Culture and community in the factory became the concern of ‘scientific management’, a comprehensive strategy significantly in advance of the paternalism of the 1850s and 1860s. The working environment improved as employers implemented new factory legislation and extended the range of welfare programmes, but other initiatives were less benevolent. Pioneer forms of Taylorism provided new managerial techniques to raise labour productivity and curb the power of organised labour and were pursued with some vigour as international competition increased and prices fell.[1]

The design and planning of production processes became a managerial prerogative, a task undertaken by new production engineers, while shopfloor operatives were kept under constant surveillance by foremen. This challenged the skilled workers’ belief that they had autonomy in the sphere of production. Supervision was often accompanied by new methods of payment, elaborate incentive schemes such as bonus systems. Employers hoped to effect the maximum division of labour to take advantage of the technological developments of the ‘second industrial revolution’: semi-automatic machines, standardised and interchangeable parts and the increasing use of semi-skilled labour on tasks previously the preserve of a skilled elite. These managerial and technical innovations threatened to undermine skilled status and craft organisations but, in the English context at least, they were to prove remarkable resilient.

The consequences of attempts to reorganise production varied from industry to industry according to the balance of power and authority at the workplace. In general terms craft organisation remained strong where employers were inhibited by market forces, by the relative inelasticity of demand for the product or its perishable nature. Hand compositors in the newspaper industry, for example, gained control of the new linotype machines for their own exclusive ‘craft’ use, a privilege extracted from employers in the competitive market for a perishable product. Some employers decided against reorganisation when confronted by the threat of craft resistance. This was a sensible, if short-term, attitude for family-owned firms making satisfactory profits. In addition the product market for British-made capital goods was often highly individualised, a significant obstacle to the introduction of standardised mass-production techniques: ships, machines, railway engines were constructed to fulfil the individual needs of customers. It was not until the bicycle boom of the mid 1890s that a broad-based demand for a product with standardised parts emerged and at this point engineering employers began to introduce American-style machine tools and lathes. Mechanisation was implemented in the midst of workplace conflict, as employers combined in a national organisation -- the Engineering Employers Federation -- to reverse the gains secured by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers during the craft militancy of the 1889-1892 boom. In the lock-out of 1897, the EEF insisted on the absolute right to management but their victory did not portend the crushing of the union of the thorough transformation of the division of labour. The aim of employers was to boost output and reduce labour costs without major capital spending rather than the new rationalising Taylorist mode. Throughout the 1890s there were similar disputes in other major industries as employers reasserted their authority in pursuit of lower labour costs and more efficient use of labour. Between 1892 and 1897 some 13.2 million days were lost through disputes compared to 2.3 million between 1899 and 1907 when new systems of national collective bargaining, similar to those in engineering, took effect. Conflict was particularly intense in the coalfields.

The collective bargaining arrangements of the 1890s, the outcome of national strikes and lock-outs, recognised and confirmed the role and functions of craft trade unions, while also making clear the power and prerogatives of employer authority. The compromise workplace relationships of the 1850s and 1860s were reconstructed in different forms.

Skilled workers had to resolve whether they could or should retain their exclusivism. Some workers were prepared to shed some of their exclusivism to strengthen their position against modernising employers. The aristocratic boilermakers set the example, preventing a major reorganisation of steel ship production by a flexible union policy that kept the boundaries of membership under constant review. When the need arose, semi-skilled workers central to production were granted membership, an important step towards the establishment of a virtual closed shop. Attitudes to unskilled workers depended on circumstances: some were admitted, others were not. This redefinition of their boundaries of exclusion to admit previously prohibited groups of workers proved highly effective in allowing skilled workers to retain their aristocratic status in the new conditions of late-Victorian England. It helps to explain why the Alliance Cabinet-Makers’ Association succeeded but not the older Friendly Society of Operative Cabinet-Makers that withered away in narrow craft restrictionism. Old-fashioned prejudice was probably most difficult to abandon where gender was concerned. Craft organisation in the Potteries remained narrow and sectional, powerless to prevent displacement as cheap female labour was put to work on new machines.

The persistence of privilege depended on circumstances that varied from industry to industry, reflecting the interplay between ‘genuine skill’ (a necessary exercise of dexterity, judgment and knowledge) and ‘socially constructed skill’ (the specious status upheld by organisational control). Managerial control was exerted over the technical expertise previously located on the shopfloor. A distinction emerged between planning and execution, the implementation of which depended on supervisory workers, trained technicians who owed their position to knowledge acquired at night school. Shopfloor skills were increasingly limited and specialised despite the continued existence of apprenticeship that passed on knowledge of the trade. Formal, indentured arrangements in the older crafts steadily declined but apprenticeship expanded in several growing industries like building and printing, where there was considerable agreement between employers and workers over training methods. With the greater specialisation of work and skill, apprentice labour was quickly turned to profit by employers, a source of cheap labour that undermined the position of adult men in the labour market.

Despite the persistence of skill differentials, the working-class became more homogeneous in late Victorian England. The proportion of the occupied population engaged in farming fell from 15 per cent in 1871 to 7.5 per cent in 1901 as rural migrants entered the most rapidly expanding sections of the domestic economy, transport and mining marking a major shift from worse to better paid jobs and from less to more regular employment. Small units continued to proliferate in some sectors of the economy but the factory was finally established as the predominant form of organisation even in the sweated and shoemaking trades leaving some poor outworkers stranded in old centres of small-scale workshop production.

Differentials within the working-class were less pronounced than the sharp social and cultural divide that separated the aristocracy of labour from the marginal non-manual groups of the lower middle-class. There was some upward mobility into the lower middle-class, but many working-class families, particularly at the top end of the scale, did not regard white-collar employment as an attractive escape from manual labour. Clerks were viewed with derision by skilled workers proud of their transmissible craft and workplace skills. A cultural gulf between two different ways of life, the social separation of skilled workers and clerks reinforced the cultural and political identity of the working-class, as the aristocracy of labour, repulsed by middle-class pretensions, turned back to align themselves with their semi-skilled and unskilled manual colleagues.

[1] 'Taylorism' originated in the United States and represented the logical development of the concept of the division of labour. The different aspects of manufacture were identified and then applied to an assembly line structure.

Craft-like control persisted in amended form in the mid Victorian factory, a privilege enjoyed by a new aristocracy of labour. John Foster argues that these new aristocrats derived their status from a change in employer strategy. Stripped of their former craft control, skilled workers were incorporated in a new authority structure designed to strengthen discipline and increase productivity. The introduction of the ‘piecemaster’ system in the engineering factories brought the skilled engineer into active involvement in the work of management as pacemaker and technical supervisor. In cotton factories, spinners retained skilled status as the crucial pacesetter group after the introduction of the self-acting mule. These male workers forced an intensification of labour from juvenile and female time-paid assistants, an effective adaptation of traditional gender and family roles to the factory environment

There is some disagreement on the degree to which this new aristocracy was secure. Gareth Stedman Jones insists that distinctions of status were purely formal and real control had passed to the employers with the restructuring of industry on ‘modern’ lines. Skilled workers, he suggests, became defensive and collaborationist in approach seeking to preserve their status and differentials through the goodwill of their employers. In the absence of technical expertise, employers were often forced to concede considerable autonomy to skilled workers, though they generally derived some benefit from the arrangement. Allowing spinners to appoint their own piecers relieved employers of direct responsibility for labour recruitment and discipline. Apprenticeship operated in a similar way, providing employers with a skilled workforce trained at worker expense. This pragmatic compromise between skilled workers and employers was usually negotiated locally and informally. Capital made production possible, but the actual details of production, the workers insisted, was the responsibility of labour.

Where no independence was allowed, workers were often reluctant to enter employment whatever the material advantages it offered. Domestic service, a comparatively well paid occupation largely unaffected by cyclical unemployment, was shunned by working-class girls in factory districts and urban areas. Lancashire marriage registers show that servants tended to marry husbands from a lower social-economic status than their peers, an indication of the social stigma attached to service in an area where alternative female employment was readily available. The middle-classes of the factory districts had to depend on rural migrants for domestic servants and some obtained cheap line-in servants from the local workhouse.

Factory employment offered women some independence but they seldom attained the most lucrative and responsible jobs. They were thought ineligible for the crucial supervisory tasks, the jobs that carried skilled status and workplace authority. These male preserves were jealously protected by ‘closed’ trade unionism. There was some technical and physical basis that denied women access to the well-paid spinning sector. Women were physically quite capable of operation self-acting mules but they often lacked the necessary technical skills and experience. They had been removed from the spinning factories in the 1810s and 1820s when the use of ‘doubled’ mules put a premium on male physical strength. Without recent hands-on experience, women were the victims of a cultural discontinuity in the transmission of craft skills and knowledge from one generation to another. The cult of domesticity that sought to limit female paid employment to the brief period before marriage further hindered the acquisition of workplace skills. In some parts of Lancashire, married women went out to work in substantial numbers, but not in the southern spinning belt where the well-paid spinners and engineers feared a loss of status should their wives return to paid employment.

Unable to restrict labour supply through closed organisations, the weaver, male and female, united in ‘open’ trade unionism, a development deplored by paternal employers. The Preston lock-out of 1853-1854 brought confrontation between employers and workers in an attempt to reverse the 10 per cent wage cuts of 1847. The cotton workers were starved back to work after twenty-eight weeks, a decisive defeat that marked a turning-point in union strategy. The union leadership now abandoned politics as an economic strategy and cultivated an image of moderation and respectability, a public relations exercise to secure recognition from reluctant employers. Blackburn employers granted union recognition and negotiating rights on the strict understanding that union officials would ‘police’ the agreement. Though recognition was elsewhere delayed until the 1880s, the Blackburn weavers pointed the way forward towards modern collective bargaining.

In industries that were already unionised, similar conciliation and arbitration schemes enjoyed considerable success in the late 1860s and early 1870s. They were first introduced in the Nottingham hosiery industry and were of mutual benefit to unions and employers, an institutional expression of the mid-Victorian compromise in labour relations. New sliding wage-scales were welcomes in the coal and iron trades where wage disputes had broken many unions: conciliation boards now automatically adjusted wages to product price. Some of the other schemes clearly favoured employers: in the building trade, for example, employers took advantage of mutual negotiation to reassert and redefine managerial powers thereby curtailing the autonomous regulation of the trade. Conciliation and arbitration schemes, however, came to an end with the collapse of the mid-Victorian boom.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of work in working-class life. Work helped determine two fundamental elements of working-class existence: the ways in which workers spent many, if not most of their waking hours; and the amounts of money they had to their disposal. Work also determined most other aspects of working-class life already considered: the standards of living they enjoyed; standards of health; the type of housing they lived in; the nature of the family and neighbourhood life; the ways in which leisure time was spent and the social, political and other values that were adopted.[1]

The swing away from domestic forms of production can be roughly explained by three developments: the growth of population, the extension of enclosure with a consequent reduction in demand for rural labour and the advent of mechanised production boosting productivity and fostering the growth of new towns and cities. The result was a change in the structure of the labour market. However, this was not a linear progression to large-scale factory production and did not necessarily entail the deskilling of labour, though there were notable exceptions.

The enclosure of common lands had a profound impact on the livelihood of rural workers and their families. It led to a contraction of resources for many workers and a greater reliance on earnings. The spread of enclosure pushed rural labourers on to the labour market in a search for work that was made the more frenzied by falling farm prices and wages between 1815-1835, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic war. The result of the growth in labour supply and agricultural depression was the collapse of farm service in the south and east of the country. It had been customary for farm workers to be hired for a year, to enter service in another household and to live with another family, receiving food, clothes, board and a small annual wage in return for work, only living out when they wished to marry.  Added to this was the development of factory-based textile production that had a significant effect on the other source of earned income for rural workers: outwork. Different parts of the country were associated with different types of product: lace-making round Nottingham, stocking-knitting in Leicester, spinning and weaving of cotton and wool in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The appearance of the mills damaged the status and security of some very skilled branches of outwork. Many rural households found themselves thrown into poverty as such work became increasingly scarce and available only at pitifully low rates of pay. The fate of the handloom weavers, stocking-frame knitters and silk weavers in the 1830s and 1840s, all reflected the impact of technological change on the distribution of work[2]. Textiles were not the only industry to experience such structural changes. In both town and country, mechanisation had a marked impact on a wide variety of employment and the position of some skilled workers was undermined while the demand for new skills grew.

Urban workers had always been more reliant on wages than had rural labourers. Pre-industrial towns had tended to be commercial markets rather than centres of manufacture and employment there had been more specialised than elsewhere. Small units of production in which worked skilled artisans, providing local services and goods rather than commodities for export operated largely on a domestic basis through frequently under the control of the craft guilds. These stipulated modes of recruitment and training and the quality of products and founded the vocabulary of the rights of ‘legal’ or ‘society’ men who worked in ‘legal’ shops that permeated craft unions in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century saw the position of the skilled urban artisan increasingly under threat from semi-skilled and less well trained workers.

The Elizabethan Statute of Artificers (or Apprentices) 1563 provided a legal framework of craft regulation but had fallen into abeyance long before its apprenticeship clauses were repealed in 1811. Under the old system of apprenticeship, the pupil was formally indentured at 14-16 and joined a master’s house for a period traditionally specified as seven years before being recognised as a journeyman, qualified to practice the trade. It was also usual for journeymen to ‘live in’, entitled to bed, board and wages in return to work, only moving out on marriage. Often journeymen tramped the country in search of work in part to extend their experience and knowledge of their trade but also to escape increasingly uncertain employment prospects in their immediate locality.[3] To become a master the journeyman had to produce his ‘masterpiece’, demonstrating his mastery of the skills of the specific trade. From the early nineteenth century fewer apprentices were completing their indentures and journeymen’s wages were falling, both signs that employers were no longer bothered about hiring only men who had served their time. This led to a dilution in the labour force and an increased blurring of the boundaries between ‘society’ and ‘non-society’ men, a situation made worse by the mechanisation of production that required fewer skills than handwork.

The nature of training for skilled work changed; apprenticeships were shortened and concentrated on specific skills rather than on an extensive understanding of all aspects of production. Lads worked alongside journeymen rather than being attached to a master’s household with various adverse results. The new system bore heavily on apprentices’ families, who frequently still paid for indentures while the apprentice lived at home and could expect little or no wages for his efforts until his time was served. The old stipulated ratios between journeymen and boys were increasingly ignored and apprentices became a cheap alternative for adult labour thus depressing the adult labour market. Such developments were resented by the journeymen expected to train recruits, souring relations and often making training uncooperative. The fate of boys was often instant dismissal as soon as they were old enough to command an adult rate.

Such practices were more common during depressed times. This abuse of apprenticeship provoked sporadic industrial disputes as skilled workers tried to protect their position and to prevent their trade from being flooded (or diluted) by excess labour. The independence of their ‘aristocratic’ status was upheld through the rhetoric of custom and the invention of ‘tradition’ to sanction and legitimise current practice. This excluded employers and market calculations from the opaque world of custom, tradition, craft mystery and skill, a separate culture upheld by secrecy, theatrical ceremony and, when necessary, ritualised violence. Through these means skilled workers defended their position at the ‘frontier of control’.

Reduced to wage-earning proletarians without rights to the materials and product of their labour, skilled workers fought hard to retain some control over the ‘labour process’ and to defend their workplace autonomy against the new time and labour discipline favoured by political economists, preachers and employers. Even in new forms of work organisations, they often succeeded in recomposing skills and safeguarding their status, despite ‘deskilling’ technology and increased division of labour. But in defending or reconstructing skilled status, their actions were divisive: not just a line drawn against employers but against unfair or unskilled competition in the labour market. Skill as property became skill as patriarchy, an appropriate that left women defenceless and marginalised against the degradation of their labour.

The most obvious impact of industrialisation was found in the more intense and strictly disciplined nature of work in those industries transformed by the new technology: textiles, coal-mining, metal-processing and engineering. Skilled workers may have been able to hold the ‘frontier of control’ in relation to their skills as property but they were unable to prevent, though perhaps delay, the inexorable march of discipline and compulsion within the workplace. None of the convivial culture of the workshop was allowed to interrupt the pace of factory work. Early mills were manned by convict and pauper labour (mostly children) because the regularity of work was alien to the adult population used to a greater degree of autonomy in conducting their working lives. The higher wages available in factories provided insufficient compensation for this loss of ‘freedom’. Impoverished handloom weavers would send their daughters to work on the power looms but resisted the prospect themselves. Hours in the early factories were probably no longer than those in the domestic trades but what made it far less acceptable was the mind-crushing tedium of the work involved, the loss of public feast days and holidays and, for middle-class commentators, the physical consequences of long hours and the appalling conditions in the factory towns.

The growth of labour market conditions in the nineteenth century makes it quite impossible to make clear distinctions between the employed, the unemployed, the underemployed, the self-employed and the economically inactive. Subcontracting was rife, notably in the clothing trade where middlemen ‘sweated’ domestic women to earn a profit. The ‘slop’ end of the fashion and furnishing trades competed frantically for such orders as were available at almost any price. Casualism became more visible towards 1900 as cities spread in size. Short-term engagements and casual employment were particularly associated with the docks and the construction industries. The casual labour of the old East End was trapped within an economy of declining trades. Conditions of employment deteriorated. By the early 1870s London’s shipbuilding had slumped beyond the point of recovery and by the 1880s most heavy engineering, iron founding and metal work had gone the same way. Competition from provincial furniture, clothing and footwear factories could only be met by reducing labour costs and led to the increasing importance of sweated trades.

[1] John Benson The Working Class in Britain 1850-1939, Longman, 1989, pp. 9-38 is the best introduction to this issue. Patrick Joyce (ed.), The historical meanings of work, CUP, 1987 is an excellent collection containing a seminal introduction by the editor. Patrick Joyce 'Work' in F.M.L. Thompson, (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: volume 2 People and their environment, CUP, 1990, pp. 131-194 is a short summary of recent research.

[2] See Duncan Bythell The Handloom Weavers, CUP, 1969 and The Sweated Trades, Batsford, 1978 for a detailed discussion of this issue.

[3] See E.J. Hobsbawm 'The tramping artisan' in his Labouring Men, Weidenfeld, 1964, pp. 34-63 and E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, 1963, Penguin, 1968 and 'Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism', first published in Past and Present, no.38 (December 1967), reprinted and revised in Customs in Common, Merlin, 1991, pp. 352-403.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century within large towns and cities market forces were allowed free and unregulated rein in the provision of working-class housing: there was none of the planning, regulation and intervention that ensured the elegance of other fast-growing urban developments, the salubrious spa, resort and residential town.[1] Speculative ‘jerry-building’ produced a working-class landscape of inward-looking, dead-end alleys, courts and streets, what has been called ‘a perfect wilderness of foulness’.

Renting houses

Victorian cities were in a state of constant social flux. Many residents in all large cities were migrants but they often did not stay long in one place: 45-55 per cent of urban populations either died or moved from a town within ten years. Most housing throughout the period 1830 to 1914 was rented and owner-occupancy rarely accounted for more than 10 per cent of the housing stock before 1918.

Rented accommodation came in a vast array of types. In central areas most of provided through the construction of purpose-built working-class housing or was in large multi-occupied dwellings filtered down from the middle-classes who had moved to suburban villas or more spacious town houses. Profits and social snobbery produced a pattern of residential segregation -- the slum and the suburb. Within each town, accommodation ranged in quality and cost. Top of the market in Stockport at a vote-bearing rental of £10 per year[2] were houses with cellars and workshops attached; two-up, two-down cottages were available with privies for £8 per year and without privies for £6-7; one-up, one-down back-to-backs cost £2-4 per year and a bed in a common lodging house cost 1d a night or about £1 10s per year. From 1850 terraced suburbs increasingly housed the skilled working-class. The typical artisan cottage in Sheffield was brick-built, slate-roofed with a cellar, living room, first-floor bedroom and second attic bedroom. By moving to ‘respectable’ areas, artisans confirmed their status within the working-class as superior workingmen. They wished to distance themselves from the rough residuum but often had not wish to cross the class divide and join the ranks of the lower middle-class.

For those on low incomes, rent levels were crucial to housing availability. Although cheap housing had been built in many cities in the early nineteenth century, by the 1850s it was increasingly difficult to build new housing to rent at much below 5s per week, well beyond the means of those on low or irregular incomes. Such families had little option but to rent lodgings or take slum housing in the city centre. Income determined where you lived and construction costs controlled the type of housing that was built in different locations. In such areas as Whitechapel or St Giles in London or dockside areas and commercial districts of Liverpool slum accommodation could be obtained quite easily. Accommodation was confined and relatively expensive; for example a single room 12 feet square could be rented for 1s 6d or more per week in a provincial town and for rather more in London. It could be dirty and facilities were shared with the other tenants.

By 1850 construction of new housing in the central areas of towns had almost ceased, but lower-density terraced housing was expanding rapidly in new residential suburbs of all English and Welsh towns. In Scotland tenement construction continued to be the norm. A new terraced house with four rooms, its own privy and in-house water supply would probably cost 5-7 shillings per week to rent. Relatively few such properties were multi-occupied, though the family might take in a lodger. Working-class home ownership was feasible only for those with relatively stable incomes in prosperous areas because of repayments of around 10 shillings per month. High levels were found in parts of north east Lancashire, County Durham, the West Riding and South Wales. Housing provided by employers or by philanthropic organisations, like the Peabody Trust in London, were often locally significant but never accommodated more than a few per cent of the population.

The process of residential decentralisation with the construction of suburban housing estates by private enterprise gathered momentum after 1890. It was aided by the ‘tram revolution’ in the provinces and by the introduction of workmen’s trains in London. Here again it was the aristocracy of labour who gained most from the improvements. Take Ilford. In 1850 Ilford was a quite village on the main railway line from London to Ipswich, seven miles from Liverpool Street station; in 1891 there were some 11,000 people in the parish, but by 1901 the new urban district had expanded to 41,240 people and its population almost doubled again by 1911. Two London builders, W.P. Griggs and A.C. Corbett, encouraged by the good railway communication, acquired large areas of land and began to develop massive private housing estates. In 1906 on the Griggs estate a four-room house started at £260; a four-bedroom, double-fronted house at £375 and a five-bedroom house at £450. Both the builders and Ilford Council provided further incentives to move to the suburbs. Corbett gave loans to purchasers to cover some of the cash deposit while Ilford Council used the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act 1899 to give cheap mortgages. Ilford is a classic example of the ways in which improved transport, availability of land, the willingness of entrepreneurs and public bodies to invest and the demand for suburban living combined to restructure the city in the early twentieth century.

In the Housing of the Working-class Act 1890 government intervened in the free market for the first time and, in so doing, fundamentally affected the expansion and planning of towns. Though the provision of council housing was slight before 1919, some councils had begun building houses before 1890 and the Act gave further impetus to such schemes. Some 24,000 council units were built in Britain before 1914 but most were concentrated in London (9,746 units), Liverpool (2,895 units) and Glasgow (2,199 units). These schemes were too few in number to make any real impact on housing needs and, in any case, rent levels and selection procedures tended to exclude the very poor.

There was little fundamental change in housing between 1830 and 1914. Paying rent to private owners remained the norm, accounting for 80 per cent of all houses. Council housing accounted for only 1 per cent in 1914 and housing associations 9 per cent. Though all towns spawned a succession of new residential suburbs, these were mainly for the affluent working and lower-middle-class families who would leave the older parts of the city centre, and new skilled in-migrants. The poor remained trapped in low-cost, sub-standard housing. The spatial segregation of social groups was cleared structured by the economic realities, reflected in income and occupation that controlled access to different types of housing.

Rural housing

In 1830 rural housing was a mixture of poor quality decaying older properties, poorly built new houses and a minority of decent stone or brick-built cottages for the more prosperous. The nature of work was, in some part, a determinant of the nature of rural housing. Living space was more important for the domestic weaver or knitter who spent much time indoors, than for the farm labourer who toiled for 12 hours a day in the field. In contrast the single migrant who left home to seek work might have been hired at a hiring fair and either given accommodation as a lodger in the master’s house (most common in the north and west of England) or housed and fed in sheds or outhouses along with other hired hands as in the arable counties of England in the early nineteenth century.

Population growth since the mid eighteenth century had resulted in a crisis in rural housing that had several consequences. Many families were permanently overcrowded. Individual privacy was difficult and much of life, especially the development of friendships and courtship, was lived outside the home in lanes, woods and fields. Marriage was often delayed due to the lack of opportunity to set up home. Epidemic diseases such as smallpox or typhus fever spread rapidly in overcrowded and insanitary conditions. Some landowners maintained ‘closed’ villages, where accommodation was limited to keep down the size of the population, made the housing situation worse.

In 1830 living conditions could be as unhealthy and harsh as in many towns: a combination of poor housing, lack of employment and poor social prospects frequently impelled townward migration rather than any specific urban attractions. The density of occupation of rural housing was often as high or higher than that in towns. High natural increase in rural areas mostly offset migration losses and rural population densities continued to increase up to the 1840s. In many rural areas the housing supply expanded more slowly than population; indeed some large landowners demolished cottages and took less responsibility for housing their labour force. Many rural parents brought up eight or more children in tiny two-room cottages.[3] The quality of rural housing varied greatly and for the very poor it was often worse than its urban counterpart. Increasingly, urban housing had proper foundations, solid walls and slate roofs. In contrast much rural housing was severely substandard when first built. Most landowners accepted little responsibility for the provision of decent homes and, even in more prosperous areas such as north-west England, cottages were often small, cold and wet. In southern England, where there was more abject poverty, cottages often had mud walls, earth floors and neglected thatch roofs.

Such conditions persisted until the 1850s but, during the remainder of the century, housing gradually improved as out-migration lessened pressure on the countryside and sanitary and housing reforms began to percolate into rural areas. Commissioned by John Simon in 1864, the sample survey for the first national inquiry into rural labourers’ dwellings revealed that the average air-space a person in cottages worked out at 156 cubic feet, whereas the law required a minimum of 250 cubic feet in common lodging houses providing only temporary accommodation and 500 in workhouses and other ‘less eligible’ Poor Law institutions. Public concern about the ‘cottage question’ led to some new building, though this was brought to an abrupt end by the onset of the agricultural depression in 1873. Nevertheless, not all rural housing was bad: surviving nineteenth century houses include not only good quality homes of landowners, farmers and artisans, but well-built estate cottages and good-quality late eighteenth century dwellings of rural factory workers.

Conclusions

Community replaced kin as the crucial welfare network for the urban working-classes between 1832 and 1914. Settled and stable, especially after the 1850s, most envisaged a future spent within the narrow confines of the town or city in which they had been brought up, secure in the protection of the customs and mores of a particular district. Communities were not necessarily defined in territorial terms but often by the experience of social interaction among those of similar attitudes, beliefs and interests. Welsh migrants in Liverpool, for example, were bonded together by strong cultural and linguistic ties despite their relative lack of residential concentration: families travelled long distances to worship together in Welsh-speaking Calvinistic chapels; Welsh newspapers circulated in the city and the National Eisteddfod was held there on several occasions. Other ethnic communities were less dispersed: Irish and Jewish communities tended to be concentrated in particular urban areas.

For the most part, community was a mixture of spatial and social factors such as pubs, churches, chapels, co-ops and various special interest groups were locality-based serving the needs of relatively independent urban villages, demarcated districts within which the working-classes moved and married. Housewives, indeed, rarely ventured beyond the boundary lines of their particular ‘village’ within which there were strong family networks linking mothers and married daughters, sometimes supplemented by the services of relatives. Men who travelled out of the neighbourhood to work hurried back to their ‘local’ for a drink, now patronised in preference to the trade pub close to the workplace. Community meant a convivial communality of interests.

[1] On working-class housing see J. Burnett A Social History of Housing 1815-1985, Methuen, 2^nd ed., 1986 and E. Gauldie Cruel Habitations: a history of working class housing 1780-1918, Allen and Unwin, 1978. R. Rodger Housing in Urban Britain 1780-1914, Macmillan, 1989 is an excellent, and brief, survey of recent research.

[2] The 1832 Reform Act gave the vote to those who rented property worth £10 per annum.

[3] W. Hasbach A history of the English Agricultural Labourer, 1908 despite its age, contains much useful information but should now be read in conjunction with  W.A. Armstrong Agricultural Workers 1770-1970, Batsford,1988. Howard Newby Country Life, Weidenfeld, 1987 is a major and readable study. K. Snell Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900, CUP, 1984 is a mine of information and recent interpretation.

It's a year since I started writing my blog and in that time 17,500 hits have been made on the site, an average of 336 per week.  I've added blogs on the following subjects:

• Autobiographical fragments: 16 items
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It's my intention in the coming year to complete the blogs on Nineteenth century society by including further material on class and on religion, both of which are well advanced in terms of writing, and some materials on Sir Robert Peel. 

The ‘Great Depression’ from the mid 1870s to the mid 1890s saw working-class real wages rise dramatically, while unemployment remained close to the levels of the mid-Victorian boom[1]. The decisive factor in improved living standards was not money wages, even though they continued upwards, but the dramatic fall in prices most marked in food and other staples, goods that accounted for much of the working-class budget. Prices tumbled by over 40 per cent, drawing real wages up in the most substantial and sustained increase of the nineteenth century. Allowing for unemployment, the real wages of the average urban worker stood some 60 per cent higher in 1900 than in 1860.

There was considerable diversity in living standards. The advance in living standards was neither uninterrupted nor evenly spread. All types of workers had to endure economic fluctuations of one kind or another, not least in the troughs of 1878-1879, 1884-1887 and 1892-1893, but the severity diverged markedly. Shipbuilding felt the full impact of the world trace depression. Demand was highly inelastic for a product that was long in construction and tailor-made to specific requirements. There was an over supply of ships in the early 1870s and stockpiling was not an option during the ensuing depression. Although boilermakers and shipbuilders were part of the aristocracy of labour with over 20 per cent earning 40s or more in the early twentieth century, the income available for consumption was substantially less than these wages suggest. At such times of full employment, skilled workers paid off debts incurred during the last spell of unemployment and saved for the next interruption in earnings. Workers in the building trades were subject to a different rhythm, longer than the five to seven year trade and investment cycle experienced in capital goods industries. Swings in the building industry lasted twenty years or more: from a peak in 1876 earnings and work outlets were reduced until the mid 1890s, the start of the next boom that reached a double peak in 1898 and 1903. During the up-turns, full employed builders’ labourers, the elite of unskilled labour, reached economic independence and were able to live above the poverty line without supplementary income. Within the long cycles, building activity remained at the mercy of the weather, with a seasonal trough from November to February. This pushed those without savings back into poverty.

Winter remained a slack season in many other trades, bringing hardship and distress to the casually employed in the docks, on the streets and in the sweatshops. This was particularly evidence when trade continued depressed after the weather improved and, in 1879 and 1886, resulted in unemployed riots and demonstrations. Charles Booth’s survey found that it was the broken time of irregular work rather than low rates of pay that accounted for working-class impoverishment. Employment in the clothing trades was still seasonal and sweated. Female workers in the cheap ‘slop’ end of the market in the London tailoring trade worked no more than two and a half days a week at a daily rate of 2s 6d to 4s for machinists and 1s 6d to 3s 6d for button-holers. Wages were higher in the West End bespoke trade. Up to 30s per week was paid during brisk periods but the ‘season’ exerted a greater tyranny. Milliners, dressmakers and tailoresses were frequently driven into prostitution in the slack season returning to the shops with the advent of the new season’s trade: morals, contemporaries observed, fluctuated with trade. Irregular earnings and employment were the norm for other women workers like box-makers, artificial flower-makers and other sweated trades conducted at home or in small-unregulated factories. The female casual labour market reached its peak during this period as elderly single women, widows and wives of irregularly employed labourers and others sought work at any price whatever.

All levels within the working-classes found their family and life style affected by adverse personal circumstances that were aggravated by fluctuations in living standards occasioned by cyclical, seasonal or other economic factors. Family size began to fall in this period: the marriage cohort of 1861-1869 had an average of 6.16 children while that of 1890-1899 had 4.13 and the figure continued to fall down to and beyond 1914. Fertility rates, however, diverged markedly between social classes and within the working-class itself. Between 1880 and 1911 the fertility rate in middle-class Hampstead fell by nearly 30 per cent while in working-class Poplar the decline was only 6 per cent. Within the working-classes martial fertility declined substantially faster for families headed by skilled, semi-skilled and textile workers than for those headed by miners, agricultural labourers and the unskilled.

The introduction of compulsory education in 1880 Act was regarded as an economic threat and unwelcome intrusion by poor parents since they were often dependent on the supplementary income of their children. Despite this, children were still able to earn at an early age. From nine or so, boys sought out of school hours employment as delivery boys, newspaper sellers, hawkers and costermongers. Juvenile crime, oral evidence suggests, was often inspired by a sense of family duty, a moral determination to provide for the family whatever the legal consequences. Non-attendance remained high in large families where the father was dead or unemployed. The half time system proved an acceptable compromise in the textile districts though twelve-year-olds that spent long mornings in the mill were often in no fit state to be taught in the afternoon.

Married women’s employment was poorly paid, incurred costs and carried social stigma. Denied workplace equality, working women were condemned as unfair competition, undercutting wages and workshop practices. Antagonism was particularly acute in the Potteries where the patriarchal system of subcontracted family labour was abruptly undercut by technological innovation at the potbank that brought new opportunities for women in occupations previously defended as skilled male preserves. Paid at no more than two-thirds the rate for the job, women were set to work on the lighter, smaller ware while men struggled to maintain former wage levels on the larger, more difficult items. During the 1890s the number of male potters decreased while female employment increased by 10.9 per cent; in 1901, women made up 21,000 of the total workforce of 46,000.

Families with a skilled male breadwinner were best place to benefit from improved living standards, but illness and advancing age denied them permanent economic security. Many trades remained dangerous and unhealthy and high earnings were often interrupted by ill-health. Income and expenditure could fluctuate widely but through credit and thrift working-class families struggled to maintain decent standards. The corner-shop ‘tick book’ remained the most common form of credit and during short-term emergencies the aristocracy of labour received financial assistance from the Co-op. The easy payment check system was pioneered by the Provident Clothing Company in 1881, a rapid success that altered the traditional method of credit. Pawn broking declined from its 1870s peak after which the trade diversified into the retail business with new fashionable lines sold for check, cash or credit.

Poorer families, however, continued to use the pledge shop in the conventional way, as a cheap source of second-hand clothing and as a substitute savings bank. Expensive items purchased with seasonal earnings were subsequently pawned off one by one to tide over hard times. Pledgeable articles were the most basic form of insurance against hardship. At the other end of the scale, the friendly societies offered systematic cover against the costs of sickness, accident and death but at a price beyond the means of many working-class households. It has been calculated that the minimum weekly income necessary to be a member of a friendly society was 20s and this excluded all but the most regularly employed. Membership, however, grew: between 1872 and 1899 the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows increased from 427,000 to 713,000 and the Ancient Order of Foresters from 394,000 to 666,000. Membership was a cultural badge of status and was respected and admired throughout the working-class community.

In insurance terms, sickness benefit was the most important advantage of membership, paid at a rate of between 10s and 14s per week, a sum supplemented in some cases by trade union membership (the double cover of the aristocracy of labour). By 1900, however, the friendly societies were on the verge of crisis as an increasing number of elderly members relied on sick benefits in lieu of a pension. As well as sick pay, friendly societies entitled members to medical treatment from a general practitioner but this did not prove to be successful and many societies pooled their resources to establish medical institutes. By 1885 42 medical institutes were affiliated to the Friendly Societies Medical Alliance with a total membership of 211,000. Other forms of medical treatment depended on philanthropy, employer paternalism or the overworked services of the Poor Law. Free outpatient treatment was available from the voluntary hospitals but these were unevenly spread with a heavy concentration in London and the larger cities. Work clubs or medical aid societies were encouraged by some employers who deducted a weekly sum to fund the scheme and by 1900 it was common practice for the workers to select and appoint the medical practitioner. Poor Law medical facilities lost some of their stigma following the Medical Relief Disqualification Act 1885. The medical establishment was still, however, treated with some suspicion in working-class circles and various forms of alternative medicine were favoured ranging from homeopathy, mesmerism and spiritualism, practices based on natural remedies to the latest patent pills advertised in the press and quack commercial substitutes. Poor families without access to charity or insurance schemes were forced to rely on the Poor Law unless they could muster sufficient funds for private treatment, the much-preferred option.

With or without medical cover, burial insurance was considered obligatory, particularly for wives, children and those with no independent income of their own. The alternative was the much feared pauper burial. Much of the business was conducted by large and inefficient collecting societies: contributions were low, a penny or halfpenny a week, but expenses were high (40 per cent of income compared to 10-15 per cent for friendly societies). The industrial life assurance companies were more efficient: the Prudential kept its collectors under close supervision and the company was far more selective declining to accept Irish-born or inhabitants of certain neighbourhoods. Even in death was mattered was the judgement of neighbours and peers. Without show and display -- an ostentatious funeral -- respectability would be unacknowledged.

Food was the principal item of expenditure and considerable emphasis was placed on managing diet. In 1885 the working-class spent 71 per cent of their earnings on food and drink compared to only 44 per cent in the middle-classes. By this time, however, food prices were falling, facilitating a major advance in living standards: between 1877 and 1887 the retail price of food in a typical working-class budget fell by 30 per cent, the most significant price change of the century. Lower prices were the result of large-scale import of cheap wheat and meat, the progressive reduction of taxes on food and the belated industrial revolution in food manufacture. A whole series of changes took place in retail technology. They were not complete until 1900. Though they were not immediate and revolutionary, the end result was a radical change in the whole system.

The weekly market was gradually replaced by, or transformed into, the permanent shopping centre. Up to 1850 the first stage was characterised by the building of a market hall. Michael Marks, for example, started in Leeds as a peddler or packman; by 1884 he had a stall in the open market that operated two days a week; from there he moved into the covered market that had been opened in 1857 on a daily basis; the next stage was to open stalls in other markets and by 1890 he had five. The old core of the town, or part of it, that had been a mixture of land uses became more specialised into retail or professional uses. Mass produced goods undermined old local craft production and the old combined workshop-retailing establishments were replaced by specialist retailers of manufactured goods. The railways enhanced this process by providing speedy transport of even perishable commodities. Part of this process was the wider occurrence of the lock-up shop to which the retailer commuted each day. By the 1880s both multiple and department stores appeared, the former especially in the grocery trade. Thomas Lipton started a one-man grocery store in Glasgow in 1872; by 1899 he had 245 branches throughout Britain. The greater demand for professional services, related to urban growth, resulted in lawyers and doctors seeking central locations. But a variety of other uses also located themselves here offering services to business, auctioneers and accountants or to the public, such as lending libraries.

The following important changes in diet occurred after 1875. Declining bread consumption is widely associated with rising standards of living as more money was spent on meat. The prosperous aristocracy of labour may have bought fresh meat but other members of the working-class bought imported meat, whether tinned or frozen. It was good value, cheap and appetising when embellished with one of the new commercial sauces. Consumption of tea and sugar rose as housewives found themselves with more money to spare. New technology and factory production led to a dramatic increase in biscuit, jam, chocolate and cocoa manufacture: Chivers, Rowntree, Cadbury and Fry soon established as household names. Jam sold particularly well and there was a huge popular demand for a sweet, highly flavoured spread that was cheaper than butter and made margarine more palatable. Some of the new developments were of dubious nutritional value. Roller-milling produced finer flour and a white loaf but the process removed the wheat germ, vitamins, mineral salts and fats. Margarine was vitamin-deficient, as were cheap and convenient dairy products, hence the prevalence of rickets among children fed on canned condensed and evaporated skimmed milk. More nutritious, but much criticised by middle-class observers, was the development of the fish and chip trade. It made an important contribution to the inadequate protein content of the urban diet. For working mothers, fish and chips were a welcome and affordable convenience, saving time, effort and cooking costs.

The extent of dietary improvement in late Victorian England should not be exaggerated. Agricultural labourers, especially in the low-wage south-western counties, seldom enjoyed meat. However, shorter working hours allowed labourers to spend more time in their vegetable allotments while the new touring vans from nearby co-operative societies offered decent supplies in rural backwaters. In urban households, gains were unevenly shared: the male breadwinner was accorded priority at the table, a practice that often resulted in the underfeeding of women and children. Women’s diets remained one of bread and tea, while almost all men consumed a main meal of meat or bacon or fish and potatoes. Despite the fall in prices, families with incomes less than 30s a week were undernourished, the consequences of which were graphically revealed in contemporary social surveys and the subsequent investigation of the nation’s ‘physical deterioration’.

Health became an increasingly important issue in this period. With the advantage of hindsight the years between 1875 and 1914 can be seen as one of transition from the age-old pattern of mass mortality occasioned by infectious diseases, poor nutrition and heavy labour to the modern assemblage of functional disorders, viral disease and bodily decay associated with old age. Two factors hastened the change. First, the increased survival rates of individuals who formerly would have been lost in infancy or childhood. Secondly, the new diet with its excessive sugar and salt content, the consequences of which were aggravated by increased addiction to cigarette smoking, encouraged by the introduction of the penny-per-five packet in 1888. Harmful or not to the bodily constitution, the quality of food undoubtedly improved assisted by new legislation against adulteration and by higher standards of retailing promoted by the Co-op, that secured its biggest advances in members in the 1880s and 1890s, and by the new multiple stores pioneered by Lipton’s and Sainsbury’s. However, those still dependent on ‘tick’ had to suffer the high prices and low quality of the small corner-shop while other poor families eked out a diet on the offal and otherwise unsaleable items knocked down in price at Saturday night markets.

[1] S.B.Saul The Myth of the Great Depression 1873-1896, Macmillan, 2nd. ed., 1988 summarises historiography.

The subject of the working-classes in the nineteenth century is an enormous one and all that is offered here is a stock-taking exercise to assess the significance of some of the most important recent historiography.[1] These issues will be considered in three chronological periods -- 1830-50, 1850-75 and 1875-1914 -- corresponding to the main economic divisions of the period.

Discussion of living standards, especially the so-called ‘standard of living debate’ in the period before 1850, is bedevilled by a range of methodological problems. What is the meaning of ‘living standards’? Is it a qualitative or quantitative concept? What evidence can be used? Statistics, one of the main fuels in the debate, obscure much of the diversity and harshness of working-class experience. Should historians be using ‘actual’ wages or ‘real’ wages as the basis for their arguments? [2] These issues have given rise to a debate between pessimists and optimists over, not simply whether living standards fell or rose, but over the whole revolutionary experience. It is in this context that the discussion of living standards across the period must be grounded.

1830-1850

There was a decline in real wages starting in the 1750s that persisted through the price peak of 1812-13 and the distress of the post-war years. In London this downward trend was not reversed until the 1820s, though it was not until the 1840s that the levels of the 1740s were regained and exceeded. The national index compiled by Lindert and Williamson also situates the upturn in the 1820s but their figures are far more optimistic suggesting that real wages nearly doubled between 1820 and 1850. By 1830 therefore the worst excesses of the pessimist scenario seem to have been at an end and real wages for the bulk of the working population seem to have been rising, though whether Lindert and Williamson’s optimistic assessment is entirely valid is questionable.[3]

So what did people earn? In the 1760s most high-wage counties were in the south east. By 1850 they were in the Midlands and north: Lancashire wages stood more than a third above the level in Buckinghamshire, a differential that continued until the end of the century. This North-South divide and wage payments must be assessed in the context of family income and the higher cost of living for the working-classes, a hardship aggravated by the family poverty cycle and the devastating impact of recurrent short-term crises.

Standard of living statistics conceal important structural changes in the composition of working-class family income before 1850. The assumption on which the figures were based, especially the dominance of money-wages and of the male breadwinner, lack validity until 1850 by which time workers had been deprived of traditional perks and rights and the working-class family had been forced to redefine gender roles and functions. The imposition of monetary form of wage payment marked a fundamental change in employers’ attitudes to property and labour. What had previously been accepted as a customary right now became crime: employers could no longer allow workers to appropriate any part of the materials or product of their labour, no matter how small. What was a stake for workers was not simply a traditional source of ‘extra’ income, but the maintenance of some independence at the workplace, some control over the product and the labour process. Age was probably the most important factor in determining output and earnings. In the 1830s the youngest and fittest of the handloom weavers could earn 25 per cent more wages in the same time as a weaker person could earn on the same machine. Throughout the trades, the elderly or rather the prematurely old were often forced to give up the better-paid tasks as they fell victim to various forms of occupational disorder. The Sheffield fork-grinders killed off no less than a quarter of the workforce every five years. Differences in output and earnings were kept to a minimum where group solidarity and trade societies were strong, but these forms of mutual protection did not apply to the so-called ‘dishonourable’ trades or in the over-stocked outwork industries. Here, in the absence of day rates or ‘legal’, union-backed piece prices, opportunistic middlemen and commercially minded masters were able to exploit cheap, unskilled labour through the piece-rate system. Even in ‘honourable’ trades, few workers were fortunate enough to enjoy full-time work throughout the year.

The focus on the adult male ‘breadwinner’ in terms of the standard of living debate has diverted attention away from the notion of the family income. Earnings in this period were assessed in family, not individual, terms with the family often functioning as a unit of production. By 1830, however, the prospects for women and hence family earnings deteriorated considerably. The first victims of technological or structural unemployment were women who encountered the new prejudice and sexual division of labour and the harsh economic costs of the new male breadwinner ideal.

Sexual segregation was rigorously enforced in the textile mills where women were denied access to the best-paid skilled jobs. Skill was a male preserve in the modern factory, protected by trade union organisation and internal subcontracting that gave mule spinners and their like a supervisory role for which women were deemed ineligible. Textile mills apart, mechanisation and the factory system brought few new opportunities for women: female employment was derisory in iron and steel, railways, chemicals and the expanding heavy industries. Legislation in 1842 restricted female work in the mines. Sexual segregation was by no means restricted to the factory districts and occurred wherever men were confronted with changes in the location or process of work. In rural England, for example, female participation was limited to haymaking and weeding the corn by 1830. The family income suffered as a result but most men on their own economic grounds welcomed the new sexual specialisation. They were increasingly vulnerable to seasonal unemployment with the expansion of grain product (that was less labour intensive) and they were determined to restrict cheap female competition. Yet in many cases the wife’s contribution to the family income remained indispensable but the force of the new convention against working women confined their employment to the lowest paid ‘dishonourable’ and sweated trades. Here their cheap labour was exploited in such a way as to reinforce still further the male hostility towards ‘unfair’ competition. Relations between the sexes in the London tailoring trades were at crisis point in the early 1830s when the Owenite socialists championed the rights of working women and called on the London tailors union to adopt a policy of ‘equalisation’ in order to unite all the workforce. The resulting strike was, however, a disastrous failure and led to further marginalisation of female workers in the trades.

Domesticity was probably the best in a narrow range of options for working-class married women, but for those employed in the sweated trades it was a cruelly illusive ideal. Until their children were old enough to contribute to the family income, there was no release from the double burden of unpaid housework and ill-paid waged work. Unable not to work, married women were driven lower and lower into the sweated trades or prostitution by the forces of social convention that condemned but continued to exploit their labour. The middle-classes deplored the ‘unnatural’ behaviour of young working mothers and condemned them for leaving their children with incompetent child-minders. However, recent research has shown that only a quarter of female mill workers were married and of those with children utmost care was taken to ensure that they were looked after by a close relative, lodger or neighbour. Less than two in a hundred of all infant children in industrial Lancashire were left to the mercies of professional child minders. The middle-classes imposed their views of the ‘proper’ role of women on the working-classes, a view that reinforced the economic arguments of working men that the role of working women should be reduced. Working-class family earnings seem to have declined most where market competition intensified but there were no alternative employment prospects open. In the arable east and de-industrialising south, the removal of traditional controls in agriculture and the trades led inexorably to discrimination against women and inadequate pay for men. In the north higher wages prevailed: new employment opportunities in hand-domestic and mechanised trades developed alongside the survival of traditional institutional frameworks and hiring practices in farm service and apprenticed trades.

The expenditure or cost of living for working-class families was significantly higher than for the middle and upper-classes. Food was by far the most important item, accounting for up to three-quarters of the wage packet. They bought poor quality food in small quantities for immediate consumption and rarely received value for money. This was often obtained from the Saturday nigh markets where dealers were able to off-load their otherwise unsaleable produce: Engels commented that ‘the workers get what is too bad for the property-holding class’. They were often dependent on credit and had to pay the higher prices of the obliging small shopkeepers. Provisions were dearer still were workers were victims of the truck system and the poor quality, adulterated foods of the ‘Tommy shops’. Despite stringent legislation from 1831, the truck system remained common practice into the 1850s in south Staffordshire and in much of rural East Anglia where gangmasters supplied subcontract labour at the cheapest daily rates.

As with food, so with housing: those at the bottom end of the market received scant value for money. Accommodation accounted for anything up to a quarter or even a third of a labourer’s wages compared to about a sixth of the income of the middle-classes. The nuclear family, the sacred cow of English social history, was too expensive for many families who lived with kin or in lodgings for the first few years of marriage. John Foster found that the proportion of families living with relatives ranged from a third in Northampton to over two-thirds in South Shields. In Preston in 1851 lodgers were present in 23 per cent of all households. Many workers fell victim to the ‘house trucking’ system where housing was dependent on their employers. The ‘tied’ cottage system of rural England was a logical extension of this.

For working-class teenagers, clothes and accessories were the first call on income after they had paid their contribution to the family income. Many poor families, however, relied on cast-off, second-hand or stolen goods. Clothes could be easily pawned or fenced and there are many recorded cases of petty theft: in Manchester there was an average of 210 reports a year of stolen clothing from hedges or lines. Extra income was often spent on clothes since they were a highly pawnable commodity as well as providing immediate enjoyment.

1850-1875

Improved standards of living during the mid-Victorian boom owed more to greater stability in employment than to a marked increase in wages.[4] For some workers substantial and lasting advances in real wages did not occur until the late 1860s. The real wages of Black Country miners actually fell by a third during the mid 1850s and did not recover fully until 1869, after which there was a major advance carrying real wages some 30-40 per cent above the 1850 level. Money earnings in cotton displayed a similar chronology. Advances in the 1850s were relatively modest but some spectacular advances occurred after 1865: between 1860 and 1874 weavers wages rose by 20 per cent and spinners by between 30 and 50 per cent. These figures suggest a widening of differentials.

As a general rule in this period the wage ratio between skilled and unskilled stood at 2:1. In terms of actual earnings the skilled fared better still since they were less vulnerable to unemployment. For skilled trade unionists in the engineering, metal and shipbuilding industries, there were only two occasions, in 1858 and 1868, when the unemployment rates reached double figures. For agricultural labourers, whose numbers now fell absolutely, the mid-Victorian boom brought no real improvement in standards of living. Ironically, improvement was delayed until the 1870s and 1880s, a period of falling profitability for farming generally. George Bartley’s study of The Seven Ages of a Village Pauper, published in 1874, calculated that three out of four inhabitants of the typical village would require public relief at some stage in their lives.

In some industrial areas there was a similar lack of material advance. In the Black Country only the skilled building trades enjoyed an increase in real wages despite peak production in local coal and iron industries. On Merseyside, wage rates for skilled and unskilled workers remained stable until the early 1870s, when the general advance was eroded by particularly high food prices. Women workers in sweated trades and casual employment probably gained least from the mid-Victorian period, though there is some evidence for an improvement in day rates for charring and washing in the 1870s.

The mid-Victorian economy was characterised by high, relatively stable prices and high levels of consumption. This was, however, punctuated by spectacular inflationary spells in 1853-5 and 1870-3. Food prices rose less than most others resulting in marked increases in the consumption of tea, sugar and other ‘luxuries’. In dietary terms, however, there was no significant advance in the standard of living until the falling prices of the 1880s. Brewing apart, food remained a largely unrevolutionised industry in production and retailing until 1900. Real wages kept pace with food price rises, but rent proved increasingly expensive with particularly sharp increases in the mid-1860s.

Few working-class families rose above economic insecurity and bouts of periodic poverty, despite the greater stability of employment and the belated improvement in earnings. At critical moments in the family cycle even the differential enjoyed by skilled workers proved inadequate to prevent considerable hardship. This was particularly severe at times of general distress when a downturn in the trade cycle or a harsh winter led to short-time working and unemployment. The can be seen particularly in the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-5, a protracted period of distress and unemployment: The ‘famine’ had its origins in the over-production of the late 1850s boom and the consequent saturation of markets at home and abroad. The Federal blockade of the Confederate ports after 1861 that resulted in an intermittent supply of raw cotton was not as many contemporaries believed the sole cause of the problem. During the winter of 1862-1863 49 per cent of all operatives in the 28 poor law unions of the cotton district were unemployed with a further 35 per cent on short-time. The depth and persistence of such mass unemployment was unprecedented: at Ashton the worst hit town where there was little industrial diversification, 60 per cent of the operatives remained unemployed as late as November 1864, while at Salford the unemployment rate stood at 24 per cent.

Unemployment on this scale had a disastrous effect on standards of living and posed considerable problems for the relief agencies, both Poor Law and philanthropic once the independent and thrifty operatives had exhausted their savings. The Poor Law and the charities were unsuited to the needs of unemployed factory workers. They had already come under scrutiny following events in London during the harsh winter of 1860-1 when the temperature remained below freezing for a month causing severe privation for the casual work force. Across the East End, the Poor Law system simply broke down as the number of paupers increased from about 96,000 to over 135,000. To meet the emergency charitable funds had to be distributed without investigation, an exercise condemned in the investigative journalism of Hollingshead’s Ragged London as indiscriminate ‘stray charity’. The Poor Law Board, already under investigation by the parliamentary select committee, was determined to prevent similar problems by insisting on the strict compliance with the Outdoor Relief Regulation Order. However, local Guardians refused to force the respectable unemployed to perform demeaning work tasks in the company of idle and dissolute paupers. They paid out small weekly allowances of between 1s and 2s per head on the assumption that this meagre non-pauperising sum would be augmented from other sources -- short-time earnings, income from other members of the family or charitable aid.

Charity was more stringently controlled through the Central Executive Relief Committee that issued strict regulations, drawn up by James Kay-Shuttleworth. Well below normal working income, relief was to be paid partly in kind in the form of tickets to be exchanged only at certain shops to prevent squandering and misuse of funds. Recipients were to be regularly visited and there was to be some form of work in return for the relief granted. This proved very unpopular and serious riots ensued at Stalybridge and the disturbances reached as far north as Preston uniting Irish and English workers in indignant anger. As a result the government introduced the Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act in 1863. It was an interventionist measure in direct contradiction to the individualist premises of the Poor Law and, although it did not eradicate the bitter memories of 1863, this public works programme prevented further serious unrest.

After 1865 Lancashire operatives began to benefit from the mid-Victorian boom but others were less fortunate. Workers in the East End were hit hard by the crisis of 1866-1868, the result of an unfortunate conjunction of circumstances. The shipbuilding industry was dependent on government favour and foreign orders but it collapsed after the banking failures of 1866, a financial panic that brought an end to the boom in railway and building construction. The winter of 1866-1867 was extremely harsh and was accompanied by high food prices and the return of cholera. This added to the hardship and caused a breakdown of the seasonal economic equilibrium. The overall effect was to augment the casual labour problem.

[1] The literature on the labouring population is immense.  E.H. Hunt British Labour History 1815-1914, Weidenfeld, 1982, J. Rule The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750-1850, Longman, 1986, J. Benson The Working-class in Britain 1850-1939, Longman, 1989, E. Hopkins A Social History of the English Working-classes 1815-1945, Edward Arnold, 1977, J. Belchem Industrialisation and the Working-class, Scolar, 1990 and K.D. Brown The English Labour Movement 1700-1951, Gill and Macmillan, 1982 are good starting points.

[2] ‘Real’ wages related the actual wages earned to the level of prices. Real wages will therefore increase if wages remain constant and food prices fall: the money available will go further.

[3] W.D. Rubenstein Wealth and Inequality in Britain, Faber, 1986 and H. Kaelbe Industrialisation and Social Inequality in Nineteenth Century Europe, Berg, 1986 provide useful analyses of the issues.  S. Pollard and D.W. Crossley The Wealth of Britain 1085-1966, Batsford, 1968 and J. Burnett A History of the Cost of Living, Penguin, 1969 provide chronological perspective. R. Floud ‘A Tall Story?  The Standard of Living Debate’, History Today, May 1983 is the simplest introduction. This should now be supplemented by R. Floud, K. Wachter and A. Gregory Height, health and history: Nutritional status in the United Kingdom 1750-1980, CUP, 1990, a major contribution to the debate. A.J. Taylor (ed.), The Standard of Living in the Industrial Revolution, Methuen, 1975 contains articles by the major protagonists.   J. Burnett Plenty and Want, Scolar Press, 1969, new edition, 1989 is central to the period 1832-1914.

[4] Roy Church The Great Victorian Boom 1850-1873, Macmillan, 1975 provides a brief analyses of this critical period.

Historians have identified three further ways in which individuals were differentiated in society between 1832 and 1914 that transcended, but contributed to, the ‘paternalist-class’ debate: religion, gender and race.

Religion

In 1832 the language of religion was part of a common culture. By 1914 this situation was under considerable attack from the external challenge of secularism and science and the increasingly pluralistic nature of religious observance and experience. Three aspects of religious life can be identified. At one level, religion is made up of a quest for individual truth and salvation. Faith, belief and piety were seen by many as important features of their lives. At a second level, that of organised religion, Christianity was an institution and religion a social and moral force providing a generally agreed framework for the ‘Christian life’. Very few people in 1832 denied all religious ties and did not belong, at least nominally, to a Church or sect. Finally, there was the