1. The Torrington Diaries, ed. C. B. Andrews (1936), III, pp. 81–2.

1. P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), p. 6; Asa Briggs, ‘The Language of “Class” in Early Nineteenth-century England’, in Essays in Labour History, ed. Briggs and Saville (1960), p. 63.

1. W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (1842), pp. 4–6.

1. For an admirable restatement of the reasons for the primacy of the cotton industry in the Industrial Revolution, see E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (1962), ch. 2.

2. Estimates for U.K., 1833. Total adult labour force in all textile mills, 191,671. Number of cotton hand-loom weavers, 213,000. See below, p. 327.

1. Cf. Hobsbawm, op. cit., ch. 2.

2.There is a summary of this controversy in E. E. Lampard, Industrial Revolution (American Historical Association, 1957). See also Hobsbawm, op. cit., ch. 2.

3. Cit. M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1930), p. 210.

1. See W. W. Rostow, British Economy in the Nineteenth Century (1948), esp. pp. 122–5.

2. Some of the views outlined here are to be found, implicitly or explicitly, in T. S. Ashton, Industrial Revolution (1948) and A. Radford, The Economic History of England (2nd edn 1960). A sociological variant is developed by N. J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), and a knockabout popularization is in John Vaizey, Success Story (W.E.A., n.d.).

1. See E. E. Lampard, op. cit., p. 7.

1. Black Dwarf, 30 September 1818.

1. See S. Pollard, ‘Investment, Consumption, and the Industrial Revolution’, Econ. Hist. Review, 2nd Series, XI (1958), pp. 215–26.

1. T. Bewick, Memoir (1961 edn), p. 151.

1. H.O. 42.160. See also Hammonds, The Town Labourer, p. 303, and Oastler’s evidence on the hand-loom weavers, below, p. 329.

1. The futility of one part of this discussion is shown by the fact that if different datum-lines are taken, different answers may come up. 1780–1830 favours the ‘pessimists’; 1800–1850 favours the ‘optimists’.

1. My italics. T. S. Ashton, ‘The Standard of Life of the Workers in England, 1790–1830’, in Capitalism and the Historians (ed. F. A. Hayek), pp. 127 ff.; E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The British Standard of Living, 1790–1850’, Economic History Review, X, August 1957.

1. Lest the reader should judge the historian too harshly, we may record Sir John Clapham’s explanation as to the way in which this selective principle may order the evidence. ‘It is very easy to do this unawares. Thirty years ago I read and marked Arthur Young’s Travels in France, and taught from the marked passages. Five years ago I went through it again, to find that whenever Young spoke of a wretched Frenchman I had marked him, but that many of his references to happy or prosperous Frenchmen remained unmarked.’ One suspects that for ten or fifteen years most economic historians have been busy marking up the happy and prosperous evidence in the text.

1.T. S. Ashton, ‘The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians’, in Capitalism and the Historians, p. 41. Professor Ashton’s essay on ‘The Standard of Life of the Workers in England’, reprinted in this volume, originally appeared in the Journal of Economic History, 1949.

2. The most constructive appraisal of the controversy is in A. J. Taylor’s ‘Progress and Poverty in Britain, 1780–1850’, History, February 1960.

1. These groups have been selected because their experience seems most to colour the social consciousness of the working class in the first half of the century. The miners and metal-workers do not make their influence fully felt until later in the century. The other key group – the cotton-spinners – are the subject of an admirable study in the Hammonds, The Skilled Labourer.