I. LEISURE AND PERSONAL RELATIONS
THE Methodist Revival of the war years mediated the work-discipline of industrialism. It was also, in some part, a reflex of despair among the working population. Methodism and Utilitarianism, taken together, make up the dominant ideology of the Industrial Revolution. But in Methodism we see only the clearest expression of processes at work within a whole society. Many of its features were reproduced in the evangelical movement in all the churches, and in the social teaching of some Utilitarians and Deists. Hannah More held quite as strongly as Wesley to the view that it was a ‘fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings’, rather than as beings of ‘a corrupt nature and evil dispositions’.1 And in the Sunday schools which were promoted by the Church of England in many villages in the 1790s and 1800s we find exactly the same emphasis (although sometimes with a more paternalist tone) upon discipline and repression as we have noted in the schools of Stockport or Halifax. Their function is uniformly described as being to cherish in the children of the poor ‘a spirit of industry, economy, and piety’; Sunday school teachers at Caistor (Lincs) were instructed to—
… tame the ferocity of their unsubdued passions – to repress the excessive rudeness of their manners – to chasten the disgusting and demoralizing obscenity of their language – to subdue the stubborn rebellion of their wills – to render them honest, obedient, courteous, industrious, submissive, and orderly…2
The pressures towards discipline and order extended from the factory, on one hand, the Sunday school, on the other, into every aspect of life: leisure, personal relationships, speech, manners. Alongside the disciplinary agencies of the mills, churches, schools, and magistrates and military, quasi-official agencies were set up for the enforcement of orderly moral conduct. It was Pitt’s moral lieutenant, Wilberforce, who combined the ethos of Methodism with the unction of the Establishment, and who was most active between 1790 and 1810 in this cause. In 1797 he expounded at length ‘the grand law of subordination’, and laid down articles for the management of the poor:
… that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which wordly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest…1
By 1809 he was satisfied that overt Jacobinism was no longer a danger; but in every manifestation of moral indiscipline he saw the danger of Jacobin revival. ‘We are alive to the political offence,’ he wrote, ‘but to the moral crime we seem utterly insensible.’
In this he was too modest, since his own Society for the Suppression of Vice had clocked up 623 successful prosecutions for breaking the Sabbath laws in 1801 and 1802 alone.2 But his conviction as to the intimate correlation between moral levity and political sedition among the lower classes is characteristic of his class. Prosecutions for drunken and lewd behaviour increased; Blake’s old enemy, Bishop Watson of Llandaff, preached a sermon in 1804 in which he found the rôle of the common informer to be ‘a noble Design… both in a religious and in a political Point of View’. The amusements of the poor were preached and legislated against until even the most innocuous were regarded in a lurid light. The Society for the Suppression of Vice extended its sphere of interference to ‘two-penny hops, gingerbread fairs, and obscene pictures’.1 Nude sea bathers were persecuted as if they were forerunners of tumbrils and guillotine. ‘With regard to adultery,’ wrote John Bowdler darkly, ‘as it was punished capitally by the Jewish law, some think it ought to be so… among us.’ The Evangelical exhorted the upper classes to reform their own manners as an example to the poor. In ‘Society’ itself the post-revolutionary years saw ‘an increased reserve of manner… fatal to conviviality and humour’.2
The process of social discipline was not uncontested. The attempt of Dr Bowdler’s supporters to carry new legislation for the imprisonment of adulterers foundered in the House of Commons; unlike penalties imposed upon common Sabbath-breakers, vagrants, tinkers, stage-dancers and tumblers, ballad-singers, free-thinkers and naked bathers, legislation against adultery was open to objection in that it might discriminate against the amusement of the rich as well as of the poor. And other attempts to interfere with the leisure of the people were thrown out by the House of Commons, on slender majorities made up of one part laissez faire inertia, one part Foxite defence of the liberty of the subject, and one part traditional Tory tolerance for ‘bread and circuses’ and dislike for Methodistical ‘fanaticism’. (An irony of the time was the defence by the War Minister, Windham, of bull-baiting against both Evangelicals and reformers – a defence which led to the cry going up, from Satan’s strongholds, of ‘Windham and Liberty!’)
But if the disciplinarians lost a few legislative skirmishes, they won the battle of the Industrial Revolution; and in the process the ‘Irish’ temperament often attributed to the eighteenth-century English poor in town and countryside was translated into the methodical way of life of industrial capitalism. In the countryside this can be seen most clearly in the triumph of the money-economy over the casual, ‘uneconomic’ rhythms of peasant semi-subsistence. In the industrial areas it can be seen in the extension of the discipline of the factory bell or clock from working to leisure hours, from the working-day to the Sabbath, and in the assault upon ‘Cobbler’s Monday’ and traditional holidays and fairs.
Although the economic functions of the eighteenth-century fair were still of great importance – annual ‘hirings’, horse and cattle fairs, sale of miscellaneous commodities – we should not forget their equal importance in the cultural life of the poor. Still, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, the working man’s year was made up of cycles of hardship and short commons, punctuated with ‘feast’ days when drink and meat were more plentiful, luxuries like oranges and ribbons were bought for the children, dancing, courtship, convivial visiting and sports took place. Until late in the nineteenth century there was still a network of fairs held throughout the country (many of which authority tried in vain to limit or proscribe), at which a fraternity of pedlars, card-sharpers, real or pretended gipsies, ballad-mongers and hawkers were in attendance.1 A Northumberland diarist of 1750 describes Whit Monday:
… went to Carton Sports – a Saddle, bridle, whip, etc. all to be Gallopt for…. Abundance of young men and women diverted themselves with the game or pastime here that they call Losing their Suppers…. And after all they ended their recreation with Carrouzing at the Ale-houses and ye men Kissing and toying away most of the night with their Mistresses…
Three weeks later there was the Lebberston Sport – ‘a Copper Pan was play’d for at Quoites… there was also a Dove neatly deckt and adorned with Ribbons of divers colours and other fine Trappings which was danced for by the Country Girls…’2 In 1783 a Bolton magistrate complained that – at a time when oatmeal was selling at two guineas a load—
… there was so little appearance of want in this township that one evening I met a very large procession of young men and women with fiddles, garlands, and other ostentation of rural finery, dancing Morris dances in the highway merely to celebrate an idle anniversary, or, what they had been pleased to call for a year or two, a fair at a paltry thatched alehouse upon the neighbouring common.1
It is tempting to explain the decline of old sports and festivals simply in terms of the displacement of ‘rural’ by ‘urban’ values. But this is misleading. The more robust entertainments, whether in their ugly form of animal baiting and pugilism, or in more convivial festivities, were as often, or more often, to be found in the eighteenth century in London or the great towns as in the countryside. They continued into the nineteenth century with a vigour which recalls both the unruly traditions of the London apprentices of Tudor times, and also the very large proportion of nineteenth-century Londoners who were immigrants from the village. The greatest festival of all was Bartholomew Fair, with its menageries, pickpockets, pantomimes of Harlequin and Faustus, card sharpers, plays, exhibitions of wild men and of horsemanship. In 1825 the Trades Newspaper complained:
For weeks previous it is denounced from the pulpit and the press, and stories are raked up of apprentices led away from the paths of honesty, of ruined maids of all-work, of broken heads and brawlings…2
In the previous decade the authorities had feared that the Fair would become ‘the general rendezvous for sedition and the signal for insurrection’.3
On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution, which drained the countryside of some of its industries and destroyed the balance between rural and urban life, created also in our own minds an image of rural isolation and ‘idiocy’. The urban culture of eighteenth-century England was more ‘rural’ (in its customary connotations), while the rural culture was more rich, than we often suppose. ‘It is a great error to suppose,’ Cobbett insisted, ‘that people are rendered stupid by remaining always in the same place.’ And most of the new industrial towns did not so much displace the countryside as grow over it. The most common industrial configuration of the early nineteenth century was a commercial or manufacturing centre which served as the hub for a circle of straggling industrial villages. As the villages became suburbs, and the farmlands were covered over with brick, so the great conurbations of the late nineteenth century were formed.
But there was nothing in this process so violent as to enforce a disruption of older traditions. In south Lancashire, the Potteries, the West Riding and the Black Country local customs, superstitions, and dialect were neither severed nor transplanted: the village or small town craftsman grew into the industrial worker. Bamford has testified in his Early Days to the vigour of tradition in Lancashire weaving villages at the turn of the century. There were the tales of witches, boggarts, ‘fyerin’; the furious pugilism and the cock-fighting; the customs, such as ‘pace-egging’ (at Easter) or ‘Riding the Black Lad’; the holidays with their traditional celebrations – Christmas, Shrove-Tide, ‘Cymbalin Sunday’, and ‘Rushbearing’ in August when morris dancers were to be found in Middleton, Oldham or Rochdale:
My new shoon they are so good,
I cou’d doance morrice if I wou’d;
An’ if hat an’ sark be drest,
I will doance morrice wi’ the best.
Or there was ‘Mischief-neet’, on 1 May, when lads would leave signs on the doorsteps of the village women:
A gorse bush indicated a woman notoriously immodest; and a holly bush, one loved in secret; a tup’s horn intimated that man or woman was faithless to marriage; a branch of sapling, truth in love; and a sprig of birch, a pretty girl.1
We may set beside Bamford’s picture of the 1790s Joseph Lawson’s reminiscences of a ‘backward’ clothing village in the West Riding – Pudsey – in the 1820s, with the old and new ways of life at a moment of transition. The houses were scattered ‘as if they had sprung up from seeds dropped unawares’, the roads unlighted and unflagged, the groups of houses approached by crooked folds and passages. Rooms are low, windows small without sashes:
There is dense ignorance of sanitary science. A doctor comes into a house where there is fever, and he knocks a pane of glass out with his stick, his first dose of medicine being fresh air.
Most of the houses are without ovens but have a ‘bakstone’ for baking. The stone floors are sanded, furniture is plain and sparse: ‘in some houses there is an oaken chest or kist – a family heirloom, or a small cupboard fastened up in a corner, and a delfcase for pots and plates’. Water is scarce, and on wash-days queues of twenty or thirty may form at the wells. Coal and candles are dear, and in the winter neighbours gather to share each other’s fires. Baking and brewing are done at home; white bread and meat are regarded as luxuries: ‘oatcake, brown bread, porridge pudding, skimmed milk, potatoes, and home-brewed beer, which they always call ‘drink’, are the principal articles of food’.
The sparse routine is broken by occasional ‘tides’ or feasts, when ‘a bit of beef’ is bought, and all go to the fair, where gingerbread, fruit, and toys are sold, there are peep-shows of the Battle of Waterloo, Punch and Judy shows, gambling stalls, swings; and a customary ‘love market’, where the young men court the girls with ‘tidings’ of brandy-snaps and nuts. Very few of the working people can read well enough to read a newspaper; although papers are taken (and read aloud) at the blacksmith’s, the barber’s and several public houses. Much of the news still comes by way of broadsheet vendors and street singers. Old superstitions are a living source of terror to old and young. There are ghosts at Jumble’s Well, Bailey Gallows, Boggard Lane; parents commonly discipline their children by shutting them ‘in cellars and other dark places for the black boggards to take them’. ‘Another most serious and mischievous superstition, everywhere prevalent, was the belief that when any child died, it was the will of the Lord that it should be so.’ Sanitary reformers were regarded as ‘Infidels’. Dog-fighting and cock-fighting were common; and it was also common at feast-times ‘to see several rings formed, in which men stripped to their bare skin would fight sometimes by the hour together, till the combatants were not recognizable…’ Drunkenness was rife, especially at holidays and on ‘Cobbler’s Monday’, which was kept by weavers and burlers as well as cobblers. But there were plenty of less violent pastimes: knur and spell, ‘duck knop’, and football through the streets. The village was clannish within, and a closed community to outsiders from only two or three miles distant. Some very old traditions survived, such as ‘Riding the Stang’, whereby if a man was known to ill-use his wife, or a woman was thought to be lewd, a straw effigy would be carried through the streets by a hooting crowd, and then burnt by the offender’s door.1
So far from extinguishing local traditions, it is possible that the early years of the Industrial Revolution saw a growth in provincial pride and self-consciousness. South Lancashire and the West Riding were not rural wildernesses before 1780; they had been centres of domestic industry for two centuries. As the new factory discipline encroached upon the hand-worker’s way of life, and as the Corporation and Coronation Streets were built over Yep-fowd and Frogg Hole and T’Hollins, so self-consciousness was sharpened by loss, and a quasi-nationalist sentiment mingles with class feeling in the culture of the industrial workers (new machines versus old customs, London tyranny or ‘foreign’ capital against the local clothier, Irish labour undercutting the native weaver). George Condy, a leading publicist of the 10 Hour Movement, wrote a foreword to Roby’s Traditions of Lancashire (1830); Bamford was only one among a score of plebeian authors who followed in the steps of the eighteenth-century ‘Tim Bobbin’, in celebrating and idealizing local customs and dialect.
But this was a conscious resistance to the passing of an old way of life, and it was frequently associated with political Radicalism.2 As important in this passing as the simple physical loss of commons and ‘playgrounds’,3 was the loss of leisure in which to play and the repression of playful impulses. The Puritan teaching of Bunyan or Baxter were transmitted in their entirety by Wesley: ‘Avoid all lightness, as you would avoid hell-fire; and trifling, as you would cursing and swearing. Touch no woman…’ Card-playing, coloured dresses, personal ornaments, the theatre – all came under Methodist prohibition. Tracts were written against ‘profane’ songs and dancing;1 literature and arts which had no devotional bearing were profoundly suspect; the dreadful ‘Victorian’ Sabbath began to extend its oppression even before Victoria’s birth.
A characteristic tract shows the extent of Methodist determination to uproot pre-industrial traditions from the manufacturing districts.2 It had been noted at a Sheffield Quarterly Meeting in 1799 that some members were not ‘altogether free from conforming to the custom of visiting or receiving visits, at the annual Feast’. Such feasts, known variously as ‘Wakes’ (Derbyshire and Staffordshire), ‘Rushbearing’ (Lancashire) and ‘Revels’ (west of England) might in origin have been permissible but had become ‘dreadfully prostituted to the most diabolical purposes’. Time was spent in ‘eating and drinking intemperately; talking prophanely, or at least unprofitably; in laughing and jesting, fornication and adultery…’ The least participation was ‘fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness’. Money was wasted by the poor which might have been saved; many contracted debts. Methodists who mixed in such festivities were exposed to the worldly ways of the unconverted – backsliding was a common result. They should refuse to entertain even friends and relatives (from among the unconverted) who might call; and if such visitors could not be turned from the door they should be entertained only by Bible-reading, holy discourse and hymn-singing:
Oh, Brethren, what are we doing! There is death in the pot. The plague is begun. Wrath is gone forth against fruitless professors. The slumbers of sin are upon us…
Other customary survivals, such as meat and drink at the funeral ‘wake’, came in for equal condemnation. Even the visiting of relatives on a normal Sabbath day could not be condoned, unless in cases of sudden sickness.1
The warmth of the argument suggests that in many places, like Bamford’s Middleton, the struggle between the old way of life and the new discipline was sharp and protracted. And Lawson’s account of Pudsey shows the ‘chapel folk’ as a group set apart from the community by their sombre manners. There were many who were brought up in devout families who reacted strongly against their upbringing, as did William Lovett:
… being obliged to frequent a place of worship three times of a Sunday, strictly prohibited all books but the Bible and Prayer Book, and not being allowed to enjoy a walk, unless to chapel… are sufficient to account for those boyish feelings. My poor mother… thought that the great power that has formed the numerous gay, sportive, singing things of earth and air, must above all things be gratified with the solemn faces, prim clothes, and half-sleepy demeanour of human beings; and that true religion consists in listening to the reiterated story of man’s fall…2
To many men in the post-war generation, such as Lovett, it seemed that it was the Methodists who were uncouth and backward. And this reminds us of the extreme difficulty in generalizing as to the moral tone and manners of working-class communities during the Industrial Revolution. It is clear that between 1780 and 1830 important changes took place. The ‘average’ English working man became more disciplined, more subject to the productive tempo of ‘the clock’, more reserved and methodical, less violent and less spontaneous. Traditional sports were displaced by more sedentary hobbies:
The Athletic exercises of Quoits, Wrestling, Foot-ball, Prison-bars and Shooting with the Long-bow are become obsolete… they are now Pigeon-fanciers, Canary-breeders and Tulip-growers —
or so a Lancashire writer complained in 1823.1 Francis Place often commented upon a change, which he saw in terms of a growth in self-respect and an elevation in ‘the character of the working-man’. ‘Look even to Lancashire,’ he wrote a month after Peterloo:
Within a few years a stranger walking through their towns was ‘touted’, i.e. hooted, and an ‘outcomling’ was sometimes pelted with stones. ‘Lancashire brute’ was the common and appropriate appellation. Until very lately it would have been dangerous to have assembled 500 of them on any occasion. Bakers and butchers would at the least have been plundered. Now 100,000 people may be collected together and no riot ensue…2
It is here that evaluation becomes most difficult. While many contemporary writers, from Cobbett to Engels, lamented the passing of old English customs, it is foolish to see the matter only in idyllic terms. These customs were not all harmless or quaint. The unmarried mother, punished in a Bridewell, and perhaps repudiated by the parish in which she was entitled to relief, had little reason to admire ‘merrie England’. The passing of Gin Lane, Tyburn Fair, orgiastic drunkenness, animal sexuality, and mortal combat for prize-money in iron-studded clogs, calls for no lament.
But, between old superstition and new bigotry, it is proper to be cautious when meeting the claims of the Evangelicals to have been an agency of intellectual enlightenment. We have already noted the tendency of the Methodists to harden into a sect, to keep their members apart from the contagion of the unconverted, and to regard themselves as being in a state of civil war with the ale-house and the denizens of Satan’s strongholds. Where the Methodists were a minority group within a community, attitudes hardened on both sides; professions of virtue and declamations against sin reveal less about actual manners than they do about the rancour of hostilities. Moreover, the air of the early nineteenth century is thick with assertions and counter-assertions, especially where the values of handworkers and factory workers were in conflict, or those of the opponents and defenders of child labour. Critics of the factory system saw it as destructive of family life and constantly indicted the mills as centres of the grossest sexual immorality; the coarse language and independent manners of Lancashire mill-girls shocked many witnesses. Gaskell contrasted the idyllic innocence of the domestic workers, whose youth was spent in a pagan freedom which entailed the obligation of marriage only if conception took place, with the febrile promiscuity of the factory where some of the employers enacted scenes with the mill-girls which –
put to blush the lascivious Saturnalia of the Romans, the rites of the Pagoda girls of India, and the Harem life of the most voluptuous Ottoman.1
Such colourful accounts were, not unnaturally, resented not only by the employers but by the factory workers themselves. They pointed out that the illegitimacy rate in many rural districts compared unfavourably with that in mill-towns. In many mills the greatest propriety was enforced. If there were ‘Ottomans’ among the mill-owners, there were also paternalists who dismissed any girl detected in a moral lapse.
It is not easy to draw a balance. On the one hand, the claim that the Industrial Revolution raised the status of women would seem to have little meaning when set beside the record of excessive hours of labour, cramped housing, excessive childbearing and terrifying rates of child mortality. On the other hand, the abundant opportunities for female employment in the textile districts gave to women the status of independent wage-earners. The spinster or the widow was freed from dependence upon relatives or upon parish relief. Even the unmarried mother might be able, through the laxness of ‘moral discipline’ in many mills, to achieve an independence unknown before. In the largest silk-mills at Macclesfield, righteous employers prided themselves upon dismissing girls who made a single ‘false step’. A witness who contrasted this with the easier-going manners of Manchester came up with observations disturbing to the moralist:
I find it very generally… the case, that where the mills and factories are nearly free from mothers of illegitimate children, there the streets are infested with prostitutes; and on the contrary, where the girls are permitted to return to their work, afer giving birth to a child, there the streets are kept comparatively clear of those unhappy beings.1
The period reveals many such paradoxes. The war years saw a surfeit of sermonizing and admonitory tracts limiting or refuting claims to women’s rights which were associated with ‘Jacobinism’. Women’s subordination in marriage was dictated in the bleakest terms. ‘The Christian scriptures,’ declared Paley, enjoin upon the wife an obedience in marriage ‘in terms so peremptory and absolute, that it seems to extend to everything not criminal, or not entirely inconsistent with the women’s happiness’.2 But the same years see also a stubborn minority tradition, in the main among professional people and radical artisans in the great cities, which set forward claims more far-reaching than any known before the French Revolution. The claims made in the 1790s by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake and Thomas Spence were never wholly abandoned; they recur, not only in Shelley’s circle, but also in the Radical publications of the post-war years. They were voiced, self-deprecatingly, in the Black Dwarf; more stridently in Richard Carlile’s publications; most powerfully by Anna Wheeler and William Thompson and in the Owenite movement.3 But it was in the textile districts that the changing economic status of women gave rise to the earliest widespread participation by working women in political and social agitation. In the last years of the eighteenth century female benefit societies and female Methodist classes may have given experience and self-confidence – the claim of women to act as local preachers was a persistent Wesleyan ‘heresy’. But the war years, with their increased demand for labour not only in the spinning-mills but also at the hand-loom, accelerated the process.1 In 1818 and 1819 the first Female Reform Societies were founded, in Blackburn, Preston, Bolton, Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne. Samuel Bamford’s account – if we may credit it – suggests a sudden leap forward in consciousness. At a meeting in the Saddleworth district, on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border,
I, in the course of an address, insisted on the right, and the propriety also, of females who were present at such assemblages voting by a show of hand for or against the resolutions. This was a new idea; and the women, who attended numerously on the bleak ridge, were mightily pleased with it. The men being nothing dissentient, when the resolution was put the women held up their hands amid much laughter; and ever from that time females voted with the men at the Radical meetings…. It became the practice, female political unions were formed, with their chairwomen, committees, and other officials; and from us the practice was soon borrowed… [by] religious and charitable institutions.2
(In Newcastle, at the same time, one of Jabez Bunting’s correspondents was lamenting the default of the ‘pious sisterhood’ who were embroidering reform banners.) The twenty years between 1815 and 1835 see also the first indications of independent trade union action among women workers. John Wade, commenting upon a strike of 1,500 female card-setters in the West Riding in 1835, pointed the moral: ‘Alarmists may view these indications of female independence as more menacing to established institutions than the “education of the lower orders”.’3
But there is a paradox of feeling even in this advance. The Radicalism of northern working women was compounded of nostalgia for lost status and the assertion of new-found rights. According to conventions which were deeply felt, the woman’s status turned upon her success as a housewife in the family economy, in domestic management and forethought, baking and brewing, cleanliness and child-care. The new independence, in the mill or full-time at the loom, which made new claims possible, was felt simultaneously as a loss in status and in personal independence. Women became more dependent upon the employer or labour market, and they looked back to a ‘golden’ past in which home earnings from spinning, poultry, and the like, could be gained around their own door. In good times the domestic economy, like the peasant economy, supported a way of life centred upon the home, in which inner whims and compulsions were more obvious than external discipline. Each stage in industrial differentiation and specialization struck also at the family economy, disturbing customary relations between man and wife, parents and children, and differentiating more sharply between ‘work’ and ‘life’. It was to be a full hundred years before this differentiation was to bring returns, in the form of labour-saving devices, back into the working woman’s home. Meanwhile, the family was roughly torn apart each morning by the factory bell, and the mother who was also a wage-earner often felt herself to have the worst of both the domestic and the industrial worlds.
‘Once we could have welcomed you, by spreading before you a board of English hospitality, furnished by our industry,’ the Female Reformers of Bolton addressed William Cobbett in 1819: ‘Once, we could have greeted you, with the roseate countenances of English females…. We could have presented to your view our Cottages, vieing for cleanliness and arrangement with the Palace of our King.’ The Female Reformers of Blackburn took up the same theme – their houses ‘robbed of all their ornaments’, their beds ‘torn away… by the relentless hand of the unfeeling tax-gatherer’ so that ‘borough-mongering tyrants’ might repose on ‘beds of down’ while their families lay on the straw. Above all, they appealed on behalf of their children: ‘we are daily cut to the heart to see them greedily devour the coarse food that some would scarcely give to their swine’. It was natural that they should respond to Cobbett, who was soon to consolidate their support with his Cottage Economy, and also to Oastler, with his emphasis upon ‘the home’. Neither Cobbett nor Oastler gave the least support to the notion of women’s suffrage, nor did the Female Reform Societies raise the demand on their own account. Their rôle was confined to giving moral support to the men, making banners and caps of liberty which were presented with ceremony at reform demonstrations, passing resolutions and addresses, and swelling the numbers at meeings.1 But even these forms of participation called forth the abuse of their opponents. The ‘petticoat reformers’ of Manchester were described in the Courier as ‘degraded females’, guilty of ‘the worst prostitution of the sex, the prostitution of the heart’, ‘deserting their station’ and putting off the ‘sacred characters’ of wife and mother ‘for turbulent vices of sedition and impiety’. Whatever his view on women’s suffrage, Cobbett had no second thoughts about coming to the Female Reformers’ aid:
Just as if women were made for nothing but to cook oat-meal and to sweep a room! Just as if women had no minds! Just as if Hannah Moore and the Tract Gentry had reduced the women of England to a level with the Negresses of Africa! Just as if England had never had a queen…! 2
II. THE RITUALS OF MUTUALITY
Again and again the ‘passing of old England’ evades analysis. We may see the lines of change more clearly if we recall that the Industrial Revolution was not a settled social context but a phase of transition between two ways of life. And we must see, not one ‘typical’ community (Middleton or Pudsey), but many different communities coexisting with each other. In south-east Lancashire alone there were to be found, within a few miles of each other, the cosmopolitan city of Manchester upon which migrants converged from every point in the kingdom; pit-villages (like the Duke of Bridgewater’s collieries) emerging from semi-feudalism; paternal model villages (like Turton); new mill-towns (like Bolton); and older weaving hamlets. In all of these communities there were a number of converging influences at work, all making towards discipline and the growth in working-class consciousness.
The working-class community of the early nineteenth century was the product, neither of paternalism nor of Methodism, but in a high degree of conscious working-class endeavour. In Manchester or Newcastle the traditions of the trade union and the friendly society, with their emphasis upon self-discipline and community purpose, reach far back into the eighteenth century. Rules which survive of the Manchester small-ware weavers in the 1750s show already meticulous attention to procedure and to institutional etiquette. The committee members must sit in a certain order. The doors must be kept locked. There are careful regulations for the safe-keeping of the ‘box’. Members are reminded that ‘Intemperance, Animosity and Profaneness are the Pest and Vermin that gnaw out the very Vitals of all Society.’
If we consider this Society, not as a Company of Men met to regale themselves with Ale and Tobacco, and talk indifferently on all Subjects: but rather as a Society sitting to Protect the Rights and Privileges of a Trade by which some hundreds of People… subsist… how awkward does it look to see its Members jumbled promiscuously one amongst another, talking indifferently on all Subjects…
‘Decency and Regularity’ are the watchwords; it is even hoped that when ‘Gentlemen and Magistrates’ observe such order ‘they will rather revere than punish such a Society’.1
This represents the code of the self-respecting artisan, although the hope that such sobriety would win the favour of the authorities was to be largely disappointed. It was in a similar school that such men as Hardy and Place received their education in London. But as the Industrial Revolution advanced, it was this code (sometimes in the form of model rules) which was extended to ever-wider sections of working people. Small tradesmen, artisans, labourers – all sought to insure themselves against sickness, unemployment, or funeral expenses1 through membership of ‘box clubs’ or friendly societies. But the discipline essential for the safe-keeping of funds, the orderly conduct of meetings and the determination of disputed cases, involved an effort of self-rule as great as the new disciplines of work. An examination of rules and orders of friendly societies in existence in Newcastle and district during the Napoleonic Wars gives us a list of fines and penalties more exacting than those of a Bolton cotton-master. A General Society imposed fines for any member ‘reflecting upon’ another member in receipt of sick money, being drunk on the Sabbath, striking another, ‘calling one another bye-names’, coming into the clubroom in liquor, taking God’s name in vain. The Brotherhood of Maltsters added fines for drunkenness at any time, for failure to attend the funerals of brothers or of their wives. The Glass-Makers (founded as early as 1755) added fines for failure in attending meetings, or for those who refused to take their turn in the rota of officers; for failing to keep silence when ordered, speaking together, answering back the steward, betting in the club, or (a common rule) disclosing secrets outside the society. Further,
Persons that are infamous, of ill character, quarrelsome, or disorderly, shall not be admitted into this society…. No Pitman, Collier, Sinker, or Waterman to be admitted…
The Watermen, not to be outdone, added a rule excluding from benefits any brother sick through ‘any illness got by lying with an unclean woman, or is clap’t or pox’d’. Brothers were to be fined for ridiculing or provoking each other to passion. The Unanimous Society was to cut off benefits if any member in receipt of sick money was found ‘in ale-houses, gaming, or drunk’. To maintain its unanimity there were fines for members proposing ‘discourse or dispute upon political or ecclesiastical matters, or government and governors’. The Friendly Society of All Trades had a rule similar to ‘huffing’ in draughts; there was a fine ‘if any member has an opportunity of fining his brother, and does not’. The Cordwainers added fines for calling for drink or tobacco without leave of the stewards. The House-Carpenters and Joiners added a prohibition of ‘disloyal sentiments’ or ‘political songs’.1
It is possible that some of these rules, such as the prohibition of political discourse and songs, should be taken with a pinch of salt. While some of these societies were select sick-clubs of as few as twenty or thirty artisans, meeting at an inn, others were probably covers for trade union activity; while at Newcastle, as at Sheffield, it is possible that after the Two Acts the formation of friendly societies was used as a cover for Jacobin organization. (A ‘company’ friendly society, in 1816, bore testimony to ‘the loyal, patriotic, and peaceable regulations’ of many Newcastle societies, but complained that these regulations were often insufficient to prevent ‘warm debate and violent language’.) 2 The authorities were deeply suspicious of the societies during the war years, and one of the purposes of the rules was to secure registration with the local magistrates. But anyone familiar with procedure and etiquette in some trade unions and working-men’s clubs today will recognize the origin of still-extant practices in several of the rules. Taken together, they indicate an attainment of self-discipline and a diffusion of experience of a truly impressive order.1
Estimates of friendly society membership suggest 648,000 in 1793, 704,350 in 1803, 925,429 in 1815. Although registration with the magistrates, under the first Friendly Society Act of 1793, made possible the protection of funds at law in the event of defaulting officers, a large but unknown number of clubs failed to register, either through hostility to the authorities, parochial inertia, or through a deep secretiveness which, Dr Holland found, was still strong enough to baffle his enquiries in Sheffield in the early 1840s. Nearly all societies before 1815 bore a strictly local and self-governing character, and they combined the functions of sick insurance with convivial club nights and annual ‘outings’ or feasts. An observer in 1805 witnessed near Matlock –
… about fifty women preceded by a solitary fiddler playing a merry tune. This was a female benefit society, who had been to hear a sermon at Eyam, and were going to dine together, a luxury which our female benefit society at Sheffield does not indulge in, having tea only, and generally singing, dancing, smoking, and negus.2
Few of the members of friendly societies had a higher social status than that of clerks or small tradesmen; most were artisans. The fact that each brother had funds deposited in the society made for stability in membership and watchful participation in self-government. They had almost no middle-class membership and, while some employers looked upon them favourably, their actual conduct left little room for paternalist control. Failures owing to actuarial inexperience were common; defaulting officers not infrequent. Diffused through every part of the country, they were (often heart-breaking) schools of experience.
In the very secretiveness of the friendly society, and in its opaqueness under upper-class scrutiny, we have authentic evidence of the growth of independent working-class culture and institutions. This was the sub-culture out of which the less stable trade unions grew, and in which trade union officers were trained.1 Union rules, in many cases, were more elaborate versions of the same code of conduct as the sick club. Sometimes, as in the case of the Woolcombers, this was supplemented by the procedures of secret masonic orders:
Strangers, the design of all our Lodges is love and unity,
With self-protection founded on the laws of equity,
And when you have our mystic rights gone through,
Our secrets all will be disclosed to you.2
After the 1790s, under the impact of the Jacobin agitation, the preambles to friendly society rules assume a new resonance; one of the strangest consequences of the language of ‘social man’ of the philosophical Enlightenment is its reproduction in the rules of obscure clubs meeting in the taverns or ‘hush-shops’ of industrial England. On Tyneside ‘Social’ and ‘Philanthropic’ societies expressed their aspirations in terms which ranged from throw-away phrases – ‘a sure, lasting, and loving society’, ‘to promote friendship and true Christian charity’, ‘man was not born for himself alone’ – to more thundering philosophical affirmations:
Man, by the construction of his body, and the disposition of his mind, is a creature formed for society….
We, the members of this society, taking it into our serious consideration, that man is formed a social being… in continual need of mutual assistance and support; and having interwoven in our constitutions those humane and sympathetic affections which we always feel at the distress of any of our fellow creatures…3
The friendly societies, found in so many diverse communities, were a unifying cultural influence. Although for financial and legal reasons they were slow to federate themselves, they facilitated regional and national trade union federation. Their language of ‘social man’ also made towards the growth in working-class consciousness. It joined the language of Christian charity and the slumbering imagery of ‘brotherhood’ in the Methodist (and Moravian) tradition with the social affirmations of Owenite socialism. Many early Owenite societies and stores prefaced their rules with the line from Isaiah (XLI, 6): ‘They helped every one his neighbour; and every one said to his brother, be of good courage.’ But the 1830s there were in circulation a score of friendly society or trade union hymns and songs which elaborated this theme.
Mr Raymond Williams has suggested that ‘the crucial distinguishing element in English life since the Industrial Revolution is… between alternative ideas of the nature of social relationship’. As contrasted with middle-class ideas of individualism or (at their best) of service, ‘what is properly meant by “working-class culture”… is the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions which proceed from this’.1 Friendly societies did not ‘proceed from’ an idea; both the ideas and the institutions arose in response to certain common experiences. But the distinction is important. In the simple cellular structure of the friendly society, with its workaday ethos of mutual aid, we can see many features which were reproduced in more sophisticated and complex forms in trade unions, cooperatives, Hampden Clubs, Political Unions, and Chartist lodges. At the same time the societies can be seen as crystallizing an ethos of mutuality very much more widely diffused in the ‘dense’ and ‘concrete’ particulars of the personal relations of working people, at home and at work. Every kind of witness in the first half of the nineteenth century – clergymen, factory inspectors, Radical publicists – remarked upon the extent of mutual aid in the poorest districts. In times of emergency, unemployment, strikes, sickness, childbirth, then it was the poor who ‘helped every one his neighbour’. Twenty years after Place’s comment on the change in Lancashire manners, Cooke Taylor was astounded at the way in which Lancashire working men bore ‘the extreme of wretchedness’,
with a high tone of moral dignity, a marked sense of propriety, a decency, cleanliness, and order… which do not merit the intense suffering I have witnessed. I was beholding the gradual immolation of the noblest and most valuable population that ever existed in this country or in any other under heaven.
‘Nearly all the distressed operatives whom I met north of Manchester… had a thorough horror of being forced to receive parish relief.’ 1
It is an error to see this as the only effective ‘working-class’ ethic. The ‘aristocratic’ aspirations of artisans and mechanics, the values of ‘self-help’, or criminality and demoralization, were equally widely dispersed. The conflict between alternative ways of life was fought out, not just between the middle and working classes, but within working-class communities themselves. But by the early years of the nineteenth century it is possible to say that collectivist values are dominant in many industrial communities; there is a definite moral code, with sanctions against the blackleg, the ‘tools’ of the employer or the unneighbourly, and with an intolerance towards the eccentric or individualist. Collectivist values are consciously held and are propagated in political theory, trade union ceremonial, moral rhetoric. It is, indeed, this collective self-consciousness, with its corresponding theory, institutions, discipline, and community values which distinguishes the nineteenth-century working class from the eighteenth-century mob.
Political Radicalism and Owenism both drew upon and enriched this ‘basic collectivist idea’. Francis Place may well have been right when he attributed the changed behaviour of Lancashire crowds in 1819, to the advance of political consciousness ‘spreading over the face of the country ever since the Constitutional and Corresponding Societies became active in 1792’:
Now 100,000 people may be collected together and no riot ensue, and why?… The people have an object, the pursuit of which gives them importance in their own eyes, elevates them in their own opinion, and thus it is that the very individuals who would have been the leaders of the riot are the keepers of the peace.1
Another observer attributed the changes in Lancashire to the influence both of Cobbett and of the Sunday schools and noted a ‘general and radical change’ in the character of the labouring classes:
The poor, when suffering and dissatisfied, no longer make a riot, but hold a meeting – instead of attacking their neighbours, they arraign the Ministry.2
This growth in self-respect and political consciousness was one real gain of the Industrial Revolution. It dispelled some forms of superstition and of deference, and made certain kinds of oppression no longer tolerable. We can find abundant testimony as to the steady growth of the ethos of mutuality in the strength and ceremonial pride of the unions and trades clubs which emerged from quasi-legality when the Combination Acts were repealed.3 During the Bradford woolcomber’s strike of 1825 we find that in Newcastle, where the friendly society was so well rooted, the unions contributing to the Bradford funds included smiths, mill-wrights, joiners, shoemakers, morocco leather dressers, cabinet-makers, shipwrights, sawyers, tailors, woolcombers, hatters tanners, weavers, potters and miners.4 Moreover, there is a sense in which the friendly society helped to pick up and carry into the trade union movement the love of ceremony and the high sense of status of the craftsman’s guild. These traditions, indeed, still had a remarkable vigour in the early nineteenth century, in some of the old Chartered Companies or Guilds of the masters and of master-craftsmen, whose periodical ceremonies expressed the pride of both the masters and of their journeymen in ‘the Trade’. In 1802, for example, there was a great jubilee celebration of the Preston ‘Guilds’. In a week of processions and exhibitions, in which the nobility, gentry, merchants, shopkeepers, and manufacturers all took part,1 the journeymen were given a prominent place:
The Wool-Combers and Cotton Workers… were preceded by twenty-four young blooming handsome women, each bearing a branch of the cotton tree, then followed a spinning machine borne on men’s shoulders, and afterwards a loom drawn on a sledge, each with work-people busily employed at them…
At Bradford, on the eve of the great strike of 1825, the wool-combers’ feast of Bishop Blaize was celebrated with extraordinary splendour:
Herald, bearing a flag.
Twenty-four Woolstaplers on horseback, each horse caparisoned with a fleece.
Thirty-eight Worsted-Spinners and Manufacturers on horseback, in white stuff waistcoats, with each a sliver of wool over his shoulder and a white stuff sash: the horses’ necks covered with nets made of thick yarn.
And so on until we reach:
BISHOP BLAIZE
Shepherd and Shepherdess.
Shepherd-Swains.
One hundred and sixty Woolsorters on horseback, with ornamented caps and various coloured slivers.
Thirty Comb-makers.
Charcoal Burners.
Combers’ Colours.
Band.
Four hundred and seventy Wool-combers, with wool wigs, &c.
Band.
Forty Dyers, with red cockades, blue aprons, and crossed slivers of red and blue.2
After the great strike such a ceremony could not be repeated.
This passage from the old outlook of ‘the Trade’ to the duality of the masters’ organizations, on the one hand, and the trade unions on the other, takes us into the central experience of the Industrial Revolution.1 But the friendly society and trade union, not less than the organizations of the masters, sought to maintain the ceremonial and the pride of the older tradition; indeed, since the artisans (or, as they still are called, tradesmen) felt themselves to be the producers upon whose skill the masters were parasitic, they emphasized the tradition the more. With the repeal of the Combination Acts their banners moved openly through the streets. In London, in 1825, the Thames Ship Caulkers Union (founded in 1794) displayed its mottos: ‘Main et Coeur’, ‘Vigueur, Vérité, Concorde, Dépêche’, which reveal the pride of the medieval craft. The Ropemakers Union proceeded with a white banner on which was portrayed a swarm of bees around a hive: ‘Sons of Industry! Union gives Strength’. (At the houses of masters who had granted them an increase, they stopped and gave a salute.) John Gast’s Thames Shipwrights Provident Union, the pacemaker of the London ‘trades’, outdid all with a blue silk banner: ‘Hearts of Oak Protect the Aged’, a handsome ship drawn by six bay horses, three postilions in blue jackets, a band, the Committee, the members with more banners and flags, and delegations representing the trade from Shields, Sunderland, and Newcastle. The members wore blue rosettes and sprigs of oak, and in the ship were old shipwrights who lived in the union’s almshouses at Stepney.2 At Nantwich in 1832 the shoemakers maintained all the sense of status of the artisan’s craft union, with their banner, ‘full set of secret order regalia, surplices, trimmed aprons… and a crown and robes for King Crispin’. In 1833 the King rode on horseback through the town attended by train-bearers, officers with the ‘Dispensation, the Bible, a large pair of gloves, and also beautiful specimens of ladies’ and gents’ boots and shoes’:
Nearly 500 joined in the procession, each one wearing a white apron neatly trimmed. The rear was brought up by a shopmate in full tramping order, his kit packed on his back, and walking-stick in hand.1
No single explanation will suffice to account for the evident alteration in manner of the working people.2 Nor should we exaggerate the degree of change. Drunkenness and uproar still often surged through the streets. But it is true that working men often appear most sober and disciplined, in the twenty years after the Wars, when most in earnest to assert their rights. Thus we cannot accept the thesis that sobriety was the consequence only, or even mainly, of the Evangelical propaganda. And we may see this, also, if we turn the coin over and look at the reverse. By 1830 not only the Established Church but also the Methodist revival was meeting sharp opposition in most working-class centres from free-thinkers, Owenites, and non-denominational Christians. In London, Birmingham, south-east Lancashire, Newcastle, Leeds and other cities the Deist adherents of Carlile or Owen had an enormous following. The Methodists had consolidated their position, but they tended increasingly to represent tradesmen and privileged groups of workers, and to be morally isolated from working-class community life. Some old centres of revivalism had relapsed into ‘heathenism’. In Newcastle’s Sandgate, once ‘as noted for praying as for tippling, for psalm-singing as for swearing’, the Methodists had lost any following among the poor by the 1840s. In parts of Lancashire weaving communities as well as factory operatives became largely detached from the chapels and were swept up in the current of Owenism and free-thought:
If it had not been for Sunday schools, society would have been in a horrible state before this time…. Infidelity is growing amazingly…. The writings of Carlile and Taylor and other infidels are more read than the Bable or any other book…. I have seen weeks after weeks the weavers assembled in a room, that would contain 400 people, to applaud the people who asserted and argued that there was no God…. I have gone into the cottages around the chapel where I worship, I have found 20 men assembled reading infidel publications…1
Owenite and secular movements often took fire ‘like whins on the common’, as revivalism had done before.
Engels, writing from his Lancashire experience in 1844, claimed that ‘the workers are not religious, and do not attend church’, with the exception of the Irish, ‘a few elderly people, and the half-bourgeois, the overlookers, foremen, and the like’. ‘Among the masses there prevails almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost, some trace of Deism…’ Engels weakened his case by overstating it; but Dodd quoted a Stockport factory where nine out of ten did not attend any church, while Cooke Taylor, in 1842, was astonished at the vigour and knowledge of the Scripture shown by Lancashire working men who contested Christian orthodoxies. ‘If I thought that the Lord was the cause of all the misery I see around me,’ one such man told a Methodist preacher, ‘I would quit his service, and say he was not the Lord I took him for.’ Similarly, in Newcastle in the Chartist years thousands of artisans and engineers were convinced free-thinkers. In one works employing 200 ‘there are not more than six or seven who attend a place of worship’. ‘The working classes,’ said one working-man,
are gathering knowledge, and the more they gather, the wider becomes the breach between them and the different sects. It is not because they are ignorant of the Bible. I revere the Bible myself… and when I look into it… I find that the prophets stood between the oppressor and the oppressed, and denounced the wrong doer, however rich and powerful…. When the preachers go back to the old book, I for one will go back to hear them, but not till then…
The Sunday schools were bringing an unexpected harvest.2
The weakening hold of the churches by no means indicated any erosion of the self-respect and discipline of class. On the contrary, Manchester and Newcastle, with their long tradition of industrial and political organization, were notable in the Chartist years for the discipline of their massive demonstrations. Where the citizens and shopkeepers had once been thrown into alarm when the ‘terrible and savage pitmen’ entered Newcastle in any force, it now became necessary for the coal-owners to scour the slums of the city for ‘candy-men’ or rag-collectors to evict the striking miners. In 1838 and 1839 tens of thousands of artisans, miners and labourers marched week after week in good order through the streets, often passing within a few feet of the military, and avoiding all provocation. ‘Our people had been well taught,’ one of their leaders recalled, ‘that it was not riot we wanted, but revolution.’1
III. THE IRISH
One ingredient in the new working-class community has necessarily evaded this analysis: the Irish immigration. In 1841 it was estimated that over 400,000 inhabitants of Great Britain had been born in Ireland; many more tens of thousands were born in Britain of Irish parentage. The great majority of these were Catholics, and among the poorest-paid labourers; most of them lived in London and in the industrial towns. In Liverpool and in Manchester anything between one-fifth and one-third of the working population was Irish.
This is not the place to rehearse the appalling story of the immiseration of the Irish people in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the disasters which afflicted Ireland came less from the potato-blight than from the after-effects of a counter-revolution following upon the merciless repression of the United Irishmen’s rebellion (1798) far more savage than anything enacted in England; and from the political, economic and social consequences of the Act of Union (1800). In 1794 a clergyman of the Church of Ireland named William Jackson, who was acting as a go-between between William Hamilton Rowan, of the United Irishmen, and the French, was seized in Dublin with a paper outlining the position in Ireland and the prospects of support in the event of a French invasion. The population of Ireland was estimated (erroneously) at 4,500,000,1 of whom 450,000 were supposed to be Anglicans, 900,000 Dissenters, and 3,150,000 Catholics. Of the Dissenters (‘the most enlightened body of the Nation’) it said:
They are steady Republicans, devoted to Liberty and through all the Stages of the French Revolution have been enthusiastically attached to it. The Catholics, the Great body of the People, are in The Lowest degree of Ignorance and Want, ready for any Change because no Change can make them worse, the Whole Peasantry of Ireland, the Most Oppressed and Wretched in Europe, may be said to be Catholic.
Whereas the anti-Gallican prejudices of the English would ‘unite all ranks in opposition to the Invaders’, in Ireland ‘a Conquered, oppressed and Insulted Country the Name of England and her Power is Universally Odious…’
The Dissenters are enemies to the English Power from reason and Reflection, the Catholics from a Hatred of the English Name….
In a word, from Reflection, Interest, Prejudice, the spirit of Change, the misery of the great bulk of the nation and above all the Hatred of the English name resulting from the Tyranny of near seven centurys, there seems little doubt but an Invasion would be supported by the People.2
It is arguable that the French lost Europe, not before Moscow, but in 1797, when only a Navy in mutiny stood between them and an Ireland on the eve of rebellion.3 But the invasion, when it came, was of a different order; it was the invasion of England and Scotland by the Irish poor. And Jackson’s brief reminds us that the Irish emigration was more differentiated than is often supposed. In the years before and after ’98, the Dissenters of Ulster, the most industrialized province, were not the most loyal but the most ‘Jacobinical’ of the Irish; while it was only after the repression of the rebellion that the antagonism between the ‘Orangemen’ and ‘Papists’ was deliberately fostered by the Castle, as a means of maintaining power. The emigrants included seasonal harvest-workers from Connaught, fugitive Wexford smallholders, and Ulster artisans, who differed as greatly from each other as Cornish labourers and Manchester cotton-spinners. (The notorious Saturday night brawis were more often between Irish and Irish than between Irish and English; nor were they always religious wars – the rivalries of Leinster, Munster and Connaught were also re-enacted in the folds and courts of Preston and Batley.) Wave followed upon wave of immigration.1 Between 1790 and 1810 there was still a considerable admixture of Protestants and Ulstermen, many of them tradesmen, artisans, weavers and cotton-operatives, some of them adherents of Rights of Man. As the effects of unequal economic competition under the Union became felt, silk- and linen-weavers and cotton workers evacuated their declining industries for Manchester and Glasgow, Barnsley, Bolton and Macclesfield. In this wave came young John Doherty, who had worked in his teens in a cotton-mill in Meath, and who arrived in Manchester towards the end of the Wars, to become within a few years the greatest of the leaders of the Lancashire cotton workers.
From this time forward it was more than ever a Catholic and peasant migration. The yeomanry of Lincolnshire, a local paper noted in 1811, ‘have for many years made a point of inviting them by public advertisement’. This referred to the seasonal migrants, the harvest workers whose ‘spirit of laborious industry’ was commended, as against the ‘greedy’ Lincolnshire labourer,
who desires to make excessive wages through the necessity of the farmer, and whom half a guinea a day, at the height of the season, will not satisfy,
and who was further reproved for looking upon ‘the Irish auxiliary’ with jealousy.2 As the migration-routes became familiar, so more of the immigrants came to stay. Successive failures of the potato crop, notably the famine of 1821–2, drove forward the migration.
The mass eviction of peasant ‘freeholders’ between 1828 and 1830 swelled the numbers travelling on the crowded boats to Liverpool and Bristol. But England was ‘far from being their Mecca, and is indeed the last place they would willingly approach’. The more fortunate, who could save the passage money, were emigrating to America or Canada, and they were the most destitute who came to this country. Once here, as soon as employment was found, heroic efforts were made to send remittances back to Ireland, and often to raise the small sum needed to bring relatives across and to reunite the family in England. 1
The conditions which the greater part of the post-war immigrants left behind them were, in the language of the Blue Books, insufficient to support ‘the commonest necessaries of life’:
Their habitations are wretched hovels, several of a family sleep together upon straw or upon the bare ground… their food commonly consists of dry potatoes, and with these they are… obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal on the day…. They sometimes get a herring, or a little milk, but they never get meat except at Christmas, Easter, and Shrovetide.2
As the cheapest labour in Western Europe, this part of their story is familiar. Page after page of the Blue Books concerned with sanitary conditions, crime, housing, hand-loom weavers, are filled with accounts of the squalor which the Irish brought with them to England: of their cellar-dwellings: the paucity of furnishings and bedding: the garbage thrust out at the doors: the overcrowding: the under-cutting of English labour. Their utility to the employers in the last respect needs no stressing. A Manchester silk manufacturer declared, ‘the moment I have a turn-out and am fast for hands I send to Ireland for ten, fifteen, or twenty families…’3
But the influence of the Irish immigration was more ambivalent and more interesting than this. Paradoxically, it was the very success of the pressures effecting changes in the character-structure of the English working man which called forth the need for a supplementary labour force unmoulded by the industrial work-discipline. This discipline, as we have seen, required steady methodical application, inner motivations of sobriety, forethought, and punctilious observation of contracts; in short, the controlled paying-out of energies in skilled or semi-skilled employments. By contrast, the heavy manual occupations at the base of industrial society required a spendthrift expense of sheer physical energy – an alternation of intensive labour and boisterous relaxation which belongs to pre-industrial labour-rhythms, and for which the English artisan or weaver was unsuited both by reason of his weakened physique and his Puritan temperament.
Thus Irish labour was essential for the Industrial Revolution, not only – and perhaps not primarily – because it was ‘cheap’ (the labour of English weavers and farm workers was cheap enough in all conscience), but because the Irish peasantry had escaped the imprint of Baxter and Wesley. Demoralized in Ireland by a sub-subsistence economy or by the conacre system (by which they were reduced to semi-slavery to the farmers in return for the use of a potato patch) they had acquired a reputation for lethargy and fecklessness. Energy was no asset in a land where the good tenant was penalized by the doubling of his rent. In England they were capable of astonishing feats, showing a –
… willingness, alacrity and perseverance in the severest, the most irksome and most disagreeable kinds of coarse labour, such for instance as attending on masons, bricklayers and plasterers, excavating earth for harbours, docks, canals and roads, carrying heavy goods, loading and unloading vessels.
Dr Kay, who made inquiries as to the value of Irish labour among Lancashire employers in 1835, found that English labourers were preferred in all skilled occupations, having ‘that steady perseverance which factory employment peculiarly requires’. ‘The English are more steady, cleanly, skilful labourers, and are more faithful in the fulfilment of contracts made between master and servant.’ Although many thousands of Irish were employed in the cotton industry, ‘few, if any… are ever employed in the superior processes…; they are almost all to be found in the blowing-rooms…’ Scarcely any were placed in ‘offices of trust’, while few ‘attained the rank of spinners’. On the other hand, in unskilled occupations the position was reversed. A Birmingham employer gave evidence in 1836:
The Irish labourers will work any time…. I consider them very valuable labourers, and we could not do without them. By treating them kindly, they will do anything for you…. An Englishman could not do the work they do. When you push them they have a willingness to oblige which the English have not; they would die under anything before they would be beat; they would go at hard work till they drop before a man should excel them…
‘They require more looking after; they talk more at work’ – personal rather than economic incentives are often noted as being of most effect; good-humoured themselves, they worked best for good-humoured employers who encouraged them to mutual emulation. ‘The Irish are more violent and irritable, but they are less stubborn, sullen, and self-willed than the English.’ Their generosity and impulsiveness was easily imposed upon; it is literally true that they ‘would die… before they would be beat’. ‘In his own country he is notoriously lazy and negligent in the extreme; after crossing the channel he became a model of laboriousness and enterprise.’ Paid by piece-rate or gang-rate on the docks or at navvying, ‘they are tempted to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years. This is the case of porters, coal-heavers, and many common labourers in London,’ a high proportion of whom were Irishmen. An observer at the Liverpool docks noted the manner in which oats were loaded on to a vessel:
These men (chiefly Irishmen) received the full sacks as they were lowered by the crane off the hitch on their shoulders and carried them across the road. They pursued their heavy task during the working hours of a summer’s day at a uniform, unremitting pace, a trot of at least five miles an hour, the distance from the vessel to the storehouse being fully fifty yards… At this work a good labourer earned, at 16d. per 100 sacks, ten shillings a day; so that consequently he made seven hundred and fifty trips… carrying for half the distance a full sack of oats on his shoulder, thus performing a distance of… forty-three miles…
By the 1830s whole classes of work had passed almost entirely into the hands of Irishmen since the English either refused the menial, unpleasant tasks or could not keep up with the pace.1
Thus to an extraordinary degree the employers had the best of a labour supply from the pre-industrial and the industrialized worlds. The disciplined worker at heart disliked his work; the same character-structure which made for application and skill erected also barriers of self-respect which were not amenable to dirty or degrading tasks. A building employer, explaining why the Irish were confined to labouring rôles, gave evidence:
They scarcely ever make good mechanics; they don’t look deep into subjects; their knowledge is quick, but superficial; they don’t make good millwrights or engineers, or anything which requires thought…. If a plan is put in an Irishman’s hand, he requires looking after continuously, otherwise he will go wrong, or more probably not go on at all.
This was the consequence of ‘want of application’ rather than any ‘natural incapacity’; it was a ‘moral’ and not an ‘intellectual’ defect:
A man who has no care for the morrow, and who lives only for the passing moment, cannot bring his mind to undergo the severe discipline, and to make those patient and toilsome exertions which are required to form a good mechanic.2
The Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain, which is one of the most impressive essays in sociology among the Blue Books of the Thirties, came to this conclusion:
The Irish emigration into Britain is an example of a less civilized population spreading themselves, as a kind of substratum, beneath a more civilized community; and, without excelling in any branch of industry, obtaining possession of all the lowest departments of manual labour.
The employers found this ‘advantageous’, one master in the Potteries noted, ‘as the native population is fully employed in the more ingenious and skill-requiring works’. Nevertheless, in the view of many employers the immigration ‘has not been an unmingled benefit’. For the Irish displayed the same exuberance and indiscipline in their relaxation as in their work. ‘A large number of the labouring Irish in the manufacturing towns… spend their earnings in the following manner’:
On the Saturday night, when they receive their wages, they first pay the score at the shop… and their rent… and when their debts are thus paid, they go drinking spirits as long as the remnant of their wages holds out. On the Monday morning, they are penniless…
Maintaining a ‘fixed standard of existence, little superior to that which they observed in their own country’, they lacked the Puritan virtues of thrift and sobriety as much as those of application and forethought. Every Saturday night the streets of Manchester, Liverpool and other manufacturing towns were taken over by hundreds of drunken and brawling Irishmen.
Moreover, in a score of ways the Irishman’s virtues and vices were the opposite of those of the disciplined English artisan. The Irish had a sometimes violent, sometimes good-humoured contempt of English authority. Not only were the rulers’ laws and religion alien, but there were no community sanctions which found prosecution in the English law courts a cause of shame. Well-treated, an employer said, they were trustworthy: ‘If one among them is detected in a petty theft, the others will avoid him’. But the Irishman detected in pilfering from unpopular employers or farmers or refusing to pay rent was supported not only by the licence of his compatriots but by their collective force. A Manchester cotton master declared, there is ‘no recklessness of conduct which they do not at times display’. Constantly fighting among themselves, they turned as one man if any individual was attacked from outside. Attempts to seize illicit stills led to wars of cutlasses and brickbats, in which the Irish women were not the most backward. In Manchester’s Little Ireland attempts to serve legal executions for rent, debt, or taxes, had to be conducted like a minor military action against an embattled population. ‘It is extremely dangerous,’ said the Deputy Constable of Manchester in 1836, ‘to execute a warrant in a factory where many Irish are employed; they will throw bricks and stones on the officers’ heads as they are coming up stairs…’ And the Superintendent of the Manchester Watch gave evidence that –
… in order to apprehend one Irishman in the Irish parts of the town, we are forced to take from ten or twenty, or even more, watchmen. The whole neighbourhood turn out with weapons; even women, half-naked, carrying brickbats and stones for the men to throw. A man will resist, fighting and struggling, in order to gain time till his friends collect for a rescue…1
These Irish were neither stupid nor barbarians. Mayhew often remarked upon their generosity, their ‘powers of speech and quickness of apprehension’. They adhered to a different value-system than that of the English artisan; and in shocking English proprieties one feels that they often enjoyed themselves and acted up the part. Often, a Bolton attorney recalled, they played the fool in the dock, bringing forward a tribe of countrymen as ‘character witnesses’, showing an acute knowledge of legal procedure in their prevarications, and making magistrates dizzy with their blarney. The same disregard for veracity made many of them consummate beggars. Generous to each other, if they saved money it was for some definite project – emigration to Canada or marriage. To bring wives and children, brothers and sisters, to England they would ‘treasure up halfpenny after halfpenny’ for years, but ‘they will not save to preserve either themselves or their children from the degradation of a workhouse…’ As street-sellers they remained in the poorest grades, as hawkers or rag-dealers; their temperament, Mayhew dryly commented, was not adapted to ‘buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest’. To the English Poor Laws they maintained a cheerful predatory attitude. They turned the obsolete Settlement Laws to their advantage, joy-riding up and down the country at parochial expense (and who would know whether Manchester was or was not the parish of origin of Paddy M’Guire?) and slipping out of the overseer’s cart when the stopping-place seemed congenial. They would accept parochial relief ‘without the least sense of shame’.1
This was an unsettling element in the formative working-class community – a seemingly inexhaustible flow of reinforcements to man the battlements of Satan’s strongholds. In some towns the Irish were partially segregated in their own streets and quarters. In London in 1850 Mayhew found them in the labyrinth of alleys off Rosemary-lane, in whose folds could be seen ‘rough-headed urchins running with their feet bare through the puddles, and bonnetless girls, huddled in shawls, lolling against the door-posts’. In the cellars of Manchester and Leeds there was a similar segregation. And there was also the segregation of religion. In 1800 the native working-class population which adhered to the Catholic faith was minuscule. In the Irish immigration the Catholic Church saw evidence of a divine plan to recover England to the Faith; and wherever the Irish went, the priests followed closely after. Moreover, this Irish priesthood was poorer and closer to the peasantry than any in Europe. With an average income which has been estimated at £65 a year, in a literal sense they lived off their flocks, taking their meals in the homes of their parishioners and dependent on their goodwill. ‘The priest,’ said the Protestant Bishop of Waterford,
must follow the impulse of the popular wave, or be left behind on the beach to perish…. ‘Live with me and live as I do; oppress me not with superior learning or refinement, take thankfully what I choose to give you, and earn it by compliance with my political creed or conduct.’ Such… is the language of the Irish cottager to his priest.
The Catholic Bishop of Waterford confirmed this in a striking charge to his clergy in 1797:
Do not permit yourselves to be made instruments of the rich of this world, who will try… to make instruments of you, over the poor, for their own temporal purposes…. The poor were always your friends – they inflexibly adhered to you, and to their religion, even in the worst of times. They shared their scanty meal with you, and with your predecessors…. If they had… imitated the conduct of the rich, who not only shut their doors against you, but not unfrequently hunted you like wild beasts, I should not be able to address the present respectable body of clergy under my spiritual authority…
A Church which had found a priest to ride at the head of the insurrectionists at Wexford, and another (O’Coigly) to suffer on the scaffold in England, was deeply involved in the national aspirations of the peasantry; for thirty years after 1810, Daniel O’Connell sought (mainly through the Catholic Association) to employ the priesthood as auxiliary political agitators. When the Irish poor came to England, the priesthood used every means – devoted ministration (with a knowledge of the mind of their parishioners which no English clergy could equal), psychological terror, financial aid and financial extortion, pressure on relatives, comfort in distress – to maintain their hold on their flock; and they trusted to the only form of evangelism likely to succeed in Protestant England: the birth-rate. English coal-whippers, navvies, or costermongers were, many of them, ‘heathens’; their Irish analogues attended Mass. The priest was the only authority to whom the Irish labourers showed any deference. A Catholic Canon could quell a Saturday night riot in Bolton where the magistrates failed. When Mayhew accompanied one priest on the round of his flock:
Everywhere the people ran out to meet him…. Women crowded to their door-steps, and came creeping up from the cellars through the trap-doors, merely to curtsey to him…. Even as the priest walked along the street, boys running at full speed would pull up to touch their hair…1
Indeed, for many of the migrants the power of the priest increased. Torn up by their roots, the priest was the last point of orientation with their old way of life. Literate but not far removed in social class, free from identification with English employers and authorities, sometimes knowing the Gaelic, the priest passed more frequently between England and Ireland, brought news of home and sometimes of relatives, could be entrusted with remittances, savings or messages. Hence it followed that the most enduring cultural tradition which the Irish peasantry brought – to the third and fourth generation – into England was that of a semi-feudal nationalist Church. In the most squalid cellars there might still be found some of the hocus-pocus of Romanism, the candlesticks, the crucifix, and the ‘showy-coloured prints of saints and martyrs’ alongside the print of O’Connell, the ‘Liberator’. The enormously rich inheritance of Irish song and folklore perished, by contrast, often with the first generation. The immigrants might continue for a time the customs of their villages, visiting each others’ dwellings ‘where they jig and reel furiously’. But with their children the fiddle, the pipe, and the Gaelic were laid aside.
If they were segregated in some towns, the Irish were never pressed back into ghettoes. It would have been difficult to have made a people who spoke the same language and were British citizens under the Act of Union into a subject minority. There was a great deal of inter-marriage. And it is not the friction but the relative ease with which the Irish were absorbed into working-class communities which is remarkable. There were, of course, many riots, especially where Irish and English unskilled labour was in direct competition – in the building industry or on the docks. In the 1830s and 1840s pitched battles, with mortal casualties, took place among railway navvies. In London in particular anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling remained strong; each stage in the long parliamentary contest for Catholic Emancipation (1800–1829) took place against a background of scurrilous anti-Papal broadsheets and ballads, while as late as 1850 the appointment of Catholic bishops led to effigy-burnings and the outcry of ‘Papal Aggression’. Mayhew found ‘patterers’ and ‘chaunters’ who regarded a good anti-Papal patter as being as lucrative as a good murder:
Monks and Nuns and fools afloat,
We’ll have no bulls shoved down our throat,
Cheer up and shout down with the Pope,
And his bishop cardinal Wiseman.
But none of the chaunts or litanies recorded by Mayhew included any reference to the Irish. Most harked back to the folklore of Smithfield burnings and national sentiment, on the lines of ‘Old English John Bull’s Reply to the Papal Bull of Rome’. The cellar-dwellers off Rosemary-lane could hardly be assimilated to the folklore of alien aggression.1
On the contrary, there were many reasons why English Radicalism or Chartism, and Irish nationalism, should make common cause, although the alliance was never free from tensions. Antagonism could scarcely take racialist forms in the Army, Navy, or in the northern mill-towns, in all of which the Irish fought or worked side-by-side with English fellow victims. From the days of the United Irishmen – and the time when the Irish with their shillelaghs had helped in the defence of Thomas Hardy’s house – a conscious political alliance had been maintained. English reformers generally supported the cause of Catholic Emancipation; for years Sir Francis Burdett was its foremost parliamentary champion, while Cobbett furthered the cause not only in the Political Register but also in his myth-making History of the Protestant Reformation in England (1823) in which the origin of Old Corruption and ‘the Thing’ was traced back to the Tudor despoliation of monasteries and charitable foundations. Radical publicists also kept alive memories of the savage repression of 1798, and Hone, Cruikshank and Wooler pursued Castlereagh (‘Derry-Down-Triangle’) without mercy for his complicity in the tortures and floggings. Roger O’Connor, the father of Feargus, was a close friend of Burdett and was at one time mooted as Burdett’s fellow member for Westminster. In 1828 the Radical and anti-O’Connellite London Irish formed an Association for Civil and Political Liberty, which had Hunt’s and Cobbett’s support, which cooperated closely with advanced English Radicals, and which was one of the precursors of the National Union of the Working Classes (1830) – itself the forerunner of the Chartist London Working Men’s Association (1836).1
There is thus a clear consecutive alliance between Irish nationalism and English Radicalism between 1790 and 1850, at times enlivened and confused by the fortunes of the O’Connor family. But in the Midlands and the north the influence of the Irish immigration was less explicit. For more than twenty years after 1798 one Irish county after another was swept by agrarian disturbances, in which secret societies – Threshers, Caravats, Shanavests, Tommy Downshires, Carders, Ribbon-men, and the later Molly Maguires – employed different forms of terrorism to defend tenant rights, hold down rents and prices, resist tithes, or drive out English landlords. In 1806 the Threshers virtually controlled Connaught, in 1810 the feuding Caravats and Shanavests were active in Tipperary, Kerry, Waterford; in 1813 disturbances spread to Meath, King’s County and Limerick; while during the potato famine of 1821–2 disturbances spread throughout Munster, Leinster and parts of Connaught. Gun-law, the holding of hostages for execution by both sides, local feuds, robbery of arms, forced collections of money – the pent-up waters of agrarian hatred burst out in one place as soon as they had been dammed, by means of executions and transportations, in another. The countryside exhibited, the Irish Solicitor-General lamented in 1811, the ‘formidable consequences of an armed peasantry, and a disarmed gentry’. The Lord Chief Baron, sentencing to death a boy scarcely in his teens for stealing arms, declared:
Can it be endured, that those persons who are labouring by day, should be legislating by night? – that those who are tilling the ground by day, should be enacting laws by night to govern the country?
Many Irish immigrants, like Thomas Devyr of Donegal – who became Secretary to the Chartist Northern Political Union – had been accustomed in their youth to hear the ‘heavy tramp’ of men ‘in semi-military array’ through the village street at night.1
We can cite no actual biographies (what Irishman, in an English court, would have confessed to former membership of the Carders or ‘Levellers’?) but there can be no doubt that some of the immigrants brought with them the traditions of these secret organizations. Their influence will be noted in 1800–1802 and during the Luddite years.2 The rapid movement of men with blackened faces at night, the robbery of arms, the houghing of horses and cattle – these were methods in which many Irishmen had served an apprenticeship. Moreover, the existence of Irish colonies in all the manufacturing towns made for rapidity of communication. It contributed to the natural freemasonry of the disinherited; if the Irish were quick to quarrel, they were also quick to come to each others’ aid.
If many of the peasantry brought their revolutionary inheritance with them, the priesthood did not. It was no part of the Church’s desire to attract attention to the growing Catholic minority in Britain or to bring further disabilities down upon it. In the 1830s the politics of the priesthood went no further than allegiance to O’Connell; and O’Connell, who had abandoned the forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland in exchange for Emancipation, who voted against the 10 Hour Bill, and who confused and confounded his more critical countrymen in England by his egotism, his rhetorical royalism, and his in-and-out running with the Whigs, illustrates the alliance between Irish nationalism and English Radicalism at its weakest point. Hence, alone among the churches in England, the Catholic Church produced no ‘maverick’ clergy who became prominent in national radical movements. And although the Irish labourers were quick to join combinations, most of them worked in unskilled trades where unionism was weakest. Hence they produced few articulate leaders in the English movement. (John Doherty, with his tenacious attention to trade union organization, and his conscious adaptation of some of O’Connell’s organizational methods to the National Association for the Protection of Labour (1829), was an exception.) The Irish influence is most felt in a rebellious disposition in the communities and places of work; in a disposition to challenge authority, to resort to the threat of ‘physical force’, and to refuse to be intimidated by the inhibitions of constitutionalism. The Irish were, a Catholic priest admitted in 1836, ‘more prone to take part in trades unions, combinations and secret societies than the English’. ‘They are the talkers and ring-leaders on all occasions,’ claimed another witness. Engels saw the ‘passionate, mercurial Irish temperament’ as the precipitate which brought the more disciplined and reserved English workers to the point of political action:
… the mixing of the more facile, exitable, fiery Irish temperament with the stable, reasoning, persevering English must, in the long run, be productive only of good for both. The rough egotism of the English bourgeoisie would have kept its hold on the working-class much more firmly if the Irish nature, generous to a fault, and ruled primarily by sentiment, had not intervened, and softened the cold, rational English character in part by a mixture of the races, and in part by the ordinary contact of life.1
We may dispute Engels’ language of ‘nature’ and ‘race’. But we need only replace these terms to find that his judgement is valid. It was an advantage to the employers, at a time when precision engineering coexisted with tunnelling by means of shovel and pick, to be able to call upon both types of labour. But the price which had to be paid was the confluence of sophisticated political Radicalism with a more primitive and excitable revolutionism. This confluence came in the Chartist movement; and when Feargus O’Connor broke with O’Connell, and Bronterre O’Brien adapted the socialism of land nationalization to English conditions, it threatened to bring with it an even greater danger. Once before, in the 1790s, when Féargus’s uncle, Arthur O’Connor, had been arrested with O’Coigly and Binns at Maidstone, it seemed possible that English Jacobinism and Irish nationalism would engage in a common revolutionary strategy. If O’Connor had been able to carry Ireland with him as he carried the north of England, then the Chartist and ‘Young Ireland’ movements might have come to a common insurrectionary flash-point. The reservations of the ‘moral force’ Chartists on the one hand, and the influence of O’Connell and the priesthood on the other, together with the terrible demoralization of the ‘Great Hunger’, prevented this from happening. But this lies beyond the limits of this study.
IV. MYRIADS OF ETERNITY
If we can now see more clearly many of the elements which made up the working-class communities of the early nineteenth century, a definitive answer to the ‘standard-of-living’ controversy must still evade us. For beneath the word ‘standard’ we must always find judgements of value as well as questions of fact. Values, we hope to have shown, are not ‘imponderables’ which the historian may safely dismiss with the reflection that, since they are not amenable to measurement, anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. They are, on the contrary, those questions of human satisfaction, and of the direction of social change, which the historian ought to ponder if history is to claim a position among the significant humanities.
The historian, or the historical sociologist, must in fact be concerned with judgements of value in two forms. In the first instance, he is concerned with the values actually held by those who lived through the Industrial Revolution. The old and newer modes of production each supported distinct kinds of community with characteristic ways of life. Alternative conventions and notions of human satisfaction were in conflict with each other, and there is no shortage of evidence if we wish to study the ensuing tensions.
In the second instance, he is concerned with making some judgement of value upon the whole process entailed in the Industrial Revolution of which we ourselves are an end-product. It is our own involvement which makes judgement difficult. And yet we are helped towards a certain detachment, both by the ‘romantic’ critique of industrialism which stems from one part of the experience, and by the record of tenacious resistance by which hand-loom weaver, artisan or village craftsman confronted this experience and held fast to an alternative culture. As we see them change, so we see how we became what we are. We understand more clearly what was lost, what was driven ‘underground’, what is still unresolved.
Any evaluation of the quality of life must entail an assessment of the total life-experience, the manifold satisfactions or deprivations, cultural as well as material, of the people concerned. From such a standpoint, the older ‘cataclysmic’ view of the Industrial Revolution must still be accepted. During the years between 1780 and 1840 the people of Britain suffered an experience of immiseration, even if it is possible to show a small statistical improvement in material conditions. When Sir Charles Snow tells us that ‘with singular unanimity… the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them’, we must reply, with Dr Leavis, that the ‘actual history’ of the ‘full human problem [was] incomparably and poignantly more complex than that’.1 Some were lured from the countryside by the glitter and promise of wages of the industrial town; but the old village economy was crumbling at their backs. They moved less by their own will than at the dictate of external compulsions which they could not question: the enclosures, the Wars, the Poor Laws, the decline of rural industries, the counter-revolutionary stance of their rulers.
The process of industrialization is necessarily painful. It must involve the erosion of traditional patterns of life. But it was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain. It was unrelieved by any sense of national participation in communal effort, such as is found in countries undergoing a national revolution. Its ideology was that of the masters alone. Its messianic prophet was Dr Andrew Ure, who saw the factory system as ‘the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globe’, diffusing ‘the life-blood of science and religion to myriads… still lying “in the region and shadow of death”.’1 But those who served it did not feel this to be so, any more than those ‘myriads’ who were served. The experience of immiseration came upon them in a hundred different forms; for the field labourer, the loss of his common rights and the vestiges of village democracy; for the artisan, the loss of his craftsman’s status; for the weaver, the loss of livelihood and of independence; for the child, the loss of work and play in the home; for many groups of workers whose real earnings improved, the loss of security, leisure and the deterioration of the urban environment. R. M. Martin, who gave evidence before the Hand-Loom Weavers’ Committee of 1834, and who had returned to England after an absence from Europe of ten years, was struck by the evidence of physical and spiritual deterioration:
I have observed it not only in the manufacturing but also in agricultural communities in the country; they seem to have lost their animation, their vivacity, their field games and their village sports; they have become a sordid, discontented, miserable, anxious, struggling people, without health, or gaiety, or happiness.
It is misleading to search for explanations in what Professor Ashton has rightly described as ‘tedious’ phrases, – man’s ‘divorce’ from ‘nature’ or ‘the soil’. After the ‘Last Labourers’ Revolt’, the Wiltshire field labourers – who were close enough to ‘nature’ – were far worse degraded than the Lancashire mill girls. This violence was done to human nature. From one standpoint, it may be seen as the outcome of the pursuit of profit, when the cupidity of the owners of the means of production was freed from old sanctions and had not yet been subjected to new means of social control. In this sense we may still read it, as Marx did, as the violence of the capitalist class. From another standpoint, it may be seen as a violent technological differentiation between work and life.
It is neither poverty nor disease but work itself which casts the blackest shadow over the years of the Industrial Revolution. It is Blake, himself a craftsman by training, who gives us the experience:
Then left the sons of Urizen the plow & harrow, the loom,
The hammer & the chisel & and the rule & compasses…
And all the arts of life they chang’d into the arts of death.
The hour glass contemn’d because its simple workmanship
Was as the workmanship of the plowman & the water wheel
That raises water into Cisterns, broken & burn’d in fire
Because its workmanship was like the workmanship of the shepherds
And in their stead intricate wheels invented, Wheel without wheel,
To perplex youth in their outgoings & to bind to labours
Of day & night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file
And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious workmanship,
Kept ignorant of the use that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread,
In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All,
And call it demonstration, blind to all the simple rules of life.
These ‘myriads of eternity’ seem at times to have been sealed in their work like a tomb. Their best efforts, over a lifetime, and supported by their own friendly societies, could scarcely ensure them that to which so high a popular value was attached – a ‘Decent Funeral’. New skills were arising, old satisfactions persisted, but over all we feel the general pressure of long hours of unsatisfying labour under severe discipline for alien purposes. This was at the source of that ‘ugliness’ which, D. H. Lawrence wrote, ‘betrayed the spirit of man in the nineteenth century’.1 After all other impressions fade, this one remains; together with that of the loss of any felt cohesion in the community, save that which the working people, in antagonism to their labour and to their masters, built for themselves.