Liberty's Dawn

A People's History of the Industrial Revolution

Emma Griffin

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780300194814
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte der Neuzeit

"Emma Griffin gives a new and powerful voice to the men and women whose blood and sweat greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution" (Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London ). This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class ( The New Yorker ). The era didn't just bring about misery and poverty. On the contrary, Emma Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom. This rich personal account focuses on the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, rather than its economic and political histories. In the tradition of bestselling books by Liza Picard, Judith Flanders, and Jerry White, Griffin gets under the skin of the period and creates a cast of colorful characters, including factory workers, miners, shoemakers, carpenters, servants, and farm laborers. "Through the 'messy tales' of more than 350 working-class lives, Emma Griffin arrives at an upbeat interpretation of the Industrial Revolution most of us would hardly recognize. It is quite enthralling." — The Oldie magazine "A triumph, achieved in fewer than 250 gracefully written pages. They persuasively purvey Griffin's historical conviction. She is intimate with her audience, wooing it and teasing it along the way." — The Times Literary Supplement "An admirably intimate and expansive revisionist history." — Publishers Weekly

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: ‘A Simple Naritive’

AT THE DAWN of the nineteenth century, a subtle and little-noticed social change began to take place in Britain. As the industrial revolution picked up pace, a growing number of ordinary working people picked up pen and paper and wrote down their memories. Some, such as the poet Robert Anderson, overcame impoverished origins to acquire considerable literary skills. His ‘Memoirs of the author’ were published in 1820 as a preface to a volume of his poetry.¹ Others scratched out their stories without artistry, apologising as they wrote for their poor spelling, explaining that their schooldays had ended before they ‘learned the points and stops’.² Regardless of literary merit, these writers bequeathed an extraordinary collection of historical sources, hundreds of evocative tales of everyday life during one of the most momentous transitions in world history. This book tells their story, an unexpected tale of working people carving out for themselves new levels of wealth, freedom and autonomy. Let us begin by opening the pages of one such notebook.

In the vaults of the Norfolk Record Office lie the memoirs of John Lincoln. Written in the 1830s, the memoirs were carefully passed through his descendants from one generation to the next until they reached the local historian, Patrick Palgrave-Moore, who wisely deposited them for safe keeping at the Record Office. The eighty pages of Lincoln’s notebook are fragile and torn, filled with the untidy hand of a self-taught writer. The closely written, margin-less pages remind us that Lincoln lived at a time when paper was a precious commodity. They comprised what he called his ‘simple Naritive’, a detailed account of his life from his earliest childhood recollections to the present. Lincoln was nearly sixty when he wrote his memoirs. He is not listed in the 1841 Census, so it seems likely that he did not live for many years after their completion.³

From his notebook, we learn that John was born into a life of crushing poverty, even by the depressed standards of the late eighteenth century. His father died shortly after his birth, leaving his mother destitute. To keep her small family of two children together (down from the ten she had given birth to), John’s mother ‘would go a washing 5 days in the week’.⁴ Mother’s work and a little assistance from the parish kept a roof over the family until John was seven. At this point, though, the parish decided that the seven-year-old would have to earn his own way. John never lived with his family again. He was first dispatched to work for a hemp manufacturer that the parish had found. The placement did not last long. His mistreatment at the hands of his master’s wife escalated until she cracked John’s skull open with a wooden hemp reel. It was too much even for his lukewarm guardians, and the parish officers lost little time in finding him a new situation. Over the next decade, John moved from one post to the next, choosing his employments so as to keep close to his sister and ‘dear mother’; he felt uneasy, as he said, without a ‘friend to tell all my little sorrows’ close by.⁵ The circumstances of this little family were far from ideal, yet the bonds between mother and son were clearly strong and meaningful. Despite living apart since the age of seven, John found the death of his mother a shattering blow. Plunged into a sorrow he could not articulate, he described himself simply as ‘very unsettled’ and of a ‘Roveing dispassion’, unable for a number of years to settle in one place or one position for long.⁶

Perhaps these traumatic experiences help explain the unsatisfactory relationships he entered soon after. His first was with Ann, a fellow servant at Oxborough, an excellent cook but a woman with ‘a hot and Violent Temper – she was a very stout person and ten years older than myself’.⁷ Within little more than a year, Ann found herself in a delicate condition. A wedding was the only solution. The nuptials took place in January 1799, but the marriage was neither long-lived nor successful. As soon as she had a ring on her finger, Ann left their employers’ household and headed back to her own family, with John reluctantly following shortly after to work with her father at ‘hedging and ditching’ and to live in the family’s humble home. He admitted in his notebook that his reception there quickly left him wishing he had followed his master’s advice and never married at all. In July, Ann presented John with a son, but in the winter she fell ill. Weeks later she lay dead. With her parents unwilling to take care of the child, John was left alone to manage as best he could. He found a nurse to watch the child while he toiled in the fields during the day but suspected her of neglect. The ‘feet of my dear child was almost Rotted up’ through long hours of confinement to a cradle, he recalled, and when he returned from his day’s labour his son ‘would leap from joy at my appearance’.⁸ John removed his son to a second nurse, but the child’s pitiful life was cut short at eighteen months. Two years had passed since John had married. Both his wife and son had died and, as John laconically observed, he ‘was far from being happy’.⁹

The seasons rolled by, with John constantly shifting from one employer to the next. In his memoirs, John made a careful note of each of his employments and the petty fallings-out that had terminated many, but did not touch again upon personal matters until he ‘formed an acquaintance with a young woman’ while working in Brandon.¹⁰ Though she never intimated as much, John soon suspected his unnamed acquaintance was pregnant. In sharp contrast to the usual desires of unmarried women in her predicament, however, she seemed to care little for John’s involvement. When he moved away from Brandon in search of work, she brusquely terminated the relationship. John’s suspicions were confirmed months later when she wrote to inform him that she had given birth to his son and requested that he return to Brandon to make her his wife. He hastened back and readily published the banns, perhaps hoping for a happier outcome for this family than his first. He was soon disappointed. A month after his return ‘she took in her head to deny me Coming to her house and Resolved not to Marry’.¹¹ Unable to persuade her otherwise, John moved on, first to Wimblington to work at the plough, and then into Essex, ending up finally at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich where for a number of years he enjoyed plenty of work at good wages, thanks to the government’s insatiable need for munitions triggered by the wars with Napoleon’s France.

It was at Woolwich that Lincoln once more ‘began to think of trying another partner for life here was plenty of Choice’.¹² He met a young woman living with her family in Woolwich and although John said little about their courtship it was clearly conducted along similar lines to his previous two. His new wife gave birth to their first child just four months after the wedding. During the course of their marriage, she bore ten children in all. The memoirs provide scant detail about the nature of their married life or the fate of their children. Of his marriage, John declared that he had never ‘repented of our Union’, but he said little about their life together, and indeed did not even note her name. (From the baptism registers we learn that she was called Sarah.) The record of his children was also incomplete: the parish registers reveal that the family suffered at least one infant death that was not mentioned in the memoir.¹³ And despite the care with which John described his own childhood and entry to the workforce he wrote very little about his children and nothing about when and why they started work. After his marriage, John’s memoirs wandered on to other themes – his struggle to find employment following the downscaling of operations at the Royal Artillery and, above all, his religious conversion. He returned to family matters only sporadically and inconsistently.

Here then is an example of the kind of record we will use to unlock the meaning of working-class life: detailed in certain aspects, frustratingly incomplete in others, heartbreaking in some of its recollections, and hopeful in others. John Lincoln’s story belongs to a remarkable set of records going under such titles as memoirs, life histories, autobiographies, notes, sketches, recollections and adventures, as well as many others more idiosyncratic.¹⁴ I have turned to them in order to think about a question that has animated observers for the best part of two centuries: what was the impact of the world’s first industrial revolution on the ordinary men, women and children who lived through it?

Stating the question so baldly instantly raises a problem: what exactly do we mean by the ‘industrial revolution’? It is hard to imagine a term that has been more bitterly contested. Not only are historians divided about how it should be defined (was it the emergence of new technology? of new commercial systems? of new forms of fuel?); they also fail to agree on when the great event is supposed to have occurred. There are even a few sceptics who question whether such a ‘revolutionary’ event occurred at all.¹⁵

Yet no matter how much we dispute the fine detail, it is clear that something momentous happened in Britain between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. ‘Revolution’ is an unavoidable and apt description of these events. At some point, the nation stopped trying to make all its goods by hand, and started to burn fossil fuels to drive machinery to do the work instead. In the process, large numbers of families gave up working the land, and moved to towns and cities to take up employment in factories, mills and mines. As each decade of the early nineteenth century passed it became increasingly obvious that Britain had left behind its pre-industrial past and was travelling on an entirely new trajectory. What these changes meant for the nameless individuals who formed part of that exodus from the country to the town, from the land to the workshop, remains a question of innate human interest. And it is one of enduring relevance in our own times as other parts of the globe industrialise at a galloping pace.

As the moment when one small European nation left behind its agrarian past and entered decisively on the path to modernity, the industrial revolution has quite rightly attracted the attention of generation after generation of historians. But most of this work has focused on the great men and machines that turned Britain into the workshop of the world: James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, James Watt, George Stevenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the spinning jenny, the water frame, the steam engine, the locomotive engine, the railways. These individuals and their achievements transformed Britain into an industrial nation and fully deserve the attention they have received. But so too do the ordinary men, women and children who worked the machines, hewed coal for the steam engines, and built and drove the trains. It is too often assumed that workers like these left little mark on the historical record and must for ever remain voiceless. But as John Lincoln’s tale shows, the workers in Britain’s fields and factories were not always so silent as has generally been supposed.

It is hard to characterise the memoirs and ‘simple Naritives’ that John Lincoln and others have left behind, beyond indicating that in each, the writer and the subject are one and the same. They are works that we would today recognise as autobiographies, though the word ‘autobiography’ only entered the English language in the early nineteenth century, well after the culture of life-writing had taken root. I have consulted over 350 items, both published and unpublished. Most of the autobiographies that have survived appeared in print during or soon after the author’s lifetime. A few were even commercial successes. James Dawson Burn’s Autobiography was published in 1855, and by the end of the decade had gone into its fourth edition. Others were published in very small numbers by obscure provincial printers, more for the writer’s satisfaction than in response to any public demand. John Robinson’s Short Account of the Life of John Robinson was as short as its title promised – just one page long. Robinson was a printer and probably published his short account himself. It seems likely that the copy held by the Torquay Central Library in Devon is the only one now in existence. Some of the autobiographies I have consulted were not written for publication at all. Their authors’ motivations defy all attempts at simple categorisation. They vary from recounting a religious conversion to retelling a career of modest political achievement (and perhaps wistfully hoping to appear in print). For these authors, life-writing was a private exercise in writing and composition, perhaps intended as a record of family history for the amusement or edification of their children. Some have since been brought to light by their authors’ descendants; the others still remain locked away gathering dust in the strongrooms and vaults of local history libraries and county record offices.¹⁶

In turning to autobiography to think about the impact of industrialisation on the poor, one inevitably soon hears the criticism that there is something exceptional about the man who wrote an autobiography. It has often been suggested that the ability to write, combined with the desire to do so, was so rare in the working class during this period that the few hundred who wrote down their life history cannot be taken as representative of the silent majority.¹⁷

Yet it is my belief that the autobiographies capture a broad swath of working-class life. If we take the working class to be those who had no income other than that which they earned, those working as manual labourers, and those sufficiently close to the margins of a comfortable existence that a stint of ill health or unemployment posed serious difficulties, we find that the autobiographies do indeed capture the life experiences of this group. The skilled and unskilled; agricultural, urban and industrial workers; the reasonably comfortable and the desperately poor are all represented. Of course wealthy families purchased better educations for their children, but there was nothing exceptional in a labourer knowing how to write. There were opportunities for the most impoverished to receive some schooling, particularly following the creation of the Sunday schools at the end of the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of ‘dame schools’ – small schools run by women which combined childcare with schooling – held out the prospect of basic literacy to the children of very poor families before their working lives began. As we shall see in the pages that follow, it is undeniable that many of our authors began life in the most abject poverty. Furthermore, this period witnessed the creation of a wide range of opportunities for learning to write later in life and it was this adult learning which proved particularly important for the writing of working-class autobiography. And this raises an intriguing possibility: that many writers were able to describe an earlier time in their life when they had been wholly unable to read or write. As a result, this diverse set of memoirs contains reflections and detail about those born into poverty and who had remained poor and illiterate for a part of their adult life.

In inviting people to think about the social origins of the autobio-graphers, I have sometimes suggested they imagine a large bus with seats for working-class families only. All my writers started out on the bus – they were raised in poor families, on scant fare, with limited or non-existent schooling, and turfed out to the workplace at the earliest opportunity. But as the time passed, some of the autobiographers ste...