1853 There are few topics on which one can find Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, and Mrs Gaskell engaged in discussing the same event. The Great Preston Lockout was one.
For years, workers in the (immensely profitable) cotton mills of Lancashire had agitated and unionised for higher wages: ‘ten percent’ was the slogan. The masters resisted and, on 16 September 1853 – in the face of a threatened walkout by the labour force, or ‘operatives’ as Victorians called them – closed the factory doors. The intention was to starve their workforce into docile submission. As many as 20,000 workers were involved. Karl Marx was quick to perceive the episode as potentially revolutionary, following a street riot in late October. In the York Daily Tribune, 1 November 1853, he declared:
While the first cannon bullets have been exchanged in the war of the Russians against Europe, the first blood has been spilt in the war now raging in the manufacturing districts, of capital against labor.
The days of the ‘millocrats’ were, Marx believed, numbered (ironically his own income came, substantially, in the form of handouts from the millocrat Engels). ‘Our St Petersburg is at Preston!’ was the communists’ rallying cry.
Dickens was less sure. Now the proprietor of a weekly newspaper, Household Words, he made a personal trip to Preston in early February 1854 and wrote an article, ‘On Strike’, based on what he saw there. Declaring himself a friend to both employers and employees, Dickens reserved his criticism for the trade union organisers – particularly the rabble-rouser, ‘Gruffshaw’, from London (in historical fact the relatively unradical George Cowell, further satirised as ‘Slackbridge’ in Hard Times). Dickens’ conclusion was that:
This strike and lock-out is a deplorable calamity. In its waste of time, in its waste of a great people’s energy, in its waste of wages, in its waste of wealth that seeks to be employed, in its encroachment on the means of many thousands who are labouring from day to day it is a great national affliction.
The first-hand experience, and the long continuation of the dispute, inspired Dickens to write his only novel set outside London, Hard Times, serialised in Household Words from April to August 1854. In the novel, Dickens moved round to a more direct attack on the masters – in the form of the odious hypocrite Bounderby. But his conclusion is that of the saintly mill-worker, Stephen Blackpool: ‘A muddle! Aw a muddle!’
The union funds were less ample than those of the masters, who recruited ‘knobsticks’ (i.e. scabs) from Ireland to break the Lancashire workers’ resolve. ‘Hands’ began to trickle back in spring 1854 and on May Day, at a rally of 10,000 men, it was decided to sanction a return to work.
Dickens was still exercised by the upheaval, and he commissioned an after-the-event serial from the Lancashire novelist Mrs Gaskell, North and South, serialised in Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855. In her novel, Gaskell is at pains to be scrupulously fair to the mill-owners (whom she had earlier criticised in Mary Barton). Margaret Hale is transplanted from a comfortable life in Hampshire to ‘Milton-Northern’ (i.e. Manchester) when her clergyman father’s ‘doubts’ force him to leave the Anglican Church. Initially appalled, Margaret is gradually won over by the rough northern community and its tough (but moral) textile workers. Her southern softness tempers the hardness of the factory-owner Thornton and helps bring about an acceptable end to a savage strike.
Marx, equally hopefully, foresaw less happy endings.