1. Mayhew later described the occupational returns as ‘crude, undigested, and essentially unscientific’, a document ‘whose insufficiency is a national disgrace to us, for there the trading and working classes are all jumbled together in the most perplexing confusion, and the occupations classified in a manner that would shame the merest tyro’.

1. For these figures, see Parliamentary Papers, 1833, XXXVII; Clapham, op. cit., esp. pp. 72–4, and ch. 5; R. M. Martin, Taxation of the British Empire (1833), pp. 193, 256.

1. G. Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923), chs. 10, 37.

1. W. B. Adams, English Pleasure Carriages (1837), cited in E. Hobsbawm, ‘Custom, Wages and Work-load in Nineteenth Century Industry’, in Essays in Labour History, ed. A. Briggs and J. Saville, p. 116.

2. Another early use is in the First Report of the Constabulary Commissioners (1839), p. 134, in a context which suggests that the term was widespread at the time.

3. For the eighteenth-century ‘aristocracy’, see M. D. George, op. cit., ch.4.

1. See below, pp. 585–90.

1. Records of the Borough of Nottingham 1800–1835 (1952), VIII, Thomas Large to Framework-knitters Committee, 24 April 1812.

2. See Gorgon, 17 October, 21 and 28 November 1818, 6 February and 20 March 1819.

3. Trades Newspaper, 1825–6, passim.

1. J. A. Langford, A Century of Birmingham Life, I, p. 272; C. Gill, History of Birmingham, I, pp. 95–8; Southey, Letters from England, Letter XXVI.

2. See S. Timmins (Ed.), Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District (1866), pp. 110 et passim; H. D. Fong, Triumph of Factory System in England (Tientsin, 1930), pp. 165–9.

1. S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (1950 edn), pp. 45–6.

2. W. M. Stern, The Porters of London (1960).

3. H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1862), III, p. 243. Against this should be set the statement of one of Mayhew’s scavengers: ‘I cares nothing about politics neither; but I’m a chartist.’

1. On the social composition of friendly societies, see P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England (Manchester, 1961), pp. 71 ff.

2. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Tramping Artisan’, in Econ. Hist. Review. Series 2, III (1950–51), p. 313.

3. Mayhew, op. cit., I, p. 351.

1. Rural Rides, II, p. 294. Against this account should be set the stormy incidents in the North-eastern coalfield – the rise and destruction of Hepburn’s union between 1830 and 1832, recounted in R. Fynes, The Miners of Northumberland and Durham, chs. 4–6 and The Skilled Labourer, chs. 2 and 3.

2. See T. S. Ashton, ‘The Coal-Miners of the Eighteenth Century,’ Econ. Journal (Supplement), I, 1928, pp. 325, 331, 334.

3.T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (1948), p. 158.

1. T. S. Ashton in Capitalism and the Historians, p. 146.

1. Black Dwarf, 9 September 1818. The admission of sick club (and possibly trade union) dues as necessary ‘expenses’ does however indicate an improvement in living standards.

2. See G. W. Hilton, The Truck System (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 81–7 et passim.

3. Pioneer, September 1833, cited in R. Postgate, The Builder’s History (1923), p. 93.

1. According to a ‘Statement of facts respecting the Journeymen Mill-wrights’ in P.C. A.158, the mill-wrights had raised their wages from 2s. 6d. to 3s. a day in 1775 to 4s. 6d. a day in 1799. The journeymen worked for small masters who were themselves employed by ‘Brewers, Millers and various Manufacturers’, whose works were brought to a halt by any strike. Hence striking journeymen were able to contract directly with the latter, cutting out their own masters.

1. See Galloway’s evidence: ‘Our business is composed of six or eight different branches; workers in wood, whom we call pattern-makers; they consist of good cabinet-makers, joiners, millwrights, and others employed in wood; iron and brass founders; smiths, firemen and hammer-men;… vice-men and filers; and brass, iron and wood turners, in all their variety.’

2. In the effort to protect British industrial supremacy, it was illegal for many classes of skilled worker to leave the country.

1. See The Book of English Trades (1818), pp. 237–41; J. Nicholson, The Operative Mechanic and British Machinist (1829); J. B. Jefferys, The Story of the Engineers (1945), pp. 9–18, 35 ff.; First Report from Select Committee on Artizans and Machinery (1824), pp. 23–7; Clapham, op. cit., I, pp. 151–7, 550; Thomas Wood, Autobiography (Leeds, 1856), p. 12 et passim. See also W. H. Chaloner, The Hungry Forties: A Re-Examination (Historical Association, 1957), where, however, it is unwisely implied that the good conditions of skilled men at Hibbert and Platt’s are more typical of the ‘Forties’ than the bad conditions of hand-loom weavers.

1. Frank Peel, ‘Old Cleckheaton’, Cleckheaton Guardian, January–April 1884.

1. B. Wilson, The Struggles of an Old Chartist (Halifax, 1887), p. 13. A ‘barer in the delph’ was a quarryman.

1. Mayhew, op. cit., II, p. 338. The parts of Mayhew’s work upon which I have drawn most extensively in the next few pages include his account of the tailors and boot-and-shoemakers in the Morning Chronicle, 1849, and London Labour and the London Poor, II, pp. 335–82, III, pp. 231 ff.

1. Mayhew, op. cit., II, pp. 364–5. Cf. Mechanics Magazine, 6 September 1823: ‘It is obvious that the reason why there is no work for one half of our people is, that the other half work twice as much as they ought.’

2. From the evidence Mayhew adduces elsewhere, as to cabinet-makers and tailors, this would appear to be an exaggeration: perhaps one-fifth or one-sixth is a more probable figure.

1. W. Lovett, Life and Struggles in Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom (1920 edn), I, pp. 31–2. For the old customs of ‘footing’ and ‘maiden garnish’ (when the new workman or apprentice must buy drinks for the shop), see J. D. Burn, A Glimpse of the Social Condition of the Working Class (n.d.), pp. 39–40.

2. Mayhew, III, p. 231, gives 600–700 society men, and 4,000–5,000 non-society men.

1. See T. K. Derry, ‘Repeal of the Apprenticeship Clauses of the Statute of Apprentices’, Econ. Hist. Review, III, 1931–2, p. 67. See also below, p. 565.

1. Dr Dorothy George notes ‘garret-masters’ and ‘chamber-masters’ among the watchmakers and shoemakers: see London Life in the 18th Century, pp. 172–5, 197–8. See also E. W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1934).

2. Gorgon, 21 November 1818.

3. See Clapham, op. cit., I, pp. 167–70; M. D. George, op. cit., pp. 195–201; A. Fox, History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (Oxford, 1958), pp. 12, 20–23. For the rules of the Journeymen Boot and Shoe Makers, 1803, see Aspinall, op. cit., pp. 80–82.

1. Davenpor’s Life, reprinted in National Co-operative Leader, 1861. I am indebted to Mr Roydon Harrison for drawing attention to this source.

1. Trades Newspaper, 10 September, 10 December 1826.

2. See below, p. 466, for the organization at Nantwich.

3. Place regarded the combination - among the tailors as ‘by far the most perfect of any’. But he had, of course, exceptional opportunity to discover their secrets.

4. Cf. advertisements such as this in the papers: ‘Men competent to superintend any works in the building line may be had by applying at the following houses…’ (Journeymen Carpenters, advertising in Trades Newspaper, 17 July 1825).

1. Gorgon, 26 September, 3 and 10 October 1818; First Report… Artizans and Machinery (1824), pp. 45–6; Cole and Filson, op. cit., pp. 106–7; [T. Carter], Memoirs of a Working Man (1845), pp. 122–4. For the 1834 strike see G. D. H. Cole, Attempts at General Union (1953). For antagonism between the organized hatters and dishonourable ‘corks’, see J. D. Burn, op. cit., pp. 41–2, 49–50.

1. J. Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes (5th edn, 1835), p. 293.

1. The best – although still incomplete – account of this second period is in G. D. H. Cole, Attempts at General Union.

1. Clapham, op. cit., I, p. 174

2. T. A. Ward (ed. A. B. Bell), Peeps in to the Past (1909), pp. 216 ff; S. Pollard, A History of Labour in Sheffield (Liverpool, 1959), ch. 2; Clapham, op. cit., I, p. 174.

1. New Monthly Magazine, 1 July 1819, cit. S. Maccoby, op. cit., p. 335. See also T. S. Ashton, ‘The Domestic System in the Early Lancashire Tool Trade’, Econ. Journal (Supplement), 1926–9, I, pp. 131 ff.

2. See the lucid account in J. Prest, The Industrial Revolution in Coventry (Oxford University Press, 1960), chs. 3 and 4.

3. Clapham, op. cit., I, p. 179.

1. F. A. Hayek and T. S. Ashton in Capitalism and the Historians, pp. 27–8, 36.

1. See the discussion of Owenism below, pp. 857–87.

1. Trades Newspaper, 24 July 1825. See also W. H. Warburton, History of T.U. Organization in the North Staffordshire Potteries (1931), pp. 28–32.

1. Lovett, op. cit., I, pp. 25–6.

1. Mayhew, I, p. 452.

1. Ibid., I, p. 461. For some years after the Wars genuine disbanded sailors were the largest group of London mendicants: Fourth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1822), p. 6.

2. Ibid., I, p. 465.

3. See J. D. Marshall, ‘The Nottinghamshire Reformers and their Contribution to the New Poor Law’, Econ. Hist. Review, 2nd Series, XIII, 3 April 1961.

1. Conditions of paupers in the workhouses after 1834 were intended to be ‘less eligible’ than those of the worst-situated labourers outside.

1. Dr Kay’s evidence is in G. Cornewall Lewis, Remarks on the Third Report of the Irish Poor Inquiry Commissioners (1837), pp. 34–5; returns of workhouse inmates, 1838, in the Fifth Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (1839), pp. 11, 181; an example of Chadwick’s ‘insane’ instructional letters, when confronted with the need for out-relief in industrial depression, is in his correspondence with the Mansfield Guardians, Third Annual Report P.L.C. (1837), pp. 117–19; Tenth Annual Report (1844), p. 272. Among the large literature on the Poor Law, the lucid account of resistance to it in the north in C. Driver, Tory Radical (1946), chs. 25 and 26 is to be recommended.