Brown R. Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850

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that morality, self-denial and compassion—woman’s domestic virtues—were just what was needed in English public life. It was

a short step from the love of family to the love of the family of man, a step reinforced by the stress on charitable conduct by

all denominations. The Evangelical concern with the importance of a proper home and family life can be seen as a move

towards the more formal subordination of women that took place even in the more radical sects like the Quakers, who had

already introduced separate seating for men and women by 1800. Service and duty were implicit in both philanthropy and family

life.

‘Separate spheres’

Definitions of masculinity and femininity certainly played an important part in marking off the middle classes from other

social groups. The separation of the sexes existed at every level within society—in manufacturing, the professions and retail

trades, in the churches and chapels, in public life of all kinds and in the home. Nonconformists, Anglicans, conservatives and

radicals and the ‘haute’ and ‘petite’ bourgeoisie could agree on the subordinate position of women if nothing else and created

a homogeneous ideology between the disparate groups within the middle classes.

WALES, SCOTLAND AND IRELAND

Wales

Wales did not develop a significant class of commercial or professional people until the eighteenth century and this was

accompanied by a steady fall in the political status of the numerically strong lesser gentry. Gwyn Williams argues that

Throughout the century there is a shuffling but increasingly visible rise in the numbers of artisans, craftsmen,

professional agents of the service trades, many of them ‘on tramp’, and a notable increase in the strength of the

professions…a surprising number of whom where of relatively humble origin; shopkeepers were colonizing whole

reaches of society.

With urban and industrial expansion shopkeepers, manufacturers and merchants became settled parts of the community,

replacing the travelling packmen. Carmarthen with its river port and Wrexham and Dolgellau with their small industries

became centres for merchant houses. Cattle dealers established banks at centres like Llandovery and Tregaron where they did

most business. The Common Council of Cardiff had a significant commercial element in it in 1731 and this remained the case

throughout the century. The growth of the iron trade in Merthyr involved a range of people in its commercial life and most of

the members of its Court of Requests were shopkeepers. In rural and urban areas there was considerable variation in the

wealth and influence of these emergent capitalists. At one extreme there were ironmasters like the Guests and Crawshays whose

wealth and life-style put them on the same level as the landed gentry and who seem to have inherited the same autocratic and

paternal attitudes towards the communities where their foundries were based. The life-style of the landed gentleman was as

much the yardstick of social superiority in Wales as it was in England. Coal entrepreneurs similarly demonstrated middle-

class attitudes. David Davies of Llandinam, a coal-owner, railway and dock builder, was a Nonconformist Welshman and he

and his family took considerable interest in Welsh philanthropic activities in the mid-nineteenth century. Their social control

was as great as that of the early ironmasters through being virtually sole employers in the mining valley towns and their

public offices on boards of health and as JPs. Merchants with links, either commercial or in terms of partnerships, with Bristol

or London could exploit their position far more extensively than the village shopkeepers and small traders and the variety of

craftsmen and workers in wood, metal and leather, thatchers and later clockmakers who often combined their craft with work

on the land.

The range of professional people increased in the eighteenth century. The clergy held second place in society to the

squirearchy to which they were closely allied, in attitudes as well as family. As in England the squire often had the right to

nominate to a living. The clergy were drawn from a wide social range and some livings which were very poor were run by

poor curates who could have risen from the lower orders. Dissenting ministers often came from the ranks of the literate

craftsmen and increasingly played an influential part in Welsh cultural life. The law was regarded as a respectable as well as

lucrative profession and the Recordership of a corporation was often the door to a parliamentary seat. The number of lawyers,

often in practices that were hereditary, increased in the eighteenth century since litigation over land and other kinds of

property was important throughout this period and the growth of industry from 1750 created additional business. In related

areas land agents and surveyors were required increasingly for surveying estates, and architects for designing new buildings.

The Hopcyn family served the Margam estate as land agents for at least three generations and it was common for fathers to

bring up their sons to their professions. Landlord absenteeism led to estate stewards becoming more common and acquiring

176 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850

considerable authority. Judges, lawyers and estate stewards were, perhaps, inevitably, unpopular in the community at large.

They reflected what was increasingly seen as an alien and exploiting legal and economic system.

Doctors were few—in the late seventeenth century there were only three in the diocese of St David’s—though their number

grew in the eighteenth century. There were usually links with the gentry but medicine was not seen as a prestigious

occupation until the mid-eighteenth century. By 1800 the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons had laid down courses of

study which took young Welshmen to Dublin if they lived close to the coast or to Edinburgh, which led in the field of

medicine. The status and pay of teachers varied. Masters in grammar schools had some social standing and were well paid but

there were few such schools in Wales and they were relatively poorly endowed.

The growth of the middle classes in Wales has to be counterbalanced by the successful maintenance of social and political

control by the landed elite. Successful industrialists and merchants took on the attitudes of that elite and they, like the

landowning slate-quarry proprietors of north-west Wales, were virtually omnipotent in their communities despite the

existence of middle classes of some significance. The growth of the Welsh middle classes before 1850 was far less conducive

to civic spirit and towards liberation from landed influence in towns than was the case in England.

Scotland

The Scottish middle classes in this period were vigorous and varied. At one extreme were those on the edge of the landed

class like the judges of the Court of Session and the sons of lairds and noblemen who were put into the professions to make

their money but who meant to return to the land. At the other extreme were those on the edge of the working class, especially

those described in directories as ‘mechanics’—artisans and craftsmen who were partly employers of journeymen and

apprentices and partly workers in their own right. These great differences in wealth and status meant that, as in England, there

was no homogeneous middle-class front against the landed elite.

From the 1750s, despite social heterogenity, almost all bourgeois groups prospered. Lawyers took the opportunities offered

by increases in conveyancing and from disputes about land. Merchants took advantage of the new trade with North America,

the West Indies and Russia and to the export markets of France and Germany and finally, once they had broken the monopoly

of the East India Company, with India and China. Businessmen increased in old occupations and appeared in new ones.

Tradesmen and mechanics seized the opportunities for increasing their trades. The professions increased in scale and office-

holding became more important as a source of income.

Edinburgh and Glasgow—two streams of middle-class life

Edinburgh and Glasgow represented two streams of middle-class life: Edinburgh dominated by the professional classes and

Glasgow by commercial and manufacturing interests. Other towns in Scotland were modelled to a lesser or greater extent on

them: for example, Montrose, Dumfries and Ayr on Edinburgh; Greenock, Paisley, Galashiels and Dundee on Glasgow. Middle-

class occupations seemed to flourish from the 1750s and centres of middle-class life appeared to flourish with them.

For most of the century people of all social classes lived in the tenements of the Old Town of Edinburgh, not segregated

horizontally by fashionable and unfashionable streets but vertically according to the floor of the tenement on which they

lived. The most respectable floors were generally the second and third, above the worst of the smell but without too many

steps to climb. The most important development in Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century was the development of the New

Town and the movement of the middle classes into it, a process of segregation not completed until the 1830s. This was not

simply, however, a separation into a working-class and middle-class town, but into areas occupied by the more wealthy

middle classes and those occupied by the working population and the petit bourgeoisie.

Edinburgh was not largely a business town, though businesses flourished there because of the growing affluence of its

population. Traditional trades continued but with considerable loosening of the old guild rules. Major growth was in the

consumer goods industry which lay outside the scope of the guilds. Edinburgh society was led not by merchants and

tradesmen (despite their economic significance and control of the Town Council) but by professional men. Lawyers were pre-

eminent in this field—the street directories for Edinburgh in the 1770s give evidence of this with their lists putting advocates

first, then clerks and writers to the signet and their clerks, only then were the nobility and gentry with town houses included,

and finally the rest of the middle class without distinction. The lawyers’ closest links were not with the mercantile interest but

with the country gentry of the Lothians. Success meant an estate in East Lothian or Midlothian both as an investment and for

the political privilege and social prestige it gave one’s family. Intermarriage between lawyers and gentry was common and

they treated each other with equal respect. Urban lawyers and rural gentry formed a cultural and economic elite. After the

lawyers, the profession which contributed most to the life of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Edinburgh was teaching.

Education was a growth industry after 1720 and the University reached the height of its reputation between 1760 and 1820

with famous teachers like the historian William Robertson, William Cullen and, in chemistry, Joseph Black and Dugald

Stewart and Adam Ferguson in moral philosophy. The Medical School, founded in 1726, had immense prestige due in no small

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measure to three generations of Alexander Munros who held the Chair of Anatomy unbroken between 1720 and 1846. Its

excellence, a consequence of good teaching and a liberal curriculum, accounted for the dramatic increase in students,

including many from England, Wales and Ireland: 400 in 1780 to over 2,000 by 1820. Edinburgh was also famous for

educational establishments, for both sexes, other than the University. Hugo Arnot described it in 1779 as a city dependent for

its support ‘chiefly upon the college of justice, the seminaries of education and the inducement which as a capital it affords to

genteel people to reside in it’.

In late eighteenth-century Glasgow 30 per cent of occupations were classified as merchant and manufacturer while in

Edinburgh it was only 12 per cent. The respective figures for professional men were 12 per cent and 29 per cent, for small

tradesmen 42 per cent and 30 per cent and for nobles and gentry 1 per cent and 5 per cent. Glasgow’s strength lay in the

entrepreneurial skills of its business and manufacturing community and Glasgow rather than Edinburgh was the focal point

for Scotland’s industrial revolution.

Ireland

The middle classes developed far more slowly in Ireland than in the rest of the United Kingdom. Table 14.5 (p. 298) shows

that in 1851 ‘middle-class’ occupations accounted for 5.6 per cent of the total workforce compared to over 10 per cent in

England and Wales and almost 9 per cent in Scotland. Lecky, the Victorian historian, argued that British repression before

1778 deliberately prevented the emergence of an Irish Catholic middle class and destroyed Irish trade and manufactures. The

extent to which this was the case is difficult to determine but the growth of linencloth exports from 2 million yards in the

1710s to 25 million yards by the mid-1780s certainly calls this conclusion into question. It seems that during the second half

of the eighteenth century a Catholic urban middle class emerged, largely unheralded, and by 1800 controlled a large share of

Irish commerce.

There was some mobility between land, business and the professions in Ireland but on the whole it was not pronounced.

This is confirmed by the stream of immigrants into business in the Irish cities. The influx of Scots into the wholesale trade and

industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is an example of this. The range of families in foreign trade was

comparatively narrow. Only in the south-east did a combination of social pressures and aspirations predispose even the lower

classes to mobility on a scale unequalled elsewhere outside the ranks of Nonconformists and Presbyterians particularly in

Ulster.

Ireland remained a gentry-based culture where, outside urban centres, the middle classes did not develop to any significant

extent. A possible exception to this was the ‘middlemen’ who were perhaps the only group which constituted anything like a

rural middle class. Middlemen leased land and lived off the profits between their head rents and the sub-rent paid by their

tenants. Some adopted an entrepreneurial role in developing the rural economy in the eighteenth century. They helped to

accelerate the spread of a stable market structure to remoter areas through their role in marketing produce, often received

instead of cash rents. Middlemen were a function of the degree of backwardness of a region and were never a major facet of

society in more developed areas like Kildare, Kilkenny or Meath and the spread of a cash economy after the 1750s made their

position less economically viable. Middlemen stood between the small tenant farmers and the landowners and were important

social brokers in the countryside, who, however archaic and conservative they were, contributed powerfully to the cohesion of

social life. As they disappeared, the conflicting social interests of rural Ireland confronted each other much more directly.

THE ‘PROFESSIONS’

One of the most distinctive features of the development of the ‘middling ranks’ was the expansion of ‘the professions’.

Sociologists have defined a ‘profession’ as an occupation with the following characteristics: a collegial and hierarchical

organization; control over recruitment policy; a self-imposed and self-regulated code of individual behaviour (within a

framework of considerable individual autonomy) and group practice; a claim to monopoly in the particular area of expertise

through their understanding and application of specialized knowledge; and finally, a sense of esprit de corps or professional

solidarity. There are, however, certain problems with this sociological perspective. It has Whiggish implications —historians

are being asked ‘to measure the ancient professions against the yardstick of the modern’. It also implies an inevitable

continuum, a route whereby groups achieved the goal of full professionalism. As Rosemary O’Day says: ‘Rarely has there

been a subject for study so elusive of satisfactory definition. For “profession” it not simply the equivalent of “occupation”; the

word implies an ideology…’

Why was there a growth in the ‘professions’ in the eighteenth century? Some historians, Geoffrey Holmes for example, see

professionalization as a feature of urbanization if not industrialization. The existence of towns was certainly of major

importance in the development of the professions but it does not provide a complete answer. The varieties of economic

growth may.

178 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850

The eighteenth century saw a growing and central importance of the notion of ‘vocation’ to the professional. A profession

was not simply a specialized occupation but possessed status. Only the higher clergy, physicians and barristers were

considered members of the ‘liberal professions’ and were recruited almost exclusively from the upper levels of society.

Curates, surgeons, teachers, apothecaries and attorneys (as solicitors were called until 1874) were regarded as little higher

than tradesmen. Status could be surrounded by mystique as in the case of physicians who wrote their prescriptions in Latin

and left their dispensing to others. Apothecaries, because of their more limited education, wrote theirs in English and

dispensed themselves. The practitioner, it was argued, possessed a calling from God. This was obvious when applied to

professions like the clergy, but it was only gradually secularized and accepted that laymen and eventually laywomen also had

callings. Out of the notion of vocation and the economic definition of a profession in terms of having ‘cornered the market’

institutionalized professions emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Evangelicalism and the High Church Oxford Movement, as well as the reformation of Anglican church organizations in the

1830s re-established the Church as a serious professional vocation rather than just congenial sinecures for the younger sons of

the gentry. In 1845 the first proper theological college was established at Cuddesdon to train ordinands for their new

responsibilities. Teacher-training institutions date from the same decade. The Royal College of Surgeons was founded in

1800, the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1818 and the British Medical Council started life as the Provincial Medical and

Surgical Association in 1832. The Law Society was set up in 1825 and in 1836 it supervised the first examinations held for

any branch of the legal profession. The Inns of Court followed suit in 1851 when they set up the Council for Legal Education,

though examinations for barristers was not compulsory until 1872.

By 1850 only the upper reaches of the armed services and the civil service were still ‘unprofessionalized’ in the sociological

sense outlined above. Control over service commissions was not breached until the reforms of the early 1870s though the

civil service was to be reformed, as a result of the government’s Northcote-Trevelyan report in 1855 and pressure from the

Administrative Reform Association. As John Bourne has recently argued,

historians should not neglect the importance of

patronage in nineteenth-century England.

‘MIDDLE CLASSNESS’

The concept of a middle-class standard of living was developed by the 1830s. It provides, despite the warnings of G.Kitson

Clark in The Making of Victorian England, an objective set of standards against which membership of the middle class can be

tested and a subjective set of goals which individuals strove for. This was a concept both of self and class consciousness and,

as a result, the middle classes were much more conscious of their ‘classness’ than the labouring population. They possessed

both organizational ability and ideological unity when the working population did not. The middle classes opposed many

aspects of aristocratic society, especially what they perceived as its idleness and excess, and yet wished to emulate their

‘betters’. Keeping up with the Joneses, and especially the Lord or Sir Jones, was an inherent part of the credo. They preached

puritan values of sobriety and hard work, holding themselves up as a model for the working population—a moral imperative

which succeeded in inculcating or developing a highly individualistic, upwardly-mobile attitude among a significant section

of those workers. Contemporaries and modern historians both saw class relations as complex and, in the case of the working

classes, downright confusing. But this was less the case for the middle classes. In terms of income and occupation, types of

expenditure and pattern of family living the criteria used by contemporaries and today are very clear. Religious certainty,

moral zeal and purity, respectability, the importance of ‘appearance’ were all essential to this self-definition. Growing economic

strength and prosperity gave them exploitative power over the labouring population—economically as employers of the work

force, but also socially and politically as a focus for emulation and sexually through the underworld of prostitution that

existed behind the facade of family life. By 1850 a hegemony of middle-class social and economic values had been

established. The emergence of the Liberal Party during the 1850s and early 1860s was to give these values national political

power.

NOTES

1 D.Defoe Robinson Crusoe quoted in I.Bradley The English Middle Classes are Alive and Kicking, Collins, 1982, p. 63.

2 K.Marx, quoted in R.H.Tawney Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Penguin, 1964 edn., p. 266.

3 Aristotle The Politics, Oxford University Press, 1947, Book IV, ix (8).

4 R.Porter English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1982, p. 88. P.Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class,

Methuen, 1989 and P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783, Oxford University Press, 1989 provide a

much needed analysis of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie.

5 ibid. pp. 86–7.

6 J.C.D.Clark English Society 1688–1832, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 71.

7 H.Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, p. 23.

CAPITAL 179

8 King, Massie and Colquhoun have recently been scrutinized in a series of papers by P.H.Lindert and J.G.Williamson, conveniently

summarized in N.Crafts British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 11–17.

9 R.Porter op. cit. p. 92.

10 Quoted in J.Scott The Upper Classes, Macmillan, 1980, p. 70.

11 R.Porter op. cit. p. 97.

12 I.Bradley op. cit. p. 65.

13 J.S.Mill ‘The State of Society in America’, Westminster Review, January 1836.

14 G.Kitson Clark The Making of Victorian England, Methuen, 1965, p. 96.

15 D.Marshall, Industrial England 1776–1851, Routledge, 1973, p. 96.

16 C.Hall ‘Gender Divisions and Class Formation in the Birmingham Middle Class 1780–1850’, in R.Samuel (ed.) People’s History and

Socialist Theory, Routledge, 1981, p. 165. L.Davidoff and C.Hall Family Fortunes, Hutchinson, 1987 is now the definitive work on

middle-class women.

17 Ellen Weeton Miss Weeton: The Journal of a Governess, ed. E.Hall, 1939 is very informative on the life and tribulations of middle-

class women.

18 On women and philanthropy see F.K.Prochaska Women and Philanthropy in 19th Century England, Oxford University Press, 1980,

and his more recent The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain, Faber, 1988.

19 G.A.Williams When Was Wales?, Penguin, 1985, p. 146.

20 Quoted in T.C.Smout A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830, Fontana, 1972, p. 355.

21 For the development of the ‘professions’ see G.Holmes Augustan England: Professions, State and Society 1680–1730, Allen &

Unwin, 1982 and W.J. Reader Professional Men: the Rise of the Professional Classes in Victorian England, Weidenfeld, 1966. A

useful summary can be found in the bibliographical essay by R.O’Day ‘The Professions in Early Modern England’, History Today,

June 1986, pp. 52–5. F.M.L.Thompson, The Rise of Respect-able Society, Fontana, 1988 offers a thematic approach from 1830.

22 R.O’Day op. cit. p. 52.

23 J.M.Bourne Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-Century England, Edward Arnold, 1986, especially chapters 1, 2 and 7.

180 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850

Wages

All of you who are sixty years of age can recollect that bread and meat and not wretched potatoes, were the food

of the labouring people; you can recollect that every industrious labouring man brewed his own beer and drank it

by his own fireside…. You can recollect when the young men did not shirk about on a Sunday in ragged smock-

frocks with unshaven faces, and a shirt not washed for a month, and with their toes pointing out from their shoes,

and when a young man was pointed out if he had not, on a Sunday, a decent coat upon his back, a good hat on his

head, a clean shirt with silk handkerchief around his neck, leather breeches without a spot, whole worsted

stockings tied under the knee with a red garter…. There were always some exceptions to this; some lazy, some

drunken, some improvident young men; but I appeal to you all, those of you who are sixty years of age, whether

this be not a true description of the state of the labourers of England when they were boys?

William Cobbett articulated deeply felt contemporary feelings when he lamented changes in the attitude of farm labourers

between the 1760s and the 1820s. This sense of loss showed itself in nostalgia, a mourning for the passing of a richer life, not

just materially but in terms of the quality of experience. While it is easy to demonstrate the empirical unsoundness of

nostalgia, that each generation deceives itself in its old age, historians cannot escape the existence of a sense of loss. This

chapter is concerned with those groups in society who worked with their hands and for whom wages, in one form or another,

were the primary source of income. No matter how skilled they were, how high their earnings, their social status was

determined by the kind of job they did. Labouring people lived in a world of their own, remote from the experience of their

more prosperous and articulate contemporaries. They were both vulnerable to the changes that occurred in the British

economy from the early eighteenth century and yet some were also able to exploit those changes to improve both their status

and income. The working population was not a single entity, a homogeneous class. It was divided between town and country,

manufacture and service, skilled and unskilled. Superimposed on these divisions was the deep separation of experience

through gender and race. These distinctions were further overlaid by local and regional differences expressed in dialects,

customs and loyalties. Poverty alone provided a unifying factor: the threat of poverty, the fear of poverty, the certainty of

poverty. All I can hope to do in one chapter is to sketch the broad outline of developments and identify the major areas of

concern for historians

WAGES

A ‘proletariat’?

The comprehensiveness of the Marxist formulation of a ‘proletariat’ as

that class of society which procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour and not from

the profit derived from any capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose whole existence depend on the

demand for labour, hence, on the alternation of times of good and bad business, on the fluctuations resulting from

unbridled competition.

is extremely appealing yet the way in which people were paid varied throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Increasingly wages were paid directly in cash, though this could be in the form of ‘tokens’ which could only be exchanged at

the ‘company store’. Wages were paid by the hour, day, week or at ‘piece-rates’. In other cases wages were paid ‘in kind’.

Many farm servants ‘lived in’, receiving bed and board as well as small money wages. As late as the 1850s quarrymen of

Swanage in Dorset received the equivalent money value of their wages in stone.

Wage labourers or the emergence of a ‘cash’ nexus

By 1800 wages accounted for about 45 per cent of the national income. Wage-labourers received a disproportionately small

share of this. Probably around two-thirds of the population were living on wages

During the eighteenth century, though less

in the nineteenth, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether a person was a wage-earner or not. Many people occupied

small plots of land supplementing their incomes by woriking as wage-labourers for larger farmers or as outworkers in, for

example, the cloth, straw or leather industries. It is also difficult to treat women and children working on family farms or

workshops as employees working for wages. The emergence of fully fledged wage-labour as opposed to the ambiguous world

of peasant labourers and family workers did not occur evenly over time. In areas where agricultural holdings were divided to

accommodate an increasing number of people then the outcome was farms too small to support families by agriculture alone.

Additional employment was necessary to supplement farm incomes and in the forest and upland regions of England and

Wales and parts of Ireland this led to peasant manufacture which eventually became commercialized. Where systems of

primogeniture were widespread, as in lowland England, growing population created an increasing body of landless labourers,

who either worked for farmers possessing farms large enough to need wage-labour, or of moving to areas where work was

available. Wage-labour was more an industrial than an agricultural phenomenon and was probably most widespread in the

service sector, occupations requiring little skill which were easily available for people lacking land, capital or training. Wage-

labour developed more slowly in agriculture. In 1831 there were only 2.5 farm-labouring families to every farm-occupying

family. Farm servants frequently lived in farmers’ houses, though the practice seems to have been in decline in England, if

not Scotland and Wales, in the eighteenth century. At busy periods, such as harvest times, casual labour was employed

including short-term migrants from Ireland. In two types of manufacturing industries wage-labour became more important.

One was capital-intensive enterprises like metal-smelting and mining. The other was the more numerous category of wage-

earners found in textiles, metal-working and leather-working, where wage-labour was combined with working capital to

supply standardised goods of uniform quality and low prices to national and international markets. These wage-labourers had

little chance of graduating to better things, unlike urban craft journeymen and apprentices, another group of wage-earners,

who could achieve the status of small masters. Increasingly, however, the growth of metropolitan permanent journeymen who

had little prospect of becoming masters was a feature of this period. As late as the censuses of 1841 and 1851 it remains

difficult to distinguish between self-employed and wage-earners in craft occupations, though it is clear that such forms of

employment declined in importance relative to wage-earners employed in capital-intensive enterprises.

The changing eighteenth-century labour market

One problem when discussing wage-labour in the eighteenth century is the nature of the labour market. In practice, before

1800 there were many rather than a single labour market. Institutions like guilds, municipal authorities and the state impaired

their smooth operation while both employers and employees often restricted the free flow of labour. Poor communications,

local traditions and customs, differentiation by skill and status combined to make labour one of the least immobile factors of

production. Labour markets operated with fewest obstacles at the lowest levels of skill. By 1800 there was a considerable

pool of unskilled labour which could be recruited to any manual occupation. Variations in the intensity of demand had a

direct influence on wages. Incomes were generally higher in towns than in the countryside, because urban demand for labour

was greater than its supply.

Changing social attitudes

There was a marked change in social attitudes to wage-earning in the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century wage-

labourers were generally despised, had no place in society, possessed no political rights and were accorded no consideration

except as producers of wealth. Their wages were kept as low as possible to keep production costs down. Since they possessed

no property, other than their labour, wage-earners were ‘masterless men’, out of harmony with a society in which the

possession of property determined a person’s place in the social hierarchy. Economic changes after 1700 reshaped

relationships between employers and workers, widening the social gulf between them. This eventually resulted in a challenge

to the rights of property with an articulation of the rights of men, the emergence of ‘working-class consciousness’. Two

intellectual developments strengthened arguments in favour of higher wages. The first was the refutation that labourers were

lazy. Adam Smith argued that ‘where wages are high…we shall always find the workman more active, diligent and

expeditious than when they are low…’.

Secondly, higher wages created a demand for consumable goods and so stimulated further economic growth. Smith argued

that rising wages caused workers to copy the consumption patterns of their social superiors:

182 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850

it is but equity…that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the

produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.

‘STANDARDS OF LIVING’

There are major problems with the quantity of wages throughout this period and this is reflected in the vexed controversy over

‘standards of living’

. ‘What was the impact of economic change on standards of living for the labouring population?’ is

generally the question historians have asked. The conclusions reached range from those who point to the beneficial effects of

industrialization upon wages to those who take a view of progressive immiseration. The popular conception of living standards

in England between Peterloo and ‘the hungry forties’ is of a working population in a state of dire and unrelenting poverty.

This view, expressed graphically if not always with historical accuracy, by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, maintains

that

With the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater

masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more…. Machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour and nearly

everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.

Marx demonstrated the problem of making general statements and helps to explain why the best-known economic history

controversy is distinguished by a low level of academic objectivity. Rigour needs to replace rhetoric.

‘Real’ wages

In attempting to ascertain living standards emphasis has been placed on the relationship between wages and prices: the

question of ‘real wages’.

So what was the course of ‘real’ wages between 1700 and 1850 and what methodological problems have historians

encountered in attempting to determine this? Attention has focused on living standards in early industrial towns, especially

cotton towns, for which there is ample evidence. The problem is whether their experience was representative of other areas of

Britain and whether the contrast between these ‘dark satanic mills’ and ‘merrie England’ is a valid one or merely a construct

of historians who have put ideological considerations before historical ones. Radical pessimists— some contemporary novelists,

poets and social critics—had the better of the rhetorical debate and their stand was taken over by historians in the 1880s. Arnold

Toynbee, the Webbs and the Hammonds were united in their condemnation of the long agony of the industrial revolution,

characterizing it as ‘history’s blackest hour’. The counter-attack, led by Sir John Clapham, began in 1926 and, supported by

Ashton and Hartwell, proved so powerful that E.P.Thompson could, in 1963, call it ‘the new anticatastrophe orthodoxy’.

Recently, the optimists’ advance has been checked.

The problem lies in the manner of compiling indices of real wages. By selecting appropriate starting and finishing points it

is perfectly possible to construct any of a range of increases or decreases in real wages. For example, any index using 1800 as

a base will, because high food prices depressed the value of real wages, show a marked upward bias. Tucker’s index of real

wages for London artisans shows a decline in real wages of 11 per cent between 1780 and 1840 but an increase of 25 per cent

between 1790 and 1850. How wages were spent also creates problems. Most surviving series are for wholesale rather than

retail prices and little is known of the weight that should be ascribed to different items or of the ways in which expenditure

patterns responded to price changes or the introduction of new commodities. What, for example, was the impact on standards

of living of the increased availability of potatoes? More difficulties arise from the need to adjust hourly or weekly earnings to

compensate for periods of under- or unemployment. The best available statistics are those contained in customs and excise

returns which include four items of importance in the diet of the labouring population—beer, tea, coffee and sugar. But

interpretation is difficult. Beer returns end in 1830, while trends in tea and coffee often reflect not rising living standards but

the fact that they were substitutes for each other. Supplies of bread, the main item of diet, were always dependent on harvest yields

and increased potato consumption was seen as a sign of falling standards in the south but was welcomed in the north as a

dietary variant. The main evidence for beef and mutton relates to the Smithfield indices but Smithfield may not have been

representative as there were other meat markets, and these indices do not include pig prices, which made up an important part

of the labouring population’s diet.

Diversity of ‘experience’

To the patchiness of this evidence and the difficulties inherent in its interpretation must be added the enormous diversity of

working experience. Some workers experienced a rise in wages while others experienced a relative decline. Skilled workers in

unmechanized occupations whose services were increasingly needed by a developing economy, like compositors, blacksmiths,

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building craftsmen, joiners etc. and new craftsmen like boilermakers, iron puddlers and railway engine drivers—

conventionally labelled the ‘labour aristocracy’—were prominent among the fortunate group. Factory cotton spinners, the

majority of farm workers in the Scottish Lowlands, most domestic servants and perhaps building workers also experienced

rising real wages. Workers hit by technological advance and who were unadaptable like handloom weavers, framework

knitters and the nail-makers of the Black Country; a great many of the London workers mentioned by Henry Mayhew and the

agricultural labourers of southern England, declined. Regional variations were imposed on these differences. If anything

economic change markedly increased regional wage variations: by 1850 there were at least twelve distinct wage areas in Britain.

In the early nineteenth century, for example, compositors earned 12s.–19s. in Scotland. 18s.–22s. in northern England, 18s.–

24s. in the south-east and as much as 25s. in London. Emphasizing handloom weavers or agricultural labourers as opposed to

factory workers, or one region rather than another, or 1790–1830 rather than 1800–50, would lead to different conclusions.

Conclusions?

Given all these qualifications can historians say anything about real wages with any degree of confidence? In the first half of

the eighteenth century production of staple foodstuffs kept pace with population growth. Wheat prices were low and, after

1730, were falling, reaching their lowest point in 1755. By the 1760s the southern counties were largely on a wheat diet,

though the northern counties, poorer than the south, continued longer on barley and rye and took to potatoes sooner. Lower

prices increased the purchasing value of wages, allowing a greater proportion to be spent on manufactured goods and imports

than previously. This increase in demand played an important role in stimulating economic growth and rising wages in the

vicinity of industrial areas. However, the position of the labourer and cottager in southern England, where the opportunities for

additional or alternative employment were limited, showed signs of deterioration. It was their low wages which were partly

responsible for lower wheat prices down to 1755. Between the 1760s and 1790s corn prices began to rise faster than other

prices and faster than wages. Average wages are estimated to have risen by 25 per cent between 1760 and 1795 and the cost

of living by 30 per cent, though this obscures a definite rise in the industrial north and a distinct fall in London and the

agricultural counties. From about 1790 until the end of the French Wars, M.W.Flinn estimated

, real wages of most workers

kept pace with rising prices. Between 1813 and the early 1820s prices fell sharply and to a greater extent than wages so that

those who were in work (an important qualification) appear to have enjoyed an increase in living standards of up to a quarter.

These gains seem to have been retained, though not increased, between 1820 and 1850 and with less unemployment a greater

proportion of the labour force may have benefited from the earlier gains. There is nothing here to suggest that there was a

general and sustained fall in real wages between 1790 and 1850. Lindert and Williamson, however, disagree with Flinn’s

analysis, arguing for a decline in real wages between 1815 and 1819 locating the real improvement between 1820 and 1850.

Qualitative considerations

It is not enough to argue that because real wages rose for the bulk of the labouring population that there was an overall

improvement in standards of living. Standards of living cover qualitative as well as quantitative conditions. When ‘the quality

of life’ is considered the pessimists have a less assailable position. Exploitation, human misery, squalor are highly ambiguous

and emotive concepts for historians to use. What validity is there in arguing, for example, that the change in the nature of

work from the ‘freedom’ of the domestic system to the soul-destroying factory system marked a reduction in the quality of

life? In what ways did the relationship between rich and poor change? How was the family affected? J.L.Hammond argued

that there was a price to be paid for economic change, one that could not be measured in statistical terms, including ‘the want

of beauty, the same want of pageants or festivals…the ugliness of the new life, with its growing slums, its lack of beautiful

buildings, its destruction of nature.’

But were conditions qualitatively worse for the labouring population in 1850 than in

1700? Again historians have problems with the ‘general’ and the ‘specific’.

Much early industrialization took place in rural areas and manufacturers often provided housing and other social amenities

for their workers. Jedidiah Strutt, the eighteenth-century mill-owner, for example provided houses, shops, schools, a library, a

swimming pool with instructor and a room for dancing for his workers. The result was that conditions in industrial villages

were often quite good though increasingly urban squalor and the proliferation of mills and mines were seen as synonymous.

Overcrowding, jerry-building, impure water, street pollution and poor sanitation were the consequences. Many more people were

exposed to the hazards of adulterated food. In 1819 alone, for example, there were nearly one hundred convictions of brewers

and brewers’ druggists for using a variety of substitutes for beer and hops. But Engels overstated the case when he wrote that

‘Everything in this district that arouses our disgust and just indignation is of relatively recent origin and belongs to the

industrial age….’

Open sewers and adulterated foods were not the invention of the industrial age and neither was poor housing, though all were

accentuated by the growth of manufacturing industries. Engels inherited a romanticized notion of pre-industrial rural cottages

in which lived contented spinners and weavers. Urban death rates in 1700 or Hogarth’s prints leave no doubt that squalor

184 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850

existed without modern industry

. The pessimist case relies too much on romanticized notions of pre-industrial England but

the deterioration of the ‘quality’ of life may have offset any improvement in real wages.

The alleged loss of freedom when machines rather than traditional work rhythms dictated toil has been used by pessimists

as a further example of qualitative decay. Great care must, however, be taken not unduly to exaggerate the degree of freedom

and independence enjoyed by pre-industrial workers. In parts of Yorkshire woollen weavers seem to have purchased their own

raw materials but this was not widespread as elsewhere weavers depended on entrepreneurs for their wool. The sense in which

‘freedom’ can be applied was limited to weavers’ owning their own looms (though framework knitters generally rented

theirs) and self-determination of daily work patterns. The ‘loss of freedom’ argument may fit the handloom weavers best,

though even their independence was limited, but few other occupations. Agricultural labourers had long periods of

underemployment punctuated by periods of intense labour at harvest and in the spring. Eighteenth-century miners frequently

worked shorter shifts than became usual in the nineteenth century. Labour patterns had, in the words of E.P.Thompson

, a

‘characteristic irregularity’, with alternate bouts of intense labour and idleness. The universality of irregular work patterns in

pre-industrial England has been questioned. During the first half of the eighteenth century many trades developed a

conception of a certain number of hours which made up a normal full working day. In most handicraft trades a 10-hour day

was considered the norm by 1750, and weavers considered ten and a half hours a hard day. Economic change merely

increased the number of workers subjected to the growing regularity and intensity of work.

The spread of the factory system was slow and uneven and so was its impact on work patterns

. Freedom was replaced,

according to Engels and others, by ‘the tyranny of the factory bell’. For Wordsworth factories were ‘an outrage against

nature’. Discipline could be harsh and fines were imposed. The most publicized evils of the factory system were usually found

in the older and smaller mills where machinery was so crowded together that passageways were not clearly defined and where

accidents occurred most frequently from machinery not being boxed in. Ceilings were sometimes so low that it was difficult

to stand upright, while lighting, ventilation and drainage were inadequate. The pessimists argue that, even if factory

conditions were probably no worse than those in domestic industries, the transition to factory production still involved a

major qualitative deterioration. The issue was one of the ‘freedom’ of capitalists to destroy the customs of a trade, whether by

new machinery, by factories or by unrestricted competition which beat down wages and led to undercutting rivals and

undermining standards of craftmanship. The notion that Time is Money’, they argue, has its origins in this process. But even

several contemporaries who were hostile to industrialization conceded the point that factory work required no more exertion

than much other work. Labour was by waterwheel or steam engine, hours were no longer than in some non-factory

occupations and after 1830, with progressive legislation curbing the working day, the cotton town gradually lost their

reputation for excessive hours. Mills became safer, less crowded, better ventilated and less dependent on young children.

Hightened social conscience and a determination to investigate and reform social evils have an important role in the

optimists’ case that the association of industrialization with a declining quality of life is founded on too rosy an interpretation

of pre-industrial conditions. As E.H.Hunt says:

Whether the people of industrial England were more or less contented than their rustic forebears cannot be determined—

but the effects of industrialisation on their lives is less indeterminable than commonly supposed. The debate entails a

comparison between England as it was and the non-industrial alternative.

Families and children

The impact on the family of the economic changes was a cause of considerable pessimism among many contemporaries like

Richard Oastler, Lord Shaftesbury and particularly Peter Gaskell

. The result of the transition from domestic to factory

system was, for the textile workers’ families, nothing less than catastrophic, ‘a violation of the sacred nature of the home’. As

with the ‘standards of living’ debate it is necessary to distinguish valid evidence from polemic. Two points are clear. First, the

pessimistic critique stems from a contrast of the impact of factories with the presumed conditions of family life under the

domestic system. Secondly, critics rarely went outside the textile industry in making comparisons. The domestic system was

based on an integrated family unit of reproduction, production and consumption. Patriarchal control and moral guidance were

exerted over both wives and children. Children often followed in their father’s trade, a disadvantage in trades which were

already overstocked. In this context the advent of the factory affected the ‘independent’ economic status of the family. Engels

argued that it destroyed the pride and status of the breadwinner, now dependent on the factory earnings of his wife and

children. Women were no longer able to carry out their domestic functions effectively and the family’s dietary needs suffered.

Daughters were not instructed in the domestic virtues and were exposed to a promiscuously early mixing with young men.

The contrast was drawn, by Marx and others, between the artisan as an independent seller of his own labour and the slave-

trader, selling his own and his wife and children’s labour in the factory. William Cobbett wrote in 1821: ‘You are for reducing

the community into two classes: Masters and Slaves…. When master and man were the term everyone was in his place and

all were free. Now, in fact, it is the affair of master and slaves…’.

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