Men at Work
Week after week, and month after month, and season after season, for a period of nine years, the very prime of my manhood, did I thus drudge [in a tan-yard] … My past reverses and pressing necessities had taught me the value of regular employment. (’Jacques’, 1 November 1856)
As a miner I did very well and made my earning about seven pounds a month. (Oliver, p. 18)
SINCE THE MOMENT that the term ‘industrial revolution’ entered our language, most writers have believed that the process went hand in hand with the destruction of older, more benign, working patterns. Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England gave an unflattering, and hugely influential, account of the newly created factory system. He informed his middle-class readers of the ill health, physical deformities and accidents caused by very long hours of work at machines; and the discipline, oppressive and petty in equal measure, that subjugated the hapless worker to fines for lateness, but also for activities as innocuous as singing, whistling and laughing.1 Of course, there were the factory apologists who found social progress and happiness for all in the move towards mechanised industry. But claims (such as those of Andrew Ure) that factory workers enjoyed light labour in pleasant conditions and that whatever ill health they suffered stemmed from their tendency to consume the wrong sort of bacon and too much tobacco and gin displayed such ignorance and insensitivity that they failed to make any impression on subsequent assessments of work during the ‘Bleak Age’.2
If the outlines of the dark view were first sketched by Engels, historians of the twentieth century added much of the subsequent shading. A succession of pioneering social histories painted an unremittingly grim picture, with the imposition of longer hours, the subordination of the individual worker, and the introduction of work that was more monotonous, more intensive, and less meaningful.3 As E. P. Thompson summarised with his usual eloquence: ‘It is neither poverty nor disease but work itself which cast the blackest shadow over the years of the Industrial Revolution … long hours of unsatisfying labour under severe discipline for alien purposes’.4 More recent academic judgements slot neatly into the same framework, providing a little more detail, illuminating the odd unexplored corner, but not, ultimately, disturbing the perceived wisdom. Yes, working hours were extended.5 Yes, the position of the traditional artisan and skilled labourer was eroded.6 Yes, factory discipline and new working methods rendered workloads more intensive and relentless.7 And yes, punitive criminal sanctions were used to coerce labour from a supposedly ‘free’ labour force.8
At first blush, the autobiographies seem to amply confirm the historians’ grim assessments. Take William Dodd’s account of his life as a factory boy. Starting work at a Cumbrian woollen mill at the tender age of six, William’s life entered a period of ‘uninterrupted, unmitigated suffering’.9 The long hours and unnatural posture at the spinning machines soon left him with seriously bowed knees. By early adulthood, William was (in his own words) a ‘miserable cripple’.10 The noxious smells, deafening machines, unnatural rhythms, extremes of heat and cold, and deformed bodies – all were recounted in careful detail. The injustice of ‘toiling and sweating day after day for the bare necessities of life [while] the manufacturers were amassing immense wealth’ left William disgusted with the system.11 He quit in his early thirties, in search of a better life outside the confines of the factory walls.
But using life-writing to retell the dark story of the industrial revolution is not quite such an easy or straightforward matter. William Dodd, after all, was active in the factory reform movement, so it would surely be naïve to imagine that his political convictions did not colour his account of life as a factory child. He was also describing experiences from childhood. Writers tended to remember their adult years in the mill, mine or forge in a far more positive light. Recalling his seven-year apprenticeship in a Lancashire factory, one anonymous writer declared that he ‘was never as happy as I was at that time’.12 Still working at the mill during the early years of his marriage, he and his new wife enjoyed plenty of money and good furniture. No wonder then that ‘things went on very smoothly for a long time’.13
In Scotland, the cotton mills held out similar attractions to Charles Campbell. By any measure, Campbell led a chequered life. He spent his childhood working in a cotton mill in the lowland town of Johnstone, but as a young adult decided to exchange the monotony of Johnstone for a life on the seas. There he certainly found the adventure he sought. When his captain and most of his crew were killed by yellow fever, he ended up spending two years working in the West Indies. The experience was enough to persuade him to make his living once more on British soil. On his return to Scotland he gained enough medical training from Glasgow University to establish a small medical practice in a west Highland village. But when this failed to pay its way, Campbell decided to seek out a ‘more congenial situation’.14 What did he choose? What, for a man who had spent his youth in a cotton mill, could be more congenial than a small country medical practice? Campbell knew of something better. He became a spinner in one of Glasgow’s many cotton factories, where he earned a hefty 30 shillings a week. For these workers, the good wages and regular work that could be found in the factories more than compensated for the clatter of the machines. Some writers, it seems, simply refused to tell the story of working lives blighted by the advent of mechanisation.
These difficulties are compounded by the slant of our sources. Some writers took up the pen precisely because they had been born into a life of illiteracy and hard, manual labour but managed by dint of perseverance to escape the life mapped out at birth. They became teachers, preachers, poets, scientists, politicians: at some stage leaving behind their overalls and smocks and taking up a more comfortable job sitting down in the warm. For these men manual labour was effectively a life stage, rather than, as it was for most ordinary workers, a continuous state that lasted as long as their capacity to perform it. Then there is the uneven spread of records over the pre-industrial and industrial eras. As we move back in time, fewer autobiographies survive, and those that exist become ever less concerned with temporal matters. The result is that working lives before the industrial revolution are usually discussed in the most cursory of terms. So despite the relative abundance of our source material, there are gaps and imbalances that make it difficult to get at the truth about the nature of work for the labouring poor and the way in which it changed with industrialisation.
Difficult, but not impossible. Making sense of our autobiographers’ stories requires defining with care the questions that need to be answered. It is my belief that opportunities in the workplace were brighter for adult men in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than they had been at any other time in the eighteenth century or before. Work, and more particularly the wages that went with it, was a powerful tool for raising a man’s status within his family and his community. The trouble historically has been that there simply was not enough work to go around. Not enough, at least, to provide workers with much independence from their employers or to allow them much autonomy in their personal lives. Autobiographies can shed light upon some of these issues. With nearly 350, it is possible to identify genuine developments in the extent and nature of work available in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.15
An idea of the scope of the autobiographies can be captured by looking at Edward Barlow’s ‘journal’, a handwritten memoir of the early eighteenth century which recounts his successful career as first sailor, then captain. Barlow was born in 1642 in Prestwich, then a village about five miles from Manchester, now a settlement physically connected to the city through urban sprawl and subsumed administratively by the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester. Barlow was not the only autobiographer who ‘never had any great mind to country work’. Ploughing, sowing, haymaking, reaping, hedging, ditching, threshing and dunging amongst cattle were all, in his opinion, ‘drudgery’.16 But his prospects for quitting the plough in mid-seventeenth-century Lancashire were not bright. His parents lacked the means to provide him with an apprenticeship, and in any case, nobody in the neighbourhood seemed to need an apprentice. Eventually an opening with a whitester came up. The work involved bleaching yarn for the weaving trade. He went on a ‘liking’ – a trial period – but returned two weeks later informing his parents that he did not in fact like it at all, and persuaded them to let him come back. But resettling at home was not straightforward. Returning to his village after refusing to be bound apprentice to a trade he did not like, he faced his father’s displeasure and comments from the neighbours, ‘asking why I could not stay at my place … [and] hitting me in the teeth’.17 The good folk of Prestwich, it seems, did not take too kindly to the return of a neighbour who had turned down work in Manchester and had nothing better to say for himself than that he did not like it.
Several clues in Barlow’s account indicate that work around mid-seventeenth-century Prestwich was in short supply. Prior to his apprenticeship to the whitester, Barlow was clearly not fully employed – he described himself as ‘troublesome’ to his parents when ‘out of work’. And even when in work, he earned ‘but small wages’. Yet despite his small and irregular earnings, he continued in Prestwich for some years as nobody in the neighbourhood was hiring apprentices: he stayed with his parents until ‘at last’ his father heard of a man ‘willing to take an apprentice’. This small whitester’s business was not even at work the year round: during the winter they ‘worked but little at the trade’, so they did threshing, hedging, ditching and ‘other country work’ instead. Then there was the response of his neighbours when he turned down work with the whitester and returned to the village. Their hostility to the return of one of their own suggests they did not welcome another pair of hands competing for work in the village – too many workers posed a serious problem when one day’s work bought the next day’s meal. Using autobiographies to capture the changes in men’s working lives during the period of industrialisation is not straightforward. Nonetheless, Barlow’s account of trying to earn a living in the seventeenth century offers a clue to some of the questions that we might ask in order to make sense of the ways in which working lives changed over the following two centuries.
Let us begin by looking at the world of skilled labour – the shoemakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, butchers and other artisans who formed the backbone of the pre-industrial, urban economy. Though the factories and mines provide us with the most dramatic manifestation of industrial growth, large numbers continued to find employment in a raft of occupations whose processes were changed hardly at all by new working methods. The traditional way of learning such trades was by apprenticeship, worked according to a legally binding contract between master and apprentice, with obligations on either side. The usual expectation was that the master would provide lodging, board, training, and often wages as well, for a set period of time, typically seven years. In return for this training, the apprentice’s family paid an upfront fee, or premium, and the apprentice himself was bound to work for his master, accepting below-market wages or sometimes even no wages at all. At the end of the specified term, the apprentice’s indentures were cancelled and he obtained his ‘freedom’: the freedom to leave his master and to work at his trade for whomever he pleased. The Statute of Artificers, 1562, had limited the practice of most skilled trades to those who had served their time, so despite the expense an apprenticeship had the potential to secure very real long-term advantages in the workplace.18
The skeleton of the apprenticeship system was still visible in the late eighteenth century, though much had changed since Barlow’s time. Over the century, terms were becoming shorter and by the century’s end the prohibition on trading without an apprenticeship was in many trades a dead letter, though it was not until the repeal of the relevant clauses of the Statute of Artificers Act in 1814 that it was formally abolished.19 The autobiographies let us sketch out the ways in which these changes altered the daily life of skilled artisans. Above all, our working-class writers illustrate how the unmaking of some elements of the apprenticeship system introduced a new degree of fluidity and openness to the world of skilled labour, especialy in two of the most common and easily learned trades – shoemaking and tailoring.
In the 1760s, Thomas Hardy was the first of several autobiographers to take advantage of easier, cheaper and more flexible ways of learning a skilled trade. Hardy’s family had fallen upon hard times following his father’s death, so his mother, unable to pay the premium for an apprenticeship, sent young Thomas to learn shoemaking from her father. When he had taught him all he knew, Thomas moved to Glasgow to improve his skills by working in a better-class establishment.20 Within a matter of years, Thomas was making his living as shoemaker, despite never having served an apprenticeship. In subsequent years, these kinds of stories about the learning of shoemaking and tailoring resurface many times.21 Thomas Carter, for instance, learned the tailoring trade in this way. His father was a day labourer with a heavy drinking habit, and there was no question of his summoning the means to pay for an apprenticeship. But Thomas’ parents did manage to find him a position as an errand boy to a prosperous woollen-draper who employed twelve men in his tailors’ shop. By rising early and spending the first hour of the day assisting one of the tailors, Thomas learned just enough about clothes-making to subsequently set himself up in business as a tailor.22
By the early nineteenth century, tailors and shoemakers were more likely to learn their skills outside an apprenticeship than within. They picked up the rudiments of their trade while working as a dogsbody in a workshop.23 Some perfected their skills later by paying for teaching from a more highly skilled, urban craftsman. A similar route was taken by many of the bakers, butchers, carpenters, coopers, metalworkers and shipwrights.24 Other more unusual trades were also accessible outside the apprenticeship system. Amongst those who became skilled labourers without ever mustering the means to pay their master a premium were a coach-trimmer, chair-maker, knife-grinder, shopkeeper, and a maker of pearl ornaments.25
The creation of new ways to learn a skilled trade has sometimes been dismissed as evidence of the ‘deskilling’ of the independent artisan that occurred during the industrial revolution.26 But the beauty of skilled labour is very much in the eye of the beholder. Of course, the protected status of those who had served an apprenticeship was valuable to the fortunate few; but it did little for those who by dint of poverty were left outside. From their perspective, the relaxation of entry to the trades was wholly advantageous. Take, for example, the experiences of Thomas Dunning. Thomas’ family was never going to pay for him to learn a skilled trade. His father had chosen to remain in service following his marriage, leaving his wife to raise their two sons alone. Given Mrs Dunning’s desperate attempts to earn a little money, it seems unlikely that her husband was sending much, if any, of his wages home. When he lost his place in service, his contribution to the family’s welfare deteriorated further: he stole his wife’s linen and other household goods, then found Thomas at work and begged him to give him what little money he had. Thomas’ ‘poor dear mother’, meanwhile, was so reduced in circumstances that she had left her youngest son in the care of a friend and returned to service. It seems highly unlikely that this man would willingly pay for his son’s apprenticeship, while his wife was clearly unable to do so. So at the age of twelve, instead of entering an apprenticeship, he ‘had to turn out … to earn a few shillings and a bit of food’.27
But following the death of his father, matters for Thomas began to look up. His mother married a ‘shoe manufacturer’ and rather than see her son depart as a merchant sailor for the East India Company, she persuaded her new husband to teach him shoemaking instead. This he did, and Thomas quickly became proficient in his stepfather’s line of business – rough shoes for the workpeople of Lancashire. As Thomas wished to ‘master the best class of ladies’ boots and shoes’, however, he left off working for his step-father and went to lodge with the Cooke brothers, excellent shoemakers who agreed to teach him ‘to finish best goods suitable for the first-rate shop in town’ in return for payment. From these men he learned how to make fine ladies’ shoes, and worked at this for several years.28 Through most of the eighteenth century, the poverty and misfortune of Thomas’ family would have prevented him from entering an apprenticeship and closed down the possibility of his ever becoming a shoemaker. In the 1820s, by contrast, he was able to take advantage of well-established alternative routes to the world of skilled labour.
It was only in the most skilled and complex trades that apprenticeships remained the norm. Almost none of the many printers amongst the autobiographers, for example, had learned their work outside a formal, seven-year apprenticeship.29 None of the wood carvers and gilders, or cutlers had.30 Elsewhere, skilled workmen sought to keep the doors to their ranks firmly closed to those who had not served their time. Trade societies were stripped of their legal power to restrict the practice of their trade by the new legislation of 1814. Nonetheless, determined and united workmen could be a powerful force keeping the unwelcome out, as the future leader of the Chartist movement, William Lovett, found to his cost.
Lovett had been born in the Cornish fishing town of Newlyn, a mile from Penzance, in 1800. His mother raised him alone following the early death of her husband and somehow found the means to pay for her son’s apprenticeship. Their choice of trade – the dying Cornish rope-making industry – could hardly have been more unfortunate. Even before the end of his seven-year term, the trade had become so bad that his master was unable to pay his wages. His indentures had to be cancelled and Lovett was forced to find alternative employment, working first on the fishing boats, and then with a carpenter. But the sight of a poor boy learning the carpentry trade without being apprenticed was enough to arouse some of the local apprentices’ jealousy. Two young men from Penzance came to Lovett’s employer and muttered enough about the ‘legal consequences’ of hiring an untrained carpenter for his master to break the engagement.
Unable to find work in Cornwall, Lovett made the long trek to London. Either the country carpenter had taught him well or Lovett was especially talented, for soon he was busily employed by a firm of cabinetmakers, working in the most skilled branch of the trade. But no sooner had he found himself a position in one of the finest cabinet-making shops in London than the hostility of carpenters who had served their time surfaced once more. His new workmates took a very dim view of the arrival of a man who had never been properly apprenticed to the trade and agreed to set ‘Mother Shorney’ at him. As Lovett explained, this meant ‘the putting away of your tools, the injuring of your work, and annoying you in such a way as to drive you out of the shop’. Lovett responded by deploying the skills that would later prove such an asset to the Chartist movement. He called a meeting with his workmates, explained how he had wasted his youth learning a trade that was ‘comparatively useless, and appealed to their sense of justice to determine whether it was right to prevent me from learning another’.31 Needless to say, after Lovett had put his case justice won the day. But Lovett was a remarkable man and his entry to the highly skilled world of cabinet-making without serving an apprenticeship was unusual: he was certainly the only one amongst the autobiographers to do so.
So tradition and protectionism kept the gates barred to those who had not served an apprenticeship in a handful of trades; but a practice that had once been usual and enshrined in law had now become exceptional, a right tenaciously (and illegally) held on to in pockets of the most skilled trades. For most of the rest, access to the world of skilled labour had never been easier to obtain.
The experiences of learning a trade in the early eighteenth century and before could hardly have been more different. Only one writer before 1750 learned a trade without serving an apprenticeship. This was Benjamin Bangs, who had entered an apprenticeship in Norfolk in the 1660s but never completed it, as his master had gone bankrupt within his first year. He travelled to London and there found a shoemaker willing to take on a cheap, but unqualified, worker.32 But Benjamin Bangs was unique in learning a skilled trade in this way and it is probably significant that it was in London rather than Norwich that he found a master willing to teach him shoemaking outside the apprenticeship system. Otherwise, for writers in the pre-industrial period, access to the trades was gained by apprenticeship only.
The rise of informal apprenticeships is no less than we should expect in a society undergoing the kind of growth seen in Britain over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was an era of rising wealth, and even if the lion’s share was greedily swallowed up by the middle classes, their burgeoning incomes inevitably increased demand for goods such as shoes, clothes, bread, buildings and furniture. At the same time, rapid urbanisation made the kinds of control that the trade societies had previously exercised over entry to their ranks impossible to enforce. Industrialisation certainly did carry a degree of social turmoil along with it in much the way that many of the pessimists have maintained. It may also have led to the ‘deskilling’ of some trades. Yet many at the bottom of society proved extremely adept at grasping opportunity from the chaos.33
No matter how skills had been acquired, the learning of a trade could usher in a more comfortable and prosperous working life. In even the humblest branches of skilled labour the ability to work a trade carried the promise of better-paid and more regular employment, which together represented a very significant advantage indeed. Almost all the autobiog-raphers who had learned a trade reported earning sufficient to keep themselves and their families in a degree of comfort.34 Several recalled ‘good wages’.35 Another recurring theme is the satisfaction that young men experienced once they had started work as a journeyman and could afford to buy decent clothes and a few books of their own.36
Nor can this be explained away by suggesting that those who wrote their memoirs were either life’s victors or too proud to admit to personal or business failure. After all, it is not as if low wages, poverty and hardship were themes that the autobiographers were reluctant to discuss. Indeed they form the mainstay of the skilled labourers’ accounts of learning their trade, whether formally apprenticed or not. Many experienced serious privation, even to the extent of regularly going hungry. John Gibbs recalled crying himself to sleep ‘for hunger’; another was ‘much afflicted’; Joseph Burdett described himself as ‘miserable’ and ‘almost naked for clothes’.37 Many others expressed bitter resentment that they had been forced to work such long hours for a pittance. Yet once they became adults with a skill to their name, their complaints about low wages, insufficient food and lack of clothes simply faded away. A skill was enough to ensure a reasonable living. As James Dawson Burn commented: ‘I knew I never could be badly off while I could work at my business.’38
The material well-being of many skilled workers had less to do with the wages they received than with the fact that they were at work week in and week out throughout the year. One whitesmith boasted that since arriving in London he had never been out of work.39 Never ‘have I been unemployed,’ wrote a London printer.40 Samuel Hick had work ‘pouring in’ following the end of his apprenticeship.41 More modest writers still referred to ‘plenty of employment’.42 As a young man John Bennett gave up trying to earn a living in the sleepy Wiltshire village of South Wraxall and moved to Bristol. It was fair time on the day he arrived and no one was hiring. It was not long, though, before the fair left town and everyone was back at work. As John watched the men going into the shipyard a workman cried out ‘Can you saw?’ John replied, ‘Yes … top or bottom.’ The workman shouted, ‘Come along then’, and so began John’s life as an urban carpenter.43 He spent the rest of his adult life in either Bristol or Bath and appears never to have been out of work.
It is likely that there was a regional dimension to the employment patterns of skilled workers which is obscured in the autobiographies. London and other large cities no doubt offered better prospects for employment than smaller provincial towns.44 Similarly, the flow of work throughout the year and over the years was probably more varied than writers recalled. Yet whilst autobiographies do not allow us to sketch regional and temporal patterns with the degree of detail we might wish, they nevertheless make clear the relative ease with which skilled workers found employment. When work dried up they were rarely plunged into the desperate poverty that had blighted the lives of some as they learned their trade. They simply moved on to a larger town, where they invariably found someone willing to hire them.45
It comes as little surprise to find that those who encountered the greatest difficulties in finding regular work were employed in the most easily entered of the skilled occupations: the shoemakers and above all the tailors. Allen Davenport was raised in a poor family as one of ten children. In his late teens he joined the army and during a stay in Aberdeen befriended two young shoemakers who encouraged and assisted him in making a pair of shoes for himself.46 Following his discharge, he settled in Cirencester, and found his friends had taught him just enough about making shoes for him to set himself up as a shoemaker. But the people of Cirencester did not have sufficient call for his services to provide him with much of a living. Davenport was faced with the same dilemma as many other skilled workmen trying to earn their way in villages or small provincial towns: to stay put and face declining living standards or move somewhere larger in search of better prospects. And in opting to move rather than stay put, he made the same decision as most of the other writers who found themselves in this position. After four years he gave up plying his trade in Cirencester and moved to London, quickly going on to establish a prosperous business.47
The difficulties for the tailors were more acute. It was not uncommon for tailors to move on to a larger town in search of work only to find none there either. Even in the cities, almost all of the tailors suffered from unemployment, paying the price for working in an industry that had become extremely easy to enter.48 The problems with the trade were captured by Robert Lowery, who started his adult life as a tailor but later emerged as a key figure in the working-class political movement. When Lowery became a tailor’s apprentice in 1825, the trade ‘was then very good – wages were high, and it was considered a very respectable employment’. But even within the time it took to complete a short apprenticeship of just two years the situation had deteriorated. As Lowery explained, ‘there had been a rush into it, from its being considered an easy and genteel business with good wages, there was soon a surplus of journeymen, and, except for a few, there was but little chance of regular work for more than six months of the year’.49 And so indeed it proved, not just for Lowery, but for almost all of the tailors who have left behind a life history.
Yet the tailors stand alone amongst skilled labourers in encountering chronic difficulties in making ends meet. It was rare for artisans to be unable to find enough work to make their business a going concern and those who failed usually pointed at some exceptional reason. The bootmaker Dan Chatterton found he could only earn a ‘precarious crust’, but this he blamed on his ill health.50 A number of writers indicated that heavy drinking had undone their attempts at business. Miles Watkins, for instance, had enjoyed a prosperous start to his career as a bootmaker, but became ‘enslaved to the drinking customs’, fell into debt and soon found himself staring poverty straight in the face.51 In fact even the drunkards occasionally possessed skills in such high demand that they were able to remain fully employed. John Colin was a skilled leather-dresser. He learned his trade in Scotland and spent nearly two years living in Paris where he learned some of the most valuable and lucrative branches of the trade. His drink problem made it impossible for him to derive much profit from his skills: he was frequently turned away from his work and ‘always … through my drunkenness’.52 But although Colin could not hold on to employment, he had no difficulty finding it. In Worcester, for example, he had ‘many places offered me’.53 In order to keep him at his place, one of his employers ordered a three-gallon bucket of beer each morning and had it ‘placed beside me, with a half pint cup to drink it with’.54 It must be admitted that John Colin was unusual in combining a successful working life with a drinking habit he could not control. But his experiences indicate something that was shared by many of the skilled artisans amongst the autobiographers: high levels of employment with all that that entailed.
Once again, it might be countered that those who wrote their life histories were more likely to have made a success of their lives, or at least to emphasise their successes. But the autobiographers were not unremittingly cheerful and upbeat. Poverty, ill health, unemployment, low wages and suffering were themes they were only too ready to discuss. More generally we should never underestimate the seriousness of ill health in a society with little in the way of a safety net for those who fell upon hard times. John Buckmaster was learning to be a carpenter when he deserted his master and ran away to nearby Salisbury in search of a better future. In fact he fell ill with smallpox which not only left him unable to earn, but landed him with a large doctor’s bill when he recovered.55 The autobiographies contain heart-rending tales of families reduced to dire straits by such apparently innocent misfortunes as a ‘great Boil’, an unexplained loss of sight in early adulthood, an infected cut, a cold that could not be shifted, a slip while getting off an omnibus, and a leg that was so badly injured by a stick thrown by a boy that it eventually had to be amputated.56 When skilled workers found themselves unable to work, they were no better off than anyone else.
Life was hard for working people in early nineteenth-century Britain, extremely hard, and it is not my purpose to deny the crushing poverty and suffering endured by far too many of those at the bottom of the pile. But if life was hard, life was also changing, and if we look carefully enough we can glimpse in these changes an unmistakable upturn in the fortunes of the skilled labourer. The decline of the apprenticeship system caused by rapid urban growth created new opportunities for learning a skilled trade, and with the economic expansion that occurred over the century 1750 to 1850 those with skills were in demand. It became both easier to learn skills and easier to find work no matter how those skills had been learned. In other words, social flux and economic growth created a scenario in which many working men stood to gain.
Nor was this the only way in which working men gained. Better wages filled out wage packets, but they also enhanced the status of skilled workers in more subtle ways. Shining through the autobiographies is the fact that complex working lives cannot be reduced to simple measures of pounds, shillings and pence: abundant employment also changed the balance of power in the master–servant relationship. Artisans frequently and fondly retold stories about the time when their younger selves had had enough of their master’s petty tyrannies and retorted in no uncertain terms that they would no longer submit. James Lackington was twenty-one, a shoemaker just out of his time, when he fell out with his master’s wife about where he should buy the milk. His mistress ordered him to purchase it from a customer of the shop, but as Lackington had a ‘smart little milk-maid of my own’, he refused to comply. He ‘left without hesitation’ that very day.57 The errant shoemaker took a circuitous route to Bristol, collecting his sweetheart, the ‘beautiful Nancy Trott’, before deciding that travelling with Nancy was perhaps not such a good idea, and proceeding to Bristol alone. Having finally reached the city, he ‘got work the same evening’.58 Although Lackington could not have known that his search for employment would be quite so straightforward, he probably grounded his hasty departure in a sound knowledge of the buoyancy of the labour market in nearby Bristol. The demand for labour gave workers meaningful choices and this in turn helped to shape the relationship between master and servant in tangible ways.
Although Lackington was the only writer who walked out on his master over a quarrel about milk, he was just one of several who threw up perfectly good employment for a relatively minor matter. The leather-dresser John Colin may have been frequently dismissed for drunkenness, but he was not slow to walk away from positions he disliked. He quit one master because he was ‘such a tyrant’; another because he cut his wages for going to a lecture against the Corn Laws; and another simply because he ‘got sick of the job’.59 William Swan left a good bake-shop rather than ‘beg pardon’ from his master after the pair had had some ‘high words’.60 Another London baker handed in his notice rather than waste one more of his precious Sunday mornings at his pious master’s family services.61 There was no doubt some degree of story-telling going on here: men whose lives had been devoted to serving other men’s needs seem to relish recounting the moment when the tables were turned. Yet even allowing for some rhetorical flourish, there is no reason to discount the essential truth at the heart of these accounts. And stories like this remind us that work is about more than pay and hours, important as such things undoubtedly are. All working relationships are defined by a disparity between master and servant, an inequality that is rendered more palatable if we are well remunerated for our services and can leave at will.
With so much evidence that learning and practising a trade became easier in the century after 1750, it will surely no longer do to parrot the oft-repeated claim that the rapid economic growth of this period brought nothing but misery for the working man. An unintended, and largely unnoticed, consequence of economic growth was a liberalisation of the workplace, with the creation of new opportunities for growing numbers amongst the poor to acquire the skills, and with them the advantages – above all more work and better-paid work – that artisans had always enjoyed. Entering the ranks of skilled labour ushered in a very welcome enhancement in men’s material lives but it also improved their status in ways less obvious but no less important. It widened their choices, strengthened their hand, and bestowed a drop of personal power.
The first half of the nineteenth century brought brighter prospects for skilled workers. But what about those who did not follow this route? Not only did economic growth make it easier for the poor to gain skills, it also made it much easier for them to earn a decent living without acquiring any of the skills that had formed the traditional path to advancement. The growth of cottage industry, factories, mills, mining and towns all, in their different ways, increased demand for male labour. This in turn helped to raise both the wages and the status of the unskilled worker. With industrialisation came a raft of new occupations, none of which called for exceptional skills or training that could not be picked up at the workplace. The result was that the unskilled labourer also had better prospects than at any earlier time.62
Much of the expansion in unskilled labour came from the growth of cottage industry. Sometimes also called domestic manufacture or ‘proto-industry’, this refers simply to production that takes place within the home. It can encompass a variety of processes. In Britain the most vibrant cottage industries were in spinning, weaving, knitting, metalworking, basket-making and straw-plaiting. Small-scale domestic production of this kind had existed for hundreds of years, but the eighteenth century witnessed significant expansion, particularly in the textile sector.63 At the forefront were the handloom weavers, using hand-operated looms to weave thread into cloth. Weaving thrived in Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Scottish borders, with smaller centres in East Anglia, the West Country and the east Midlands. Also important was the framework knitting industry centred in Nottingham and Leicester and in the many villages thereabout.
Weaving and knitting sit somewhere between the worlds of skilled and unskilled labour. Some entered the trades by serving an apprenticeship, though as both trades could be learned quickly and the apprentice was therefore soon able to earn an income for his master, the terms were short (typically two years) and entry costs were low.64 Many others learned how to weave or knit from their family, the skill being passed from parents to children, as might be expected given that most worked their looms or frames within the home.65 And, of course, the handloom weavers and stockingers occupy a special place in the mythology of the industrial revolution, frequently cast as independent labourers who dovetailed their industrial avocations with wholesome work in their garden. In the dark interpretation, these domestic workers figure prominently as traditional artisans ground down by the remorseless spread of machines, the hapless victims of the dismal process of industrialisation.66
It would be hard to deny that the weavers have been romanticised by posterity, but like all good historical myths this one contains a kernel of truth. Weavers and knitters often did combine textile production with farming a small garden, and this life of dual occupation did provide a higher income than could be gained from agriculture alone.67 Weavers were able to earn, during the good times at least, more than they could ever earn on the land. Several of those engaged in the handloom industry recalled periods of prosperity during which they had enjoyed good wages.68 In Glasgow in the 1840s, for example, William Hammond earned 35 shillings a week.69 When this wage is contrasted with the nine shillings a week that Joseph Arch earned as an agricultural labourer in the Warwickshire village of Barford in the same decade, it is not hard to understand why workers were so ready to quit the land and work the loom.70
There is also real substance to the claim that the weavers enjoyed a degree of independence. Most of the autobiographers engaged in domestic manufacture regarded their work as preferable to agriculture, and the autonomy that came with weaving formed part of its appeal. Weavers were for the most part self-employed, either owning their own loom or renting it in a shop. Either way, they set their own hours, which gave them the very welcome option of trading work for leisure. Samuel Bamford approvingly noted that on exchanging his position in a Manchester warehouse for a loom, he became ‘master of my own time’, with the liberty to partake of ‘country amusements with the other young fellows of the neighbourhood’, a liberty which would quickly have led to his dismissal had he tried it at the warehouse.71 Hardly less importantly, it also paved the way for working long hours when prices were high. A few of the autobiographers could hardly contain their surprise at the riches that weaving occasionally allowed them to amass. When Ben Brierley and his family took to weaving satin shawls they thought they had ‘found a silver mine’. Ben was earning 24 shillings a week and his father 30: ‘such an income was enough to turn our heads, We seemed to be rolling in wealth.’72
But if we can agree that the weavers did enjoy periods of high wages, did often tend a cottage garden, and did appreciate the independence associated with working the loom, there are other parts of the myth that we cannot accept. For all its attractions, there were intractable problems associated with the weaving industry. Even in the good years, the demand for woven cloth could fluctuate wildly from one season to the next, and as quickly as weavers remembered the good wages, memories of periods of acute hardship came flooding back. During the trade depression of the 1840s, William Hammond saw his weekly earnings plummet from 35 shillings to 12 shillings a week. ‘During bad trade all the prices for work fell, and slim diet was the order of the day.’73 And Ben Brierley’s ‘silver mine’ was soon exhausted, his prosperity lasting ‘only for a time’.74 Thirty-one of the autobiographers turned their hand to weaving at some stage in their life, and over half recalled periods of falling demand and its predictable consequences.75 Others had experienced the same effect as children raised in weaving families.76 In fact, this helps to explain why so many weavers continued to tend a cottage garden. The weavers did not pursue farm-work through love of the wholesome fresh air, but as part of a necessary survival strategy when working in such a volatile and precarious industry.
The position of the framework knitters was broadly similar. George Calladine became an apprentice framework knitter in 1805 when the trade was prospering. After two years, he could complete his master’s work and also ‘with ease earn four shillings a day’ for himself. With hindsight, George considered that the custom of paying by the task rather than the hour encouraged the apprentice to become ‘almost independent of his master … very apt to idle away a day or two at the beginning of the week’. In his own case, he regretted that ‘too much liberty’ had led him into bad company.77 But as those who stayed in the trade could testify, such problems were not usually long lived. Outside a few years of exceptional prosperity, most of the knitters were unable to generate steady year-long earnings. All those involved in the knitting industry encountered the same difficulty, one moment enjoying the boom times the next plunged into poverty when demand for their goods fell sharply and rapidly away.78 Most retained some footing on the land for no other reason than to cushion their fall during the hardest times.
So here is the context in which we should situate the long-term pressures on the handloom and knitting industries that resulted from the spread of mechanisation. By the 1820s, new ‘power looms’ were beginning to rival handlooms in the quality and quantity of cloth they could weave. As the machines were refined and improved they became ever more attractive to manufacturers. Inevitably, the growth of factory-based weaving in the 1830s and 1840s had serious ramifications for those who continued to weave on a small scale in their own home.79 Most of the autobiographers born in the nineteenth century at some point abandoned their attempts to earn a livelihood from the handloom industry. For some, moving out of weaving was a painful transition.80 Joseph Gutteridge described the desperate conditions he endured in the 1830s during long intervals without employment: ‘some of our experiences were bitter indeed’.81 In the same decade, William Thom’s family was plunged into crushing poverty when the Scottish weaving industry collapsed, silencing ‘in one week, upwards of six thousand looms in Dundee alone’.82 Entirely out of employ and unable to feed his children, Thom took the road with his family. On their travels, the family’s youngest member, a small baby, passed away. Some of the weavers have bequeathed heart-rending accounts of horrendous suffering, a salutary reminder of the harshness of life in the absence of an adequate safety net; a reminder too that the autobiographers were not simply the ‘winners’ of industrialisation, but came from all walks of life.
What is less obvious is how we should fit the handloom weavers into our narratives of the industrial revolution. For those committed to the dark view, the matter is clear cut. The weavers were tragic victims of the dismal process, their misery stamped on the back of the new capitalist coin. But there are at least two problems with connecting the weavers’ distress and the industrial revolution in this way. In the first place, the problems with the weaving and knitting industries were apparent decades before the mechanisation of either process. Here were trades easily learned and easily entered. As willing workers crowded in, the slice of the pie that each could take got smaller. In many respects, the weavers’ position was no different to that of the tailors: casualties not of that mythic beast ‘the industrial revolution’, but of a rather more prosaic force – a surplus of workers. At the very least, this was not the first generation of domestic workers to find that supply outstripped demand. In 1747, William Hutton was forced to look for a new master as a stockinger following the death of his uncle. Unfortunately, at this time ‘trade was dead’. The hosiers could not employ their own workers, still less a newcomer like him. He tried several warehouses, but ‘all proved a blank’, and Hutton was reduced to tears to think he had served seven years as an apprentice to a trade ‘at which I could not get bread’.83 Almost a century before the rise of mechanised weaving, Hutton was in much the same situation as Gutteridge and Thom, the victim of an endemic problem that pre-dated industrialisation.
In the second place, the autobiographies suggest a far more complicated relationship between the old and the new ways of weaving cloth than the black-and-white view permits. After all, the new factories needed workers too. It is true the factory owners exhibited an unmistakable preference for employing women and children, regarding them as a cheaper and more submissive source of labour.84 But adult men, especially those living in Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Scottish Lowlands, can also be found taking up new opportunities in factories and warehouses. Indeed the factories were the most common destination for the unemployed handloom weavers among the autobiographers. Those living in Lancashire or Yorkshire were particularly well placed. Seven moved from weaving to factory work, a further six moved into warehouses, dealing or travelling.85 Three more set themselves up as small-scale shopkeepers: living in areas with large populations of working people made such enterprises viable, though not necessarily profitable.86 All of the weavers living in the heartlands of the industrial revolution found alternative employment once they had decided to give up their loom.
Outside the industrial regions, the situation for the weavers was very much worse. John Castle in Essex, John Leatherland in Northampton, and Joseph Gutteridge in Coventry all hung on to the weaving industry more tenaciously than their northern counterparts. They suffered a very serious reduction in living standards when their local industries failed. When finally cast out of employment with thousands of others, their options were virtually non-existent.87
But in the industrial districts the situation was very different. Factories provided a real alternative to handloom weaving and the autobiographers moved seamlessly from one line of work to the other. The only writers to voice consistent dissatisfaction with the transition were the poets and writers, and they perhaps had rather different concerns to the run-of-the-mill early industrial worker.88 Nor is these weavers’ enthusiasm for the factory system too hard to fathom, for there were some very real compensations for adults who worked in the factories. First and foremost were the high wages. We noted in the opening pages of this chapter Charles Campbell and the anonymous autobiographer who appreciated the good wages they could earn in the factory.89 They were not the only writers to express pleasant surprise at the pay they received. Samuel Catton spent his early years as an agricultural servant, but in his twenties he moved to Stratford where he found employment at the chemical works for ‘very good wages’.90 In Preston, Benjamin Shaw found ‘good work & wages’.91 Other writers stopped short of describing their pay as good, but nonetheless indicated that their factory wage had enabled them to save fairly considerable sums of money. Working as a machine grinder and glazier in Heywood, William Marcroft saved £20 in two years and eventually retired from manual labour altogether.92 Adam Rushton stashed away enough to contemplate emigrating to the USA.93 Even William Dodd, whose childhood experiences in the factories were so harrowing that he became a reformer, was forced to concede that his working conditions and pay picked up when he reached adulthood.94
And although factory work could never offer the same degree of independence as cottage industry, it did hold out the offer of more stable and continuous earnings. Many of those who worked in factories stayed relatively long periods with the one employer. Positions which spanned a decade or more were not unusual and a few men spent almost their entire working life at one mill. Robert Collyer’s father, for example, worked at one factory, ‘man and boy’, for thirty-two years.95 John Tough spent thirty-seven years with a hosiery manufacturer in Aberdeen.96 William Wright’s father was a weft manager at a mill for ‘somewhere about half a century’.97 A position at the factory could last for several unbroken years. Of course not all were so lucky, and those working in factories sometimes found themselves in the trough of a trade cycle, experiencing cuts in their wages or even finding themselves out of work altogether. But this should not be permitted to obscure the fact that factories and mills promised steady employment over many years, and that those who found such work had very few complaints.
In some parts of the industrialising north, the mills were emerging as a major source of employment, but the new towns offered much more than the chance of employment as a factory operative. After all, mill owners had needs that went beyond the making of goods. One common alternative to working in the factory was working in the warehouse. With better wages and pleasanter working conditions, most of our writers regarded this as something of a promotion.98 Thomas Wood found work repairing the machines in the factories of Oldham rather than working them.99 And in Preston, Benjamin Shaw made a living fixing spindles and making fly frames, mules and other parts of the machines that kept the town’s cotton industry going.100 Others kept the books or collected accounts for mill owners.101 As George Hanby found, goods needed to be weighed as well as made.102 Then there was work to be done moving raw materials and finished goods around. William Smith minded a turnpike gate.103 John Hemmingway carried goods on his horse and cart for a fustian manufacturer.104 James Watson had the charge of a saddle-horse for a Leeds warehouse.105 Yet others found work on the railways, or delivering mail.106
In addition to the employment to be found servicing the factories, there was a mountain of work to be done providing for the needs of a large population. The urban workforce required bread, clothes, shoes and furniture; as we have already seen, their demand for the staples of life generated plenty of business for skilled tradesmen. Those without a skilled trade to their name could also take advantage of the growing urban economy. One option was to set up as a small shopkeeper. George Cooper, for example, was unable to find employment in the Stockport cotton mills following his role in leading the strikes in 1848, so he set up a very small grocer’s shop instead.107 One autobiographer gave up manual labour to sell tea. Another sold ‘cheap cheese’ in very small quantities to his neighbours; yet another, his own sweets, cakes and gingerbread.108 To the dismay of many a polite commentator, the urban workforce had an insatiable appetite for alcohol, so setting up a beer shop was yet one more alternative for workers seeking a new way to make a living.109 The urban poor had a taste for entertainment, providing an opening for a handful of singers, ballad-writers, sellers of cheap literature, and actors.110 They also needed policing, or at least so it was thought by those who governed them: just another example of the new opportunities emerging in the towns.111
Many of these businesses were initially conducted on a very small scale funded by no more than a few borrowed shillings. George Cooper, for example, began his store with eight shillings lent by two friends; and Joseph Livesey, the seller of ‘cheap cheese’, started trading on a borrowed sovereign and a pair of borrowed scales. Nor were they always successful. The difficulties of making money in poor communities can be easily imagined. The beer-sellers usually found that working in the beer trade did far more to ruin their health than it did to make their fortune and many of the quacks and entertainers carved out a living that was at best precarious. Shopkeepers sometimes prospered, and sometimes not. At the end of a year’s trading, John Hemmingway ‘was very glad to get out of the shop at any price, a ruined man’.112 So these activities should not be held up as examples of how urban growth permitted a flourishing of entrepreneurial genius or facilitated social mobility.113 We are on safer ground using them simply to suggest that Britain’s growing towns increased the amount and variety of employment available to the unskilled urban worker, evidence of yet one more way in which city life opened choices to the working man.
The sheer variety of opportunity that was opening up in many industrialising areas is captured in the life history of John Tough. Between the ages of seventeen and thirty-nine, Tough turned his hand to no fewer than ten different jobs. He began his working life as a gardener, three years later he moved into land surveying, and next he became a traveller for a hosiery manufacturer. He then had a succession of office-based jobs; first as an assistant clerk at a cotton mill, next as a bookkeeper for a brewery, and then as the ‘Collector of Freights’ for the London Shipping Company – though this proving to be ‘a very disagreeable situation’, he soon left. Finding himself without work, he filled in a little time by hiring a vessel and travelling to Danzig to collect a cargo of wheat, before returning to Aberdeen and trying to eke out a living with a horse and cart and three cows. When this small enterprise failed, he travelled with his family down to the central belt of Scotland to work first in a mill and then at an ironworks, before finally returning to the hosiery business in Aberdeen.114 He stayed at this company for the next thirty-seven years.
As with the skilled labourers, the combination of good wages and abundant employment produced a very real rise in unskilled working men’s status and sense of self-worth. Those who worked in the most vibrant parts of the economy were also the most likely to be found leaving their work for minor considerations. James Powell, for example, gave as his reason for quitting the mill no more than a ‘trivial act of oppression’ which caused him ‘considerable annoyance’.115 As a young man, Thomas Whittaker left ‘profitable employment’ because of what he lamely summarised as ‘a little temper on the part of the master, with too much defiance on the part of the servant’.116 Some industrial workers were prepared to leave work over the frequency of their ‘drinkings’, or tea breaks as we now call them. Joshua Dodgson, a dyer in Halifax, left a good position after just two weeks when he realised that the drinkings he had been promised were to be discontinued.117
Benjamin Shaw and his workmates went even further. Shaw’s master, David Ainsworth, had decided that his workmen should ‘not go out to [their] drinkings’ and when the men continued to leave work for their breaks in defiance of his order, he fined them all two shillings of their wages. The men responded by combining and summoned Ainsworth before the mayor. This got their two shillings returned, but it also got them the sack. According to Benjamin, ‘some submited & Beged their work again’ but not him: he found himself a new employer.118 And all this over a matter that that Benjamin himself described as a ‘trifeling thing’. There was no doubt more than a little pride at stake in such instances, and our slighted workmen did not always move on to find work at such preferable rates. But, and this I think is the important point, find work of some kind they did. These employed and healthy adult workers were clearly not on the breadline and this allowed them to exercise some control over whom they would work for and what conditions they would (or would not) tolerate. So long as levels of pay and employment were relatively good, workers would reap the benefit.
The same pattern is evident in other areas of the industrialising economy. In mining, for example, wages were generally good and unemployment relatively rare.119 Almost all of the miners recorded earning good wages as adults.120 As Thomas Oliver summarised, ‘as a miner I did very well’.121 The fact that mining was a growing industry with good prospects for finding employment also enhanced the industry’s appeal. Very few of the miners suffered serious unemployment. Some indeed appear never to have been out of work, though they frequently needed to migrate short distances in order to remain in full-time employment.122 This is not of course to suggest that mining provided an easy living. The work was hard, the conditions unpleasant and often dangerous, and there was expense and inconvenience involved in moving in search of new work. By the same token, however, our writers did not expect life to be easy or comfortable. The decision to move a short distance for a full week’s work was taken in a heartbeat, too inconsequential to merit much retrospective analysis.
One final way in which industrialisation improved prospects for the working man was in the rapid extension of navvying (unskilled building work). A growing population and economy ensured that there was a lot of such work to go around. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, workers drifted out of agriculture and into construction, working on projects ranging from the building of canals, roads, factories and warehouses to drainage projects and (from the 1840s) the railways. Emanuel Lovekin described himself as ‘a bit given to roaming about’ so working as a navvy held considerable appeal. ‘Railway tunneling was very rife, at this time,’ he continued. ‘But my mate and I, had the getting of quirry stone for putting in the Locks in the Severn reiver between Stourport and Woscester.’123 The life of a navvy was summed up by Joseph Arch as ‘hard work, good wages, rough quarters’.124 Much of the attraction of navvying undoubtedly lay in the higher wages it paid: one autobiographer noted that his wages doubled overnight when he left the farm and started work as a navvy.125 And when Lovekin and his mate went navvying they found ‘very good jobs and plenity of money’.126 It all amounted to one more option for men who had been raised to expect to spend their lives devoted to earning a subsistence wage in agriculture.
The navvies must have appreciated the good money they could earn, but as with most of the developments we have looked at here, moving into construction involved more than the prospect of better wages. Navvies enjoyed a private life that was remarkably free from supervision, and this must have formed a very palpable benefit for farm servants who were used to living under their master’s roof. As one farm labourer recalled: ‘men living in the house were not expected to leave the premises without the master’s permission’.127 Such restrictions could prove irksome to adults. One anonymous writer took up navvying following a quarrel with his master about his visiting the public house.128 Once the transition from servant to navvy had been made, a man’s days of having his trips to the public house monitored had truly come to an end.
Even at work, the relationship between navvy and gangmaster was quite different to the traditional master–servant relationship, as John Wilson described:
My father being a navvy, and the railway system in this country being in its early development, there was a great demand for workmen at high wages, and he, being a strong vigorous man, was sure of employment wherever he went. Being, however, of a very sharp temper, he would throw up his work at the first sign of harsh treatment or fault-finding, and thus he and I were very often on the move, for I was his constant companion where possible.129
It is worth emphasising that our writers do not suggest that they found their employment in the mills and towns pleasant, easy, enjoyable, worthwhile or anything else that we might seek from our work today. Many of these jobs were physically demanding. The hours were invariably long. Being a navvy could be particularly difficult, with dangerous work, constant movement in search of the next job, and occasional spells of unemployment when the demand for navvies dried up. Most men tired of this existence in the longer term, especially once settled with a family. Nor in our haste to stress the gains that many working men found in the booming economy should we neglect to point out the very serious diffi-culties that many workers experienced when the economy hit the buffers. The first half of the nineteenth century was haunted by deep trade depressions, with unusually severe downturns in the winter of 1831–2 and again in 1841–2.130 In addition to these periodic downturns was the constant risk of commercial failures and strikes. Any and all could throw the mill-hands out of work and threaten the livelihoods of those connected to the mills’ good fortune. In no time, families that had been enjoying a measure of prosperity were pawning their furniture and living on short rations. The grim struggle that the labouring poor faced throughout our period to make ends meet should not be underestimated.
Yet repeatedly our writers tell us that work in cottage industry, factories, mines, warehouses, large cities and construction was better than the labour that had consumed their fathers’ energies – and often their own early labours as well. And however much this might jar with our own expectations of earning a living during the industrial revolution, it is probably worth our while to take these comments seriously. Implicit in the accounts of good wages and plentiful work is a relative judgement about the alternatives that were available. In other words, making sense of this view requires us to look at those who tried to earn a living before the emergence of the new industrial economy.
Understanding the nature of manual labour in the pre-industrial era is difficult. The answers to even the simplest questions about wage levels or employment are obscure, as early writers usually spent very little time dwelling on the material aspect of their life. Most life histories before about 1750 were framed around religious conversions. A working life might be summarised in no more than a couple of paragraphs, the brief prelude to a narrative describing the author’s journey from sin to salvation. Yet even with such unpromising material, it is clear that many adult men, including skilled craftsmen, suffered endemic unemployment and underemployment. This had formed part of Edward Barlow’s objection to being bound to that whitester in Manchester. There was really not much demand for bleached yarn, so the whitester made up his living by farming a small plot of land. Throughout the year, looking after the animals formed a part of his apprentices’ daily workload. In fact during the quiet winter months they worked very little at ‘the trade’ and spent most of their time ploughing, ditching and doing other ‘country work’.131 In a similar fashion, the coal mines in early eighteenth-century Durham were not busy enough to keep the miners fully employed. Christopher Hopper worked driving horses on the wagonways connecting the district’s coal mines, but he was also employed in ‘various branches of agriculture’.132 And given that many men needed to turn their hand to more than one occupation in order to make a living, it is little surprise to find that others complained that there was simply too little work. William Chubb stayed with his master at the end of his glove-making apprenticeship for, as he glumly noted, he ‘had no better, or indeed no other way, to get a livelihood’.133 He spent a further four years with him, despite his fear that the close work was destroying his eyesight.
And just as buoyant employment prospects strengthened a worker’s hand in the master–servant relationship, so insufficient work had the reverse effect. Consider the choices that James Ferguson made when two employers in succession failed to keep their end of the bargain. In the early 1730s Ferguson went to work with a miller, hoping to improve on his previous position in service. He was quickly disappointed. His master was a heavy drinker and failed to provide Ferguson with adequate food, leaving him ‘almost starved … for want of victuals’. But Ferguson had entered into a year-long contract and so stayed until the end of his time. When he returned to his father at the end of the year, he was ‘in a very weak state’ and had to rest there a short while, to recover his strength.134 His next situation with a country doctor promised to be better, but soon proved to be even worse. Ferguson’s new master kept him ‘constantly to very hard labour’ and early in the placement the overwork injured his arm. But once again, Ferguson did not leave. It was only when the injury became so bad that he was unable to continue working that Ferguson finally left his master. As he had broken his six-month contract, his master refused to pay him anything for the three months of service he had completed.135 Ferguson may have been unlucky in meeting with two such miserable masters, but his response was not unreasonable. What other choices did he have? His family could not take him in – ‘I could not think of staying with my father, who I knew full well could not maintain me’ – and there was little chance of finding alternative employment before the next round of hiring fairs.136 Both times, his best chance of obtaining a meal and keeping a roof over his head lay in staying where he was. And this was just what he did.
I would not suggest that Ferguson’s experience was normal for his times. Even in the early eighteenth century, most workers did not leave their master half starved or with their health seriously impaired, and most were paid for the service they completed. Deciding how common such experiences were is simply impossible. The autobiographies cannot tell us this, and it is hard to imagine any other kind of evidence which might. What can be said, however, is that Ferguson’s experience lay within the range of the expected. Although the evidence is incomplete and difficult to interpret, the autobiographies indicate that work was in short supply in pre-industrial Britain. It was certainly more scarce than it would become once the industrial revolution took off. And so long as this was the case masters had a very powerful hold over their employees. Low levels of employment not only left large numbers of manual workers uncomfortably close to the breadline but also rendered them powerless to challenge their masters’ authority.
The suggestion that it was the amount of work available which did the most to influence workers’ living standard is reinforced by the experiences of men living in areas largely untouched by industrialisation. The uneven and piecemeal nature of early industrial growth left large pockets of rural workers working in conditions that resembled those of earlier writers more than they would have liked. All through the first half of the nineteenth century, the same package of low wages and insufficient work remained the lot of those trying to earn a living on the land and there is little to indicate that farm workers were sharing in the gains made by workers in the larger towns and cities.
Most of the men working as agricultural labourers described taking home wages that were too low to provide a decent living for their family. ‘Small wages’ that were not raised ‘for a long time’, as the wife of one farm labourer recalled.137 We were ‘very hard off’ and ‘very bad off’ wrote another.138 ‘Starvation wages’ and ‘in very narrow Circumstances’, lamented others.139 Of course, the weekly wage does not quite do justice to the farm worker’s income, as the grandees of the parish often provided their villagers with small non-monetary gifts. Richard Cook remembered how ‘the Laides bountiful’ of his Lincolnshire parish sent baby linen and cordial to the newly delivered wives of working men in the parish.140 Elsewhere auto-biographers wrote about gifts of cast-off clothes, blankets and the occasional plate of broken meat.141 But these exceptional acts of largesse did little to alter the fact that almost all of those who described ongoing difficulties in earning a living were working on the land.
Shortage of work lay at the root of the problem. Many agricultural labourers simply could not find constant employment, year in, year out. Their lives were composed of interludes of steady work followed by leaner times, scraping by without the blessing of a regular weekly wage. In Cambridgeshire, James Bowd found that after an accident at work, his master ‘did not care for having me much more’. Inevitably, there was nobody else in the parish who needed the services of a lame man, so Bowd had ‘sometimes work and sometimes none and that ment not much for a man and two Children to live upon’.142 And in Buckinghamshire, unemployment reduced Joseph Mayett to gathering ‘old raggs’, selling ‘laces, thred and Cotton &c’, and taking work from the parish overseers for as little as six shillings a week. Let us put six shillings in context: Mayett’s rent and fuel cost 3s. 2d. a week, and a loaf of bread 2s. 4d. This was a man in a desperate situation.143
Agricultural historians remind us of the great regional diversity that existed in rural England, of the differences in working patterns and wages between pasture and arable, uplands and lowlands, areas of good soils and poor. They emphasise that conditions for rural workers deteriorated with the return of large numbers of unskilled workers to the countryside following the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. But such differences across time and space are hardly visible in the autobiographical material. What stand out are the things that agricultural workers had in common. The perennial problem in rural areas was that the demand for labour was much lower during the quiet winter months than in the spring and summer, leaving a glut of hands with little choice but to take whatever work they could at whatever wage was offered.
Low wages and insufficient employment obviously depressed the living standards of agricultural workers and their families, but farm workers were not the only ones who felt the pinch. Their poverty also made it very difficult for others in their community to earn a proper livelihood. Villages needed their bakers, shoemakers, carpenters and small shopkeepers, yet tradesmen often found it difficult to keep afloat when their neighbours were so poor. As one man wrote of his father, who was working as a shoemaker in the Scottish border village of Longnewton in the late eighteenth century, there were ‘plenty of feet requiring comfortable shoes, though too little money in circulation to pay for them’. His father turned to the land to supplement his income, keeping a cow and a sheep, growing vegetables, and skinning horses.144 Many of the skilled workers in rural areas were forced to supplement their income by a range of agricultural pursuits. So we find amongst the autobiographers a tailor in County Antrim running a farm;145 carpenters in Cornwall eking out their income by brewing, gardening and keeping cows;146 and a glove-maker in Sussex digging graves and wells, harvesting, skinning horses, making cider, growing potatoes, and performing countless other tasks.147 In agricultural areas, skilled workers were rarely fully employed and so turned to field work to make ends meet. The root of the problem was that the land could not provide sufficient wealth to maintain all its workers in comfort. In nineteenth-century Britain, as the world over, those at the bottom fared worst.148
Most of the dissatisfaction with rural life stemmed from insufficient income, but many writers also commented on something in the master–servant relationship that they found restrictive and distasteful. The scarcity of employment in rural areas inevitably influenced this balance of power and could be a powerful tool for employers seeking to extract obedience from their workers. Ann Oakley remembered the trouble that had followed when her husband, an agricultural labourer, managed to upset his master just after their marriage. She recalled that he had ’vexed his master so much’ by applying to the parish for relief for his elderly mother that he lost his harvest work – a very serious penalty when the wages from harvest work were vital for paying off debts and buying essential items such as clothes and shoes.149 Samuel Catton spent a year living on a farm where ‘he was very uncomfortable, and cruelly treated, as his master and mistress were both drunkards, and the only son was very often deranged’.150 Nonetheless, he stayed out his term. When he was next hired to a farmer he noted he ‘worked hard and did not live well’, but he still stayed until the end of the year’s term.151 Nothing did more to keep a servant in his place than the prospect of unemployment if he left.
Farm servants could of course leave an unreasonable master. But in the small and relatively closed community of the village, a disgruntled master was never far away, as Joseph Mayett could testify only too well. Mayett and his master both belonged to Quainton’s newly formed Baptist church, and along with others in the congregation they helped to pay his stipend. Mayett gave one of the nine shillings he earned each week towards the stipend. A few months into this arrangement, Mayett’s rent was increased and, much to his master’s displeasure, he could no longer afford to make the weekly one shilling payment. From that point on there was, as Mayett laconically noted, ‘no peace’. The months rolled by and Mayett’s payments for the minister fell deeper into arrears until his master finally ‘fell in a passion and said he would have it then’. Mayett responded that he ‘would not pay it at all’.152 The pair agreed to part and as it was harvest time, Mayett had little difficulty finding a new employer. But this did not mark the end of his old master’s interference in his life. Six months later, in the dead of winter and out of work, Mayett started claiming relief from the parish. When his old master heard of this he instructed the parish to stop paying him, giving as a reason no more than the fact that Mayett had ‘left his Service’. The parish complied, heedless of the fact that it put them in breach of the law. Mayett had to go to the magistrates to compel the parish to pay the relief he was due. And when Mayett did find a new position, his old master went and spoke to his new one and ‘perswaded him to discharge me which he did’.153 Farm workers lived in small, deferential communities. New employers could sometimes be found, but old ones could not so easily be lost. Not for nothing did James Murdoch grumble that as a child in rural Scotland he had been ‘taught to look forward with humble submission to a life of rustic serfdom’. As he never could ‘learn to like submission to the authority of a master’, he left off farm service as soon as he could.154
With too little work to go around it is not surprising to find that autobiographers tended to be rather less than romantic about rural life. For the most part, rural roots were something to escape, not something to glorify. Many of the autobiographies devoted considerable attention to describing the whys and wherefores of their leaving. About fifty of our writers migrated from rural areas in order to seek work in industry, towns and commerce, usually leaving as an adolescent or young adult. Their experiences were predictably diverse. About twelve left the land as part of the process of becoming a skilled labourer, leaving either to take up an apprenticeship or in search of a position once their rural apprenticeship was complete.155 The same number left in order to become a soldier or sailor.156 A few of these left tolerably comfortable lives and appear to have been driven by a spirit of adventure, but most were mired in the most oppressive rural poverty and a life on the seas or in the armed forces obviously represented their best hope for a better life.
By far the largest group, thirty in all, took up work as navvies or moved directly to a nearby town, trading in effect unskilled agricultural work for unskilled urban, industrial or construction work. Once settled, they moved into the same set of occupations already described in this chapter. Several managed to learn a skill outside the apprenticeship system: tailors, shoemakers and ironmongers figure repeatedly.157 Hard labour in quarries, mines, canals and railways provided employment for yet more.158 Others took up work in factories, mills and warehouses.159 The autobiographers skipped off without a backward glance, never regretting the step they had taken, never lamenting the health or simplicity of their earlier life, and almost never returning to the scene of their birth.
It is interesting that many of those retelling the story of their departure dwelled upon the moment when they took their final leave of their master. Here, for example, is George Mitchell’s account of leaving his Somerset village of Montacute. Mitchell had been born there in 1827, and (as a consequence of his father’s low wages and love of cider) was raised ‘in the greatest poverty and misery’.160 He started work when he was five and by the age of nineteen he was working for a local farmer for a subsistence wage. He ‘was certainly very discontented with my lot’. Following a particularly onerous day’s work ending in a quarrel with his master, Mitchell resolved to leave. He rose the next morning to give his master a fortnight’s notice and informed him he would go to neighbouring Ham Hill to work in the stone quarries, adding that ‘fourteen shillings a week was better than seven’, a presumption that caused his master to scoff.161 On the day of Mitchell’s departure at the end of the fortnight, his master gave him an extra two shillings, telling him he had worked hard and deserved it. However, Mitchell did not bow his head and say thank you, but turned to enquire whether his master thought the five shillings he had been paying him until then constituted an adequate wage. A discussion ensued, with neither man giving ground. Mitchell continued to refuse to play the part of the deferential servant and eventually brought the matter to a close by telling his master that he would spend the extra two shillings on ‘shoeleather to carry me away’ from the village.162
If the story of Mitchell’s departure was long-winded, that of Isaac Anderson was exceptionally brief. When railway-building began near his village in Essex he gave his master one week’s notice. This astonished his master, who asked him where he was going. Anderson replied that he did not yet know, saying only ‘I can’t stand this work any longer’.163 And where Anderson was brief, an anonymous writer in the Working Man’s Friend was self-important. He thought the farmer he worked for ‘somewhat tyrannical, ordering me up at four o’clock in the morning, and requiring other things which I considered an infringement of my rights. I told him plainly I would not submit, and took it upon myself at once to become my own master.’164
Maybe our autobiographers spoke these words; maybe these are the words they wished they had spoken. Either way, it is significant that they were inserted into their stories. In the usual order of things, farm servants could not expect to criticise their masters without unpleasant repercussions. Most of the time quiet submission was a far wiser option than speaking one’s mind. Perhaps these writers retrospectively associated leaving the land with finding their voice. Certainly most of those who moved on found higher wages and better living standards. Yet it is interesting to note how much time the writers spent telling us that leaving the village marked the end of that ‘humble submission’ that Murdoch had so reviled.
Of the fifty men who left the land as young adults, just three returned later in life. Their accounts provide us with a rare opportunity to place experiences of rural and urban life side by side. One, Joseph Mayett, we have already met, falling out with his master over payments for their minister’s stipend. Mayett was then in his mid-thirties, back in the village of Quainton after a twelve-year stint in the army between 1803 and 1815. Mayett’s situation continued to deteriorate over the next two decades. Unable to find regular work, increasingly dependent on handouts from the parish, and in declining health, he died in poverty in the village of his birth in his late fifties.
Then there was John Lincoln, born in Suffolk in 1777. By the age of twenty his search for work had taken him no further than across the county border into Norfolk. Following the death of his wife and child, Lincoln turned his hand to whatever rural Norfolk could offer. Between 1801 and 1807, his jobs included minding horses, harvesting, well-digging, driving a ‘Mail Cart’, managing a garden, ploughing, and working as a footman.165 In 1807, however, he received a letter from a friend who had moved to Woolwich and found him work at the Royal Arsenal. Lincoln left without hesitation. At Woolwich, he had no reason to regret the life he had left behind. At the Arsenal ‘the work was very Light and the pay very good’, and at one point his earnings rose as high as 38 shillings a week.166 But sadly for Lincoln the good times did not last. Following the peace with France in 1814, the government downscaled production at Woolwich and Lincoln was laid off. He moved back to Norfolk, but returned to Woolwich soon after in the hope of finding a new opening at the Arsenal. Disappointed, he returned to Norfolk once again, giving up all hope of work at the Arsenal and settling down to a life as an agricultural day labourer, his paltry earnings eked out by a small dole from the parish.167
Finally George Mockford. Unlike Mayett and Lincoln, Mockford spent the whole of his life in east Sussex, never moving much further than fifteen miles from the village just outside Lewes in which he was born. He started work as a bird-scarer but got a glimpse of industrial life when he found work in a soap factory in Lewes. He continued there for a number of years, but when his master went bankrupt, Mockford’s stint of factory work came to an abrupt end, there being few factories in Lewes. Mockford was back to picking up what casual and intermittent work he could find as an agricultural labourer – a ‘little employment, for a time’ here and there, at tasks such as haymaking, harvesting, hop-picking and gardening. He and his wife ‘struggled on’ trying to make a living from a smallholding, the annual harvest work, and the charity of his friends in the church.168 The experiences of Lincoln and Mockford turn the pessimistic interpretation on its head. No mention of machines or monotony, of ‘unsatisfying labour … for alien purposes’.169 No regret for the supposedly wholesome or meaningful toil of farm work. Returning to agricultural work implied returning to low wages and unemployment. All in all, it is not surprising that leaving the land was so common and returning was so rare.
Only twelve of the autobiographers born in rural areas remained in agriculture well into adult life, which is much fewer than we would expect, given what the censuses tell us about the structure of nineteenth-century society. The under-representation of rural workers is a useful reminder that the autobiographers are not a reliable cross-section of working-class society. Working-class autobiographers may have been born into ordinary lives, but at some point they tended to diverge from the expected path. Clearly, life-writing was associated with adventure and achievement, and these things were more likely to occur if one moved away from the village. Yet if relatively few of our writers lived out their lives on the farm, there is nevertheless no reason to think their experiences particularly exceptional. And here there is little to add beyond what has already been said. Until at least 1850, many of those who stayed faced an ongoing struggle to make ends meet: low wages, insufficient work, and positions or masters that they disliked yet could not leave.
It is time to end this chapter; but this, perhaps, is where any attempt to understand the impact of the industrial revolution on the working poor ought to begin. Since the moment when commentators recognised that Britain was undergoing an irrevocable transformation, informed opinion has betrayed an unshakeable uneasiness that those at the bottom did not share equally in the advantages. Running like a thread through more than a century of historical analysis is the belief that the ordinary worker enjoyed a healthier, simpler and less frenetic life before the smoke and steam of the industrial revolution.
The trouble is that our autobiographers simply refuse to tell the story we expect to hear. Work was central to any labourer’s life and was a theme to which the autobiographers frequently returned. But piecing together their thoughts and observations leaves us in little doubt that many working men saw substantial improvements in their living standards, not in spite of industrialisation, but because of it. Of course, much of the reason for this lay simply in the fact that the pre-industrial economy had been so poor at providing for its workers. In most places, there was just not enough to go around, and this left workers with irregular wages that covered little more than the bare essentials of existence, and too often not even that. And low incomes had cultural as well as economic consequences. Nothing gave meaning to the words ‘master’ and ‘servant’ more fully than low levels of employment. Deference and submission were part of the natural order of things when the servants’ need for work outstripped the masters’ ability to provide it.
With industrialisation some of the unskilled got to taste good, regular wages and the kind of independence that reliable earning power could bring. It is hard to unpack precisely when matters began to change, but dramatic changes had taken place between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Nor is it easy to pinpoint exactly why industrialisation had the effect that it did, but the sheer demand for the backs and hands of adult men must stand out. Mills, factories, mines and quarries needed large numbers of men, not only to produce goods but to perform a range of tasks to ensure that raw materials and finished goods were to be found in the places and at the times they were needed. The rise of industry, the growth of towns and the development of new forms of transport increased the demand for construction workers. And towns housed large populations, forming a ready market for a wide range of goods and services. It all helped to increase the amount and variety of work that needed to be done and this had myriad and far-reaching effects. Even the humble shoemaker, fashioning his shoes from materials and with methods not substantially different from those in use hundreds of years earlier, found himself drawn into this brave new world.