as he left the hills for the valleys or the plains for the mountains. Now he was approaching a new type of country. His past experience would be far from valueless but it would have to be adjusted to very different conditions. Instead of achieving one summit, only to find its fellow facing him, the rocks behind which he could shelter were growing smaller, the wind fresher and more challenging. As he topped the rise he saw before him a vast plateau over which the mists hung low, so that, peer as he might, if there were further peaks ahead he could not see them, let alone discern their shapes and sizes. As he tried to look ahead the landscape seemed to be dominated by strange and unfamiliar forms. Though in the later stages of his journey he had noted many small indications that the terrain was changing, he had not expected anything so revolutionary. Nor had he expected the force of the wind that seemed to be pushing him further and further away from his familiar past. It was exciting but it was confusing and frightening too.

The changes that faced English society and made the England of 1851 very different from that of 1776 possessed all these qualities. Whether men welcomed or feared it, they were being blown towards a new society by an irresistible wind of progress. Probably most people were reasonably content with the England that they knew, because to them it seemed a more desirable country in which to live than that which their fathers had known. It was healthier, it was wealthier, it seemed to have achieved political stability. The old landmarks had not yet been swept away, or dwarfed and smothered and replaced by novel ways of life and modes of thinking. England was still a ‘green and pleasant land’ untouched by ‘dark, satanic mills’. The majority of its people lived in the country. Apart from agriculture, which absorbed much labour, and the crafts or professions that depended on it, most industry was located in rural areas. Except for London, which had grown enormously in the eighteenth century, most British cities and towns were small. Even by 1801 only fifteen had a population of over 20,000. There were a few large ports but London monopolized much of the country’s seaborne trade, though Bristol still handled a great deal of traffic, being the chief port for the slave ships carrying their human cargoes between Africa and the Caribbean. Many smaller ports served the coastal trade which played a vital part in the national economy until the revolution in inland transport. But by 1786 Liverpool was believed to have a population of around 50,000 and was growing rapidly. Apart from the ports, most towns were still each the natural centre of some rural area, providing it with a market for its local produce or industry and supplying it with those things that its people needed for their everyday wants. Men still wore clothes made by the local tailor and shoes by the local shoemaker. Some towns, such as Exeter and Norwich, had long been commercial centres for the clothing industry, organizing production in the rural hinterland and providing facilities for buying raw materials and selling the finished goods. During the eighteenth century towns of this type, particularly when they served some expanding industry, had been on the increase. Both Manchester and Birmingham are examples of this kind of growth. However, the actual manufacture of most goods still took place in the houses of the workers. The family was the normal economic unit and the number of persons who worked on their employer’s premises was small; so were the premises on which they worked. Breweries, iron foundries, brickyards all employed wage labour, as did many minor industries, but most industry took place in the home. This was the traditional pattern, however much its details might vary from district to district and from industry to industry. Very few people in 1776 could have visualized what the next fifty years would bring forth.

This is not the place for either a detailed examination of the causes of the Industrial Revolution or for a comprehensive analysis of its major changes. Nevertheless because these changes affected the pattern of social development in this country so drastically the links between the two must be indicated. Three factors profoundly influence social developments; rapid changes in the size of a country’s population, an improvement or breakdown in transport, and changes in the ways in which the majority of people earn their living. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth there were dramatic changes in each of these. They are not easy to disentangle, and the historian is perpetually faced with the aged problem of the egg and the hen, which came first? The interactions between these factors were so intricate and complex that the attempt to isolate them, however necessary for the sake of clarity, must inevitably cause some historical distortion. Population figures are notoriously unreliable before the first official census in 1801, and even that leaves much to be desired. But because population was a vital ingredient in the relative strength of the European powers, and therefore a matter on which England, vis-à-vis her great rival France, was very sensitive, English contemporary writers on political economy, as the new science was called, have furnished modern historians with estimates that are a mixture of such statistics as were available and brilliant guesswork. It seems unlikely that anyone will now get nearer to the truth. The starting-point for all such calculations is the work of Gregory King, who reckoned that in 1687 the population of England and Wales amounted to roughly five-and-a-half million. The increase by the mid-eighteenth century was considerable and had possibly reached a figure of between six-and-a-half and seven million. What is certain is that by 1801 the crude figure was 8,872,000 and the revised figure, when allowances had been made for omissions and errors, was 9,168,000. By 1851 this figure had doubled. Within the period covered by this volume, therefore, the population had increased approximately twofold. It had taken from prehistoric times to 1801 for the population to reach a mere nine million. It took only fifty years for it to double itself and, fifty years are well within the life-span of a man. Why this tremendous population explosion took place when it did is still a matter of argument between historians, one school laying the greater stress on a fall in the death rate, particularly of that of young children and childbearing women, as providing its main impetus, the other stressing the effect of a rising birth rate due to changing social patterns, such as earlier marriages and more economic opportunities. The argument is complicated by the fact that this increase was not confined to Britain. Sweden, whose statistics go back to 1749, experienced a similar one. The population of France was growing in the same way; so was that of Ireland. Whatever the explanation, certain consequences followed. The mass of the people had always been inadequately housed; now the problem was intensified. Moreover, these increased numbers had to be clothed and fed. They had to be organized in such a way as to increase the national product unless once again poverty and disease were to do their work. If the increase were to be maintained then new economic resources had to be developed and transport improved. The fact that although after 1851 the rate of increase lessened, the population not only continued to grow but, it is generally agreed, managed to improve its standard of living, is proof that this was done. Nevertheless the strain on traditional society was immense. Had the country not adopted new methods in agriculture, in industry and in transport the disasters that Malthus prophesied as a result of an ever-growing population must have followed.

The most rapid rise in the birth rate between 1780 and 1820 not only increased the population materially, but also altered the composition of the age groups within it. Though the death rate was heavy, and was to rise again in the towns in the third and fourth decades of the century, it seems to have dropped below its eighteenth-century peak. The result was a greater proportion of children, teenagers and young adults in the population. On one occasion Edwin Chadwick was to complain that half the labour troubles and undisciplined behaviour of the urban workers was due to the large number of hotheads who had less sense of responsibility than their elders. The argument is suspect; the interesting point is that it was made. This disbalance in age groups produced other problems for society. At what age should this very youthful segment of the population be allowed to swell the labour force in order to provide itself with the means to live? Until it was able to do so, how was it to be fed and clothed? How could it best be inured to social discipline, instructed in religion and given the modicum of education that the new industrial techniques were beginning to demand? Behind these questions lay the yet more fundamental one, was the flood of young lives becoming too overwhelming? In the past statesmen had considered a large population to be an advantage. In the new circumstances was it a curse? If so, how could it be curbed?

This spectacular increase of population had mental and emotional as well as material repercussions. In the past the problem had been to keep people alive in the face of the ravages of plague, the constant menace of smallpox and typhus, and the periodic failure of the harvest. The possibilities of the new situation were presented to the thinking public by Malthus, who in his successive editions of his Essay on Population (1798, rev. ed. 1803) issued a grim warning to his fellow countrymen when he argued in convincing terms that, because food supplies increased only by arithmetical progression while population increased by geometrical progression, the consequence must be a welter of suffering unless something could be done to check the birth rate. His views were not original. But by presenting in one coherent whole the scattered observations of other men he won wide acceptance for them and conditioned the way in which men thought about the new social problems with which they were faced. This is not surprising. Men believe the evidence of their own eyes. Though the future was to prove Malthus wrong, at least in the short run and as far as Britain was concerned, when his contemporaries saw the population double in their own lifetime their fears are understandable.

A further problem arose from the fact that, in the towns at least, this population was no longer homogeneous. In comparison with Ireland, England was a rich country. As a consequence there had been throughout the eighteenth century a constant flow of Irish peasants to England to fill seasonal gaps in the labour force when additional help was needed with the harvest. Most of them had returned with their earnings to eke out the bare subsistence that was all the land shortage and lack of industry afforded to the Roman Catholic majority. Some, however, had remained in London, where an Irish colony in St Giles-in-the-Fields was of long standing. As the population of Ireland increased the need to emigrate increased with it. By the end of the century more and more Irish workers were coming, not just for the harvest, but looking for permanent, or at least semi-permanent, work in England. Some came in the Welsh colliers that carried coals to Ireland and returned with this human freight. Many came to Liverpool, to which after 1824 the new steam packet boats provided quick and easy transport. In comparison with the native increase the Irish influx was small, but from the social angle it was highly significant, because it introduced a new element into the expanding industrial towns, particularly those of Lancashire. If these immigrants fell sick or were unemployed, for however short a time, being without any other resources they were a constant cause of trouble and expense to the Poor Law authorities. Though they had no legal claim on the authorities, destitute immigrants could hardly be left to die openly in the streets, and they were in fact given casual relief and passes to return to Ireland. In the first year after the new Poor Law Act of 1834 an assistant commissioner reported that one-fifth of the population of Manchester was Irish. They were also unpopular for reasons very similar to those advanced against the coloured immigrants in the nineteen-sixties. Because for the most part they were unskilled and were competing for work in a labour market where there was no shortage of hands, they were prepared to accept employment at wages so low that no Englishman would accept them except under the compulsive threat of the workhouse. Moreover the Irish accentuated the desperate shortage of houses and by their habits created additional problems in the towns. In Ireland their living standards had been desperately low and their ideas of hygiene and sanitation primitive. Crowded into the worst possible quarters, existing on the wages of unskilled labour, wherever they congregated the area became a slum. English workers resented them because their competition brought down wages, respectable householders resented them because they believed that they put up the rates. Protestants disliked them because they were Roman Catholics, against whom popular prejudice was still strong. Few people were prepared to admit that the economic contribution that they made counterbalanced the strains that they brought to urban life in those areas where they settled most thickly. Yet without the manpower that they provided as builders’ labourers, as navvies digging canals (the word ‘navvy’ comes from ‘inland navigation’) and later in making railways Britain could not have moved into her industrial future with the speed with which she did. Integrating a new element into the population is never easy and those who suffer in the process are apt to stress the debit and ignore the credit side in the nation’s balance sheet.

If the increased population had not been accompanied by increased agricultural production (due at least as much to the enclosure of new land as to the use of better methods), by fundamental innovations in basic industries, and by a transformation in internal communications, all without too great a time lag, the barrier of limited resources might, as in the past, have checked what by the eighteen-twenties seemed an irresistible flood. That the economy was able to respond to its new opportunities meant, however, that new strains were put on the fabric of society by the changes that this response involved. Briefly, they transformed Britain from a bundle of regions into a geographical unity, and they turned the majority of her people into townsmen and industrial workers instead of country folk whose income in one way or another depended on the land. The fact that both these fundamental changes were taking place at the same time makes it difficult either to isolate them or to decide on priorities. In the past Britain enjoyed little more than a political unity, and that only in the very general sense that Parliament represented the entire nation and legislated for it. Economic and social life, with some exceptions was largely regional. One should not exaggerate this static character of pre-industrial society. There had always been more personal mobility than is sometimes realized. Nevertheless until the closing decades of the eighteenth century travel had been physically exhausting, slow, and not to be undertaken lightly.

The art of road-making had to be relearned before the roads were tolerable for anything but the horseman and the horsewoman or the humble pedestrian. In winter, or after heavy rain, roads that crossed the clay belt were almost impassable. The fact that each parish was responsible for the roads meant that they were repaired in the most amateurish way. Many parts of the country had no signposts. Away from the main arteries of trade, which connected London, the bigger towns and the ports, it was often necessary to hire a local guide if the traveller did not wish to risk being lost in forests or on moors and commons. The use that could be made of rivers to supplement the inadequacies of the roads was limited. Not only were many parts of the country deficient in serviceable rivers, but navigation was frequently hindered by dams, by weirs, by shallows and by the difficulty of dragging heavy barges along the towpath where they could be used. The result was to divide the country into a series of economic and social regions, each with its own provincial capital, its own ports, its own industries and its own way of life. Exeter and Bristol dominated the west, Norwich and King’s Lynn East Anglia, York the north-east, Liverpool and Manchester the north-west, and rising towns like Birmingham, or older ones like Nottingham and Coventry, the midlands. London merchants had links with them all, and their products, both manufactured and agricultural, gravitated to the London market, either for consumption there or for export. For most people these links were at second or third hand, or even non-existent. The clothes of the Devon clothier might be taken by packhorse to the metropolis, but the weaver rarely went further than the nearest market town. Unless he lived within walking distance, even a journey to Exeter or Bristol was an event. The man who had been as far as either would describe the marvels of the city to his fellow villagers as something very strange and wonderful. Conversely, the urban worker rarely went far beyond the fields that ringed the town, though exceptions must be made for those craftsmen whose work was often itinerant. Pedlars regularly penetrated the isolation of villages and scattered hamlets, drovers regularly brought animals on the hoof to London and the bigger towns. Yet even such men generally confined themselves to a limited district. It would be unusual to find a Yorkshire pedlar in Sussex, or a Lancashire one in Devon. Tramping craftsmen, too, had their regular beats.

Though to a lesser extent, the gentry also spent most of their lives in their own neighbourhoods. Only those with extensive estates and generous rent rolls, the type of country gentleman who represented a local borough, or, even more importantly, the county, passed some part of every year in London when Parliament was sitting. Usually he was accompanied by his wife and family. Sometimes he was rich enough to own a town house, but the more general practice was to rent one for the season, or even to take furnished rooms. The majority went less far afield for their urban pleasures. During the winter months, when the roads were at their worst and villages were cut off by seas of mud, floods or snow, the more affluent gentry found it pleasant and convenient to repair to the provincial capital. Cities like Norwich had a very active social life. If the county town were too distant then the lesser gentry congregated in the nearest town that had any pretensions to be a social centre, such as Preston, or went to some genteel spa like Bath. Here they could attend assemblies, patronize the local circulating library and make easy contact with their friends without the hazards of travelling some miles merely to dine with a neighbour. When roads were bad, and, except within the familiar radius of home, comparatively unknown, there was little inducement to go further afield than the nearest market town. Even visiting was generally confined to moonlit nights. This was true even in towns. In Birmingham the well-known Lunar Society, composed of scientists and men of letters, got its name from the fact that its meetings were arranged to coincide with the prospect of a moonlit night. This lack of easy communication with other areas led to an intensification of local feeling. Even national politics were based on the reality of local interests and rivalries. It was enough for one leading county family to be Whig for another to be Tory. Local traditions died hard. Local superstitions had an all but religious sanction. People from another town, in the country almost those from another parish, were ‘foreigners’ or ‘off comes’. Dialect shaped the language of ordinary people and even the gentry thought it no disgrace to speak with a provincial accent.

This regionalism affected many aspects of the national life. As woods and forests were eaten up coal became a vital fuel, and coal was heavy to move. Indeed to do so, except by water, outside a ten-mile radius was rarely economic. The result was both a multiplicity of small pits and an effective check on the growth of large towns, unless these were also ports. Basic supplies of foodstuffs were also largely limited to what could be produced locally. The limit which bad transport placed on the growth of towns was extended to industry. Only towns that had access to raw materials in sufficient quantities, and that possessed facilities for marketing the finished goods, could hope to develop any large-scale manufactures. Woollen and cotton goods were comparatively easy to transport on packhorses. Bulky goods were a very different proposition. This meant that local needs were largely supplied by local craftsmen, though whether the goods that they were making were clothes, or furniture, or even the house itself, they often copied London designs. Since the arrival of the postal service news and fashions travelled with surprising rapidity even to the remoter regions. Even so, what was up-to-date fashion in Yorkshire was behind the times in London. This division of the nation into tightly knit communities had the further effect of creating a tradition of opposition to any interference from the central government that later was to affect profoundly the way in which social legislation was to be envisaged and enforced. Communities, whether they were corporations or parishes, had managed their own affairs for so long without outside interference that local traditions had grown up, either within the framework of undetailed legislation, or to supplement it. The result was a considerable diversity of practice in such matters as the routine of holding parish meetings or in administering the Poor Laws. This was partly because of a lack of knowledge as to what was done elsewhere. Communities were not only self-sufficient. They were self-satisfied: criticism was muted and innovation hampered.

The first major breakthrough came with the construction of a widespread network of canals. These had long been used in Holland and in France and it is not surprising, once there was a reasonable prospect of a good return on the heavy expenditure that building them would necessitate, that they should be introduced into England, though to read some accounts of the Duke of Bridgewater’s experiment in linking his coalfield at Worsley with the profitable Manchester market one might supp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Original Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 The Economic Framework
• Chapter 2 Urban England
• Chapter 3 Rural England
• Chapter 4 The Changing Social Structure
• Chapter 5 The Climate of Opinion: Upper and Middle Class
• Chapter 6 The Climate of Opinion: Working Class
• Chapter 7 Constitutional and Administrative Adjustments
• Chapter 8 Legislative Experiments in Social Reform
• Figures
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index