For Engels, describing the Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1844 it seemed that ‘the first
proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it . . .the
factory hands, the eldest children of the industrial evolution, have from the
beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labor Movement.”
However different their judgements of value, conservative, radical, and
socialist observers suggested the same equation: steam power and the
cotton-mill= new working class. The physical instruments of production were
seen as giving rise in a direct and more-or-less compulsive way to new social
relationships, institutions and cultural modes. At the same time the history of
popular agitation during the period 1811-50 appears to conform to this picture.
It is as if the English nation entered a crucible in the 1790s and emerged
after the Wars in a different form. Between 1811 and 1813, the Luddite crisis; in 1817 the Pentridge Rising; in
1819, Peterloo; throughout the decade the proliferation of trade union
activity, Owenite propaganda, Radical journalism, the Ten Hours Movement, the
revolutionary crisis of 1831—2; and, beyond that, the multitude of movements
which made up Chartism. It is, perhaps, the scale and intensity of this
multiform popular agitation which has, more than anything else, given rise
(among contemporary observers and historians alike) to the sense of some catastrophic change.
Almost every radical phenomena of the 1790s can be found reproduced tenfold
after 1815. The handful of Jacobin sheets gave rise to scores of ultra-Radical
and Owenite periodicals. Where Daniel Eaton served imprisonment for publishing
Paine, Richard Carlile and his shop men served a total of more than two hundred
years imprisonment for similar crimes. Where Corresponding Societies maintained
a precarious existence in a score of towns, the post-war Hampden Clubs or
political unions struck root in small industrial villages. And when this
popular agitation is recalled alongside the dramatic pace of change in the
cotton industry, it is natural to assume causal relationship. The cotton mill
is seen as the agent not only of industrial but also of social revolution,
producing not only more goods but also
the ’Labor Movement’ itself. The Industrial Revolution, which commenced
as a description, is now involved in an explanation.
From the time of Arkwright through to the Plug Riots and beyond, it is the
image of the ‘dark, Satanic mill’ which dominates our visual reconstruction of
the Industrial Revolution. In part, perhaps, because it is a a dramatic visual
image – the barrack-like buildings, the great mill chimneys, the factory
children, the clogs and shawls, the dwellings clustering around the mills as if
spawned by them. ( It is an image which forces one to think first of the industry,
and only secondly of the people connected to it or serving it.) In part,
because the cotton-mill and the new mill-town –from the swiftness of its
growth, the ingenuity of its techniques, and the novelty or harshness of its
discipline –seemed to contemporaries to be dramatic and portentous: a more satisfactory
symbol for debate on the ‘condition-of-England’ question than those
anonymous or sprawling manufacturing districts which figure even more often
in the Home Office ‘disturbance books.’ And from this both a literary and an
historical tradition is derived. Nearly all the classic accounts by
contemporaries of conditions in the Industrial Revolution are based on the
cotton industry – and, in the main, on Lancashire: Owen, Gaskell, Ure, Fielden,
Cooke, Taylor, Engels, to mention a few. Novels such as Michael Armstrong or Mary
Barton or Hard Times perpetuate
the tradition. And the emphasis is markedly found in the subsequent writing of
economic and social history.
But many difficulties remain. Cotton was certainly the pace-making industry of
the Industrial Revolution, and the cotton mill was the pre-eminent model for the
factory system. Yet we should not assume any automatic, or over-direct,
correspondence between the dynamic of economic growth and the dynamic of social
or cultural life. For half a century after the ‘break-through’ of the cotton
mill (around 1780) the mill workers remained as a minority of the adult labor
force in the cotton industry itself. In the early 1830s the cotton hand-loom
weavers alone still outnumbered all the men and women in spinning and weaving
mills of cotton, wool and silk combined. Still, in 1830, the adult male
cotton-spinner was no more typical of that elusive figure, the ‘average working
man’, than is the Coventry motor-worker of the 1960s.
The point is of importance, because too much emphasis upon the newness of
cotton-mills can lead to an underestimation of the continuity of the political
and cultural traditions in the making of working-class communities. THE factory
hands, so far from being the ‘eldest children of the industrial revolution’,
were late arrivals. Many of their ideas and forms of organization were anticipated
by domestic workers, such as the woolen workers of Norwich and the West
Country, or the small-ware weavers of Manchester. And it is questionable whether
factory hands- except in the cotton districts – ‘formed the nucleus of the
Labor Movement’ at any time before the late 1840s (and, in some northern and
Midland towns, the years 1832-4, leading up to the great lock-outs). Jacobinism,
as we have seen, struck root most deeply among the artisans. Luddism was the work
of skilled men in small workshops. From 1817 onwards to Chartism, the
outworkers in the north and the Midlands were as prominent in every radical
agitation as the factory hands. And in many towns the actual nucleus from which
the Labor movement derived its ideas, organization, and leadership, was made up
of such men as shoemakers, weavers, saddlers and harness-makers, booksellers, printers,
building workers, small tradesmen, and the like. The vast area of Radical London
between 1815 and 1850 drew its strength from no major heavy industries (shipbuilding
was ending to decline, and the engineers only made the impact later in the
century) but from a host of smaller trades and occupations.
Such diversity of experiences has led some writers
to question both the notions of an ‘industrial revolution’ and of a ‘working
class’. The first discussion need not detain us here. The term is serviceable enough
in its usual connotations. For the second, many writers prefer the term working
classes, which emphasizes the great
disparity in status, acquisitions, skills, conditions within the portmanteau
phrase. And in this they echo the complaints of Francis Place:
If the character and conduct of the working
people are to be taken from reviews, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, reports
of the two Houses of Parliament and the Factory Commissioners, we shall find them
jumbled together as the ‘lower orders’, the most skilled and the most prudent
workman, with the most ignorant and imprudent laborers and paupers, though the
difference is great indeed, and indeed in many cases will scarce admit
comparison.
Place is, of course, right: the Sunderland sailor, the Irish navy. The Jewish
costermonger, the inmate of an East Anglian village workhouse, the compositor
on The Times - all might be seen by their ‘betters’ as
belonging to the ‘lower classes’; while they themselves might scarcely
understand each others’ dialect.
Nevertheless, when every caution has been made, the outstanding fact of the period
between 1790 and 1830 is the formation of ‘the working class’. This is
revealed, first, in the growth of class-consciousness: the consciousness of an
identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people as
against the interests of other classes. And, second, in the growth of corresponding
forms of political and industrial organization. By 1832 there were strongly-
based and self-conscious working-class institutions – trade unions, friendly societies,
educational and religious movements, political organizations, periodicals – working
class intellectual traditions, working-class community-patterns, and a working-class
structure of feeling.
The making of the working class is a fact of political and cultural, as much as
of economic, history. It was not the spontaneous generation of the factory system.
Nor should we think of an external force –the ‘industrial revolution’ working
upon some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity, and turning it
out at the other end as a ‘fresh race of beings’. The changing productive
relations and working conditions of the Industrial Revolution were imposed, not
upon raw material, but upon the free-born Englishman – and the free-born
Englishman as Paine had left him or as the Methodists had molded him. The
factory hand or stockinger was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered village
rights, of notions of equality before the law, of craft traditions. He was the
object of massive religious indoctrination and the creator of new political
traditions. The working class made itself as much as it was made.
To see the working class in this way is to defend a ‘classical’ view of the
period against the prevalent mood of contemporary schools of economic history
and sociology. For the territory of the Industrial Revolution, which was first
staked out and surveyed by Marx, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs and the Hammonds,
now resembles an academic battlefield. At point after point, the familiar ‘catastrophic’
view of the period has been disputed. Where it was customary to see the period
as one of economic disequilibrium, intense misery and exploitation, political
repression and heroic popular agitation, attention now directed to thhe rate of
economic growth (and the difficulties of ‘take-off’ into self-sustaining
technological reproduction).The enclosure movement is now noted, less for its
harshness in displacing the village poor, than for is success in feeding a
rapidly growing population. The hardships of the period are seen as being due
to the dislocations consequent upon the War, faulty communications, immature
banking and exchange, uncertain markets ,and the trade-cycle, rather than to exploitation
or cut-throat competition. Popular unrest is seen as consequent upon the
unavoidable coincidence of high wheat prices and the depressions, and explicable
in terms of an elementary ‘social tension’ chart derived from these data. In
general, it is suggested that the position
of the industrial worker in 1840 was better in most ways than the domestic worker
of 1790. The Industrial; Revolution was an age, not of catastrophe or acute
class-conflict and class oppression, but of improvement.
The classical catastrophic orthodoxy has been replaced by a new
anti-catastrophic orthodoxy, which is most clearly distinguished by its empirical
caution, and, among its most notable exponents
(Sir John Chapman, Dr. Dorothy George, Professor Ashton) by an stringent
criticism of the looseness of certain
writers of the older school. The studies of the new orthodoxies have enrich
historical scholarship, and have qualified and revised in important respects
the work of the classical school. But as the
new orthodoxy is now, in its turn, growing old and entrenched in most
academic centers, so it becomes open to challenge in its turn. And the
successors of the great empiricists too often exhibit moral complacency, a
narrowness of reference, and an insufficient familiarity with the actual
movements of the working people of the time. They are more aware of the
orthodox empiricist postures than of the changes in social relationships and in
cultural modes which the Industrial Revolution entailed. What had been lost is
a sense of the whole process –the whole political and social context of the
period. What arose as valuable
qualifications have passed by imperceptible stages to new generalizations
(which the evidence can can rarely sustain) and from generalizations to a
ruling attitude. . .
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