Читать книгу Early Victorian Britain: 1832–51 - Литагент HarperCollins USD - Страница 7

In 1847 George Richardson Porter, a statistician at the Board of Trade, brought out a new edition of his Progress of the Nation, in its various Social and Economical Relations, from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. The book professed ‘to mark the progress of this United Kingdom, in which all the elements of improvement are working with incessant and increasing energy’. To enquire into the circumstances which have made one’s own country preeminent, he argued, would almost seem to be a duty; but especially is this so in the case of the present generation, ‘by which have been made the greatest advances in civilisation that can be found recorded in the annals of mankind’. Although he allotted one of the eight sections to ‘Moral Progress’ (comprising chapters on crime, manners, education and postage), most of the book was devoted to economic and financial growth. Progress meant essentially material progress, based on ‘well-authenticated facts’, from which could be drawn conclusions ‘supported by principles, the truth of which has in general been recognised’.

The figures which Porter produced certainly looked impressive. Not one of his innumerable tables covering everything from emigration and manufacturers to taxes and food, failed to show a substantial increase during the previous forty years. By 1847 Britain just had more of everything: more raw cotton imported, more tons of coal dug out, more miles of railway built – also more crime – than ever before. Even the increase in population was taken as evidence of prosperity, and the dark fears of the Malthusians dispelled by the growth in food production. The early Victorians were the last people to claim that worldly wealth was the sole end of man’s existence. Nevertheless the material achievement was so dazzling that at times they were quite carried away and wrote of it in lyrical, even transcendental language. They admitted that of course there were other constituents of progress, but none was so conveniently measurable nor so dear to the heart of a generation which, like Mr Gradgrind, had a veritable passion for ‘facts’. Porter (with all the enthusiasm and brashness of the pioneer generation of social statisticians) thought that because his facts were unconnected with ‘party feelings’ or ‘fanciful theories’, they had an objective validity which put them beyond any questioning. Despite this myopia, his compilation from parliamentary and other official records was a brilliant plundering and a massive testimony to the unprecedented growth of the economy. Porter had difficulty, because of insufficiency of data, in measuring the growth of total national wealth. But modern economists have calculated that the total gross national income of Great Britain rose from £340 millions in 1831 to £523·3 millions in 1851. There could hardly be much doubt, in this sense, about the Progress of the Nation.

The developments which Porter was outlining have usually been described by historians as the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century with a series of inventions in the textile industry, this revolution rapidly transformed the whole basis of British life. The world’s first machine civilisation was born and the transition to the ‘industry state’ commenced. By 1832 the first stage had been completed, with the successful application of steam power to new machines in the textile mills, the expansion of production in the coal, iron and engineering industries, and the concentration of production in the North and Midlands. The 1830s and 1840s saw an intensification of the trend towards factory production and a ruthless exploitation of economic resources.

More recently these developments have been approached from a somewhat different angle. In place of the idea of the Industrial Revolution, as formulated by Arnold Toynbee in 1881, we now have an interpretation which reflects the modern economists’ interest in economic growth. Five stages of economic growth in the life of industrial societies are identified by W. W. Rostow and vividly labelled in language appropriate to the space age.⁵ According to this nomenclature Britain by the 1830s had long since completed her ‘take-off’ (1783–1802) and was more than half-way through her ‘drive to maturity’. During the forty years or so of this stage (which would be completed by 1850) the economy made sustained, if fluctuating, progress as it moved beyond the narrow range of industries (textiles, coal and iron) which had powered the original take-off. A high proportion of the national income went into investment (thus ensuring that production kept ahead of population increase) and full use was made of the most advanced technology of the day. As yet however the main thrust of the economy was in the basic industries sector and the shift to consumers’ goods and services was still in the future.

Whether we talk of take-off or prefer the older and more familiar term, Industrial Revolution, there are two aspects of the economic history of early Victorian Britain which have briefly to be considered. First is the pattern of industrial development. Porter’s statistics, supplemented by the census of 1851, make it clear that the largest industry was still agriculture. Over one and three-quarter million people were directly engaged in it, and when harvests were reasonably good Britain was virtually self-supporting in food supplies. With only a small increase in the labour force, agricultural production during the 1830s and 1840s was almost able to keep pace with the expanding demands of the town population. In the non-agricultural sector of the economy the textile industry dominated the life of the nation, as it had done for the previous sixty years. The numbers employed in the main branches of the trade were large (probably about 1,100,000, excluding hosiery and lace), but even more important was the role of textiles, especially cotton, as a pace-setter for the whole of industry in matters of economic organisation, industrial relations and technological innovation. In conjunction with coal, iron and engineering, textiles provided the basis of British achievement. ‘It is to the spinning-jenny and the steam-engine,’ observed Porter, ‘that we must look as having been the true moving powers of our fleets and armies, and the chief support also of a long-continued agricultural prosperity.’ Mechanical engineering had by the 1840s developed most of the machine tools necessary for precision work: James Nasmyth’s steam hammer could forge a huge casting or gently crack an egg in a wineglass, while Joseph Whitworth produced gauges which were accurate to a ten-thousandth of an inch. No such technical progress was observable in the coal industry, which increased output simply by sinking deeper shafts and employing more men. In 1836 the mines produced 30 million tons of coal, and ten years later this figure had increased to 44 millions. Closely geared to coal as a main consumer was the iron industry. Continuous innovation in the iron-making processes greatly improved efficiency, and total output rose spectacularly from about 700,000 tons per year in 1830 to 1 million tons in 1835 and 2 millions in 1847. The basic sector of the economy (sometimes called the Great Industry) comprising manufacturing and mining probably did not employ more than 1·7 million workers. This was less than a quarter of the occupied persons listed in 1851, and only a fraction of the total population. Yet it provided the motive force for ‘the workshop of the world’.

The second aspect to be noted is the fluctuation of the economy. In the years following the Reform Bill of 1832 harvests were good and the price of wheat (always taken as an index of food prices) fell drastically. Investment in home industries was stimulated and there was a boom in railway construction after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester line (begun in 1826) became apparent. The prosperity, however, was shortlived: in 1836 the good harvests and the trade boom came to an end, and by 1837 the country was plunged into a prolonged depression lasting until 1842. These six years were the grimmest period in the history of the nineteenth century. Industry came to a standstill, unemployment reached hitherto unknown proportions, and with high food prices and inadequate relief the manufacturing population faced hunger and destitution. At no time did the whole system seem nearer to complete breakdown. Revival began in 1843 and continued into the 1850s, though broken by another recession in 1847–8. A second railway boom in the mid-forties contributed largely to the recovery (between 1843 and 1848 the length of line in the United Kingdom was extended from 2,000 to 5,000 miles), and by 1851 the Great Exhibition was able, with some plausibility, to suggest that the ‘Hungry Forties’ were no more than a temporary interruption in the rapid progress of the nation towards prosperity for all.

That economic developments are closely related to social institutions and actions should not perhaps require much emphasis. But in early Victorian Britain the relationship was unusually prominent. The very rapid rate of economic development meant that relatively few people were fully abreast of what was going on in the country, the more so as ‘Progress’ proceeded unevenly between different parts of the country and in different sections of the same industry. It is hard to escape the impression that very large numbers of people in the 1840s were completely bewildered by the environment in which they found themselves. They were required to make adjustments of a far-reaching nature: moving to a strange new place, starting a new type of job, suddenly being unemployed. Their past experience had given them few of the social skills required to cope with such situations. Small wonder that the period overflowed with social tension and frustration. The period 1832–51 saw an unprecedentedly large number of people involved in a variety of movements of social protest, which ebbed and flowed according to (among other things) the cycle of booms and slumps. It is in fact possible to construct a rough social tension chart,⁶ correlating periods of maximum radical protest with unemployment and the price of bread – though it would be unwise to draw simplistic conclusions from such data.

To say that contemporaries were bewildered by the events of the 1830s and 1840s is not to deny that they had definite views about things. They could not, as individuals, do much about the fluctuations of the economy, but they could and did express themselves about the ‘social problem’ or the ‘condition-of-England question’. In so doing they were trying to comprehend the nature of the changes which acceptance of an industrial way of life demanded. The fateful initial steps which led inevitably to the ‘industry state’ had been taken long ago, and there was now no turning back. The potentialities of the new economy of growth seemed enormous, but if they were to be realised there would have to be acceptance of fundamental changes in ways of life and habits of thought. The Industrial Revolution was at this stage essentially a social experience. At the time contemporaries made many different diagnoses of the problems, depending upon their stations in life and ideological positions. If we are to avoid ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’⁷ we have to take seriously what they were saying, even though sometimes we may think that they were mistaken. After all, they were there and we were not. They lived through this phase of the Industrial Revolution and they tried to express their experience in meaningful terms. The problems identified by Chartists and professors of political economy, by factory reformers and Whig mill owners provide the key to the social experience of industrialism.

From an economic point of view the prime characteristic of industrialism is economic growth. This is the main evidence on which Porter relied to establish the Progress of the Nation – but he was well aware that this was not the whole of the story. Associated with economic growth are certain forms of social organisation and also (as was very evident in the 1830s and 1840s) social disorganisation, without which the expansion cannot take place. Industrialism therefore implies social change, and the context in which this change takes place is indicated by the ‘problems’ which the participants identify – overpopulation, poor laws, great cities, the factory system. There need not in principle be any necessary connection between an industrial revolution, urbanisation and a factory system. Great cities existed in ancient times long before industrialism or factories; and historians have shown that ‘manufactories’ predated the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. In Britain the three have usually been regarded as inseparable, but this is an assumption which is not very helpful in exploring the nature of early Victorian society in the first instance. For purposes of analysis the process of urban growth and the development of a factory system can be considered as independent factors.⁸

The census of 1851, as we have seen, showed that for the first time slightly more than half the population was urban. The period of fastest growth had been the decade 1821–31, but the increase was not much less during the succeeding twenty years. Most of what are now the principal cities of modern Britain continued to grow rapidly between 1831 and 1851: Manchester from 182,000 to 303,000; Leeds 123,000 to 172,000; Birmingham 144,000 to 233,000; Glasgow 202,000 to 345,000. Bradford, the fastest growing town in this period of the Industrial Revolution, had 13,000 inhabitants in 1801, 26,000 in 1821, and 104,000 by 1851. At the beginning of the century London (with nearly a million) was the only city with more than 100,000 population; by 1851 there were nine. This massive growth had come from both natural increase and immigration, the proportion differing considerably from town to town. In 1851 a half or more of the adult inhabitants of Leeds, Sheffield and Norwich had been born in the town: in Manchester, Bradford and Glasgow just over a quarter were natives; and in Liverpool the proportion was even less.

The facts of demography provided a foundation for the Victorians’ great debate about cities, but the debate focused on ‘problems’ rather than numbers. Harking back to a much older tradition of rural-urban dichotomy, in which country life was assumed to be the norm and cities an ‘unnatural’ development which required special explanation, conservative critics of the new towns concentrated their attention on what was wrong. Cobbett’s denunciation of London as ‘the great Wen’ is a picturesque and well-known example of this view. Reformers of a different stamp also joined the chorus of disapproval; and even pro-urbanites like the Reverend Robert Vaughan, who saw cities as centres of civilisation, adopted a problems approach. Vaughan’s book, The Age of Great Cities; or modern society viewed in its relation to intelligence, morals and religion (1843), was indicative of the interest in the subject from the 1840s. Preoccupation with the problems of cities, however, defined fairly rigidly the terms of the debate, and precluded any serious consideration of the process of urbanisation as such. It became almost fashionable in Victorian Britain for writers dealing with urban developments to adopt a sensational approach. Such accounts are valuable evidence of contemporary attitudes on a multitude of social situations which happened to develop in cities. They do not, as some later social historians apparently thought, tell us much about how and why the urbanisation of the population came about. As defenders of the cities in the 1840s, such as Edward Baines, editor of the Leeds Mercury, were quick to point out, many of the problems of the urban areas (sanitation, housing, education, religion) were equally prominent in the countryside. So that the problems as such cannot be used to define the nature of urbanisation. The growth of population and its concentration in cities of various sizes is the great social change to be noted here; the problems will be dealt with in succeeding chapters.

One of the more unfortunate impressions left by an older generation of historians and sociologists is that all large towns in the nineteenth century were more or less the same – that is, equally smoky, soulless and horrible to live in. The tendency to lump them all together, ignoring any modifying differences, was in part derived from contemporary caricatures like Dickens’ Coketown and encouraged by references in the 1840s to ‘Cottonopolis’ and ‘Worstedopolis’. This is very misleading. Quite apart from obvious regional differences in traditional culture and economic and social relationships, the impact of population increase was very uneven. Not all towns were in the position of a Bradford or a Liverpool. Virtually all towns did increase between 1831 and 1851, but in some instances the expansion was relatively modest. Cambridge, Chester, Exeter and Norwich were of this order. Too often our impressions of urban growth have been derived from an overconcentration on the northern textile towns, though even among them their problems were by no means identical. London, again, was sui generis. In 1851 it was still by far the largest British city, though its position relative to the rest of the population had changed. The contrast with all other cities remained:

‘London [wrote Friedrich Engels, the young businessman and future collaborator of Karl Marx] is unique, because it is a city in which one can roam for hours without leaving the built-up area and without seeing the slightest sign of the approach of open country. This enormous agglomeration of population on a single spot has multiplied a hundredfold the economic strength of the two and a half million inhabitants concentrated there.’⁹

Here the process of urbanisation had begun earliest, had gone farthest, and was more easily distinguishable as such than in the northern towns of the classic Industrial Revolution.

Closely associated, indeed often taken as synonymous with industrialism and urban growth, was the factory system. Objectively this was simply a system of concentrated large-scale production, using power machinery and large numbers of operatives, together with the correspondingly necessary social institutions. In the 1830s and 1840s the factory system was still mainly confined to the textile industries. The Factory Acts were designed to regulate working conditions in cotton and woollen mills, and the home of the factory system was assumed to be Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of Scotland. To establish the unique characteristics of the factory system it was, and still is, customary to contrast it with the previous mode of production, the domestic system. This was small-scale, handicraft industry, organised through a middleman and carried on in the homes of the people, often in rural surroundings. In textiles, relics of this form of organisation of industry continued into the 1840s, side by side with the factory system. The handloom weaver remained as a sad reminder of an earlier and once-prosperous type of economy; and in times of distress the older hands could look back nostalgically to this alternative order.

The complexity, and often sheer incomprehensibility, of the factory system baffled many Victorians. A writer in 1886 remarked that after a hundred years it was still not understood.¹⁰ His father in 1842 had declared:

‘The Factory system is a modern creation; history throws no light on its nature, for it has scarcely begun to recognise its existence; the philosophy of the schools supplies very imperfect help for estimating its results, because an innovating power of such immense force could never have been anticipated.’

He emphasised its complete newness, and added, ‘the manufacturing population is not new in its formation alone: it is new in its habits of thought and action, which have been formed by the circumstances of its condition’. Nevertheless the factory system is ‘what statesmen call un fait accompli; it exists, and must continue to exist; it is not practicable, even if it were desirable, to get rid of it; millions of human beings depend upon the Factories for their daily bread’.¹¹

With the last point there could be little argument during years of prosperity. But when the factories failed to supply millions of human beings with their daily bread, as was the case in the depressions of 1837–42, suppressed doubts and latent criticisms came to the surface, and the factory system was condemned as the source of all social ills. William Dodd, ‘a factory cripple’, was one such critic. Describing a visit to Leeds in 1841 (‘I drew near the town and … the tall chimneys of the factories became … visible through the dense clouds of smoke’), he noted ‘the many marks by which a manufacturing town may always be known, viz., the wretched, stunted, decrepit, and, frequently, the mutilated appearance of the broken-down labourers, who are generally to be seen in the dirty, disagreeable streets; the swarms of meanly-clad women and children, and the dingy, smoky, wretched-looking dwellings of the poor’.

The factory system was for him an unmitigated evil: ‘We see, on the one hand, a few individuals who have accumulated great wealth by means of the factory system; and, on the other hand, hundreds of thousands of human beings huddled together in attics and cellars, or crawling over the earth as if they did not belong to it.’¹²

By the 1840s the term factory system had ceased to be an objective description of a certain type of economic and social organisation, and had become a slogan or a convenient label for a complex of social attitudes and assumptions. This is not hard to appreciate, for the changes demanded by the new order were terrifyingly fundamental and aroused men’s deepest responses. The factory integrated men and machines in a way that had never before been attempted. ‘Whilst the engine runs, the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine … is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness.’¹³ Reactions to this phenomenon varied according to a man’s position in life and his social and temperamental attitudes. To some the factory system was the practical application of Adam Smith’s principle of the division of labour; others saw it as a system of gross immorality in which sexual appetite and precociousness was fostered by the overheated atmosphere of mills; working men complained that too often it meant the introduction of machines that put them out of work; and reformers denounced it as a system of child slavery. The factory system was all of these things, but was not bounded by any one of them. It was more than simply an aggregate of individual factories; it was a new order, a completely new way of life. The spread of power looms was for Porter an important symbol of Progress. For thousands of textile operatives factory life was their social experience of industrialism.