Читать книгу The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain - Литагент HarperCollins USD - Страница 7

In the autumn of 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, in an atmosphere of triumphant excitement turned to tragedy by the fatal accident to Huskisson, and the Reform Parliament met in a buzz of expectant speculation at Westminster. The two events were not unconnected. The railway, the first locomotive-operated public line in the world, was the culmination of the application of the new technological skills, enterprise, and capital which had been transforming the British economy for the previous half century or more. The first Reform Act was an attempt to adapt political institutions to the alteration in the balance of social forces brought about by this transformation. While they shared these common roots and may both be viewed as at once instruments and symbols of the start of a new age, Reform essentially glanced backward with an approving eye on the traditional order which it sought to buttress, and the railway pointed forward into the unknown territory of urbanized and industrialized society. Therein lies the kernel of their message: not that 1830 was some decisive turning-point and outstanding landmark in social history, but that it stood in a particularly prominent way at the crossroads between the traditional and the new, neatly demonstrating the twin forces of continuity and change that are always at work in society.

Nowhere was this tension between old and new more obvious than in the political structure, which was widely believed to have become dangerously out of touch with social realities. Power and influence were concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, mainly the landed classes aided and abetted by allies and hangerson from the wealthier reaches of commerce and the professions, operating through a system whose agglomeration of curious franchises, pocket and rotten boroughs, was so bizarre as to defy rational justification. The unreformed system was tolerable only so long as it worked, through manipulation of its ramshackle machinery by networks of influence, patronage, and deference, to produce reasonably acceptable and enforceable exercise of authority. That this ceased to hold true for some sections of the ruling class itself, which were alienated from the governments of the 1820s by their handling of the issues of agricultural distress, deflation, and Catholic Emancipation, may indeed have triggered Reform by producing a critical shift within the charmed circle of the political nation that enabled an unreformed Parliament to reform itself without resort to unconstitutional means. Politically this was extremely important. More significant socially, however, was the resentment at their exclusion from the political nation expressed by many groups in society in the rumblings and eruptions of parliamentary reform agitation from the later eighteenth century onwards, since this defined the points at which political and social structure were felt to be seriously out of mesh.

The salient characteristic of those who spoke for the excluded was that they came from every rank in society, save for the poorest and most illiterate, and framed their attacks on the old order in the language of justice and equality rather than in appeals to the interests of class. The leaders of popular radicalism were predominantly artisans, whose skills as printers, compositors, tailors, or cobblers stretched even further back than the ancestry of their ideas, which may be traced to the sturdy independence and self-respect of the Civil War Levellers. These were no more representatives or products of a recently created industrial order clamouring to be admitted to their rightful place in the body politic than were the gallery of orators from middle-class backgrounds – the farmers Cobbett and Hunt, and the army officer Cartwright were the most prominent – which played such a large role in the popular cause. They thought of themselves as the champions of the rights of downtrodden and neglected ordinary people, who counted increasing numbers of industrial workers, particularly factory workers, in their ranks; these undoubtedly formed an important element in the great reform meetings and demonstrations of 1816–19 or 1830–2, but there is no evidence that they were the backbone of popular protest. Information about the rank and file of such movements is invariably patchy, but such as there is suggests a different conclusion. A list of ‘the leading reformers of Lancashire’ at the end of 1816, for example, names two cotton manufacturers, two letterpress printers, a draper, a tailor, a hatter, a shoemaker, a stone cutter, and a clogger, who were all small masters or artisans; three cotton weavers, three silk weavers, and one wool weaver, who would all have been handloom weavers; and not a single cotton spinner, the sole type of factory worker to be found in the region in any numbers at that time. At the other end of the scale the great Reform riots of 1831 took place in Derby and Nottingham, manufacturing towns but not factory towns; Bristol, a commercial more than a manufacturing town; and Bath and Worcester, well removed from the centres of industrialization. The factory towns of Lancashire and the West Riding were absent from this list not because they enjoyed a superior form of social discipline and unanimity in support of reform which rendered rioting against the traditional authorities that had rejected the second Reform Bill superfluous, but because the class antagonism between millowners and operatives was so strong that there was no popular support for what was seen as an employer’s measure. Disciplined leadership of the struggle for parliamentary reform was taken by precisely those towns, Birmingham above all others but also Newcastle, which had seen considerable growth and industrial expansion but had retained the structure of small workshops that blurred the divisions between masters and men and supported sufficient social harmony and cohesion to nourish an interclass radical alliance.

There was, then, massive working-class involvement in reform, and it centred in the traditional, preindustrial, groups rather than in those spawned by factory and machine. This is not to say that these groups had been unaffected by the course of economic change; but it is to say that viewed from this angle the perceived conflict between the established political structure and social reality was not a simple, direct consequence of the emergence of a factory proletariat. Viewed through the ruling-class end of the telescope, all workers, irrespective of their precise status or relationship to the means of production, being propertyless were either potentially dangerous as liable to subvert property and the social order, or at best not worthy of political recognition as being incapable of taking a balanced and responsible view of the public interest. The vital thing in the situation of 1830–2, so it seemed to Whig ministers, was to break the radical alliance by driving a wedge between the middle and the working classes, buying off the one with votes and representation and leaving the other, isolated and weak, outside the pale. The tactic, in Grey’s words, was ‘to associate the middle with the higher orders of society in the love and support of the institutions and government of the country’. Accordingly, the middle classes were accommodated with the £10 householder franchise, the hallmark of the 1832 Reform Act in the boroughs. It has often been remarked that this action defined, even created, the working class by lumping together all those unable to afford to occupy a house of at least £10 annual value as unfit to exercise the franchise, thus forging a common bond of resentment and frustration between otherwise diverse social groups. The other side of this coin is that the franchise also defined the middle class as all those who came above the £10 line regardless of differences in social position.

The middle classes who asserted their claims to be included in the political nation were a very mixed bag, and it would be as difficult to claim for them as for the working classes that their alienation from the old order stemmed wholly or even principally from the new social forces generated by industrialization. To be sure, by 1830 many industrialists had come round to the view that the protection of their interests and recognition of their status required direct representation in Parliament, whereas a generation or so earlier they had been largely indifferent to notions of parliamentary reform and direct involvement in politics, being content to accept the arguments of virtual representation and leave the conduct of public affairs to those accustomed to handling such matters. Northern manufacturers, in Lancashire and the West Riding, were active in the cause of reform in 1830–2; and a Wolverhampton manufacturer neatly expressed the sharpening of political awareness in his class: ‘Fifty years ago we were not in that need of Representatives, which we are at present, as we then manufactured nearly exclusively for home consumption, and the commercial and manufacturing districts were then identified with each other; where one flourished, both flourished. But the face of affairs is now changed – we now manufacture for the whole world, and if we have not members to promote and extend our commerce, the era of our commercial greatness is at an end.’ Manufacturers were key recruits to the cause of limited reform, and their demands for representation for themselves and the chief industrial centres were clear expressions of the failure of the political structure to reflect new social and economic developments. Nevertheless, manufacturers were recruits to a band of bankers, lawyers, writers, traders, editors, and other professional men, who continued to provide most of the drive and organization of middle-class political action: men of property, conscious of their position and probity no doubt, but not unmistakably men of the Industrial Revolution.

The towns which were given representation for the first time in 1832 were indeed in the main the chief centres of ‘manufacturing capital and skill’ in the Midlands and the north, whose fair representation Lord John Russell picked out as a major purpose of the Reform Bill when introducing it. It is worth remarking, however, that Brighton, the fastest growing town of the 1820s and in its fashionable seaside frivolity the very antithesis of an industrious town, and Stroud, a small pocket of the traditional woollen industry set in rural Gloucestershire, were included in the same company as the familiar industrial giants, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield, and were placed on a par with Bolton, Bradford, Blackburn, or Oldham. Similarly, Cheltenham, Frome, and Kendal were equated with the second-ranking industrial towns like Dudley and Walsall in the Black Country, Rochdale, Salford, and Warrington in Lancashire, or Gateshead, South Shields, and Tynemouth on Tyneside, in being elevated to single-member boroughs. These are reminders that the new constituencies did not all fall into a single category, and that scope was deliberately found for some increase in the weight given to traditional and non-industrial urban interests, quite apart from the five new parliamentary boroughs created in metropolitan London, itself a kaleidoscope of aristocratic, financial, commercial, administrative, and professional, as well as manufacturing, interests. In addition the boroughs which were preserved from extinction, although shorn of one of their former two members, and those which were continued unaltered from pre-reform days, were predominantly county towns, small market towns, long-established ports, and the like, albeit they did include some places – Liverpool, Preston, Hull, Newcastle, or Sunderland, for example – that were in the mainstream of industrial growth. In sum, however, the collection of new and surviving boroughs that made up the total of 187 post-1832 parliamentary boroughs in England was dominated by small towns, hangovers from the preindustrial past.

The fact that something like two thirds of the post-1832 boroughs might be thus classed could indicate no more than the limited, cautious, imperfect, and muddled nature of the Reform Act itself, removing only the most glaring defects of the unreformed system, perpetuating many anomalies and inequalities of representation, and never intending to supply an accurate political mirror of the actual distribution of economic and social weight and consequence in the nation. Even so, it is significant that among the top third of boroughs, measured by the size of their electorates, less than half would figure on any list, however widely drawn, of thrusting, expanding places at the forefront of economic change. Thus Chester, Exeter, Bath, Worcester, or York were in the same league as Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds in numbers of voters, although not, of course, in total population; while Bedford, Reading, Colchester, Canterbury, and Maidstone could out-vote but not outnumber Stockport, Salford, Bolton, Oldham, and Wolverhampton. This was an effect of the franchise and the fact that the distribution of £10 householders differed, often quite sharply, from the distribution of population. In part this was due to marked regional differences in house values, themselves produced by complex interactions of custom and market forces, with the great majority of houses in London having rents of over £10 a year so that many working-class householders obtained the vote, while essentially similar houses in Leeds or Manchester were rented at £5 to £8 a year. In part, however, it was due to regional variations in the numbers and proportions of men with high enough incomes to command a £10 house and the standing of respectability and modest substance that went with it; in relation to total population the older established towns tended to have a higher proportion of such householders than those of most recent rapid growth.

While it is clear that the £10 householders did not constitute a single social class, since there were wide social differences within towns between those who just qualified and those whose houses could be worth £50 or £100 a year, as well as between towns, it is also clear that this property qualification embraced virtually the entire population of middle-class family men, even if in some localities it also had the effect of bringing some artisans and skilled workers within the net. The middle class thus attached, in expectation, to the support of the constitution contained large numbers of small shopkeepers, traders, and dealers, small masters and lesser professional men, men of some consequence and influence in their communities but far removed in wealth and status from the great overseas merchants, the bankers and financiers, and the industrial capitalists. Whether they were precisely the sort of men Earl Grey had had in mind when he had spoken of ‘the middle classes who form the real and efficient mass of public opinion, and without whom the power of the gentry is nothing’, may perhaps be doubted, since at the time he was more concerned with the intelligent, educated and articulate men who shaped informed opinion in the press, the journals, the literary and philosophical societies, and the counting houses. Nevertheless, they formed the core of the middle classes, the most numerous and most widely spread groups with a solid stake in the country, however small their individual properties. This core had been growing in size and wealth as a result of the general influences of population growth and economic expansion, but only in some parts, depending on location, had it become integrated into industrial society in direct economic and cultural dependence on the great capitalist employers. In bringing the urban middle classes within the political nation the new franchise brought in something at once more varied, and more traditional, than simply an industrial-based middle class. This was as much a matter of reflecting the nature of the existing social structure as it was one of political calculation, although it did not escape notice that the lesser bourgeoisie of the smaller towns were amenable to patronage and influence.

Political calculation entered strongly into the Reform Act’s treatment of the countryside, and it is arguable that the entire business of reaching some kind of accommodation with the towns and the urban middle classes was of secondary importance to the political managers, whose prime concern was to revitalize and strengthen the power of the landed interest. In this view an inescapable minimum of concessions to the aspirations of the towns was a small price to pay for securing the power base of the landed classes in the counties. The trouble with the unreformed regime had not been its failure to reflect adequately the importance of new social forces in the community, but its increasingly corrupted and attenuated representation of the opinions and interests of the country landowners. Those opinions, it was argued, could only be properly expressed by county members chosen because of the trust placed in them by county constituencies which were too large to be dominated by one or two individuals, and too independent to be bribed. Instead, too many of the landed MPs sat for rotten or pocket boroughs, represented nothing except their patrons’ or their own personal wealth, were prone to be ensnared by the Administration of the day, and failed to voice the feelings of their order. The answer was to increase the county representation, and to purify the county electorates of urban and non-agricultural foreign bodies. This was done in 1832. The number of county members was increased from 188 to 253; and the parliamentary distinction between county and borough was made to correspond much more closely than before to the economic and social distinction between country and town. On the one hand, the invasion of county electorates by extraneous elements who qualified for the 40-shilling freehold county vote by the ownership of urban property was rolled back by the creation of boroughs in which such property conferred the vote; on the other hand, the agricultural character of county electorates was boosted by the enfranchisement, on a Tory amendment it should be noted, of the £50 a year tenants-at-will, that is the middling and larger tenant farmers.

As with so much else about the Reform Act, the line between town and country was not so clearly drawn in practice as this picture implies. To begin with, there were still many lesser towns, particularly in the manufacturing districts, that had not been made into parliamentary boroughs; those who owned freehold property in them worth over 40 shillings a year, whether in the form of warehouses, workshops, offices, factories, mills, or houses did not matter, qualified for votes in the county in which the town lay. Then, while anyone owning property in a borough worth at least £10 a year was expressly restricted to acquiring only a vote in that borough, those who owned smaller parcels of property within a borough worth between 40 shillings and £10 a year remained eligible for votes in the surrounding county. Some dilution of county electorates with urban blood therefore remained, and in the industrial counties it was of considerable political moment. The Whigs in fact had hedged their bets over the wisdom of securing the preponderance of the landed interest in the counties, doubtless calculating that the increase in landlord influence stemming from tenant farmers’ votes would chiefly benefit the Tories, and had therefore retained the urban propertied counter-weight in the counties which they or their liberal allies might hope to turn to advantage. Nonetheless, although it was thus fudged in its execution partly at least for party reasons, one important strand in the Reform design was to pen up the middle classes in the boroughs the better to secure the power base of the aristocracy and gentry in the counties, and thus preserve landed and agricultural interests from being undermined.

In retrospect it might seem that this was a purely defensive and protective measure, the use of entrenched aristocratic power while there was yet just time to fashion a barricade of franchises and constituencies which would keep the mounting urban and industrial forces at bay, thus delaying or preventing altogether their capture of the commanding heights of society and the economy. The barrier was severely tested during the Corn Law debates of the 1840s, when the most radical wing of the Anti-Corn Law League hoped to use repeal as a lever for toppling the entire ‘aristocratic monopoly’; but it survived, thanks to the opportunism and realism of the ruling class, and lived on to shelter the anachronism of a predominantly landed control of an essentially industrial society. Such a view, however, begs many questions: in what sense the landed dominance of government, Parliament, and much of local administration was artificially contrived rather than an expression of the essence of the social order; in what sense Britain was, or became, an industrial society; and in what sense urban and industrial interests and values were in conflict with the rural and agricultural world.

In the 1830s, at any rate, it made perfectly good sense to accord the preponderant place in the political nation to the landed and rural elements. This was not just a matter of privilege, property, and tradition, but one of economic and social reality. It is true that fundamental and far-reaching changes in the scale and methods of production had been under way for the past seventy years: an older generation of historians regarded the Industrial Revolution, in its headlong pioneering phase, as complete by 1830; a younger generation, intrigued by models of economic growth, placed the take-off into self-sustained growth as long since accomplished and viewed the economy of 1830 as being at least half-way through its drive to maturity, the maturity of a modern, fully industrialized economy. All would agree that structural, technical, and organizational changes had gone so far that a wholly new kind of society was bound to develop; and all would accept G. R. Porter’s statement that ‘it is to the spinning-jenny and the steam-engine 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.’ The revolutionary character of technological innovations and their potential for producing social transformation are one thing, however; the extent and pace of their impact on the social fabric are another matter, and the key to understanding the state of society.

It was a pardonable exaggeration to claim that the spinning jenny and the steam engine had been carrying the economy on their backs since the turn of the century. Cotton goods had replaced woollens as Britain’s principal export, and the meteoric rise of the cotton industry, if not literally attributable to the jenny alone, could be justifiably ascribed to the new breed of spinning machinery, particularly the mule, and its harnessing to water and steam power. The spinning mills, the advance guard of the factory system, had momentous effects on work habits, living conditions, and social relationships, possibly more momentous and revolutionary than their effects in increasing production and creating wealth, since they were the birthplace of the industrial proletariat. Much attention was concentrated on the mills, their marvels and their miseries, their awesome grandeur and awfulness, as contemporaries commented on the apparently limitless power of machinery and speculated on the chances of society handling, or indeed surviving, the arrival of a factory population.

The curiosity and anxiety were most understandable, in face of the novelty of the development and uncertainty about what it might portend for the future. For, in 1830, the day when typical English men or women would be town dwellers, or factory workers, still lay emphatically in the future. The cotton industry was very important, it was far and away the largest factory industry, and it was growing rapidly; but its factory element was not yet all that imposing. There had been around 100,000 factory operatives in the mills towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and by 1830 there were about double that number; they were still outnumbered by the quarter million or so non-factory workers who made up the rest of the labour force in the cotton industry, chiefly handloom weavers but also many ancillary workers, some working in quite large weaving sheds but many working in the home. Moreover, when factory inspectors began to count millworkers more accurately, from the mid-1830s, it was revealed that half the cotton factory operatives were women, a proportion that was to creep up in the course of the century to over 60 per cent. Child labour in the mills created an immense stir, and excited deep feelings of indignation, pity, and outrage; indeed, it is responsible for the enduring popular image of the Industrial Revolution as a shameful and regrettable episode fatally flawed by the ‘evils of the factory system’ heartlessly inflicted on innocent children. There is plenty of evidence, to be sure, of incidents of maltreatment and cruelty to children in the mills, although whether it is sufficient to indict a whole generation of millowners is another question. For the moment the point to notice is that children under fourteen were about 13 per cent of the factory labour force, perhaps slightly more in 1830; 26,000 or so is certainly not a negligible number of children, but it was but a minute fraction of the age group, and the factory children were far from representative of the general body of child workers, let alone of children at large.

In a comparatively poor society with low productivity and limited resources, children had always had to earn their keep, since it was impossible to support large numbers of non-workers. Traditionally most children had probably been at work by the age of seven or nine, frequently helping at their parents’ occupations but not uncommonly working for other masters. There was nothing remarkable about child labour in the mills, apart from the novelty of the factories themselves and the publicity they attracted. More remarkable was the minor role of men in the cotton mills, only a little more than a quarter of the factory workers, perhaps 50,000 or so in 1830, being adult males. Being men in a man’s world, they had collared the plum jobs, as mulespinners; but by the same token, in a world which defined workers as essentially male, their minority position tended to emphasize the peculiarity and untypicality of factory workers among the working population as a whole. The early recruitment and continued dominance of the mill girls has frequently been remarked and explained, in terms of the resistance of established, male, workers to employment in unfamiliar and possibly degrading conditions, and of the greater docility, submissiveness, and adaptability of the women. Since in the eyes of generations of commentators from Engels onwards virtue, in the promise of democratic and socialist achievements, has been seen to reside in the factory proletariat, it is more surprising that little emphasis has ever been placed on the influence of women as the major element in the first factory proletariat in the world. It could be that they contributed a decisively non-violent and non-revolutionary tone to the nascent proletariat at the one moment, in the late 1830s and 1840s, when for a variety of reasons social tensions were so acute that a determined move from the mills might have tipped the scales towards disintegration of the social order.

Powered machinery and factory organization of course existed in other industries besides cotton by 1830, notably in parts of the woollen and worsted industries of the West Riding, in flax spinning, in some branches of engineering, and in the large works engaged in the manufacture of iron. But, all told, there were probably still fewer than 100,000 male factory workers in 1830, outnumbered by the women although they were concentrated in fewer industries and were scarcely to be found outside Lancashire, Lanark, and the West Riding. There were more cobblers and shoemakers, craftsmen working on their own or in small workshops, than there were male factory workers; and there were between three and four times as many working in the completely unmechanized building trades. Tailors outnumbered coalminers, and there were three blacksmiths for every man employed in making iron. The message is plain. Industry had been growing rapidly since the late eighteenth century, and employment in manufacturing, mining, and building, inside and outside the factory, had grown from about 30 per cent of the total working population in 1811 to over 40 per cent by 1831, or from 1.7 million men and women to 3 million. Yet most of this expansion took the form of multiplying the number of people working with traditional tools in traditional occupations: much less than 10 per cent of industrial workers had any experience of factories, or about 3 per cent of the occupied population.

Agriculture had long been in relative decline, certainly since the early seventeenth century if not before, since it is the essence of commercial and industrial growth that the non-agricultural proportion of the population should increase, fed and supplied either by the increasing efficiency of those who worked on the land, or by growing advantages and opportunities for importing agricultural produce. Both had been happening in Britain, although since in the early 1830s, given normal to good harvests, the country was virtually feeding itself, the emphasis had been on improvements in agricultural productivity, bolstered by growing imports of grain and livestock from Ireland. Agriculture had probably ceased to provide the livelihood of a majority of the population before the middle of the eighteenth century, and the agricultural sector had declined from over a third of the working population at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a quarter by 1831. Nevertheless, the actual numbers engaged in farming were still increasing, growing from about 1³/₄ million then to the historical peak of over 2 million in 1851; it was only from the plateau of the 1850s that the long and practically uninterrupted decline in the number of farmworkers began. These numbers included nearly 300,000 farmers, about half of whom employed some hired labour while the other half used only the labour of themselves and members of their families. That left something like a million agricultural labourers, landless and propertyless, owning neither their homes nor their tools, and entirely reliant on wage labour. This was far and away the largest single occupation of male workers, about twice the size of the next largest group, those working in textiles of all sorts, and not far short of three times larger than the body of workers in the building trades. Many women also worked in agriculture, some full-time like the dairymaids, the members of the new and growing labour gangs in East Anglia, or the Northumbrian bondagers who were regular field workers as brawny as any men; many more were drawn in at the seasonal work peaks of turnip hoeing and singling, or harvest. Ambiguities of self-perception and of definition make the number of women who described themselves as agricultural workers (in the 1841 census) somewhat suspect; they appear to have been the fourth largest group of women workers, after those employed in domestic service, textiles, and the clothing trades, but they may have been more numerous than the 80,000 enumerated in 1841 or 230,000 in 1851.

Insofar as it makes any sense at all to look for the average British workingman, he was to be found in 1830 working in the broadly defined industrial sector, but not in a factory; the most representative workingman, however, was the agricultural labourer. The typical working woman, there is no doubt, was a domestic servant. The nature of work is a major influence on a person’s sense of identity, but its place is scarcely less important, and most people lived and worked in the countryside, whether directly involved in farming or not. It was not until 1851 that a majority of the British population was classified as being urban, on the unexacting definition of living in a place with 2000 or more inhabitants. Population size is a convenient, but rough and ready, measure of urbanity; while the judgement of contemporaries in the Registrar-General’s office should be respected, that this size represented the dividing line between country and town, it is clear that many of the smallest notional ‘towns’ would have been overgrown villages, their inhabitants as close to the land in their way of life as their cottages were to the surrounding open country. It should be acknowledged that small country towns like Aberystwyth (Cardiganshire), Burford (Oxfordshire), Midhurst (Sussex), Sedbergh (West Riding), or Spilsby (Lincolnshire), all of which had populations in the 1500–2000 range in the 1830s, were unmistakably town-like in the sense that they were something more than collections of agricultural workers and agricultural trades. They performed marketing, administrative, and professional functions for their rural hinterlands; and in their small way they looked like towns in layout and contiguity of buildings. Nevertheless, diminutive towns like these, and the great majority of the places which clearly had the look and feel of towns, were essentially traditional country towns. In 1831 about 90 per cent of the places which physically and often administratively were towns had populations of under 20,000, and in most of them the inhabitants were accustomed to country sights, sounds, and smells in the streets, and had strong links of kinship or friendship in the surrounding countryside. This considerable slice of the ‘urban’ population remained, therefore, well integrated into a traditional economic and social order, and by and large had not recently experienced upheavals in jobs or living conditions, or changes in the texture and scale of their environment, of a kind likely to produce disruptive social effects or to alienate them from established authorities in church, corporation, and neighbouring country house.

To be sure, the 20,000 threshold, like any other, is no more than an approximate and imperfect guide to a town’s character, and there were places like Bury, Wigan, Bradford, or Huddersfield which had only just crossed it or were poised to do so, that were unmistakably parts of the new industrial order. All the same, it was in the really large towns that a new kind of urban society was taking shape; it was there that the sheer scale of concentration of numbers produced something like a quantity – quality change and threw up those features of segregation, social distancing, overcrowding, pollution, public order, and health hazards most commonly associated with nineteenth-century urban living. In 1831 about one quarter of the total British population lived in towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants, but the essentially urban element of society may be usefully visualized as smaller than that. By 1951, it should be noted, over half the population lived in urban clusters with more than 100,000 people, and that has become the normal setting of the typical British citizen. By contrast, in 1801 there had been no towns in Britain, outside London, with as many as 100,000 inhabitants. By 1831 there were seven – Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Leeds, and Bristol – and together with London they contained one sixth of the total population. This fraction, it can be argued, was both the central core and the advanced guard of modern urban society. It was here and in the next layer of the urban hierarchy that the most rapid and dramatic social changes took place, here that the most pressing problems and acute tensions and contrasts developed, here that new habits and lifestyles were evolved which ultimately percolated through to the rest of the country, and here that familiar and accustomed patterns of behaviour were most strongly challenged.

This was also the most rapidly expanding face of society in the nineteenth century, for by 1901 there were nearly forty towns over the 100,000 mark and between them they accounted for well over one third of the total population. To put it another way, 10 million out of the net increase in British population between 1831 and 1901 of 11 million lived in these very large towns, which can thus be said to have monopolized expansion. The most significant point, however, was that the large-town urban base of early Victorian Britain, although not inconsiderable, was comparatively small. Moreover, at least two thirds of that base was occupied by London, and whatever the metropolitan scene offered in lavish wealth or abject poverty, magnificent buildings or filthy courts, happiness or misery, social harmony or social conflict, it was not exactly a new phenomenon. Already for several centuries government and society had been obliged to come to terms with the existence of a huge concentration of people in London, and to adjust to the consequences of the fact that a tenth or more of the entire population lived there. This is not to say that London was necessarily a static or particularly stable and unproblematic element in society, nor that it exercised a constant and predictable influence on the rest of the country. Far from it. The internal dynamics of changes within London in its size and structure, and the external dynamics of its changing relationships with Britain and the rest of the world, were and continued to be of fundamental importance in determining the main lines of British social, just as much as economic, development. It does imply, however, that the experience of urban life on the metropolitan scale, and of London’s impact on the lives of provincials and countrymen, had been absorbed and familiarized over the preceding generations into a normal and accepted feature of the early Victorian social fabric.

Viewed in this light the quintessentially novel feature of Victorian urbanization was the growth of the large-town population outside London from just over one million in 1831 to nearly nine million in 1901, from less than one tenth to about a quarter of the British people. It would be wrong to infer from this that London was outpaced or displaced by the large provincial cities, for if the continuous built-up area of Greater London is taken as the appropriate demographic and social unit for measurement, it increased its share of total population from 11.5 to 17.8 per cent in this period, thus decisively resuming its relative growth which had virtually halted in the eighteenth century. Equally it would be simplistic and misleading to leap from the unprecedented growth of extra-metropolitan large towns to the conclusion that all the exciting action of Victorian social history took place in that arena. Nevertheless that growth, and its timing, are crucial in placing the time-scale of the emergence of a modern urban and industrial society in Britain: however far the British economy may have travelled by 1830 beyond the point of no return on the path towards industrialization, Britain was still far from possessing that kind of society.

Its emergence was a Victorian affair. It was not a question of the Victorians improving, reforming, institutionalizing, and more or less cleaning up a rough and raw society which they took over from the preceding half century of headlong economic change; it was rather a matter of their fashioning the elements of a new society in step with the appearance of its material and human components. This is not to deny that there were raw, indigestible, and unassimilated new elements already present in society as a consequence of previous urban and industrial growth. Manchester was already acquiring its reputation as the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, and Leeds was not far behind; but this was precisely because such places were so unusual and unfamiliar. More traditional environments and communities remained so much more typical, even if jobs and workplaces might have altered radically, that society as a whole had tolerated such exceptions without being transformed. Transformation was a long-drawn-out process, longer drawn out than the coming of machines and power and the transformation of the means of production. The making of the working class, once thought to have been accomplished by 1830, is now placed firmly in the 1890s; and many of the features of modern society, trivial and profound, from smaller families to bacon and eggs, from production-line working to fish and chips, or from class politics to branded foods, only made a strong appearance in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Family and neighbourhood ties, upbringing, inherited cultures, and group loyalties proved more persistent and resilient than technologies, which might change almost overnight. These social forces were sufficiently powerful to smooth the impact of new working and living conditions, and to ease the passage towards large-town society without disastrous dislocation. A fruitful tension, and accommodation, between social continuity and conservatism, and economic innovation and discontinuity, was an underlying theme of the Victorian period.

The economy and society of the early 1830s, then, was not grossly distorted by the political mirror of the first Reform Act. Factory industry and urban concentrations were present, but not in sufficient proportion to eclipse the familiar world of farm and workshop, labourer, craftsman, and trader, village and small town, and it made reasonable sense to leave authority substantially in the hands which had held it for generations, those of landowners, clergy, lawyers, and greater merchants. The economic foundations of this social and political order were changing rapidly. The most momentous end-product of those changes was the growth of large towns, and it used to be assumed that industrialization and urbanization were synonymous. The distinction between the two processes, however, is critical to understanding the way in which people at all levels of society contrived to weather the shocks and stresses of revolutionary changes in working conditions or living arrangements without society itself experiencing the catastrophic disintegration or outright social revolution which were widely thought, especially in the 1840s, and not only by alarmists, to be inescapable and imminent.

Much more is involved than the observation that not all industry was urban and that not all the fastest growing, or largest, towns were industrial. Although this was a most important point about the early 1830s, when Brighton, emphatically a pleasure rather than a business let alone an industrial town, had been the fastest growing town of the previous decade, and when an important group of water-powered cotton mills were in semi-rural locations, it was of diminishing relevance over the rest of the century. The general tendency was for the mechanization of a broadening range of industrial activities, the adoption of steam power, and a gravitation towards coalfield sites; while all the larger towns supported some manufacturing industries, even if these might in some cases be geared only to their own internal markets. What continued to be important in the shaping of social structures was the diversity of developments within and between industries, in timing, technologies, and organization, and the variety of different occupations and activities forming the economic base of towns.

Industrialization, even considered in the restrictive and potentially misleading sense as something that happened simply to manufacturing industry rather than to all sectors of the economy, was far from being a one-way procession into the factory. Mechanization of one sector or process in an industry, and its move into the factory, could well generate increased demand for handwork and outwork in other sectors. The classic example was in the cotton industry, where from the later eighteenth century the rise of the spinning mills had led to an enormous expansion in the number of handloom weavers, most of them outworkers (a minority were pseudo-factory workers, working in large weaving sheds for a single employer), and many of them rural workers with dual employments in farming. In cotton that expansion was over by the mid-1820s, and the decline in the number of handloom weavers as weaving moved swiftly into the mills in the 1830s and 1840s was little short of catastrophic in material hardship and social dislocation. In spite of the evident triumph of the powerloom, however, there were still nearly 50,000 cotton handloom weavers left in 1850, many of them in extreme destitution at the lowest paid and coarsest end of the industry, but some of them working upmarket on fancy designs in short runs which were still beyond the technical capacity, or economics, of power weaving. A few lingered into the 1860s, but by then the surviving handloom weaver in cottons was no more than a curiosity. The worsted industry followed much the same pattern as cotton, although barely one fifth as large in terms of total employment, and by the early 1830s worsted spinning was almost entirely a factory occupation; the key preparatory process of combing, however, remained a manual operation, and the woolcombers were among the cream of skilled workers until combing machinery undermined their scarcity and status extremely rapidly from the mid-1840s. Worsted weaving, indeed, became a factory industry even more rapidly and conclusively than cotton: until the mid-1830s there were virtually no powerlooms in worsteds, and by the mid-1850s handloom weavers had all but vanished. In the process the industry, spinning and weaving branches alike, achieved a far more complete geographical concentration than the cotton industry which had an important secondary base in Lanarkshire centred on Paisley as well as its Lancashire-Cheshire heartland. Worsted workers, by the 1850s, were almost all to be found in the West Riding, strongly localized in the Bradford area, and this sharp focus of a particular kind of factory experience was not without social significance.

The woollen industry, by contrast, took to the mills later, much more slowly, and in a pattern which permitted factory work and outwork – at least in the handweaving of tweeds in the Highlands and Hebrides – to continue to coexist until the end of the century. The preponderance of the West Riding was firmly established long before 1830; it continued to become more pronounced over the century but did not achieve complete concentration to the exclusion of locally significant branches of the industry in Stroud, the West Country, Cumbria, or the Scottish Borders region. It was in the West Riding that factory methods and organization made most rapid progress, and even there half those engaged in the manufacture of woollens were still in 1850 non-factory manual and domestic outworkers. Spinning itself was not completely mechanized, although leading firms had adapted the mule to woollen yarns by the 1820s; and the intermediate process of preparing rovings from the carded wool, before mule-spinning them, was firmly in the hands of the billy slubbers working their little wooden machines called billies, within the mill precincts but not properly factory workers. These handworkers were, in their turn, displaced by machinery, the condenser; but it was a very gradual matter. The condenser was known, and in use, from the mid-1830s, but it was not until the end of the 1870s that the billy slubbers vanished and woollen spinners became entirely factory workers. Woollen fabrics came in such a profusion of types and qualities that it is not surprising that in the early decades of their adoption powerlooms were as much complementary to as competitive with handlooms. Until mid-century it is probable that the numbers of handloom weavers, at roughly 100,000, had scarcely declined at all, at which point there were no more than 9439 powerlooms in woollens, giving work to 5–6000 factory weavers; there being at the same period over 32,000 powerlooms in worsteds, and 250,000 in cotton. Plenty of handloom weavers remained in the West Riding in the third quarter of the century, their numbers only gradually falling, and on the whole there was a reasonable amount of work for them at the fancy end of the trade. It was not until the 1880s that weaving was fully consolidated in the mills and virtually all the quarter million men and women employed in the woollen and worsted industries, taken together, could be classed as factory workers.

In the lesser but traditional textile industries, linen and silk, outwork remained at least as important in relation to factory work as in woollens. Jute, practically speaking a new industry of the 1850s and strongly localized in Dundee, was by contrast a mill industry from the start; the few handloom weavers still there in the late 1860s were a sad leftover from Dundee’s earlier linen-working phase. For a while the linen industry operated with something of a national division of labour, machine-spun yarn from English mills, epitomized by Marshall’s great flax mill in Leeds of the 1820s, being woven by the cheaper domestic labour of Scotland and Ulster. By mid-century there may have been about 70,000 handloom weavers of linens in Scotland, clustered mainly around Aberdeen and Dundee, and in Dunfermline where much fine table-linen was woven. Thereafter the English section of the industry went into decline, but the Scottish held its own until the 1870s by switching into power weaving; in the late nineteenth century growth was Ulster’s province. The silk industry grew rather rapidly from the 1830s, practically doubling its workforce between then and the early 1860s; at that time nearly two thirds, or about 100,000 people, were domestic outworkers, chiefly weavers. Silk weaving was expanding fast enough in the 1840s, indeed, to be able to absorb many of the displaced handloom weavers from cotton, so that by 1851 there were about 25,000 silk workers in Lancashire, a county where they had been almost unknown twenty years before. From the 1860s the silk industry declined continuously, so that by the end of the century its labour force, at around 40,000, was back to half the size of the mid-1830s; from the 1880s this shrinking industry was predominantly a factory industry.

The general impression from this survey of the textile industries is that there was a succession of bursts of demand for outworkers, mainly handloom weavers, at different dates in different sectors, triggered either by the mechanization of spinning or by general expansion in the industry; and that these bursts were followed by periods of contraction of very variable duration, leading to the ultimate disappearance of non-factory workers. The conclusion that it was not until the 1880s that textiles in general were firmly settled in factories is less important than the lack of synchronization or uniformity in the process of shedding outworkers or in the speed at which factory work expanded; those were the factors which affected the work experience of the people involved, and hence their lives and those of their families.

The textile industries as a whole were the leading edge of the transformation of manufacturing from home and hand to power and mill, and it is therefore especially significant that outside cotton the decisive phases of this transformation took place after the overall expansion of textiles, as a provider of jobs, was over. Total employment grew rapidly in the decade after 1841, when the census occupation returns first make it possible to measure numbers, and the proportion of all manufacturing workers who were involved in textiles rose from one third to two fifths. After 1851, however, the numbers of textile workers ceased to expand and remained more or less constant at around 1.3 million for the rest of the century, while in relation to total employment in manufacturing they entered a period of continuous decline, their share falling back to one third by 1881 and one quarter by 1901. The overall stability of numbers in the textiles group in the second half of the century was clearly the statistical end-product of shifts between the different branches and of movements between outwork and factory work, and certainly does not imply stability in the circumstances of individuals or families. The declining share of textiles in total manufacturing employment in turn reflects the expansion of other sectors of manufacturing, particularly in the metalworking and engineering group, and has no necessary implications for the continued prosperity or otherwise of those actually working in textiles. Nevertheless the growing diversity in the structure of manufacturing industry in the second half of the century and the ending of the lopsided dominance of textiles were both evidence of increasing maturity and balance in the industrial economy, and signals that the general social impact of any single industrial occupation was being progressively blunted and diluted.

Factory work itself was very far from being a single homogeneous category of experience, but varied widely with size of establishment, date, industry, location, and employer, as will be seen in a later chapter. But it was, in the age of almost universal adoption of steam power after mid-century, pretty well exclusively urban work. The handworkers and outworkers who survived for so long in the textile industries, on the other hand, might live and work either in towns or in the countryside. The Spitalfields silk weavers, for example, still 16,000 strong in 1851, were decidedly town dwellers, as were most of their fellow weavers in Maccles-field; the majority of Lancashire’s sore-pressed cotton handloom weavers in the 1840s were probably in the weaving towns, and maybe not actually working in their own homes, but a sizeable element of domestic outworkers in outlying villages undoubtedly persisted; this pattern was repeated with the Yorkshire woollen weavers, with an opposite balance between town and village, while weaving in the Stroud district was almost entirely a cottage industry. In the lace and hosiery trades, usually classified with the textile industries although they were engaged in processing materials – cotton, wool, or silk – produced by the primary industries, country and small-town locations remained characteristic until the 1880s. Hosiery, strongly localized in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire, was a domestic industry on the classic model, the framework knitters in their cottages and their villages being organized, dominated, and exploited by layers of merchant-middlemen from petty bag-hosiers to master hosiers, who threw in extortionate frame-renting practices for good measure. It remained that way, in large part, until the 1890s; for although factories were known in the industry by the 1870s many of them were only large frame-shops full of hand frames, and it was not until the very end of the century that factories with power-driven machinery had taken over all the business. Lace, centred on Nottingham, had perhaps completed a slow move into the factory several decades earlier, since the machinery required to satisfy the great Victorian appetite for lace curtains was complicated and costly, and perforce had to run in factory fashion.

The socks and stockings produced by the framework knitters were ready to wear, but for the rest the fabrics issuing from the textile industries had to be made up into final products before they could be used by the consumers. Much of this work, with furnishing fabrics as well as in clothesmaking, was done in the home and forms part of that domestic household production which is unmeasured in employment or national income accounting. But a great deal of clothing was made for the market, and the clothing trades (among which boot- and shoemaking are normally classified) were second in importance only to the textile industries themselves. Until 1861 just over one quarter of all the men and women engaged in manufacturing were working in this varied group of trades; thereafter the proportion gradually declined until it was down to one fifth by the end of the century. Total numbers in the group continued to rise, however, from a million in 1861 to 1.2 million in 1901, and by 1911 were on a par with those in the textile industries. No simple generalizations can cover such a diversity of occupations and industries, which ranged from independent village craftsmen-tailors to the sweated labour of seamstresses in city garrets, and from making fashionable gloves to making clogs. An important social feature, indeed, was the ubiquity of country craftsmen in tailoring and shoemaking, and the extent to which local demands were met by local production. There were, however, concentrations of workers producing for more than local markets, the glovemakers of Worcestershire being a case in point. Some of these, like the straw plaiters and straw-hat makers of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, constituted an important rural industry, a cottage and village industry of outworkers, mainly women and children, its commercial and finishing organization imparted from the centre at Luton. Others, particularly in clothing proper, came to have a distinctly urban character. The initial effect of mechanization here was to increase the scope for outwork and its commercial organization, for the hand-operated sewing machines which were being introduced from the 1850s onwards were well suited to domestic working and to management by putting-out employers. Clothing factories, in which Leeds led the way from the 1860s, similarly served to increase the numbers of outworkers while pulling more of them into the urban environment; for the very speed and efficiency with which machinery performed some processes in these factories, such as cutting out or buttonholing, generated a massive demand for outworkers for other stages of production which still had to be done by hand, individuals or small workshops specializing in repetitive work on maybe collars, or sleeves, or linings for the large factories.

Clothing factories grew steadily in number and size, and in the quality of their product, in the last two decades of the century, in Manchester and London as well as in Leeds; and they branched out from ready-to-wear men’s clothing into blouses, skirts, and dresses. But at the end of the century even the making of mass-produced clothing, let alone the higher quality and fashion end of the business, was far from having become a pure factory industry. The factory workers needed the cooperation of perhaps hundreds of thousands of outworkers and other manual workers in the small workshops of subcontractors; the distinctive effect of mechanization was to draw more and more of the outworkers into a few large towns, rather than to eliminate or even sharply curtail their occupations. Boot- and shoemaking had a broadly similar history, with different concentrations of large-scale commercial production in Northamptonshire and lesser centres in Somerset and Westmorland. Machines for some parts of the manufacturing process began to be introduced from the mid-1850s, for some of the stitching and cutting-out work. The sequel was a half century of division of labour, albeit not a static division, between what was done by machine and in a factory, and what was done by hand and mainly by outworkers. So late as the early 1890s nearly half the work of bootmaking in Leeds was still done by outworkers in their homes, and the shoemaking villages of Northamptonshire around Kettering, Wellingborough, and Northampton itself were full of outworkers. Complete conquest by machine and factory – outside the high-quality bespoke trade – came late and in a rush in the ten years after 1895, with the adoption of perfected machinery for closing uppers on to soles, and under the spur of competition from imported factory-made American shoes. By this time the image and reality of factory work had come full circle: factory conditions and factory wages were a boon to many of the workers, and boot and shoe operatives pressed for an acceleration of the move into factories as an escape route from penury.

Although textiles and clothing continued to employ more than half the manufacturing population until after 1881, the metalworking and engineering sector had clearly moved into the van of industrial change by mid-century. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a shrine to machinery of immense variety, ingenuity, and complexity, as well as a festival of manufactured consumer goods; its temple, the Crystal Palace, was itself an engineering product. This symbolized and foreshadowed the fields of innovation and expansion which were to dominate industrialization in the second half of the century. The growth of this sector from one seventh to one quarter of the manufacturing workforce is less important than the diversity of callings and of work situations which sheltered under the broad umbrella of this industrial classification. In economic terms, of technology, capital intensity, or business organization, there was precious little in common between the components of an industrial sector which included traditional crafts and trades like nailmaking, cutlery, or blacksmithing; long-established but totally revolutionized processes like iron- or steelmaking; and completely new occupations like the building of locomotives, and the making of textile machinery, bicycles, or electrical apparatus.

This heterogeneous sector was at the heart of Britain’s position as the workshop of the world, and it was in important respects indeed more of a workshop than a factory. Many traditional occupations of the Sheffield cutlery trades variety, or the manufacture of Birmingham wares, long retained their workshop structure, hundreds of small units perhaps coexisting with a few large establishments in the same general line of business, while small-scale use of power and specialized machinery, displacing former hand tools, could be incorporated into production methods without displacing the skilled workers. In some branches outworkers continued to survive, if not flourish, into the early twentieth century, either because their products could not be made by machines in factories, as with Black Country chainmaking, or because factory-made articles were inferior substitutes, as in nailmaking where the best horseshoe nails remained hand forged even though a factory trade in machine-cut nails and wire nails had been growing since the 1830s. Some categories, like vehicle-making, were no more than convenient labels artificially uniting such disparate trades as coach and carriage building, a handicraft business with a highly articulated hierarchy of specialized skills, and the manufacture of railway carriages and wagons, a new industry which lent itself to large works and assembly methods. Above all, the making of machines generated a whole series of new industrial activities and occupations, multiplying and bifurcating from roots in the work of smiths, millwrights, and toolmakers. It is not too much to say that the development of machine tools, stemming from pioneering work on lathes, planing machines, slotting machines, steam hammers and the like in the 1820s and 1830s, lay at the heart of all subsequent mechanization in manufacturing and growth in the range and variety of consumer goods as well as capital goods. Yet not only was this development of more sophisticated and specialized machinery – turret lathes, milling machines, grinding machines – a long-drawn-out and continuing affair, of American rather more than British origin, but also it had scarcely begun to produce automatic machinery before the beginning of the twentieth century. In effect workers acquired power tools in place of hand tools, files, saws, drills, or hammers, and they had vastly greater speed, capacity, and accuracy. But the operation of these power tools continued to depend on the skill and experience of the operator, while the actual construction of the machine tools themselves continued to rely on the craftsmanship of individual workers and a great deal of skilled handwork in fitting together the components. This situation began to change from the 1890s, but the processes of minute subdivision of labour, production-line working, and deskilling had not reached very far before 1914. Until that time one highly important effect of the advance of mechanization was to generate new and rapidly increasing battalions of skilled workers, highly conscious of their scarcity value. Boilermakers, steam-engine makers, and engineers – makers or operators of machine tools in the main – were craft-minded even if they were not exactly handicraftsmen; they liked to think of themselves as working in engineering shops, not factories, thus conveying the workshop atmosphere of the individual’s control of his tools and his product, even if the scale of operations was likely to be a world away from the traditional workshop.

The engineering shops and the works producing or fabricating metals were in the vanguard also of the urbanization of industry. But whereas the heavy end of the industry, particularly the making of iron and steel, was tightly bound to the coalfields by its high fuel consumption, much engineering work with its high skilled-labour content was not equally constrained. The result was that iron and steel works tended to generate towns around themselves, while engineering and metalworking tended to grow where there were existing supplies of skilled labour, external economies in the form of supporting trades and services, and easy access to final markets, thus reinforcing and diversifying already large towns. Manchester and Leeds, Clydeside and Tyneside, became important centres for machine tools and other kinds of engineering, building outwards from core interests in textile machinery, shipbuilding, colliery equipment, and locomotives. London, far from any coalfield, was however the pioneer of mechanical engineering in the 1820s, and although technical leadership may have passed to the northern towns after mid-century it continued to have a larger mechanical engineering industry than any other region except Lancashire until after 1871, an industry which went on growing to the end of the century and beyond. In the much smaller industry of instrument-making, with its large handicraft element, London held a preeminent position throughout the century, while in the new occupation of the 1880s, electrical engineering, it at once established dominance: such were the advantages of a large pool of highly skilled workers and an enormous market on the doorstep. The pulling power of the large towns should not be exaggerated. In such a specialized business as the making of agricultural machinery, proximity to the customers and direct knowledge of their requirements helped manufacturers to flourish in country towns like Lincoln, Grantham, Peterborough, Ipswich, Bedford, or Banbury, and to live with their competitors in Leeds or Manchester; but by the last quarter of the century firms with such country locations were supplying national and international markets, showing ability to outgrow any narrowly local initial locational factors and to ignore any apparent disadvantages of distance from their supplies of raw materials and fuel. It has been in the twentieth century that the spread of electric power has severed the umbilical cord tying engineering – and industry generally – to coalfield sites; but the link was not universally binding even in the full flush of steam power.

Large towns also had a strong but not overpowering attraction for other sectors of manufacturing industry. Some of these, although not large employers of labour in national terms, were well established as factory-type industries by the 1830s because of their large and costly plant, and were concentrated in a few areas with favourable access to resources, where they could be of great importance in the local economy. The pottery, glass, and chemical industries are cases in point, with their concentrations in the five towns of the Potteries, Merseyside, Tyneside, and Clydeside. The woodworking industry, by contrast, employing roughly as many people as these other three throughout the period, was widely diffused. It was in effect a bundle of trades and crafts, from cabinet-makers and french polishers to willow-strippers and hurdle-makers, and like these last some remained parts of rural woodland economies. The chief effect of the growth of urban population and markets, however, was to stimulate the woodworking trades in towns generally, through a proliferation of workshops, small businesses, and outworkers, rather than through any rise of furniture factories.

The basic consumer industries, those concerned with processing food, drink, and tobacco, presented a mixed pattern of development of the growth of large enterprises using factory methods alongside both the survival of slowly declining traditional producers, and the multiplication of new small businesses. This group consistently held fourth place as an employer of workers in manufacturing, after textiles, clothing, and metals and engineering; and its steady rise in relative size after 1871, to reach over 15 per cent of the manufacturing workforce by the end of the century, was a reflection of the commercialization of much food preparation and preserving which had previously been part of the household economy, as well as of a general increase in consumption. The Kellogg effect, or cornflakes revolution, was by this time under way, and in sweets and biscuits, cigarettes or margarine, it was in the late Victorian years that Cadbury and Rowntree, Huntley and Palmer, Wills and Player, and Lever were establishing themselves as household names. Much of the expansion of demand, however, perhaps particularly before the 1880s, was met by a simple increase in the numbers of small bakeries, confectioners’ shops, and the like; indeed many processes long continued to be performed behind the shop counter, and it was not until the early twentieth century that a clear-cut distinction between manufacture on the one hand, and distribution and retailing on the other, became normal in the food trades. In corn-milling also the dramatic changes came in the 1880s. Steam mills were established in the larger towns earlier in the century, using traditional millstones, but they did not make serious inroads into the trade of windmills and watermills. The perfection of roller-grinding, coupled with the rise in wheat imports, led to rapid growth of giant flour mills in the major wheat-importing ports, London, Liverpool, and Hull, in the decade or so after 1881. Even so, although country milling came under pressure, its decline was not precipitous, and as late as 1907 not far short of a quarter of all the power used in flour-milling was still provided by water.

Manufacturing occupied the centre of the stage in the industrial economy which was consolidated during the Victorian period. Machines, factories, and power were the key elements in innovation and productivity growth, and catch the eye of the historian as they did of contemporaries on account of their novelty, modernity, and success. The phasing of the introduction of factory methods over a long period, with steady diffusion in the third quarter of the century and a decided burst from the 1880s, coupled with the survival of pre-factory methods of production and the creation of new non-factory trades, means however that the overall social impact of manufacturing industry was much more diverse and complex than the straightforward creation of a factory proletariat. In any event one of the apparent paradoxes of industrialization is that the share of manufacturing industry as a whole in the national workforce did not increase over the century; it may possibly have been rising in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but from the 1840s onwards its share remained remarkably constant at around one third of the occupied population, although there were the considerable shifts between different sectors within manufacturing that have been noted. The relative decline of agriculture was inexorable, although the actual numbers employed in farming went on rising slowly until 1851; thereafter absolute numbers fell by 100,000 or more every decade, with the result that agriculture’s share of the labour force declined from a quarter to a fifth between 1831 and 1851, and had dropped to under 9 per cent by 1901. This was the shrinking sector of the economy. Since the manufacturing sector did not expand, relatively, it can be argued that the net effect of the restructuring of the Victorian economy was the redistribution of some 16 per cent of the labour force away from agriculture and into non-manufacturing, expanding, sectors.

Most of this expansion took place in the service sectors of the economy, commerce, transport, the professions, central and local government service, and domestic and personal service; some of it was in mining and quarrying, and building and construction, usually classified as non-manufacturing industries. In terms of economic analysis part of this expansion can be viewed as a necessary condition of the course of industrialization, and part as a consequence of generally rising incomes. Manufacturing clearly depended on increasing inputs from mining and building, and on more elaborate and sophisticated transport and commercial services; and, towards the end of the century, on more specialized services, in accountancy or advertising maybe, which industrialists had once supplied for themselves. The capacity of manufacturing to produce an enormous increase in industrial output from an unchanging share of the labour force depended – apart from its own internal rise in labour productivity through mechanization – upon the relative expansion of those sectors where labour productivity actually fell, as in mining, scarcely altered, as in building, or rose much less rapidly, as in the provision of services. If it were possible to quantify these elements of expansion, they could be accounted transfers out of agriculture for the necessary support of manufacturing. On the other hand, some part of the expansion in building went to providing better housing, in transport to increasing and widening the opportunities for personal travel, and in other services to providing more education and health and more employment in entertainment, leisure, and holiday occupations. This part of the restructuring was an expression of the ways in which increasing wealth and incomes were enjoyed. In terms of social analysis, however, the prime interest of these expanding sectors lies more in their individual characteristics than in the identification of the different economic forces at work: a railwayman was a railwayman, up to a point, whether shunting coal wagons or driving an excursion train.

Mining had long been a strategically important activity for the industrial economy but in the 1830s it was still a comparatively small occupation, probably numbering less than 200,000 workers, among whom coalminers were scarcely more numerous than miners of copper, lead, tin, and iron; while a third of the coal output was destined for burning in domestic grates. The broad lines of nineteenth-century developments were for non-ferrous metal mining to decline to insignificance, either dwindling away as did lead from the 1870s, or collapsing swiftly as did copper also in the 1870s and tin in the 1890s, in the face of imports from vastly richer and more cheaply worked overseas mines; for coal output and coalminers to increase roughly tenfold between 1830 and the end of the century, so that the 800,000 coalminers of 1901 and million of 1911 constituted virtually the whole of the mining industry; and for coal to become first the fuel of manufacturing, ironmaking, transport, and gas, a position reached by 1870, and then to become in addition a major export, so that by the early twentieth century one third of output was being exported. The continued relative expansion of the mining sector after 1881 can, indeed, be attributed as much to the rise of coal exports as to the decline in labour productivity.

There were many changes in the organization of this expanding industry, which may be crudely summarized as a tendency towards deeper workings and larger colliery undertakings, the mechanization of ventilation and vertical haulage – leaving advance in underground haulage to the pit ponies – and the retention of hewing as skilled manual labour. These changes were accompanied by shifts in the relative importance of different coalfields, principally the rise of the South Wales, Scottish, and South Yorkshire fields, the decline of Staffordshire, and the ending of the traditional predominance of the north-east. They did not, however, do a lot to modify or dilute the separateness, internal cohesion, and cultural independence of mining communities, with their strong tendencies to be places apart whose folk did not mingle much with others. Some mining communities became large settlements, and there were indeed pure, or almost pure, coal towns like Barnsley, Wigan, the linear towns of the Rhondda, or new towns like Ashington, Northumberland, which mushroomed with the development of mining under the bed of the North Sea in the 1890s. These, also, were somewhat outside the mainstream of urban life, rather more than mining villages writ large but still retaining strong affinities with those typical, self-reliant, vigorous, and aloof communities.

Miners shared some of the conditions of factory workers, in being employed in large units, but scarcely shared in the life of ordinary towns at all. Builders, by contrast, were to be found in every town but had little from their work experience in common with factory workers. Building was an industry scarcely touched by technological change until the present century, and although some machinery was introduced in joinery shops it remained essentially a matter of assembling building materials, and fabricating some of them, by manual labour on the site. Many different skills were involved, those of masons, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers, glaziers, plumbers, slaters, and the like, traditional skills which were joined by the new ones of gas-fitters early in the period, and electricians towards its end, as new equipment entered offices, shops, and homes. By no means all of these were, or managed to remain, crafts which were highly skilled and could be entered only by serving apprenticeships; but they were skilled trades with strongly persistent customary work practices. The formal structure of the industry changed hardly at all in the nineteenth century – or indeed before the 1960s – with a great preponderance of small firms employing ten men or less, and large employers a rarity. This continuity of structure, however, concealed a change in organization, the rise of the entrepreneur-builder who contracted for all the different work required for a complete building, which had far-reaching effects on the status and customs of the trades. Here, then, was a major industry growing, with its mass of unskilled labourers underpinning the trades, from 400,000 workers in 1841 to 1.3 million by 1901, which was far from being a simple preindustrial remnant. Its producers were fundamental to both urban and industrial growth, and it played a key role in the cycles of expansion and depression in the economy at large. Yet with its lack of mechanization, its manual labour and skilled trades, its small firms, and its continually moving workplaces, it was an industry whose workers remained a distinctively idiosyncratic element of late Victorian industrial society.

Symbolically and literally the railway lay somewhere near the centre of that society. Whether the railways did in fact impel the whole economy ‘down the ringing grooves of change’ is debatable. The extent and nature of the contribution to economic growth of both railway construction, as an investment, and railway operation, as a transport service, have been extensively studied; in general terms the conclusion is that the contribution was considerable but some way short of decisive. There is less doubt that railways were a major influence in stimulating and consolidating regional concentrations of industry, and in encouraging the move to town; and no doubt at all that railway speed, railway convenience, and railway timetables produced wholly new perceptions of individual horizons and profound changes in social habits, of work and leisure, in the pace as well as the place of living. Railways paraded the power of the machine across the whole country, they eroded localism and removed barriers to mobility, and they created new jobs and new towns. Their very modernity and success in generating new traffic, however, also generated expansion in older forms of transport, for all the feeder services bringing freight and passengers to the railway stations were horse-drawn. This, coupled with the needs of road transport within the larger towns, produced a three- or fourfold increase in horse-drawn traffic on Victorian roads. The result, in employment terms, was that there were consistently more than twice as many road transport workers as there were railwaymen until after 1891, and that in the early twentieth century the road transport men, by now including some handling electric trams and soon to include others on motor vehicles, remained easily the largest group of transport workers. Railway companies, the first organizations outside the army and navy to have the control of thousands of men, and with the problem of managing and coordinating a workforce dispersed over tens or hundreds of miles, ran their labour with a discipline and hierarchical structure that no factory could rival. Railwaymen indeed could have been the leading example of the new type of labour created by industrialization and subordinated to machine and employer, were it not that the very paramilitary nature of their regime instilled habits of obedience and sentiments of loyalty to the company which separated them from other workers. Those who worked with horse transport, on the other hand, remained in a highly traditional environment, modified here and there by the rise of large-scale commercial organizations for horse bus companies or some carriers’ businesses, but technically conservative with work patterns which did not alter a lot.

The transport industry, with its merchant seamen and dockers as well as its railwaymen and carters, rather more than doubled its share of the total occupied population in the Victorian period. So, too, did the group formed by the professions and public service, which also chanced to be the same in absolute size, providing occupations for 1.3 million people in 1901. The postmen and policemen in this group had uniforms, discipline, and the attraction of job security in common with railwaymen; but most of the group were the salaried middle class of public servants, and the middle-class professions which expanded and multiplied as the economy grew more complicated and as society demanded more education and more health care. Much of the employing middle class was to be found counted in with the industrial sector in which each firm lay, since the occupational tables of the census did not distinguish between employers and employed. But most of the trading middle class were in the group providing commercial and trading services, which included merchants, traders, dealers, brokers, bankers, and insurers, as well as the lower-middle-class ranks of clerks, office workers, and small shopkeepers and shop assistants. The group was not exclusively middle-class, since it included coal heavers, rag-and-bone men, and street traders, any more than was the group of public service and the professions; but taken together their growth from 14 per cent of the occupied population in 1841 to 22 per cent in 1901 may not be too badly misleading as an indicator of the growth of the middle classes. Domestic service has often been seen as the mirror reflecting middle- and upper-class status; this is definitely misleading, since while virtually all middle- and upper-class households had servants, all domestic servants were not to be found in such households. At one level domestic service was an outlet for otherwise unemployable and destitute girls from the workhouse, who for a pittance became drudges for other working-class families. At other levels it was a career of disciplined respectability in which something of the status and manners of wealthy employers might rub off on the servants, whose loyalty to employers and sense of superiority tended to keep them apart from other workers who regarded domestic service as degrading and inferior. Here was a very large, if varied, group of workers, swelling steadily along with others in personal service such as waiters, waitresses, charwomen, and laundresses, to over 15 per cent of the labour force by 1891 before beginning to subside slightly. Numerically four times as large as the transport sector at the start of the period and still twice the size at the close, domestic service was clearly not part of the dynamic of economic growth and industrialization; domestics can indeed be seen as underemployed human resources, although they were not so entirely unproductive as is sometimes supposed. Their very large numbers, however, were evidence that an increasingly wealthy society preferred to use a considerable part of its wealth on consuming services rather than on consuming more goods; and they furnished another facet of the way in which an industrializing society spawned old-fashioned, menial jobs alongside the new.

The major shifts in the structure of the Victorian economy are only partially revealed by an approach through the occupations of the people, since that largely hides from view questions of international trade and investment, and assumes without discussion the different movements in productivity between sectors which were the essence of economic growth. The occupational results of economic changes, however, were the ones of most direct relevance to social structures and to individual lives. They suggest the complexity, diversity, and unevenness of the impact of the maturing industrial economy upon society, and indicate that continuity of the familiar was as important as change and disruption of work habits. They do not in themselves show how some uniformity and coordination was conjured out of occupational diversity, not only by the articulation of the different sectors into an effective economy, but also by common experience of expansion and depression, and these will be brought out later. Nor do they provide more than a partial explanation, or illustration, of the move to the towns, that other great social fact of the century. It is perfectly true that a restructuring of the kind observed, between agriculture and non-agriculture to put it at its most basic, had it been conceivable within a static population would have occasioned an increase in urbanization. The actual course of urbanization, however, the emergence of the large towns and the living conditions in them, were determined more by the pressure of increasing population than by industrialization. Increasing numbers migrated to the towns to escape from rural poverty and overpopulation; they went in greater numbers to the industrializing towns than to other towns, because job opportunities were better there, but they went to other towns as well. Increasing numbers, in turn, were only to a limited extent a response to industrialization; they were the result of fertility and mortality experiences within the basic population unit and social unit, the family.