1. R. N. Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge, 1949), esp. pp. 480, 495, 506, 541–2. J. C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, the historians of The Englishman’s Food (1939), also see this as a period of decline.
1.E. Waugh, Lancashire Sketches, pp. 128–9.
2. See J. Burnett, ‘History of Food Adulteration in Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, Bulletin of Inst. of Historical Research, 1959, pp. 104–7.
3. Lawson, op. cit., pp. 8, 10.
4. Agricultural State of the Kingdom (1816), p. 95.
1. For an indication of some of the points at issue here, see the articles on the standard-of-living by T. S. Ashton, R. M. Hartwell, E. Hobsbawm, and A. J. Taylor cited above.
1. G. C. Holland, The Vital Statistics of Sheffield (1843), pp. 56–8.
2. Capitalism and the Historians, pp. 43–51.
1. Fifth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (1938), p. 170. See also Fourth Report (1838), Appendix A, No. 1.
2. See M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, ch. 2; England in Transition (Penguin edn), p. 72; Hammond, The Town Labourer, ch. 3 and Preface to 2nd edition; Dr R. Willan, ‘Observations on Disease in London’, Medical and Physical Journal, 1800, p. 299.
1. G. C. Holland, op cit., p. 46 et passim. An excellent account of the working man’s urban environment in mid-century Leeds is in J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living (1961), pp 7–20.
2. R. M. Hartwell, op. cit., p. 413.
1. G. C. Holland, op cit., p. 51; W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (1842), pp. 12–13, 160.
1. See especially J. T. Krause, ‘Changes in English Fertility and Mortality, 1781–1850’, Econ. Hist. Review, 2nd Series, XI, No. 1, August 1958, and ‘Some Neglected Factors in the English Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, XIX, 4 December 1959.
1. See J. T. Krause, ‘Some Implications of Recent Work in Historical Demography’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, I, 2, January 1959.
2. K. H. Connell, ‘The Land Legislation and Irish Social Life’, Econ. Hist. Review, XI, 1 August 1958.
3. T. McKeown and R. G. Brown, ‘Medical Evidence Related to English Population Changes in the Eighteenth Century’, Population Studies, November 1955. See also J. H. Habakkuk, ‘English Population in the Eighteenth Century’, Econ. Hist. Review, VI, 2, 1953; G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (1962), ch. 3; and, for a thorough examination of economic and demographic data in one region, J. D. Chambers, The Vale of Trent, 1670–1800 (Economic History Society, Supplement, 1957).
1. The Effects of Arts, Trade and Professions… on Health and Longevity (1832), ed. A. Meiklejohn (1957), p. 24.
2. The only support for this way of reading the evidence would appear to be the highly unsatisfactory and impressionistic discussion of the medical evidence on child labour in W. H. Hutt, ‘The Factory System in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Economica, March 1926; reprinted in Capitalism and the Historians, pp. 166 ff. See below, p. 371.
1. G. C. Holland, op. cit., ch. 8; J. P. Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes employed in the Cotton Manufacture of Manchester (1832); First Annual Report of the Registrar-General (1839), passim; A. Redford, op. cit., p. 16.
1. W. Cooke Taylor, op. cit., p. 261.
2. See the evidence of Dr S. Smith, of Leeds, in Poor Man’s Advocate, 5 May 1832. The low incidence in Sheffield of maternal deaths in childbirth may perhaps be related to the fact that fewer girls were employed there in occupations which required standing for twelve or fourteen hours a day.
1. G. C. Holland, op. cit., pp. 114–15.
2. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes (1842), p. 153; G. C. Holland, op. cit., p. 128; for Halifax, Dr Alexander, cited in W. Ranger, Report on… Halifax (1851), pp. 100 ff.; for later figures, see James Hole, The Homes of the Working Classes (1866), pp. 18 ff.
1. G. C. Holland, op. cit., p. 124.
1. See M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, ch. 5.
1. G. F. French, Life of Samuel Crompton (1859), pp. 58–9, 72; see also B. Brierley, Home Memories (Manchester, 1886), p. 19.
2. Committee on the Woollen Trade (1806), p. 49.
1. Children’s Employment Commission. Mines (1842), p. 43.
1. Ibid., pp. 71, 80.
2. It is to be noted that some of the worst examples in Marx’s Capital are taken from the Children’s Employment Commission of the 1860s.
3. H. L. Beales, The Industrial Revolution (1928), p. 60.
1. W. H. Hutt, ‘The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century’, Economica, March 1926.
1. Capitalism and the Historians, pp. 165–6. Professor Hutt even repeats the gossip of the masters and of Dr Ure, such as the baseless charge that John Doherty had been convicted of a ‘gross assault’ on a woman.
2. See The Voice of the West Riding, 1 June 1833: ‘The men of Leeds – the working classes – have nobly done their duty. They have indignantly refused to co-operate with a set of men who, if they had the least spark of honesty amongst them, would have let the Tyrannical Factory Lords do their own dirty work…’ Also ibid., 15 and 22 June 1833 and Driver, op. cit., ch. 19.
1. N. J. Smelser, op. cit., esp. chs. 9 and 10.
1. Against such stories we have to set the appalling accounts of sadism, employed by adult operatives themselves upon pauper apprentices, during the period of the Wars. See J. Brown, Memoir of Robert Blincoe (Manchester, 1832), pp. 40–41.
2. P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England, p. 7.
1. Capitalism and the Historians, pp. 18–19, 35–6.
2. See E. Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy (1951), p. 80: and Mr Strauss’s comment – ‘Ignorance of the facts was not one of the causes of Irish misery during the nineteenth century.’
1. See J. L. and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer, pp. 176–93.
1. Monthly Magazine, 1 November 1799. I am indebted to Dr D. V. Erdman for this reference.
2. T. Cooper, Some Information Respecting America (1794), pp. 77–8.
3. R. Southey, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies… (1829), I, p. 711; A. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), pp. 277–8. See also Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Penguin edn, 1961), pp. 39 ff.
4. MS. Diary of Robert Ayrey, Leeds Reference Library.
1. C. Driver, op. cit., pp. 327–8.
1. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Penguin edn), p. 239.
1. It was believed of many mill-owners that they kept a special fund from the fines raised from their workers, and used it for charitable or chapel-building purposes. A large chapel in Dewsbury is still known among the older generation as ‘brokken shoit chapel’ after the fines taken for broken threads.
1. G. Crabtree, operative, Brief Description of a Tour through Calder Dale (1833); Voice of the West Riding, 20, 27 July 1833; Account of a Public Meeting Held at Hebden Bridge, 24 August 1833.
2. It is interesting, however, to note that Cecil Driver, op. cit., p. 110, says that the Primitive Methodists often loaned their chapels to Richard Oastler.