At the same time that the members of the industrial middle class were seeking to reduce the barriers between themselves and the landed elite, they were also trying to separate themselves from the laboring classes below. The working class was actually a mixture of groups in the first half of the nineteenth century. Factory workers would eventually form an industrial proletariat, but in the first half of the century, they did not constitute a majority of the working class in any major city, even in Britain. According to the 1851 census, there were 1.8 million agricultural laborers and 1 million domestic servants in Britain but only 811,000 workers in the cotton and woolen industries. And one-third of these were still working in small workshops or at home.
In the cities, artisans or craftspeople remained the largest group of urban workers during the first half of the nineteenth century. They worked in numerous small industries, such as shoemaking, glovemaking, bookbinding, printing, and bricklaying. Some craftspeople, especially those employed in such luxury trades as coach building and clock making, formed a kind of aristocracy of labor and earned higher wages than others. Artisans were not factory workers; they were traditionally organized in guilds, where they passed on their skills to apprentices. But guilds were increasingly losing their power, especially in industrialized countries. Fearful of losing out to the new factories that could produce goods more cheaply, artisans tended to support movements against industrialization. Industrialists welcomed the decline of skilled craftspeople, as one perceptive old tailor realized in telling his life story:
It is upwards of 30 years since I first went to work at the tailoring trade in London.... I continued working for the honorable trade and belonging to the Society [for tailors] for about 15 years. My weekly earnings then averaged £1 16s. a week while I was at work, and for several years I was seldom out of work. ... No one could have been happier than I was .... But then, with my sight defective ... I could get no employment at the honorable trade, and that was the ruin of me entirely; for working there, of course, I got “scratched” from the trade society, and so lost all hope of being provided for by them in my helplessness. The workshop . .. was about seven feet square, and so low, that as you [sat] on the floor you could touch the ceiling with the tip of your finger. In this place seven of us worked. [The master] paid little more than half the regular wages, and employed such men as myself-only those who couldn’t get anything better to do .... I don’t think my wages there averaged above 12s. a week ... . I am convinced I lost my eyesight by working in that cheap shop . ... It is by the ruin of such men as me that these masters are enabled to undersell the better shops .... That’s the way, sir, the cheap clothes is produced, by making blind beggars of the workmen, like myself, and throwing us on [the benevolence of ] the parish [church] in our old age.
Servants also formed another large group of urban workers, especially in major cities like London and Paris. Many were women from the countryside who became utterly dependent on their upper-and middle-class employers.
WORKING CONDITIONS FOR THE INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS Workers in the new industrial factories also faced wretched working conditions. We have already observed the psychological traumas workers experienced from their employers’ efforts to break old preindustrial work patterns and create a well-disciplined labor force. But what were the physical conditions of the factories?
Unquestionably, in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, “places of work,” as early factories were called, were dreadful. Work hours ranged from twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with a half hour for lunch and for dinner. There was no security of employment and no minimum wage. The worst conditions were in the cotton mills, where temperatures were especially debilitating. One report noted that “in the cotton-spinning work, these creatures are kept, fourteen hours in each day, locked up, summer and winter, in a heat of from eighty to eighty-four degrees.” Mills were also dirty, dusty, and unhealthy:
Not only is there not a breath of sweet air in these truly infernal scenes, but ... there is the abominable and pernicious stink of the gas to assist in the murderous effects of the heat. In addition to the noxious effluvia of the gas, mixed with the steam, there are the dust, and what is called cotton-flyings or fuz, which the unfortunate creatures have to inhale; and .. . the notorious fact is that well constitutioned men are rendered old and past labor at forty years of age, and that children are rendered decrepit and deformed, and thousands upon thousands of them slaughtered by consumptions [lung diseases], before they arrive at the age of sixteen.
Thus ran a report on working conditions in the cotton industry in 1824.
Conditions in the coal mines were also harsh. The introduction of steam power meant only that steam-powered engines mechanically lifted coal to the top. Inside the mines, men still bore the burden of digging the coal out while horses, mules, women, and children hauled coal carts on rails to the lift. Dangers abounded in coal mines; cave-ins, explosions, and gas fumes (called “bad air”) were a way of life. The cramped conditions - tunnels often did not exceed 3 or 4 feet in height - and constant dampness in the mines resulted in deformed bodies and ruined lungs.
Both children and women were employed in large numbers in early factories and mines (see the boxes on pp. 616-617). Children had been an important part of the family economy in preindustrial times, working in the fields or carding and spinning wool at home with the growth of the cottage industry. In the Industrial Revolution, however, child labor was exploited more than ever and in a considerably more systematic fashion. The owners of cotton factories appreciated certain features of child labor. Children had an especially delicate touch as spinners of cotton. Their smaller size made it easier for them to crawl under machines to gather loose cotton. Moreover, children were more easily broken to factory work. Above all, children represented a cheap supply of labor. In 1821, just about half of the British population was under twenty years of age. Hence, children made up a particularly abundant supply of labor, and they were paid only about one-sixth to one-third of what a man was paid. In the cotton factories in 1838, children under eighteen made up 29 percent of the total workforce; children as young as seven worked twelve to fifteen hours per day, six days a week, in cotton mills.
Especially terrible in the early Industrial Revolution was the use of so-called pauper apprentices. These were orphans or children abandoned by their parents who had wound up in the care of local parishes. To save on their upkeep, parish officials found it convenient to apprentice them to factory owners looking for a cheap source of labor. These children worked long hours under strict discipline and received inadequate food and recreation; many became deformed from being kept too long in contorted positions. Although economic liberals and some industrialists were against all state intervention in economic matters, Parliament eventually remedied some of the worst ills of child abuse in factories and mines (see “Efforts at Change: Reformers and Government” later in this chapter). The legislation of the 1830s and 1840s, however, primarily affected child labor in textile factories and mines. It did not touch the use of children in small workshops or the non-factory trades that were not protected. As these trades were in competition with the new factories, conditions there were often even worse. Pottery works, for example, were not investigated until the 1860s, when it was found that 17 percent of the workers were under eleven years of age. One investigator reported what he found:
The boys were kept in constant motion throughout the day, each carrying from thirty to fifty dozen of molds into the stoves, and remaining ... long enough to take the dried earthenware away. The distance thus run by a boy in the course of a day ... was estimated at seven miles. From the very nature of this exhausting occupation children were rendered pale, weak and unhealthy. In the depth of winter, with the thermometer in the open air sometimes below zero, boys, with little clothing but rags, might be seen running to and fro on errands or to their dinners with the perspiration on their foreheads, “after laboring for hours like little slaves.” The inevitable result of such transitions of temperature were consumption, asthma and acute inflammation.
Little wonder that child labor legislation enacted in 1864 included pottery works.
By 1830, women and children made up two-thirds of the cotton industry’s labor. As the number of children employed declined after the Factory Act of 1833, however, their places were taken by women, who came to dominate the labor forces of the early factories. Women made up 50 percent of the labor force in textile (cotton and woolen) factories before 1870. They were mostly unskilled labor and were paid half or less of what men received. Excessive working hours for women were outlawed in 1844, but only in textile factories and mines; not until 1867 were they outlawed in craft workshops.
The employment of children and women in large part represents a continuation of a preindustrial kinship pattern. The cottage industry had always involved the efforts of the entire family, and it seemed perfectly natural to continue this pattern. Men migrating from the countryside to industrial towns and cities took their wives and children with them into the factory or into the mines. Of 136 employees in Robert Peel’s factory at Bury in 1801, 95 were members of the same twenty-six families. The impetus for this family work often came from the family itself. The factory owner Jedediah Strutt was opposed to child labor under age ten but was forced by parents to take children as young as seven.
The employment of large numbers of women in factories did not significantly transform female working patterns, as was once assumed. Studies of urban households in France and Britain, for example, have revealed that throughout the nineteenth century, traditional types of female labor still predominated in the women’s work world. In 1851, fully 40 percent of the female workforce in Britain consisted of domestic servants. In France, the largest group of female workers, 40 percent, worked in agriculture. In addition, only 20 percent of female workers in Britain labored in factories, and only 10 percent did so in France. Regional and local studies have also found that most of the workers were single women. Few married women worked outside the home.
The factory acts that limited the work hours of children and women also began to break up the traditional kinship pattern of work and led to a new pattern based on a separation of work and home. Men came to be regarded as responsible for the primary work obligations as women assumed daily control of the family and performed low-paying jobs such as laundry work that could be done in the home. Domestic industry made it possible for women to continue their contributions to family survival.
Historians have also reminded us that if the treatment of children in the mines and factories seems particularly cruel and harsh, contemporary treatment of children in general was often brutal. Beatings, for example, had long been regarded, even by dedicated churchmen and churchwomen, as the best way to discipline children.
The problem of poverty among the working classes was also addressed in Britain by government action in the form of the Poor Law Act of 1834, which established workhouses where jobless poor people were forced to live. The intent of this policy, based on the assumption that the poor were responsible for their own pitiful conditions, was “ to make the workhouses as like prisons as possible . .. to establish therein a discipline so severe and repulsive as to make them a terror to the poor.” Within a few years, despite sporadic opposition, more than 200,000 poor people were locked up in workhouses, where family members were separated, forced to live in dormitories, given work assignments, and fed dreadful food. Children were often recruited from parish workhouses as cheap labor in factories.
DID INDUSTRIALIZATION BRING AN IMPROVED STANDARD OF LIVING? One of the most heated debates on the Industrial Revolution concerns the standard of living. Most historians assume that in the long run, the Industrial Revolution improved living standards dramatically in the form of higher per capita incomes and greater consumer choices. But did the first generation of industrial workers experience a decline in their living standards and suffer unnecessarily? During the first half of the nineteenth century, industrialization altered the lives of Europeans, especially the British, as they left their farms, moved to cities, and found work in factories. Historians have debated whether industrialization improved the standard of living during this time. Some historians have argued that industrialization increased employment and lowered prices of consumer goods, thereby improving the way people lived. They also maintain that household income rose because multiple members of the family could now hold wage-paying jobs. Other historians argue that wage labor made life worse for most families during the first half of the nineteenth century. They maintain that employment in the early factories was highly volatile as employers quickly dismissed workers whenever demand declined. Wages were not uniform, and inadequate housing in cities forced families to live in cramped and unsanitary conditions. Families continued to spend most of their incomes on food and clothing. Most historians agree that what certainly did occur in the first half of the nineteenth century was a widening gap between rich and poor. One estimate, based on income tax returns in Britain, is that the wealthiest 1 percent of the population increased its share of the national product from 25 percent in 1801 to 35 percent in 1848. The real gainers in the early Industrial Revolution were members of the middle class-and some skilled workers whose jobs were not eliminated by the new machines. But industrial workers themselves would have to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century to reap the benefits of industrialization.
Before long, workers looked to the formation of labor organizations to gain decent wages and working conditions. The British government, reacting against the radicalism of the French revolutionary working classes, had passed the Combination Acts in 1799 and 1800 outlawing associations of workers. The legislation failed to prevent the formation of trade unions, however. Similar to the craft societies of earlier times, these new associations were formed by skilled workers in a number of new industries, including the cotton spinners, ironworkers, coal miners, and shipwrights. These unions served two purposes. One was to preserve their own workers’ position by limiting entry into their trade; the other was to gain benefits from the employers. These early trade unions had limited goals. They favored a working-class struggle against employers, but only to win improvements for the members of their own trades.
THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT Some trade unions were even willing to strike to attain their goals. Bitter strikes were carried out by miners in Northumberland and Durham in 1810, hand-loom weavers in Glasgow in 1813, and cotton spinners in Manchester in 1818. Such blatant illegal activity caused Parliament to repeal the Combination Acts in 1824, accepting the argument of some members that the acts themselves had so alienated workers that they had formed unions. Unions were now tolerated, but other legislation enabled authorities to keep close watch over their activities.
In the 1820s and 1830s, the union movement began to focus on the creation of national unions. One of the leaders in this effort was a well-known cotton magnate and social reformer, Robert Owen (1771-1858). Owen came to believe in the creation of voluntary associations that would demonstrate to others the benefits of cooperative rather than competitive living (see Chapter 21). Although Owen’s program was not directed specifically to trade unionists, his ideas had great appeal to some of their leaders. Under Owen’s direction, plans emerged for the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which was formed in February 1834. As a national federation of trade unions, its primary purpose was to coordinate a general strike for the eight-hour working day. Rhetoric, however, soon outpaced reality, and by the summer of that year, the lack of real working-class support led to the federation’s total collapse, and the union movement reverted to trade unions for individual crafts. The largest and most successful of these unions was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, formed in 1850. Its provision of generous unemployment benefits in return for a small weekly payment was precisely the kind of practical gains these trade unions sought. Larger goals would have to wait.
LUDDITES Trade unionism was not the only type of collective action by workers in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites were skilled craftspeople in the Midlands and northern England who in 1812 attacked the machines that they believed threatened their livelihoods. These attacks failed to stop the industrial mechanization of Britain and have been viewed as utterly naïve. Some historians, however, have also seen them as an intense eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism. The inability of 12,000 troops to find the culprits provides stunning evidence of the local support they received in their areas.
CHARTISM A much more meaningful expression of the attempts of British workers to improve their condition occurred in the movement known as Chartism - the “first important political movement of working men organized during the nineteenth century.” Its aim was to achieve political democracy. Chartism took its name from the People’s Charter, a document drawn up in 1838 by the London Working Men’s Association. The charter demanded universal male suffrage, payment for members of Parliament, the elimination of property qualifications for members of Parliament, and annual sessions of Parliament. Women, too, joined in the movement. Chartist groups in many large towns often had female sections. Although some women were quite active in the movement, they were fighting to win political rights for their husbands, not for themselves, as the Chartist platform did not include the right to vote for women.
Two national petitions incorporating the Chartist demands gained millions of signatures and were presented to Parliament in 1839 and 1842. Chartism attempted to encourage change through peaceful, constitutional means, although there was an underlying threat of force, as is evident in the Chartist slogan, “Peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must.” In 1842, Chartist activists organized a general strike on behalf of their goals, but it had little success.
Despite the pressures exerted by the Chartists, members of Parliament, who were not at all ready for political democracy, rejected both national petitions. As one member said, universal male suffrage would be “fatal to all the purposes for which government exists” and was “utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilization.” After 1848, Chartism as a movement had largely played itself out. It had never really posed a serious threat to the British establishment, but it had not been a total failure either. Its true significance stemmed from its ability to arouse and organize millions of working-class men and women, to give them a sense of working-class consciousness that they had not really possessed before. This political education of working people was important to the ultimate acceptance of all the points of the People’s Charter in the future.
Efforts to improve the worst conditions of the industrial factory system also came from outside the ranks of the working classes.
From its beginning, the Industrial Revolution had drawn much criticism. Romantic poets like William Wordsworth (see Chapter 21) decried the destruction of the natural world:
I grieve, when on the darker side
Of this great change I look; and there behold
Such outrage done to nature as compels
The indignant power to justify herself.
Reform-minded individuals, be they factory owners who felt twinges of conscience or social reformers in Parliament, campaigned against the evils of the industrial factory, especially condemning the abuse of children. One hoped for the day “that these little ones should once more see the rising and setting of the sun.”
GOVERNMENT ACTION As it became apparent that the increase in wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution was accompanied by ever-increasing numbers of poor people, more and more efforts were made to document and deal with the problems. As reports from civic-minded citizens and parliamentary commissions intensified and demonstrated the extent of poverty, degradation, and suffering, the reform efforts began to succeed.
Their first success was a series of factory acts passed between 1802 and 1819 that limited labor for children between the ages of nine and sixteen to twelve hours a day; the employment of children under nine years old was forbidden. Moreover, the laws stipulated that children were to receive instruction in reading and arithmetic during working hours. But these acts applied only to cotton mills, not to factories or mines where some of the worst abuses were taking place. Just as important, no provision was made for enforcing the acts through a system of inspection.
In the reform-minded decades of the 1830s and 1840s, new legislation was passed. The Factory Act of 1833 strengthened earlier labor legislation. All textile factories were now included. Children between the ages of nine and thirteen could work only eight hours a day; those between thirteen and eighteen, twelve hours. Factory inspectors were appointed with the power to fine those who broke the law. Another piece of legislation in 1833 required that children between nine and thirteen have at least two hours of elementary education during the working day. In 1847, the Ten Hours Act reduced the workday for children between thirteen and eighteen to ten hours. Women were also now included in the ten-hour limit. In 1842, the Coal Mines Act eliminated the employment of boys under ten and women in mines. Eventually, men too would benefit from the move to restrict factory hours.
The Industrial Revolution was one of the major forces of change in the nineteenth century as it led Western civilization into the machine-dependent modern world. It began in Britain, which had an agricultural revolution that increased the quantity of foodstuffs, population growth that created a supply of labor, capital for investment, a good supply of coal and iron ore, and a transportation revolution that created a system of canals, roads, and bridges. As the world’s leading colonial power, Britain also had access to overseas markets. The cotton industry led the way as new machines such as the spinning jenny and power loom enabled the British to produce cheap cotton goods. Most important was the steam engine, which led to factories and a system of steam-powered railroads that moved people and goods efficiently. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London showed the world the achievements of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Industrialization also spread to the Continent, and by 1860, the United States was also well along that road. In the non-Western world, industrial development was much slower, in large part because European colonial powers deliberately pursued a policy of preventing the growth of mechanized industry, thus keeping the colonies as purchasers of industrial products. The Industrial Revolution also transformed the social world of Europe. The creation of an industrial proletariat produced a whole new force for change. The work environment, especially in the new factories and mines, was dreadful, characterized by long hours, unsafe conditions, monotonous labor, and the use of child labor. Eventually, laws were passed to improve working conditions, especially for women and children. Labor unions were also formed to improve wages and conditions but met with limited success. Workers sometimes protested by destroying the factories and machines, as did the Luddites. The Chartist movement petitioned Parliament, calling for the right to vote and other reforms, but the members of Parliament refused the demands. The development of a wealthy industrial middle class presented a challenge to the long-term hegemony of landed wealth. Though that wealth had been threatened by the fortunes of commerce, it had never been overturned. But the new bourgeoisie became more demanding, as we shall see in the next chapter.
The Industrial Revolution seemed to prove to Europeans the underlying assumption of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century-that human beings were capable of dominating nature. By rationally manipulating the material environment for human benefit, people could attain new levels of material prosperity and produce machines not dreamed of in their wildest imaginings, Lost in the excitement of the Industrial Revolution were the voices that pointed to the dehumanization of the workforce and the alienation from one’s work, one’s associates, oneself, and the natural world.