IF the average is elusive in agriculture, it is no less so when we come to workers in urban industry. Still, in 1830, the characteristic industrial worker worked not in a mill or factory but (as an artisan or ‘mechanic’) in a small workshop or in his own home, or (as a labourer) in more-or-less casual employment in the streets, on building-sites, on the docks. When Cobbett directed his Political Register towards the common people in 1816, he addressed, not the working class, but the ‘Journeymen and Labourers’. There were great differences of degree concealed within the term, ‘artisan’, from the prosperous master-craftsman, employing labour on his own account and independent of any masters, to the sweated garret labourers. For this reason, it is difficult to offer any accurate estimates of the number and status of artisans in different trades. The occupational tables of the Census of 1831 make no effort to differentiate between the master, the self-employed, and the labourer.1 After the agricultural labourers and domestic servants (670,491 female domestic servants alone being listed for Great Britain in 1831), the building trades made up the next largest group, accounting perhaps for 350,000 to 400,000 men and boys in 1831. Leaving aside the textile industries where outwork still predominated, the largest single artisan trade was that of shoemaking, with 133,000 adult male workers estimated for 1831, followed by tailoring, with 74,000. (Such figures include the employer, the country cobbler or tailor, the outworker, the shopkeeper, and the urban artisan proper.) In London, the greatest artisan centre in the world, where Dr Dorothy George appears to lend her authority to a rough estimate of 100,000 journeymen of all types in the early nineteenth century, Sir John Clapham advises us:
… the typical London skilled workman was neither brewery hand, shipwright nor silk weaver, but either a member of the building trades; or a shoemaker, tailor, cabinet-maker, printer, clockmaker, jeweller, baker – to mention the chief trades each of which had over 2,500 adult members in 1831.1
The wages of the skilled craftsmen at the beginning of the nineteenth century were often determined less by ‘supply and demand’ in the labour market than by notions of social prestige, or ‘custom’. Customary wage-regulation may cover many things, from the status accorded by tradition to the rural craftsman to intricate institutional regulation in urban centres. Industry was still widely dispersed throughout the countryside. The tinker, knife-grinder, or pedlar would take his wares or skills from farm to farm and fair to fair. In the large villages there would be stonemasons, thatchers, carpenters, wheel-wrights, shoemakers, the blacksmith’s forge: in the small market town there would be saddlers and harness-makers, tanners, tailors, shoemakers, weavers, and very possibly some local speciality such as stirrup-making or pillow-lace, as well as all the business of the posting-inns, carriage of farm produce and of coals, milling, baking and the like. Many of these rural craftsmen were better educated and more versatile and felt themselves to be a ‘cut above’ the urban workers – weavers, stockingers or miners – with whom they came into contact when they came to the towns. They brought their own customs with them; and no doubt these influenced wage-fixing and differentials in those small-town crafts which grew into great urban industries – building, coach-making, even engineering.
Custom, rather than costing (which was rarely understood), governed prices in many village industries, especially where local materials – timber or stone – were used. The blacksmith might work for so much a pound for rough work, a little more for fine. George Sturt, in his classic study of The Wheelwright’s Shop, has described how customary prices still prevailed in Farnham when he took over the family firm in 1884. ‘My great difficulty was to find out the customary price,’
I doubt if there was a tradesman in the district – I am sure there was no wheelwright – who really knew what his output cost, or what his profits were, or if he was making money or losing it on a particular job.
Much of the profit came from ‘jobbing’ and repairs. As for carts and waggons, ‘the only chance for me to make a profit would have been by lowering the quality of the output; and this the temper of the men made out of the question’. The men worked at the pace which their craftsmanship demanded: ‘they possibly (and properly) exaggerated the respect for good workmanship and material’; and as for the latter, ‘it happened not infrequently that a disgusted workman would refuse to use what I had supplied to him’. In the workman was ‘stored all the local lore of what good wheelwright’s work should be like’.1
Customary traditions of craftsmanship normally went together with vestigial notions of a ‘fair’ price and a ‘just’ wage. Social and moral criteria – subsistence, self-respect, pride in certain standards of workmanship, customary rewards for different grades of skill – these are as prominent in early trade union disputes as strictly ‘economic’ arguments. Sturt’s wheelwright’s shop perpetuated much older practices, and was country cousin to the city industry of coach-building, in which – in the early nineteenth century – there was a veritable hierarchy whose wage-differentials can scarcely be justified on economic grounds. ‘The wages are in proportion to the nicety of the work’, we are told in an 1818 Book of English Trades: for the body-makers, £2 to £3 a week: the trimmers ‘about two guineas’: the carriage-makers £1 to £2: the smith about 30s.: while the painters had their own hierarchy – the herald painters, who adorned the carriages of the great and the ostentatious with emblems, from £3 .to £4: the body painters about £2: and journeymen painters 20s. to 30s. The differentials supported, or perhaps reflected, gradations of social prestige:
The body-makers are first on the list; then follow the carriage-makers; then the trimmers; then the smiths; then the spring-makers; then the wheelwrights, painters, platers, bracemakers and so on. The body-makers are the wealthiest of all and compose among themselves a species of aristocracy to which the other workmen look up with feelings half of respect, half of jealousy. They feel their importance and treat the others with various consideration: carriage makers are entitled to a species of condescending familiarity; trimmers are considered too good to be despised; a foreman of painters they may treat with respect, but working painters can at most be favoured with a nod.1
These conditions were supported by the activities of a ‘Benevolent Society of Coachmakers’; and they survived the conviction under the Combination Acts of the General Secretary and twenty other members of the society in 1819. But it is important, at this stage, to note this early use of the term ‘aristocracy’, with reference to the skilled artisan.2 It is sometimes supposed that the phenomenon of a ‘labour aristocracy’ was coincident with the skilled trade unionism of the 1850s and 1860s – or was even the consequence of imperialism. But in fact there is both an old and a new élite of labour to be found in the years 1800–1850. The old élite was made up of master-artisans who considered themselves as ‘good’ as masters, shopkeepers, or professional men.3 (The Book of English Trades lists the apothecary, attorney, optician and statutory alongside the carpenter, currier, tailor and potter.) In some industries, the craftsman’s privileged position survived into workshop or factory production, through the force of custom, or combination and apprenticeship restriction, or because the craft remained highly skilled and specialized – fine and ‘fancy’ work in the luxury branches of the glass, wood and metal trades. The new élite arose with new skills in the iron, engineering and manufacturing industries. This is plain enough in engineering; but even in the cotton industry we must remember the warning, ‘we are not cotton-spinners all’. Overlookers, skilled ‘tenters’ of various kinds who adjusted and repaired the machines, pattern-drawers in calico-printing, and scores of other skilled subsidiary crafts, at which exceptional wages might be earned, were among the 1,225 sub-divisions of heads of employment in cotton manufacture enumerated in the 1841 Census.
If a specially favoured aristocracy was to be found in the London luxury trades and on the border-line between skills and technical or managerial functions in the great manufacturing industries, there was also a lesser aristocracy of artisans or privileged workers in almost every skilled industry. We can see this if we look for a moment through the inquisitive, humorous eyes of Thomas Large, a Leicester stocking-weaver who took part in a deputation to London in 1812 to lobby M.P.s on behalf of a Bill for regulating conditions in the hosiery industry.1 Once they had reached London, the framework knitters – who had at this time no permanent trade union organization but simply an ad hoc committee formed to promote the passage of their Bill – made contact with trade unionists in London who, despite the Combination Acts, were easily located at their houses of call:
We have engaged the same Room, where the carpinter committee sat [Thomas Large wrote back to his friends in the Midlands] when they brought on the late Trial on the sistom of colting. We have had an opportunity of speaking to them on the subject, they thought we possessed a fund on a permanent principle to answer any demand, at any time, and if that had been the case would have lent us two or three thousand pounds, (for there is £20,000 in the fund belonging to that Trade) but When they understood our Trade kept no regular fund to support itself, Instead of Lending us money, Their noses underwent a Mechanical turn upwards, and each saluted the other with a significant stare, Ejaculating, Lord bless us !!! what fools!!! they richly deserve all they put! and ten times more!!! We always thought stockeners a sett of poor creatures! Fellows as wanting of spirit, as their pockets are of money. What would our Trade be, if we did not combine together? perhaps as poor as you are, at this day! Look at other Trades! they all Combine, (the Spitalfields weavers excepted, and what a Miserable Condition are they in). See the Tailors, Shoemakers, Bookbinders, Gold beaters, Printers, Bricklayers, Coatmakers, Hatters, Curriers, Masons, Whitesmiths, none of these trades Receive Less than 30/- a week, and from that to five guineas this is all done by Combination, without it their Trades would be as bad as yours…1
To Thomas Large’s list we might add many others. The compositors and pressmen then stood at the edge of the 30s. line of privilege, having had a particularly hard struggle to organize in the face of the combined London masters. Some skilled men were less fortunate. The type-founders’ combination had been broken up, and their wages in 1818 were claimed to average only 18s. per week, having seen no advance since 1790. The same was true of the opticians and pipe-makers. The Gorgon suggested in 1819 that 25s. might be the wages of the average London ‘mechanic’, when averaged over the year.2 But when in 1824 the Combination Acts were repealed, and the craft unions in the London trades openly showed themselves, we can get an idea of the ‘lesser aristocracy’ by citing some trades which appeared most often in the columns of the Trades Newspaper of 1825: to Large’s list we can add the coopers, shipwrights, sawyers, ship caulkers, wire-drawers, cock-founders, fell-mongers, leather dressers, ropemakers, brass founders, silk dyers, clock and watch makers, skinners, and others. It is an impressive list; and in London as well as the larger cities such men were the very heart of the artisan culture and political movements of these years. By no means all of these trades were equally privileged. Some of the trades clubs in 1825 had fewer than 100 members, and not many exceeded 500. They varied between exceptionally privileged groups, like the upholsterers (who charged ‘enormous premiums’ for admission to apprenticeship) to the shoemakers who (as we shall see) were already in the grip of a crisis which was degrading them to the status of outworkers.3
Similar important groups of privileged artisans or skilled workers will be found in the provinces, not only in the same trades, but in trades scarcely represented in London. This was true, in particular, of the Sheffield cutlery and Birmingham small-ware industries. In the latter, there persisted far into the nineteenth century the numerous petty workshops, which made Birmingham the metropolis of the small master. Boulton’s Soho works bulks large in the story of economic growth. But the great majority of the city’s population, at the close of the eighteenth century, were employed in very small shops, whether as labourers or as quasi-independent craftsmen. To enumerate some of the Birmingham products is to evoke the intricate constellation of skills: buckles, cutlery, spurs, candlesticks, toys, guns, buttons, whip handles, coffee pots, ink stands, bells, carriage-fittings, steam-engines, snuff-boxes, lead pipes, jewellery, lamps, kitchen implements. ‘Every man whom I meet,’ Southey wrote in 1807, ‘stinks of train-oil and emery.’1
Here, in the Black Country, the process of specialization in the first three decades of the nineteenth century tended to take the simpler processes, such as nail and chain-making, to the surrounding villages of outworkers, while the more highly skilled operations remained in the metropolis of Birmingham itself.2 In such artisan trades the gulf between the small master and the skilled journeyman might, in psychological and sometimes in economic terms, be less than that between the journeyman and the common urban labourer. Entry to a whole trade might be limited to the sons of those already working in it, or might be bought only by a high apprenticeship premium. Restriction upon entry into the trade might be supported by corporate regulations (such as those of the Cutler’s Company of Sheffield, not repealed until 1814), encouraged by masters, and maintained by trade unions under the aliases of friendly societies. Among such artisans at the commencement of the nineteenth century (the Webbs suggested) ‘we have industrial society still divided vertically trade by trade, instead of horizontally between employers and wage-earners’.1 Equally, it might be that a privileged section only of the workers in a particular industry succeeded in restricting entry or in elevating their conditions. Thus, a recent study of the London porters has shown the fascinating intricacy of the history of a section of workers – including the Billingsgate porters – who might easily be supposed to be casual labourers but who in fact came under the particular surveillance of the City authorities, and who maintained a privileged position within the ocean of unskilled labour until the middle of the nineteenth century.2 More commonly, the distinction was between the skilled or apprenticed man and his labourer: the blacksmith and his striker, the bricklayer and his labourer, the calico pattern-drawer and his assistants, and so on.
The distinction between the artisan and the labourer – in terms of status, organization, and economic reward – remained as great, if not greater, in Henry Mayhew’s London of the late 1840s and 1850s as it was during the Napoleonic Wars. ‘In passing from the skilled operative of the west-end to the unskilled workman of the eastern quarter of London,’ Mayhew commented, ‘the moral and intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race’:
The artisans are almost to a man red-hot politicians. They are sufficiently educated and thoughtful to have a sense of their importance in the State…. The unskilled labourers are a different class of people. As yet they are as unpolitical as footmen, and instead of entertaining violent democratic opinions, they appear to have no political opinions whatever; or, if they do… they rather lead towards the maintenance of ‘things as they are’, than towards the ascendancy of the working people.3
In the south, it was among the artisans that the membership of friendly societies was largest1 and trade union organization was most continuous and stable, that educational and religious movements flourished, and that Owenism struck deepest root. It was, again, among the artisans that the custom of ‘tramping’ in search of work was so widespread that it has been described by one historian as ‘the artisan’s equivalent of the Grand Tour’.2 We shall see how their self-esteem and their desire for independence, coloured the political radicalism of the post-war years. And, if stripped of his craft and of his trade union defences, the artisan was one of the most pitiful figures in Mayhew’s London. ‘The destitute mechanics,’ Mayhew was told by the Master of the Wandsworth and Clapham Union, ‘are entirely a different class from the regular vagrants.’ Their lodging-houses and ‘houses of call’ were different from those of the tramps and the fraternity of ‘travellers’; they would turn to the workhouse only in final despair: ‘Occasionally they have sold the shirt and waistcoat off their backs before they applied for admittance…’ ‘The poor mechanic will sit in the casual ward like a lost man, scared…. When he’s beat out he’s like a bird out of a cage; he doesn’t know where to go, or how to get a bit.’3
The London artisan was rarely beaten down so low – there were many half-way stages before the workhouse door was reached. His history varies greatly from trade to trade. And if we look out of London to the northern and Midlands centres of industry, there are other important classes of skilled labourer or factory operative – miners in certain coalfields, cotton-spinners, skilled building-workers, skilled workers in the iron and metal industries – who are among those whom Professor Ashton describes as being ‘able to share in the benefits of economic progress’. Among such were the Durham miners whom Cobbett described (in the Sunderland area) in 1832:
You see nothing here that is pretty; but everything seems to be abundant in value; and one great thing is, the working people live well…. The pitmen have twenty-four shillings a week; they live rent-free, their fuel costs them nothing, and their doctor costs them nothing. Their work is terrible, to be sure; and, perhaps, they do not have what they ought to have; but, at any rate, they live well, their houses are good and their furniture good; and… their lives seem to be as good as that of the working part of mankind can reasonably expect.1
The miners, who in many districts were almost an ‘hereditary caste’, had a reputation as comparatively high wage-earners:
Collier lads get gowd and silver,
Factory lads gets nowt but brass…
Professor Ashton considers it to be probable that their real wages were higher in the 1840s than in any but the best of the war years. But their conditions of work were probably worse.2
Many such groups increased their real wages between 1790 and 1840. The progress was not as smooth nor as continuous as is sometimes implied. It was closely related to the success or failure of trade unionism in each industry, and unemployment or seasonal short time must be set against ‘optimistic’ wage-series. But if we were concerned only with skilled ‘society men’ in regular employment, then the controversy as to living standards would long ago have been settled on the optimistic side.
But in fact the whole problem presents endless complexities. The student who comes across a confident statement of this order in his textbook –
In 1831 the cost of living was 11 per cent higher than in 1790, but over this span of time urban wages had increased, it appears, by no less than 43 per cent.3
– should at once scent danger. It is not only that the cost of living indices are themselves the subject of serious dispute – Professor Ashton himself having described the index upon which his own statement is based as being perhaps derived from the diet of a ‘diabetic’.1 We should also realize that the index of urban wages is based, in the main, upon the wages of skilled workers in full work. And it is exactly here that a host of further problems enter. Why should we suppose, in a period of very rapid population-growth, that the proportion of employed and skilled to casual and unemployed workers should move in favour of the former? Why should the social historian repeatedly encounter evidence suggesting that this was an exceptionally painful period for great masses of the people? How was it – if 1820 to 1850 showed an appreciable rise in the standard-of-living – that after thirty more years of unquestioned improvement betwen 1850 and 1880 – the unskilled workers of England still lived in the conditions of extreme deprivation revealed, in the 1890s, by Booth and by Rowntree?
The first half of the nineteenth century must be seen as a period of chronic under-employment, in which the skilled trades are like islands threatened on every side by technological innovation and by the inrush of unskilled or juvenile labour. Skilled wages themselves often conceal a number of enforced outpayments: rent of machinery, payment for the use of motive power, fines for faulty work or indiscipline, or compulsory deductions of other kinds. Sub-contracting was predominant in the mining, iron and pottery industries, and fairly widespread in building, whereby the ‘butty’ or ‘ganger’ would himself employ less skilled labourers; while children – pieceners in the mills or hurryers in the pits – were customarily employed by the spinner or the collier. The Manchester cotton-spinners claimed in 1818, that a wage of £2 3s. 4d. was subject to the following outpayments:
|
1st piecer per week |
0 |
9 |
2 |
|
2nd piecer per week |
0 |
7 |
2 |
|
3rd piecer per week |
0 |
5 |
3 |
|
Candles on the average winter and summer per week |
0 |
1 |
6 |
|
Sick and other incidental expenses |
0 |
1 |
6 |
|
Expense |
£1 |
5 |
0 |
– leaving a balance of 18s. 4d.1 In every industry similar cases can be cited, whereby the wages quoted by workers reveal a different complexion from those quoted by employers. ‘Truck’, or payment in goods, and ‘tommy shops’ complicate the picture further; while seamen and waterside workers were subject to peculiar extortions, often at the hands of publicans – for example, the Thames coal-whippers who – until a protective Act in 1843 – could only gain employment through the publicans who, in their turn, would only employ men who consumed up to 50% of their wages in the public house.2
Where a skill was involved, the artisan was as much concerned with maintaining his status as against the unskilled man as he was in bringing pressure upon the employers. Trade unions which attempted to cater for both the skilled and the unskilled in the same trade are rare before 1830; and when the builders, in their period of Owenite enthusiasm, adopted proposals embracing the labourers, the distinction was very clearly marked:
These Lodges should, by degrees, consist of architects, masons, bricklayers, carpenters, slaters, plasterers, plumbers, glaziers, painters; and also quarriers, brickmakers, and labourers as soon as they can be prepared with better habits and more knowledge to enable them to act for themselves, assisted by the other branches who will have an overwhelming interest to improve the mind, morals and general conditions of their families in the shortest time.3
But we must also bear in mind the general insecurity of many skills in a period of rapid technical innovation and of weak trade union defences. Invention simultaneously devalued old skills and elevated new ones. There is little uniformity in the process. As late as 1818 the Book of English Trades (a pocketbook based mainly on London skills) does not list the trades of engineer, steam-engine maker, or boiler-maker: the turner was still regarded as mainly a woodworker, and the skills of the engineer were united in the ‘machinist’ – a versatile master of many trades, ‘of considerable ingenuity and great mechanical knowledge’ who ‘requires the talents and experience of the joiner, the brass and iron founder, the smith and the turner, in their most extended variety’. Only ten years later there was published The Operative Mechanic and British Machinist, running to no less than 900 pages, showing the extraordinary diversity of what had once been the mill-wright’s craft. And the separation off of new skills can be seen in the formation of the early societies or trade unions which were later to make up the engineers: well-organized trades clubs of mill-wrights at the end of the eighteenth century give rise to the Friendly Society of Iron-moulders (1809), the Friendly and Benevolent Society of Vicemen and Turners (London, 1818), the Mechanics’ Friendly Union Institution (Bradford, 1822), Steam Engine Makers’ Society (Liverpool, 1824), and the Friendly Union of Mechanics (Manchester, 1826).
But the progression of these societies should not lead us to suppose a record of continuing advancement as new skills became established. On the contrary, whereas the mill-wright (at least in London) was an aristocrat, who was protected both by his own organization (which was so strong that it was one of the occasions for the passing of the Combination Act)1 and by apprenticeship restrictions, and who maintained a wage of two guineas in the first years of the nineteenth century, the repeal of the apprenticeship clauses of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers in 1814 left him exposed to serious competition. Alexander Galloway, a former assistant Secretary of the L.C.S. and now the leading engineering employer in London, gave evidence in 1824 that after repeal, ‘when a man was allowed to work at any employment, whether he had served one, two, or three years, or not at all, that broke the neck of all combinations’. The old mill-wrights were ‘so overwhelmed by new men, that we could do without them’, while piece-rates and other incentives completed the trade unionists’ discomfiture. Where the mill-wrights ‘used to scoff and spurn at the name of an engineer’, which was thought to be an inferior, upstart trade, it was now the turn of the mill-wrights to disappear. Unapprenticed engineers could be found at 18s. per week; and the introduction of the self-acting principle to the lathe (the slide-rest or Maudslay’s ‘Go-Cart’) led to an influx of youths and unskilled.
Hence even this industry – surely one of the most remarkable for the introduction of new skills – does not show an easy progression in status and in wages commensurate to the pace of technical innovation. Rather, it shows a peak towards the end of the eighteenth century, a rapid decline in the second decade of the nineteenth accompanied by an influx of unskilled labour, followed by the establishment of a new hierarchy and of new forms of combination. The work was highly differentiated, and for some years (as the diversity of names of the early trade unions suggests) it was doubtful which trade would establish precedence.1 The rise of the skilled engineer, in the machine-making industry, was facilitated by the scarcity of his experience. The labour turnover in the early engineering workshops was prodigious; Galloway, who employed eighty or ninety men in 1824, claimed to have had between 1,000 and 1,500 men pass through his works in the previous twelve years; that is more than a total turnover of the labour force per annum. Agents of foreign employers scoured Britain in the hope of enticing skilled men to France, Russia, Germany, America.2 London employers naturally suffered especially. A foreign agent (said Galloway) ‘has only to watch at my gates as they come out and in, and get the names of the most able men: and many engagements of this sort have been made in this way’. In consequence, the wages of the best men steadily rose until by the 1830s and 1840s they belonged to a privileged élite. In 1845, at Messrs Hibbert and Platt’s (Oldham), the premier textile machinery works in Britain, employing close on 2,000 workers, wages of 30s. and upwards were paid to good men. The engineers (a Methodist workman complained) spent freely, gambled on horses and dogs, trained whippets, and had flesh meat ‘twice or thrice a day’. The wheel had now, however, turned full circle. Where Galloway had been forced to bribe his best men to stay in 1824, the engineer’s skill had now multiplied so far that Hibbert and Platt’s could carefully select only the best-qualified men. ‘I saw,’ our Methodist recalls, ‘many start that were paid off the first day, some at even shorter trial.’ Already the engineer could rely no more on the scarcity of his skill to protect his conditions. He was forced to return to trade unionism, and it is significant that Hibbert and Platt’s was the storm-centre of the engineers’ lock-out of 1851.1
We must always bear in mind this overlap between the extinction of old skills and the rise of new. One after another, as the nineteenth century ran its course, old domestic crafts were displaced in the textile industries – the ‘shearmen’ or ‘croppers’, the hand calico-printers, the hand woolcombers, the fustian-cutters. And yet there are contrary instances of laborious and ill-paid domestic tasks, sometimes performed by children, which were transformed by technical innovation into jealously defended crafts. Thus, carding in the woollen industry was done with leather-backed ‘cards’ into which thousands of wire teeth must be set – in the 1820s and 1830s this was done by children at the rate of 1,500 or 1,600 for a ½d., and (we are told of one West Riding clothing village) ‘on almost every cottage hearth little workers who could scarcely walk relieved the monotony of the weary task by putting a tooth into the card for every inhabitant of the village, and calling out each name as the representative wire was inserted’.1 Less than fifty years later successive inventions in card-setting machinery had enabled the small craft union of Card-Setters and Machine-Tent to establish itself in a privileged position among the ‘aristocracy’ of the woollen industry.
But when we follow through the history of particular industries, and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people. Manufacturers in the first half of the nineteenth century pressed forward each innovation which enabled them to dispense with adult male craftsmen and to replace them with women or juvenile labour. Even where an old skill was replaced by a new process requiring equal or greater skill, we rarely find the same workers transferred from one to the other, or from domestic to factory production. Insecurity, and hostility in the face of machinery and innovation, was not the consequence of mere prejudice and (as authorities then implied) of insufficient knowledge of ‘political economy’. The cropper or woolcomber knew well enough that, while the new machinery might offer skilled employment for his son, or for someone else’s son, it would offer none for him. The rewards of the ‘march of progress’ always seemed to be gathered by someone else.
We shall see this more clearly when we examine Luddism. But even so, we are only at the fringe of the problem; for these particular insecurities were only a facet of the general insecurity of all skills during this period. The very notion of regularity of employment – at one place of work over a number of years for regular hours and at a standard wage – is anachronistic. We have seen that the problem in agriculture was that of chronic semi-employment. This was also the problem in most industries, and in urban experience generally. The skilled and apprenticed man, who owned his own tools and worked for a lifetime in one trade, was in a minority. It is notorious that in the early stages of industrialization, the growing towns attract uprooted and migrant labour of all types; this is still the experience of Africa and Asia today. Even the settled workers pass rapidly through a succession of employments. Wage-series derived from the rates paid in skilled trades do not give us the awkward, unstatistical reality of the cycle of unemployment and casual labour which comes through in the reminiscences of a Yorkshire Chartist, recalling his boyhood and youth from the late 1820s to the 1840s.
Tom Brown’s Schooldays would have had no charm for me, as I had never been to a day school in my life; when very young I had to begin working, and was pulled out of bed between 4 and 5 o’clock… in summer time to go with a donkey 1½ miles away, and then take part in milking a number of cows; and in the evening had again to go with milk and it would be 8 o’clock before I had done. I went to a card shop afterwards and there had to set 1,500 card teeth for a ½d. From 1842 to 1848 I should not average 9/- per week wages; outdoor and labour was bad to get then and wages were very low. I have been a woollen weaver, a comber, a navvy on the railway, and a barer in the delph that I claim to know some little of the state of the working classes.1
There is some evidence to suggest that the problem was becoming worse throughout the 1820s and 1830s and into the 1840s. That is, while wages were moving slowly but favourably in relation to the cost-of-living, the proportion of workers chronically under-employed was moving unfavourably in relation to those in full work. Henry Mayhew, who devoted a section of his great study of the London poor to the problem of casual labour, understood that this was the crux of the problem:
In almost all occupations there is… a superfluity of labourers, and this alone would tend to render the employment of a vast number of the hands of a casual rather than a regular character. In the generality of trades the calculation is that one-third of the hands are fully employed, one third partially, and one-third unemployed throughout the year.1
Mayhew was incomparably the greatest social investigator in the mid-century. Observant, ironic, detached yet compassionate, he had an eye for all the awkward particularities which escape statistical measurement. In a fact-finding age, he looked for the facts which the enumerators forgot: he wrote consciously against the grain of the orthodoxies of his day, discovering his own outrageous ‘laws’ of political economy – ‘under-pay makes over-work’ and ‘over-work makes under-pay’. He knew that when an easterly wind closed the Thames, 20,000 dock-side workers were at once unemployed. He knew the seasonal fluctuations of the timber trade, or of the bonnet-makers and pastry-cooks. He bothered to find out for how many hours and how many months in the year scavengers or rubbish-carters were actually employed. He held meetings of the workmen in the trades investigated, and took down their life-histories. If (as Professor Ashton has implied) the standard-of-living controversy really depends on a ‘guess’ as to which group was increasing most – those ‘who were able to share in the benefits of economic progress’ and ‘those who were shut out’ – then Mayhew’s guess is worth our attention.
Mayhew’s guess is given in this form:
… estimating the working classes as being between four and five million in number, I think we may safely assert – considering how many depend for their employment on particular times, seasons, fashions, and accidents, and the vast quantity of over-work and scamp-work in nearly all the cheap trades… the number of women and children who are being continually drafted into the different handicrafts with the view of reducing the earnings of the men, the displacement of human labour in some cases by machinery… all these things being considered I say I believe that we may safely conclude that… there is barely sufficient work for the regular employment of half of our labourers, so that only 1,500,000 are fully and constantly employed, while 1,500,000 more are employed only half their time, and the remaining 1,500,000 wholly unemployed, obtaining a day’s work occasionally by the displacement of some of the others.1
This remains no more than a guess, a grasping at the statistical expression of the complexities of London experience. But it arises from other findings; in particular, that ‘as a general rule… the society-men of every trade comprise about one-tenth of the whole’.2 The wages of society men were those regulated by custom and trade union enforcement; those of the non-society men were ‘determined by competition’. In London by the 1840s there was a clear demarcation between the ‘honourable’ and ‘dishonourable’ parts of the same trades; and trades in which this division was notorious included those of cabinet-makers, carpenters and joiners, boot- and shoe-makers, tailors and all clothing workers, and the building industry. The honourable part comprised the luxury and quality branches: the dishonourable comprised the whole range of ‘cheap and nasty’ – ready-made clothing, gimcrack or plain furniture, veneered workboxes and cheap looking-glasses, sub-contract work (by ‘lumpers’) in the building of churches, contract work for the Army or Government.
In a number of the trades which Thomas Large noted as being both organized and highly-paid in 1812 there was a serious deterioration in the status and living standards of the artisan over the next thirty years. The debasing of trades took many forms, and was sometimes accomplished only after intense conflict, in some cases as late as the 1830s. When William Lovett, who had been apprenticed as a rope-maker in Penzance came to London in 1821 and – finding no employment at his own trade – sought to get work as a carpenter or cabinet-maker, the distinction between the honourable and dishonourable trades was not so marked. The fact that he had served no apprenticeship weighed heavily against him, but after bad experiences at a dishonourable shop, and worse experiences attempting to hawk his own products, he finally gained employment at a large cabinet workshop. When it was discovered that he had served no apprenticeship, the men –
talked of ‘setting Mother Shorney at me’; this is a cant term in the trade, and meant the putting away of your tools, the injuring of your work, and annoying you in such a way as to drive you out of the shop… As soon… as I was made acquainted with their feelings… I thought it best to call a shop-meeting, and lay my case before them. To call a meeting of this description the first requisite was to send for a quantity of drink (generally a gallon of ale), and then to strike your hammer and holdfast together, which, making a bell-like sound, is a summons causing all the shop to assemble around your bench. A chairman is then appointed, and you are called upon to state your business.
Lovett’s explanation of his difficult circumstances satisfied the men: ‘but the demands made upon me for drink by individuals among them, for being shown the manner of doing any particular kind of work, together with fines and shop scores, often amounted to seven or eight shillings a week out of my guinea’.1 Ten or twenty years later he would not have succeeded in gaining employment in a respectable or society shop: the influential Cabinet-Makers Society (of which Lovett himself became President) had consolidated the position of its members in the quality branches of the trade and closed the doors against the mass of unapprenticed or semi-skilled labour clamouring without. At the same time, the dishonourable trade had mushroomed:2 middlemen had set up ‘slaughter-houses’ or great furniture warehouses, and poor ‘garret-masters’ in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields employed their own families and ‘apprentices’ in making chairs and shoddy furniture for sale to the warehouses at knock-down prices. Even less fortunate workers would buy or scrape together wood to make workboxes or card-tables which they hawked in the streets or sold to cut-rate East End shops.
The history of each trade is different. But it is possible to suggest the outlines of a general pattern. Whereas it is generally assumed that living standards declined during the price-rises of the war years (and this is certainly true of the labourers, weavers, and wholly unorganized workers), nevertheless the war stimulated many industries and made for fuller employment. In London the arsenal, the shipyards, and the docks were busy, and there were large Government contracts for clothing and equipment for the services. Birmingham prospered similarly until the years of the continental blockade. The later years of the war saw a general erosion of apprenticeship restrictions, both in practice and at law, culminating in the repeal of the apprenticeship clauses of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers in 1814. According to their position, the artisans reacted vigorously to this threat. We must remember that this was a time when there was little schooling, and neither Mechanics’ Institutes nor Technical Colleges, and that almost the entire skill or ‘mystery’ of the trade was conveyed by precept and example in the workshop, by the journeyman to his apprentice. The artisans regarded this ‘mystery’ as their property, and asserted their unquestionable right to ‘the quiet and exclusive use and enjoyment of their… arts and trades’. Consequently, not only was repeal resisted, a ‘nascent trades council’ being formed in London, and 60,000 signatures being collected nationally to a petition to strengthen the apprenticeship laws;1 but as a result of the threat there is evidence that the trades clubs were actually strengthened, so that many London artisans emerged from the Wars in a comparatively strong position.
But at this point the histories of different trades begin to diverge. The pressure of the unskilled tide, beating against the doors, broke through in different ways and with different degrees of violence. In some trades the demarcation between an honourable and dishonourable trade was already to be found in the eighteenth century.1 That the honourable trade had maintained its position despite this long-standing threat may be accounted for by several reasons. Much of the eighteenth-century trade was in luxury articles, demanding a quality of workmanship not obtainable by sweated labour. Moreover, in times of full employment, the small-scale dishonourable trade might actually offer better conditions than those of the society men. Thus the Gorgon noted in 1818 of the opticians and type-founders, that there had grown up –
a smaller class of tradesmen, termed garret-masters, who not only sell their manufacture cheaper than those of large capital, and who carry on the trade on a more extensive scale, but they do actually give higher wages to the men they employ. This we believe is the case in all trades…2
The outline of this demarcation can be seen in the differentiation between the ‘Flint’ and ‘Dung’ tailors, and between the militant and well-organized ladies’ shoemakers, and the workers in the men’s boot and shoe trade. The shoemakers of both groups were, however, among the first to feel the full effect of the influx of ‘illegal’ men. The position of the Londoners was weakened by the growth of the large outwork boot and shoe industry in Northamptonshire and Staffordshire.3 Some incidents in the London shoemakers’ history were recorded by Allen Davenport, a Spencean socialist:
It was in 1810 that I began to work for Mr Bainbridge, and it was then I first joined a shop meeting, for all the shops that I had worked for before were unconnected with any meetings… perhaps they were thought too insignificant… I was kindly received by the members of the fifth division of women’s men [i.e. makers of women’s shoes], then held at the York Arms, Holborn; and in a short time became a delegate…. From the time I became a member to 1813, the women’s men acquired great strength as to members and a considerable increase in pecuniary means. We had at one time fourteen divisions in London; besides being in union, kept up by a well regulated correspondence, with the trade in every city and town, of any importance, throughout the kingdom. But about this time the trade commenced a law suit against a master, for employing an illegal man, and refusing to discharge him. The case was conducted by two intelligent shopmates… assisted by an attorney in the court of King’s Bench… We gained the day, but the prosecution cost the trade a hundred pounds, which was money thrown away, for almost immediately afterwards the law of Elizabeth which made it illegal for a master to employ a man in our trade that had not served an apprenticeship was repealed, and the trade was thrown open to all.
In the spring of 1813 the union held a strike in support of a detailed price-list: ‘every demand of the men was conceded, and we all returned comfortably to our work’:
But some of the more turbulent of the members, intoxicated with the success of our last strike, madly proposed a few weeks after to commence another strike…. This arrogant proceeding brought on a crisis in the trade; the masters who till then had no association, and were strangers to each other, became alarmed, called themselves together, formed an association, and being completely organized, the strike was resisted, the men were defeated, and scattered to the winds and hundreds of men, women and children suffered the greatest privations during the following winter. From this fatal strike, I date the downfall of the power of the men, and the commencement of despotism among the master shoemakers.1
The bitterness of the shoemakers’ struggle may be gauged by the extreme radicalism of many of their members throughout the post-war years. The ladies’ men clung on to their position in the boom years, 1820–5; but the recession of 1826 at once exposed their weakness. The organized men were surrounded by scores of small ‘dishonourable’ workshops, where shoes were made up by ‘snobs’ or ‘translators’ at 8d. or 1s. a pair. In the autumn of 1826 several of their members were tried for riot and assault arising from a strike extending over seven or more weeks; a unionist is alleged to have told a ‘scab’ that he ‘ought to have his liver cut out for working under price’.1 But the boot and shoe workers notwithstanding maintained some national organization, and in the great union wave of 1832–4 the Northamptonshire and Staffordshire outworkers came into the same struggle for ‘equalization’.2 It was only the destruction of general unionism in 1834 which finally deprived them of artisan status.
The tailors maintained their artisan status rather longer. We can take their union as a model of the quasi-legal trades union of the artisan.3 In 1818 Francis Place published the fullest account which we have of their operation. By effective combination the London tailors had succeeded in pressing up their wages throughout the war, although probably lagging slightly behind the advance in the cost-of-living. The figures run (in Place’s average), 1795, 25s.; 1801, 27s.; 1807, 30s.; 1810, 33s.; 1813, 36s. With each advance the resistance of the masters became firmer: ‘Not a single shilling was obtained at any one of these periods but by compulsion.’ At the many ‘houses of call’ of the aristocratic ‘Flint’ tailors books of the members’ names were kept, and the masters used the houses virtually as employment agencies.4 ‘No man is allowed to ask for employment’ – the masters must apply to the union. The work was allocated by rota, and the union disciplined ‘unwork-manlike’ men. The tailors had a dual subscription, the larger contribution being reserved for benefits, the smaller for the needs of the union itself. A twelve-hour day was enforced, except in times of full employment. There were levies for unemployed members, and special levies might be made, in preparation for a strike, as to which the members asked no questions even if the purpose was not explained. The actual leadership of the union was carefully shielded from prosecution under the Combination Acts. Each house of call had a deputy,
… chosen by a kind of tacit consent, frequently without its being known to a very large majority who is chosen. The deputies form a committee, and they again chuse in a somewhat similar way a very small committee, in whom, on very particular occasions, all power resides…
‘No law could put it down,’ Place wrote: ‘nothing but want of confidence among the men themselves could prevent it.’ And in fact the ‘Knights of the Needle’ look extremely strong, at least until the recession of 1826. Their organization could be fairly described as ‘all but a military system’. But concealed within Place’s own account there was a premonition of weakness:
They are divided into two classes, called Flints and Dungs – the Flints have upwards of thirty houses of call, and the Dungs about nine or ten; the Flints work by day, the Dungs by day or piece. Great animosity formerly existed between them, the Dungs generally working for less wages, but of late years there has not been much difference in the wages… and at some of the latest strikes both parties have usually made common cause.
This may be seen as an impressive attempt to keep the dishonourable trade in some organizational association with the status-conscious ‘Flints’. In 1824 Place estimated a proportion of one ‘Dung’ to three ‘Flints’; but the ‘Dungs’ ‘work a great many hours, and their families assist them.’ By the early 1830s the tide of the cheap and ready-made trade could be held back no longer. In 1834 the ‘Knights’ were finally degraded only after a tremendous conflict, when 20,000 were said to be on strike under the slogan of ‘equalization’.1
John Wade was still able to speak of the London tailors of 1833 as ‘enjoying a much higher remuneration than is received by the generality of workpeople in the metropolis’. Indeed, he cited them as an example of artisans who by the strength of their combination had ‘fortified their own interests against the interests of the public and other workpeople’.1 But when Mayhew commenced his inquiry for the Morning Chronicle in 1849 he cited the tailors as one of the worst examples of ‘cheap and shoddy’ sweated industry. Of 23,517 London tailors in 1849 Mayhew estimated that 2,748 were independent master-tailors. Of the remainder, 3,000 were society men in the honourable trade (as compared to 5,000 or 6,000 in 1821), and 18,000 in the dishonourable trade were wholly dependent upon large middlemen for their earnings in the ‘slop’ or ready-made businesses.
London conditions should not be seen as exceptional, although London was the Athens of the artisan. And it is important to notice that there is a pattern of exploitation here which runs counter to the evidence of wage-series compiled from the rates of organized men in the honourable trade. This takes the form both of a break-up of customary conditions and restraints, and of trade union defences. It is generally true that the ‘artisan’ trades go through two critical periods of conflict. The first was in 1812–14, when apprenticeship regulations were repealed. Those trades, such as the shoemakers and tailors, which were already strongly organized in unions or trades clubs, were able in some degree to defend their position after repeal by strikes and other forms of direct action, although the same years saw greater organization among the masters. But consolidation in closed ‘society’ shops between 1815 and 1830 was at a price. ‘Illegal men’ were kept out of the better parts of the trade only to swell the numbers in the unorganized ‘dishonourable’ trade outside. The second critical period is 1833–5, when on the crest of the great trade union wave attempts were made to ‘equalize’ conditions, shorten working hours in the honourable trade and suppress dishonourable work. These attempts (notably that of the London tailors) not only failed in the face of the combined forces of the employers and the Government; they also led to at least a temporary deterioration in the position of the ‘society’ men. The economic historian should see the cases of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the great lock-outs of 1834 as being as consequential for all grades of labour as the radicals and trade unionists of the time held them to be.1
But this conflict between the artisans and the large employers was only part of a more general exploitive pattern. The dishonourable part of the trade grew, with the displacement of small masters (employing a few journeymen and apprentices) by large ‘manufactories’ and middlemen (employing domestic outworkers or sub-contracting): with the collapse of all meaningful apprenticeship safeguards (except in the honourable island) and the influx of unskilled, women and children: with the extension of hours and of Sunday work: and with the beating down of wages, piece-rates and wholesale prices. The form and extent of the deterioration relates directly to the material conditions of the industry – the cost of raw materials – tools – the skill involved – conditions favouring or discouraging trade union organization – the nature of the market. Thus, woodworkers and shoemakers could obtain their own materials cheaply and owned their own tools, so that the unemployed artisan set up as an independent ‘garret-master’ or ‘chamber-master’, working his whole family – and perhaps other juveniles – round a seven-day week and hawking the products on his own account. Carpenters requiring a more costly outlay were reduced to ‘strapping-shops’ where a sickening pace of gimcrack work was kept up under the foreman’s patrol and where each man who fell behind was sacked. Tailoring workers, who could rarely purchase their own cloth, became wholly dependent upon the middlemen who farmed out work at sweated prices. Dressmaking – a notoriously ‘sweated’ trade – was largely done by needlewomen (often country or small-town immigrants) in shops contracted by large establishments. The building worker, who could neither buy his bricks nor hawk a part of a cathedral round the streets, was at the mercy of the sub-contractor; even the skilled ‘society’ men expected to be laid off in the winter months; and both classes of worker frequently attempted to escape from their predicament by direct speculative building – ‘the land,’ as Clapham says, ‘rented in hope, materials secured on credit, a mortgage raised on the half-built house before it is sold or leased, and a high risk of bankruptcy’.1 On the other hand, the coach-builder, the shipwright, or engineer, who did not Own all his tools nor purchase his own materials, was nevertheless better situated, by reason of the character of his work and the scarcity of his skill, to maintain or extend trade union defences.
A similar collapse in the status of the artisan took place in older provincial centres. There are many complexities and qualifications. On one hand, the boot and shoe industry of Stafford and of Northamptonshire had long lost its artisan character and was conducted on an outwork basis when the London shoemakers were still trying to hold back the dishonourable trade. On the other hand, the extreme specialization of the Sheffield cutlery industry – together with the exceptionally strong political and trade union traditions of the workers who had been the most steadfast Jacobins – had led to the maintenance of the skilled worker’s status in a twilight world of semi-independence, where he worked for a merchant (and, sometimes, for more than one), hired his motive-power at a ‘public wheel’, and adhered to strict price-lists. Despite the Sheffield Cutlers Bill (1814) which repealed the restrictions which had limited the trade to freemen and which left a situation in which ‘any person may work at the corporated trades without being a freeman, and may take any number of apprentices for any term’, the unions were strong enough – sometimes with the aid of ‘rattening’ and other forms of intimidation – to hold back the unskilled tide, although there was a continual threat from ‘little mesters’, sometimes ‘illegal’ men or self-employed journeymen, who sought to undercut the legal trade.2 In the Birmingham industries, every kind of variant is to be found, from the large workshop through innumerable mazes
of small shops and self-employed journeymen, honourable and dishonourable, to the half-naked and degraded outworkers in the nail-making villages. An account from Wolverhampton in 1819, shows how the ‘garret-master’ appeared at a time of depression:
The order of things… is completely inverted. Now, the last resource of the starving journeyman is to set up master; his employer cannot find him work, on which there is any possible profit, and is therefore obliged to discharge him; the poor wretch then sells his bed, and buys an anvil, procures a little iron, and having manufactured a few articles, hawks them about… for what he can get… He might have previously received 10s a week as a servant; but now he is lucky if he gets 7s as a master manufacturer.1
In the Coventry ribbon-weaving industry there was another twilight, half-outworker, half-artisan situation: the ‘first-hand weavers’ maintained a poor artisan status, owning their own costly looms, and sometimes employing a ‘journeyman’s journeyman’, while other weavers in the city were employed in workshops or factories at comparable wages: but in the weaving villages to the north there was a large reserve pool of semi-unemployed weavers, working at debased rates as casual outworkers.2
From one point of view, the true outworker industry can be seen as one which has wholly lost its artisan status and in which no ‘honourable’ part of the trade remains:
Capitalistic outwork may be said to be fully established only when the material belongs to the trading employer, and is returned to him after the process for which the outworker’s skill is required has been completed – the wool given out to be spun, the yarn given out to be woven, the shirt given out for ‘seam and gusset and band’, the nailrod to be returned as nails, the limbs to be returned as dolls, the leather coming back as boots.3
This, Clapham estimates, was the ‘predominant form’ of industrial organization in the reign of George IV; and if we add to the true outworkers (hand-loom weavers, nail-makers, most woolcombers, chain-makers, some boot and shoe workers, framework-knitters, fustian-cutters, glove-makers, some potters, pillow-lace-makers, and many others) the workers in the ‘dishonourable’ parts of the London and urban artisan trades, it probably remained predominant until 1840.
We shall look at the weaver, as an example of the outworker, later. But there are some general points which relate both to the outworkers and to the artisans. First, it will not do to explain away the plight of weavers or of ‘slop’ workers as ‘instances of the decline of old crafts which were displaced by a mechanical process’; nor can we even accept the statement, in its pejorative context, that ‘it was not among the factory employees but among the domestic workers, whose traditions and methods were those of the eighteenth century, that earnings were at their lowest’.1 The suggestion to which these statements lead us is that these conditions can somehow be segregated in our minds from the true improving impulse of the Industrial Revolution – they belong to an ‘older’, pre-industrial order, whereas the authentic features of the new capitalist order may be seen where there are steam, factory operatives, and meat-eating engineers. But the numbers employed in the out-work industries multiplied enormously between 1780–1830; and very often steam and the factory were the multipliers. It was the mills which spun the yarn and the foundries which made the nail-rod upon which the outworkers were employed. Ideology may wish to exalt one and decry the other, but facts must lead us to say that each was a complementary component of a single process. This process first multiplied hand-workers (hand calico-printers, weavers, fustian-cutters, woolcombers) and then extinguished their livelihood with new machinery. Moreover, the degradation of the outworkers was very rarely as simple as the phrase ‘displaced by a mechanical process’ suggests; it was accomplished by methods of exploitation similar to those in the dishonourable trades and it often preceded machine competition. Nor is it true that ‘the traditions and methods’ of the domestic workers ‘were those of the eighteenth century’. The only large group of domestic workers in that century whose conditions anticipate those of the semi-employed proletarian outworkers of the nineteenth century are the Spitalfields silk-weavers; and this is because the ‘industrial revolution’ in silk preceded that in cotton and in wool Indeed, we may say that large-scale sweated outwork was as intrinsic to this revolution as was factory production and steam. As for the ‘traditions and methods’ of the ‘slop’ workers in the dishonourable trade, these, of course, have been endemic for centuries wherever cheap labour has been abundant. They would, nevertheless, appear to constitute a serious reversal of the conditions of late eighteenth-century London artisans.
What we can say with confidence is that the artisan felt that his status and standard-of-living were under threat or were deteriorating between 1815 and 1840. Technical innovation and the superabundance of cheap labour weakened his position. He had no political rights and the power of the State was used, if only fitfully, to destroy his trade unions. As Mayhew clearly showed, not only did under-pay (in the dishonourable trades) make for overwork; it also made for less work all round. It was this experience which underlay the political radicalization of the artisans and, more drastically, of the outworkers. Ideal and real grievances combined to shape their anger – lost prestige, direct economic degradation, loss of pride as craftsmanship was debased, lost aspirations to rise to being masters (as men in Hardy’s and Place’s generation could still do). The ‘society’ men, though more fortunate, were not the least radical – many London and provincial working-class leaders came like William Lovett, from this stratum. They had been able to hold their status only by an accession of trade union militancy; and their livelihood provided them with a running education in the vices of competition and the virtues of collective action. They witnessed less fortunate neighbours or shopmates (an accident, a weakness for drink) fall into the lower depths. Those who were in these depths had most need, but least time, for political reflection.
If the agricultural labourers pined for land, the artisans aspired to an ‘independence’. This aspiration colours much of the history of early working-class Radicalism. But in London the dream of becoming a small master (still strong in the 1790s – and still strong in Birmingham in the 1830s) could not stand up, in the 1820s and 1830s, in face of the experiences of ‘chamber’ or ‘garret’ masters – an ‘independence’ which meant week-long slavery to warehouses or slop shops. This helps to explain the sudden surge of support towards Owenism at the end of the 1820s – trade union traditions and the yearning for independence were twisted together in the idea of social control over their own means of livelihood; a collective independence.1 When most of the Owenite ventures failed, the London artisan still fought for his independence to the last: when leather, wood or cloth ran out, he swelled the throng of street-sellers, hawking bootlaces, oranges or nuts. In the main they were rural workers who entered the ‘strapping-shops’. The London-born artisan could rarely stand the pace; nor did he wish to become a proletarian.
We have not, perhaps, clarified the wage-indices, but have proposed a way of reading and of criticizing such indices as exist. In particular, we must always find out whether figures are derived from society or non-society men, and how far the division, in any trade, has gone at any given time. There were certain experiences common to most trades and industries. Few did not suffer during the post-war depression, and most were buoyant between 1820 and 1825 – indeed, in such a period of fuller employment the dishonourable trades could actually extend their operation and be little noticed, since they did not threaten the position of society men. The twelve months after the repeal of the Combination Acts was a period of exceptional buoyancy, when general prosperity conjoined to aggressive trade unionism led to considerable advances by many groups of workers. In the summer of 1825 a report was published in the Trades Newspaper from the Potteries, which admitted their thriving state in language quite unusual in the Radical or working-class journalism of the time. ‘It would be difficult to point out a period… when the working classes, with the exception of the weavers, enjoyed a greater degree of comfort.’ The Potteries had been swept, in the previous eight months, by a veritable strike wave:
In Staffordshire, the carpenters were the first to strike, and then every other trade turned out in rotation. The colliers knew that the potters could not go on without them, and the moment the latter had obtained an advance, not a pick was lifted, nor a bucket let down…. The potters held out a second time, and played their cards with such address, that an ordinary hand now earns 6s per day, while superior journeymen who work by the piece, are actually in the receipt of £3 per week. Even the tailors doggedly refused to shape or sew, goose or seam, or wad a collar, unless they knew the reason why and wherefore; while the spirited barbers… insisted on an advance of 50%…1
Much of this gain was lost in 1826, recovered in the next three years, and lost once again in the early 1830s. And within this wider history there are the particular histories of individual trades. In general, in those industries where much capital, skill and machinery were required, the artisan lost some of his independence but passed by fairly easy stages into becoming a skilled, even privileged, proletarian: the mill-wright became an engineer or metal mechanic, the shipwright’s skill was divided among the shipbuilding trades. In those industries where work could be put out, or where juvenile and unskilled labour could be drafted in, the artisan retained some of his independence but only at the cost of an increasing insecurity and a severe loss of status.
It is the outlook of the artisan which will most concern us when we return to the political history of the post-war years. We may therefore be more impressionistic in our treatment of those who inhabited the lower depths beneath him. In fact, less is known about the unskilled workers, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, since they had no unions, they rarely had leaders who articulated their grievances, and few parliamentary committees investigated them except as a sanitary or housing problem.2 The down-graded artisan rarely had the physique or aptitude to engage in arduous semi-skilled or unskilled labouring. Such occupation groups were either self-recruiting, or enlarged by rural and Irish migrants. Some of these earned good wages for irregular work – on the docks, or as navvies or spademen. These shade into the ‘casualties’, or casual labourers; and the totally unemployed immigrants to the city, who might be reduced, like young William Lovett when he first came to London, to ‘a penny loaf a day and a drink from the most convenient pump for several weeks in succession’. He and a Cornish compatriot:
… generally got up at five o’clock and walked about enquiring at different shops and buildings till about nine; we then bought one penny loaf and divided it between us; then walked about again till four or five in the afternoon, when we finished our day’s work with another divided loaf; and very early retired to bed footsore and hungry.1
But such discipline in eking out the last few pennies were rare. Habitual uncertainty of employment, as all social investigators know, discourages forethought and gives rise to the familiar cycle of hardship alternated with the occasional spending-spree when in work. Distinct from the labourers (stablemen, street-sweepers, waterside-workers, unskilled builders, carters, and so on), were those for whom ‘casualty’ had become a way of life; street-sellers, beggars and cadgers, paupers, casual and professional criminals, the Army. Some of the street-sellers were prosperous traders; others were irrepressible scroungers; others, like the costermongers, patterers and ballad-vendors, provide a comic, and devastating antithesis to the sententious theses of Edwin Chadwick and Dr Kay. The mind reels at the expedients by which human beings kept themselves alive, collecting dog’s dung or selling chickweed or writing letters at 1d. or 2d. a time (for love-letters ‘there’s wanted the best gilt edge, and a fancy ’velop, and a Dictionary’). The greater part of the street-sellers, certainly by the 1840s, were desperately poor. Taking a deep statistical breath, we can hazard the view that the standard-of-living of the average criminal (but not prostitute) rose over the period up to the establishment of an effective police force (in the late 1830s), since opportunities for pilfering from warehouses, markets, canal barges, the docks, and railways, were multiplying. Probably a good many casual workers supplemented their earnings in this way. The genuine professional criminal or ‘traveller’ would seem, on his own confession, to have had a splendid standard-of-life: he may be accounted an ‘optimist’. The standard of the unmarried mother, except in districts such as Lancashire where female employment was abundant, probably fell: she had offended, not only against Wilberforce, but also against Malthus and the laws of political economy.
It was a time when a widow with six children between the ages of five and fifteen might, in a mill-town, be counted fortunate; and when a blind beggar was an ‘aristocrat’ of the vagrant fraternity, with whom the sighted and able-bodied sought to travel in order to share in his takings. ‘A blind man can get a guide at any place, because they know he’s sure to get something,’ the blind boot-lace seller told Mayhew. Travelling from lodging-house to lodging-house down from his native Northumberland, and becoming ‘fly to the dodge’ of begging, ‘I grew pleaseder, and pleaseder, with the life, and I wondered how anyone could follow any other.’ When he finally entered London, ‘as I came through the streets… I didn’t know whether I carried the streets or they carried me’.1
Other optimists included the highly professional ‘cadgers’, who had as many disguises as a quick-change repertory actor, and who rang the changes according to the state of trade by assuming the distresses of others – the ‘respectable broken-down tradesman or reduced gentleman caper’, the ‘destitute mechanic’s lurk’, the ‘turnpike sailors’:
I… went out as one of the Shallow Brigade, wearing Guernsey shirt and drawers, or tattered trowsers. There was a school of four. We only got a tidy living – 16s. or £1 a day among us. We used to call every one that came along – coalheavers and all – sea-fighting captains. ‘Now, my noble sea-fighting captain,’ we used to say, ‘fire an odd shot from your larboard locker to us, Nelson’s bulldogs;’… The Shallow got so grannied [known] in London, that the supplies got queer, and I quitted the land navy. Shipwrecks got so common in the streets, you see, that people didn’t care for them…1
The impostors, who studied the market and were quick to vary the supplies of suffering to meet the jaded and inelastic demands of human compassion, fared better than the genuine sufferers, who were too proud or too inexperienced to market their misery to its best advantage. By the 1840s many of the tricks of the impostors were known; unless he had the knowledge of humanity of Dickens or Mayhew, the middle-class man saw in every open palm the evidence of idleness and deceit And, in the centre of London or the big cities, he might well be right, for he walked through a surrealist world: the open palm might be that of a receiver: the half-naked man in the snowstorm might be working the ‘shivering dodge’ (‘a good dodge in tidy inclement season… not so good a lurk, by two bob a day as it once was’): the child sobbing in the gutter over a package of spilt tea and a tale of lost change might be schooled in the dodge by her mother. The collier who had lost both arms was a man to be envied, and:
There’s the man with the very big leg, who sits on the pavement, and tells a long yarn about the tram carriage having gone over him in the mine. He does very well – remarkable well.2
Most of the worst sufferers were not there. They remained, with their families, in the garrets of Spitalfields; the cellars of Ancoats and south Leeds; in the outworkers’ villages. We may be fairly confident that the standard-of-living of paupers declined. The thirty years leading up to the new Poor Law of 1834 saw continuous attempts to hold down the poor-rates, to chip away at outdoor relief, or to pioneer the new-type workhouse.3 It was not of one of Chadwick’s ‘Bastilles’ but of an earlier model that Crabbe wrote in The Borough (1810):
Your plan I love not; – with a number you
Have placed your poor, your pitiable few;
There, in one house, throughout their lives to be,
The pauper-palace which they hate to see:
That giant building, that high-bounding wall,
Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall!
That large loud clock, which tolls each dreaded hour,
Those gates and locks, and all those signs of power:
It is a prison, with a milder name,
Which few inhabit without dread or shame.
The Act of 1834, and its subsequent administration by men like Chadwick and Kay, was perhaps the most sustained attempt to impose an ideological dogma, in defiance of the evidence of human need, in English history. No discussion of the standard-of-living after 1834 can make sense which does not examine the consequences, as troubled Boards of Guardians tried to apply Chadwick’s insane Instructional Circulars as to the abolition or savage restriction of out-relief in depressed industrial centres; and which does not follow the missionary zeal of the Assistant Commissioners as they sought to bring the doctrinaire light of Malthusian-Benthamism into the empirical north. The doctrine of discipline and restraint was, from the start, more important than that of material ‘less eligibility’;1 the most inventive State would have been hard put to it to create institutions which simulated conditions worse than those of garret-masters, Dorset labourers, framework-knitters and nailers. The impractical policy of systematic starvation was displaced by the policy of psychological deterrence: ‘labour, discipline and restraint’. ‘Our intention,’ said one Assistant Commissioner, ‘is to make the workhouses as like prisons as possible’; and another, ‘our object… is to establish therein a discipline so severe and repulsive as to make them a terror to the poor and prevent them from entering’. Dr Kay recorded with satisfaction his successes in Norfolk; the reduction in diet proved less effective than ‘minute and regular observance of routine’, religious exercises, silence during meals, ‘prompt obedience’, total separation of the sexes, separation of families (even where of the same sex), labour and total confinement. ‘I had observed,’ he recorded, in that bastard ceremonial English which one day may be as quaint as the thumbscrew and the stocks:
that the custom of permitting paupers to retain their possession, while residing within the walls of the workhouse, boxes, china, articles of clothing, &c., had been perpetuated… I therefore directed these articles to be taken into the possession of the various Governors… and deposited in the store-room. In effecting this change in the Cosford Union workhouse, Mr Plum found considerable quantities of bread secreted in these boxes (showing how abundant the dietary is), and likewise soap and other articles, purloined from the workhouse stores…. On the morning after this change twelve able-bodied female paupers left the house, saying they preferred labour out of doors.
Neither widows with families, nor the aged and the infirm, nor the sick, – continued Dr Kay, in full Chadwickian cry – should be spared these workhouse humiliations, for fear of sustaining improvidence and imposture, and of sapping the motives to industry… frugality… prudence… filial duties… independent exertions of the labourers during their years of ability and activity….
A notable victory for Dr Kay and Mr Plum! Twelve able-bodied females made frugal and prudent (perhaps transmogrified from pessimists to optimists?) at a blow! And yet, despite all their efforts, incomplete returns from 443 Unions in England and Wales in which the new Bastilles were in operation in three months of 1838 (excluding, among other areas, almost all Lancashire and the West Riding) showed 78,536 workhouse inmates. By 1843 the figure had risen to 197,179. The most eloquent testimony to the depths of poverty is in the fact that they were tenanted at all.1