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Household economy 261
households of domestic manufacturers. Tradesmen’s families illustrate
that occupational identities could be associated with idealised household
employment patterns that were relatively independent of earnings. The
skilled tradesman aspired to a male breadwinner family structure even
if he did not earn a family wage.
It would be wrong to conclude that the contributions of women and
children were unimportant. Women’s contributions were underestimated
because housework and caring were not counted, and self-provisioning
and taking in lodgers were hard to value. Self-provisioning activities, such
as gleaning, growing potatoes, keeping a cow or pig, or collecting fire-
wood, common strategies to augment family earnings in the eighteenth-
century countryside (Humphries 1990; King 1991), were curtailed by
urbanisation and the privatisation of rural resources. Some rural house-
holds that were fortunate enough to retain access to resources adapted
provisioning activities, replacing cows with pigs for example. These re-
mained able to generate resources worth 10 to 20 per cent of men’s earn-
ings at the end of the industrial revolution (Horrell and Humphries 1997).
As opportunities to forage faded, increased labour migration boosted the
demand for lodgings, and provided wives and widows with the chance to
augment family incomes by selling their domestic services or a share of
their accommodation (Davidoff 1979; see also Table 9.2).
Children were important secondary earners. When trends in child par-
ticipation rates are related to the growing numbers of children character-
istic of the period, they suggest an increase in the absolute input of child
labour time. In addition, the relatively high and increasing participation
rates in factory districts and the influx of population into such areas im-
plies a massive increase in children working in factories: a near doubling
from 1787–1816 to 1817–39 according to Horrell and Humphries’s (1995)
estimate. Although the boom in child labour was not sustained, the new
quantitative evidence (see Tuttle 1999) rehabilitates an older theme in in-
dustrial revolution studies: the exploitation of small children (Hammond
and Hammond 1932; Thompson 1963). Historians may be well advised
to revisit the role that children played in British industrialisation, espe-
cially as it looks unusual in comparison with other nineteenth-century
industrialisers (Cunningham and Viazzo 1996).
The contributions of women and children were crucial in supporting
families through the family life-cycle and associated poverty cycle. The
newly married couple, especially if the wife continued working, fared
well. But when babies arrived and the mother’s efforts were curtailed, the
ratio of dependants to wage earners rose and there was pressure on fam-
ily income. Older children’s entry into the labour force, by driving down
theratio of dependants to workers, inaugurated a new, more prosperous
phase. Thus men’s relative earnings declined in importance in the middle
stages of the life-cycle when children’s earnings made up about one-third
of income with some variation by occupation (see Horrell and Humphries
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262 Jane Humphries
1995: fig. 2). But these balmy times were soon threatened by the declin-
ing productivity of the ageing head of household and the tendency of
grownchildren to seek independence and ultimately themselves embark
on a similar familial cycle. Children’s confrontation of the dependency
hump associated with their own increasing families probably coincided
with parents’ ageing, inhibiting intergenerational assistance. Stylised ac-
counts of the family life-cycle have been given substance through the
vivid descriptions of the pressures on family resources as fathers aged
and siblings multiplied (Vincent 1981; Ross 1993).
Forone important group of households, women’s and children’s con-
tributions were not only helpful but vital: those households either tem-
porarily or permanently without a male breadwinner. High mortality left
large numbers of widows, while desertion, sickness and unemployment
also threw women and children on their own resources. In the turbulent
years of the industrial revolution both sources of female headship may
have been increasing. But whether increasing or not, households headed
by women comprised between 10 and 20 per cent at any point in time
(Humphries 1998). Given the overall importance of male earnings, it is
not surprising that these households, despite their predictably higher
ratesoffemale and child participation (Humphries 1998), often relied on
poor relief and other assistance to remain together as families (Snell and
Millar 1987; Horrell et al. 2001).
Children from such families, as well as orphans and de facto orphans,
were in the vanguard of the industrial labour force (Rose 1989). The poor
law, manufacturers through their recruitment policies, and the institu-
tion of pauper apprenticeship collaborated in this draft. By opening its
doors to ‘parentless children’ and actively recruiting workhouse orphans,
theextended family of the factory and mining districts also reallocated
child labour to where it was needed.
The male breadwinner family system came about in different ways and
over varied time scales for families facing heterogeneous local conditions.
This conclusion is consistent with research on the industrial revolution,
which emphasises regional and industrial diversity (Berg and Hudson
1992), and with feminist research, which emphasises a varied female ex-
perience (Honeyman and Goodman 1991). Political and cultural as well
as economic factors promoted it. En route some families experienced an
intensive phase of employment but they did so in different ways and
with different welfare implications, some in response to opportunities
to earn and buy, others pressurised by falling piece-rates or wages. But
over and above the variety and diversity of the industrial revolution, orig-
inating before and sprawling beyond its horizons a great transformation
did take place. Industrialisation did not introduce the male breadwinner
family. But in its tumult, by varied routes with significant interruptions
and heterogeneous welfare implications, more households adopted this
form.
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Household economy 263
THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY, THE STANDARD
OF LIVING AND CONSUMPTION
The history of the household economy provides a fresh perspective on two
of the most contested aspects of the industrial revolution: the standard of
living debate and the role of consumption. Historians of the standard of
living concentrated on men’s real wages, assuming that these moved in
line with both their own and women’s and children’s earnings. Unearned
contributions to family incomes, such as self-provisioning and poor relief,
and changes in numbers of people dependent on male earnings were
ignored. The household budgets provide direct evidence on these points,
as anticipated in the discussion in the previous section of widespread but
unevenly developing dependence on male earnings.
Levels and trends in family incomes varied widely, depending on the
occupation of the male head and the region of observation. Aggregat-
ing according to the changing importance of the specific occupational
groups, and using the best available cost of living index (Feinstein 1998)
to deflate nominal incomes, suggests that on average real family incomes
fell 14 per cent from 1791/5 to 1816/20. Improvements in the 1830s were
eroded by the recession of the 1840s, leaving the average working-class
family by 1846/50 with a 24.9 per cent higher real income, hardly a rich
reward for the generation that lived through the industrial revolution
(Horrell and Humphries, forthcoming). Consistent with the failure of
other family members’ contributions to track male earnings, household
incomes grew less than did male earnings. This relatively pessimistic pic-
ture fits with recent definitive work on real wages if account is taken
of changes in dependency (Feinstein 1998). Feinstein guessed that the in-
creasing burden of dependants on workers characteristic of the period
meant that family living standards were about 10 per cent lower than
those implied by real wage trends by mid-century (Feinstein 1998: 650).
An adjustment of this order to his estimate of welfare improvement up
to the1840s leaves it reassuringly close to the estimated growth in real
family income reported above.
Household-based accounts confirm other well-known aspects of the
era, for example the persistent poverty of agricultural families, and the
stagnation of family incomes in domestic manufacturing in the 1830s and
1840s. They also highlight the depth and frequency of setbacks in material
progress, which have been hidden by trends in relatively static wage rates.
The household data also suggest that the distribution of income across
families was becoming more unequal (Horrell and Humphries 1992). In-
creasing dependence on male earnings also hints that the distribution
within families was becoming less egalitarian, though whether this was
offset by growth in overall income depended on the type and location of
the household.
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264 Jane Humphries
Consumption has provided more than its share of awkward corners
in the jigsaw of the industrial revolution (see chapter 13). Social histori-
ans of the early modern period, noting the appearance of new market
commodities in household inventories and other sources, identified ‘a
consumer revolution’, which it was tempting to link causally through de-
mand to the industrial revolution that followed. But a consumption-led
interpretation of the industrial revolution was not easily squared with
thefindings of economic historians from the national accounts. Crafts
(1985), for example, estimated that real per capita consumption grew at
0.47 per cent per annum between 1780 and 1821, hardly consistent with
about of frenzied spending. It was none the less sufficiently strong to
jar with the stationary or even falling real wages of the period. Did a
revolution in spending characterise the early modern economy, precipi-
tating the industrial revolution in its wake? And if so, how did it happen
in the face of stagnant wages? Various scholars sought reconciliation by
hypothesising an increase in labour input. Does the history of the house-
hold economy support the idea that an industrious revolution enabled a
consumer revolution?
The traditional definition of the household was in terms of consump-
tion: the bed, board and hearth that members shared. But as urban in-
dustrial life transformed and reallocated the productive activities of the
household it also transfigured the content, scale and allocation of con-
sumption. The pre-industrial agricultural household produced much of
what it consumed. The specialised early modern producing household
had to resort to the market to sell its output and to buy goods to eat,
drink and wear. In the family wage economy, individuals pooled their
earnings and bought what they needed from the market (Tilly and Scott
1978). Consumption was ‘commodified’.
One of the earliest accounts of the consumer revolution argued that
theincreased employment of women and children, by boosting working-
class family incomes, increased demand for manufactures and encour-
aged industrial expansion (McKendrick 1974). A more sophisticated ver-
sion of the same approach linked commodification to an increase in
women’s and children’s market work (de Vries 1993). The relative cost
and attractiveness of market commodities lured women, in particular,
into wage labour so that they could replace domestic production with
purchased substitutes. But an industrious revolution, which involved in-
creasing female participation rates and family incomes, is hard to square
with the evidence presented above from household budgets. A recent ar-
gument, which partly avoids this conflict, postulates an increase in the
length of the working week and year as the way in which working peo-
ple reconciled stagnant wages with the desire to consume (Voth 2000).
While consumer aspirations remained the main driver, about a quarter of
theincrease in hours was prompted by the increase in dependency.
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Household economy 265
Table 9.4 Expenditure on necessities as a proportion of men’s earnings (%)
High-wage agriculture Low-wage agriculture Mining Factory Outwork Trades
Expenditure on food and housing as % of men’s earnings
1787–96 98 114 115 121 136 124
1810–17 – – 98 – 70 78
1824–5 – – 111 54 – –
1830–40 156 75 − 72 128 81
1841–54 100 107 85 98 177 82
Adult equivalent expenditure on food as % of men’s earnings
1787–96 27 31 26 54 35 30
1810–17 – – 31– 21 29
1824–5 – – 35 17 – –
1830–40 31 21 – 23 34 19
1841–54 24 3226315024
(Sample) (45) (93) (29) (37) (37) (13)
Notes: Adult equivalence scale uses 1.7 for man and wife and 0.5 for each other household member.
Source: Horrell 1996.
Attempts to test these various hypotheses on household-level consump-
tion founder on the lack of surviving evidence. A rare attempt to investi-
gate whether working-class families shared in the consumer boom, albeit
limited by the small sample of sufficiently detailed budgets available and
their possible selectivity bias, is instructive (Horrell 1996). There was little
sign that a growing part of men’s and other family members’ earnings
wasbecoming available for discretionary consumption. Table 9.4 indicates
that there was some improvement for families headed by men in some
occupations, but this was often short lived, while for others, such as out-
working and agricultural families, necessities took an increasing propor-
tion of men’s earnings. In only a few occupations, and not in all families
in these occupations, were men able to earn enough to feed and shelter
their families. The minority contributions of women and children by and
large went not on discretionary spending but on necessities, with little
change over time. There is little support here for the idea that women and
children worked to finance expenditure on the new manufactured goods
produced by the factories of the industrial revolution (Horrell 1996). Nor
is there evidence that working-class budgets responded to urbanisation
or the decline of self-provisioning, a blow to accounts of consumption
spending that emphasise commodification.
How was consumption allocated within the households of the indus-
trial revolution? Bargaining models suggest that allocations reflect indi-
vidual contributions filtered through familial and community notions of
deserts. An increase in dependence on male breadwinners skews house-
hold resources away from women and children, and without strong gains
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266 Jane Humphries
in male earnings family income may not increase enough to offset the
reallocation. The breadwinner effect on distribution outweighs the bread-
winner effect on total availability, to leave some family members worse
off. Although there are few quantitative studies (but see Horrell and Oxley
1999), qualitative evidence documents severe inequality in the allocation
of food, particularly meat, in working households in the late Victorian
heyday of the male breadwinner family system (Ross 1993). Children who
earned may have had access to better diets but dependent children had to
rely on their mothers’ sacrifices (Pember-Reeves 1913; Oren 1974). Work in
theindustrial revolution was often hard and dangerous, so dependence
had its benefits. But in the transition to the male breadwinner family
system, in households where incomes stagnated, dependence had costs
borne by women and children around their own kitchen tables.
Reconciliation of the evidence on real wages and family incomes with
that on aggregate consumption and the diffusion of consumer goods
awaits a careful piecing together of the diverse experiences of different
types of family over time and across space. The evidence from probate in-
ventories for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (but see
King 1997), along with the probable timing of commodification, assigns
de Vries’s voluntary industrious revolution to the early modern period.
Later theories must rely on the demand of the middle classes to kick-
start the manufacturing economy. Only fortunate working-class families
shared in this consumer boom. The harder work and longer hours of
many men, women and children during the industrial revolution were
motivated by pressure to provide necessities in the face of stagnant wages
and increased numbers of dependants.
CONCLUSIONS
Both long-run changes and short-run variations in economic conditions
shaped the household economy. Many operated outside the time frame
of the industrial revolution. For example, wage dependence, an impor-
tant underlying cause of the high frequency of small households in the
English countryside, long preceded industrialisation, as did those same
small households. Similarly the transition to large-scale centralised pro-
duction was far from complete by the mid-nineteenth century, allowing
producing households of various kinds to survive into the post-industrial
era.
Economic factors were not alone in shaping households. Mortality
grimly limited the household’s long-run size and structure and con-
tributed to its short-run variation across the industrial towns of the
nineteenth century. Institutions, for example the poor law, by shifting
the costs and benefits of including or excluding kin or resident employ-
ees, helped redraw household boundaries. Cultural factors also mattered.
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Household economy 267
Old ideas linking marriage to the formation of an independent house-
hold contributed to the persisting rarity with which married children
lived with parents. New ideas about affective familial relationships and
thedesirability of privacy contributed to the declining frequency with
which households included servants.
Households’ responses to economic changes were not narrowly de-
terministic. They could resist, speed up and divert economic pressures.
Strategies chosen and their success depended on initial conditions and
local opportunities. Hence across the towns of the industrial revolution,
against varying backgrounds in terms of poverty, employment opportu-
nities for women and children, housing availability and migration, new
kinds of mutual advantage emerged to be exploited through co-residence.
These pulled and tugged but also teased and tempted households into
new shapes, sizes, occupational structures and internal dynamics.
But households did not just offer temporary and contingent refuge.
Individuals struggled to keep their families together and would sacrifice
their own advantage in the interests of collective survival. Nor did con-
cern for family invariably foster narrow individualistic interest. Perceived
economic pressures on family life did occasion class action and organised
resistance.
Households and the individuals within them could react to the oppor-
tunities of the changing economy and seize the new industrial day. But
their ability to do so depended on many factors outside their immediate
control. Not surprisingly, the winners and losers in the industrial revolu-
tion varied systematically by household type and geographical location.
The household’s partial autonomy, its non-economic dimensions, and
thelong roots and delayed effects of many of its economic determinants
explain why historians have been hard pressed to tell a standard story
or to fit their subject into the stiff periods of the industrial revolution.
The household’s history, like an increasing number of topics, appears
occupationally and regionally differentiated, and unfolds on a time scale
that transcended industrialisation.
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10
Living standards and
the urban environment
HANS-JOACHIM VOTH
Contents
Introduction 268
Real wages 271
Heights and physical well-being 273
Working hours 276
Consumption and household budgets 280
Urbanisation, mortality and the value of life 283
Composite measures of welfare 288
The standard of living and macroeconomic performance 291
Conclusions 293
INTRODUCTION
Few topics ineconomic history generate more controversy than the
British industrial revolution – and arguably no debate in economic his-
tory is more famous than the ‘standard-of-living debate’. In the post-war
period, the question of whether the early stages of modern capitalism led
to an improvement or a decline in workers’ living standards became as
hotly contested as many of the Cold War’s other theatres. Marxist histori-
ans argued that, in exchange for ever longer hours of grinding toil in the
factories, the working classes had little to show by 1850 in terms of living
standards except for a few cotton goods (Hobsbawm 1972). Optimists such
as Max Hartwell pointed to gains in real wages and life expectancy, and
to the move tothecities as the escape from the ‘idiocy of rural life’ (Karl
Marx).
When O’Brien and Engerman (1981) discussed the issue in the first
volume of The Economic History of Britain,they emphasised that future
research would most likely have to focus on three topics: improvements
in the measurement of real wages, of inequality, and of the changes in
welfare not measured by income. Twenty years on, it appears that their
intuition was remarkably prescient – two of these areas have contributed
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Living standards and the urban environment 269
most to our reassessment of changes in living standards between 1760 and
1850. The issue of inequality, however, is too controversial to permit firm
conclusions (Williamson 1985; Feinstein 1988). Consistent wage series by
skill category have proven extremely difficult to compile, and there is no
conclusive evidence that the share of total income paid to capital rather
than labour moved significantly; the issue will therefore not be covered
in this chapter.
Iwillexamine the remaining two research themes in greater detail
below. The task of giving a coherent overview is complicated by the great
number of indicators that can and have been used to shed light on trends
in living standards. Nor do the different variables suggest a uniform di-
rection of change. Much of the difficulty in synthesising the state of the
debate arises from conflicting trends, with different variables moving
in opposite directions. Even where they converge, sizeable subgroups of
thepopulation (as distinguished by class, gender, age or location) may
have experienced substantially different changes, in terms of either mag-
nitude or direction. The echoes of economic change 250 years ago resem-
ble the dissonant tones of a Hindemith or Schönberg concert, not the
harmonies of a classical symphony. To discern patterns at all requires
more than just active listening.
As a first introduction to the trends I discuss in greater detail below,
consider the overview of a few indicators in Table 10.1. GDP per capita
in 1760 was a mere 1,803 dollars, measured in 1992 purchasing power –
Britain was marginally richer than India and Bolivia are in 2000, but
a little poorer than Armenia and Indonesia. If the Britain of 1760 were
an independent country today, it would rank 149th out of 208 countries
(World Bank 2001). Some ninety years later, per capita income had grown
substantially – today, Britain’s GDP per capita in 1850 would give it a
rank ahead of China, but behind Lebanon and the Philippines. Wages ap-
parently improved substantially less than production per head, rising by
only 4 per cent over the sixty years between 1760 and 1820, and by less
than a quarter for the period 1760–1850 as a whole. Yet to compare across
time using 1992 dollars is to ignore radical changes in the range of goods
and services that money can buy today – from anaesthesia to better light-
ing, radios, telephones, education and airtravel.
1
Alternative measures
may provide a more intuitive guide to living standards in the past.
Heights were very low by modern standards, a measure often used as
an indicator of the ‘biological’ quality of life. More than 80 per cent of
males in Britain in 1966 would have been taller than their average ances-
tor 200 years earlier; and the first century of industrialisation probably
brought little or no improvement, depending on the height series we use.
Even the highest levels recorded in the most optimistic series only reach
1
There is some evidence that the value of new goods is substantially underestimated in
cost-of-living indices (Nordhaus 1997).
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270 Hans-Joachim Voth
the 25th percentile of modern heights (Floud et al.1990: 10). Height differ-
ences between the classes were astoundingly large, indicating that chil-
dren from the lower classes rarely enjoyed adequate nutrition. Recruits to
the Sandhurst military academy, normally drawn from the upper strata
of society, towered over their peers from London slums. In 1790, for exam-
ple, the average 14-year-old boy at the Royal Military Academy was a full
14 cm taller than his contemporary from a disadvantaged background
(Floud et al.1990: 197).
Workloads were high by any standard, even before the industrial rev-
olution. While developed countries today often have working years of
1,500 to 2,000 hours, England may well have had substantially longer
hours as early as 1760. The data are hardly more than tentative, and com-
parisons of absolute levels are highly problematic. Yet the trend, which
may be a little easier to establish, also points upwards. By the middle
of the nineteenth century, working hours had reached levels that were
probably higher than ever before or since.
Alife expectancy in 1760 of 34.2 years appears very short by mod-
ern standards. In 1999, even Sub-Saharan Africa recorded average life
expectancies of forty-eight years. Inadequate nutrition as well as inef-
fective medical intervention combined to keep death rates high. Nor was
progress rapid over the following ninety years. By 1850, Englishmen –
and women – could expect to live five more years at birth. This increase
is less than the one seen in the Middle East and North Africa between
1990 and 1999 (an additional nine years) and the same as in Latin America
over the same period. Similar conclusions apply to infant mortality. With
theexception of Sierra Leone, no country in 1999 had higher death rates
than Britain in 1850 or in 1760.
Literacy rates improved during the first century of industrialisation –
even if the standard used is relatively low, measuring the percentage of
bridegrooms who could sign their names (Schofield 1973). This is still less
than in Sub-Saharan Africa today, but higher than in a number of Third
World countries. By the middle of the eighteenth century, this rate had
grownby13per cent, putting Britain ahead of present-day Senegal and
Pakistan, and on a par with Morocco.
Most social scientists would agree that civil and political rights are im-
portant aspects of the standard of living. Compiling comprehensive indi-
cators is difficult, as it requires judgements about the indicators included
as well as their calibration. One familiar scale, applied to Britain by Crafts
(1997), measures progress in these two dimensions on a scale from 1 to 7,
with 1 the best possible score. Universal suffrage remained a long way
off during the industrial revolution. At the same time, there were clear
constitutional limits on the king’s powers, and the Glorious Revolution
had established the sovereignty of parliament. A score of 3 appears ap-
propriate. Civil rights such as the right to a fair trial, an independent
judiciary, freedom of speech and the right to form associations are also
crucial facets of human progress. Compared to many European countries
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