45. Charles Booth’s revolutionary maps used colour coding to denote levels of wealth or poverty for each street of late-Victorian London. The social crisis caused by rapid urbanisation and industrialisation represented a profound challenge to art.
In the penultimate year of the nineteenth century Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, published a now largely forgotten book: The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Failures. It was, as the title suggests, a catalogue of the advances that had been made in Britain and her empire during the ‘wonderful’ nineteenth century. In his final chapters, however, Wallace decried the litany of moral and political failures that, in his esteemed view, tainted the successes of the age. Cited among these failures were the rise of militarism, the late Victorian famines that decimated British India and the ‘thinly-veiled slavery’ that was taking place across the colonial world. Wallace also listed the living conditions of the poor in Britain’s industrial cities.1
The slums that so appalled Wallace were a product of the rapid and largely unplanned urbanisation that had begun in the eighteenth century. The sheer speed at which Britain’s industrial cities expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been both breath-taking and alarming. Higher profits and greater productivity had enabled the owners of factories and mills to pay wages that were considerably higher than those for agricultural work, encouraging migration from rural villages to towns and cities. The enclosure of agricultural land, a feature of the concurrent agricultural revolution, provided further impetus for migration to the cities. Although, like Cromford Mill, the first factories had tended to be built in rural locations, near the fast-flowing rivers needed to power waterwheels, the shift to coal and ever greater mechanisation meant that industrialisation and urbanisation ultimately became synonymous. By the middle of the nineteenth century Britain became the first society in which the majority of people lived in cities.
The poster child for industrial urbanisation was Manchester. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it had been a market town with a population of around 10,000. By 1851 it was home to 400,000 people. Nothing like industrial Manchester had ever existed before. It became the focus of global fascination, a brick-built metropolis that was simultaneously a miracle and a social disaster. Although industrial wages were higher than those on the farms, increased earning power did not translate into better standards of living in the new cities. Foreign visitors to Victorian Britain were genuinely shocked by the living conditions of the poor. Great plagues of cholera and typhoid periodically swept through the slums, killing thousands. It is no accident that both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels gravitated to Britain to formulate their ideas about the age of industrial capitalism. Politicians, reformers, philanthropists and philosophers all struggled to find ways to ameliorate the human cost of urban industrialisation, all the while facing huge resistance from vested interests and parsimonious local authorities.
How were artists to make sense of mid-century Manchester and the forces that had given rise to her? What was the role of the artist in a society for which there was no precedent or precursor? From the start, artists struggled to find answers. They were wary of depicting the stark realities of the factory or the social horrors of the industrial city. One, however, was drawn to the new industrial regions of Britain. J. M. W. Turner embarked on a tour of the English north and the Midlands, to make sketches of the main centres of manufacturing. In August 1830 his journey took him to Dudley, an industrial town at the centre of the Black Country, so called because of the enormous clouds of smoke that were constantly vomited into the skies from its factory chimneys and the coals and cinders that covered the ground around the mines and furnaces. The engineer James Nasmyth described the region as one in which ‘The earth seems to have been turned inside out. Its entrails are strewn about ... By day and by night the country is glowing with fire, and the smoke of the iron forges and rolling mills.’2 Little had changed a decade later, when Charles Dickens, in The Old Curiosity Shop, described the Black Country: ‘tall chimneys, crowding on each other and presenting that endless repetition of the same, dull, ugly form poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.’3
Turner’s painting of industrial Dudley is a pictorial record – albeit a lyrically beautiful one – of the conditions Dickens and Nasmyth attested to. He used delicate watercolours to emphasise the effects of natural light at day’s end, and set the old town of Dudley, with its church and the ruins of the eleventh-century Norman castle, high on the hill, pushed into a gloomy, half-lit background. What dominates the scene is industry. Glowing fires from a forge radiate outwards. Clouds of black smoke climb upwards into a darkening sky, and the barges that ferry the raw materials of industry shimmer into indistinct shapes, merging with their own reflections. John Ruskin, who for a while was the owner of Turner’s painting, regarded it as a portent of ‘what England was to become’: a land in which the rise of industry inevitably entailed the loss of the old world, represented by Turner as the ruined castle and church. The new age, Ruskin predicted, mandated ‘the passing away of the baron and the monk’.4
46. The fires of industry dominate in J. M. W. Turner's rendering of Dudley in the English Midlands. Turner visited the town during the summer and autumn of 1830 while on a tour of England's burgeoning industrial centres.
In his fascination with industry, iron forges, steam trains and steam-powered tug boats, Turner stands out among his contemporaries. More typical was William Wyld, who – two decades after Turner’s tour of the Black Country – produced a watery, anaemic depiction of Manchester. Held in the Royal Collection, Wyld’s View of Manchester from Kersal Moor was commissioned by Queen Victoria herself, after her tour of the north-west of England in 1851.
Wyld places the great city of 400,000 souls literally on the horizon. In the foreground is a comforting pastoral landscape; goats graze in tall grass, and a resting couple, accompanied by their dog, take in the view. Smoke rises from a line of giant chimneys that puncture the skyline, and the rooftops and church spires of mid-century Manchester can be seen through the haze, but the dirt and energy of the industrial megalopolis, the conditions that had shocked the queen, are lost in the glow of a sunset that is delicately refracted through the smoke of the factories. (As generations of artists were to discover, one of the few redeeming features of industrial pollution was that it created stunning sunsets.) View of Manchester from Kersal Moor said more about the influence that Claude Lorrain, the grand master of landscape art, had had on William Wyld than it did about the world’s foremost industrial city. With Manchester thrust into the distance, the thousands of families living in damp cellars, the ceaseless noise from machine and factory, the vile smells, fetid gutters, polluted rivers and pitiless, relentless misery of it all are rendered invisible.
It was Britain’s novelists who had the most to say about the misery of the industrial working class and the wretched poverty that marred their lives. Writers more than painters were willing to venture into the parts of the Victorian city that the respectable classes preferred to ignore, despite the fact that wealth and poverty existed side by side, separated by only a few streets, as the maps of Charles Booth were later to reveal. Dickens had been forced to work in a factory aged just twelve, after his father had been incarcerated in the infamous Marshalsea prison for his debts. The author carried the psychological scars of that experience throughout his life. As a writer, Dickens was constantly fascinated by the plight of the urban poor, or at least those he regarded as the ‘deserving poor’. Yet it was perhaps a generation of women writers who most subtly and movingly uncovered the struggles of the industrial workers, and forced their middle-class readership to confront the social costs of industrialisation and the Victorian cult of progress.
47. William Wyld's view of Manchester keeps the booming industrial metropolis in the far distance. The smoke from the forest of chimneys refracts the light of the setting sun, creating a romantic atmosphere. But the painting has nothing to say about life in a city that was then home to 400,000 people.
In Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) Elizabeth Gaskell created a fictional portrait of life in the slums of 1840s Manchester, mirroring the journalistic reports of the same neighbourhoods that appeared in Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).5 In perhaps the most powerful passage, Gaskell’s characters John Barton and George Wilson venture deep into the abyss of tenements and cellar dwellings on Berry Street, in central Manchester.6
It was unpaved, and down the middle a gutter forces its way, every now and then forming pools in the holes with which the street abounded. Never was the old Edinburgh cry of ‘Gardez l’eau!’ more necessary than in this street. As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which over-flowed and stagnated. Heaps of ashes were the stepping-stones, on which the passer-by, who cared in the least for cleanliness, took care not to put his foot. Our friends were not dainty, but even they picked their way, till they got to some steps leading down into a small area, where a person standing would have his head about one foot below the level of the street, and might at the same time, without the least motion of his body, touch the window of the cellar and the dump muddy wall right opposite. You went down one step even from the foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside. The window-panes where many of them broken and stuffed with rags, which was reason enough for the dusky light that pervaded the place even at mid-day ... the smell was so fetid as almost to knock the two men down. Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet, brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband’s lair, and cried in the dank loneliness.7
