The Age of Elegance (50 page)

For here in the industrial North and Midlands was revolution— one more permanent and, to those who could comprehend its effect, more terrifying than any wrought by mob or guillotine. A whole society was being transformed by the impact of whirling wheels and grinding machines, while the nation's traditional leaders, far removed from the wild moors, mosses and lonely valleys where the revolution was being enacted, stood aside and let it take its course. The new mechanical processes in weaving and spinning cotton, wool, flax and silk, in smelting iron, mining coal and making pottery, in harnessing steam power, the manufacture of tools and the transport of goods, was creating a life of a kind hitherto unknown, where craftsmen and mechanics, instead of working as semi-independent manufacturers in their rural homes, crowded round large-scale factories as the wage-earners of employers with the capital to buy and maintain machines. The old domestic craftsman was a countryman, not only living within sight of the fields but frequently owning a stake in them. The competition of steam power either drove him, starving, from his home to seek employment in a factory town or turned his surroundings into one.

In the industrial districts the whole appearance of the countryside was changing. In south Lancashire and north-east Cheshire, in the West Riding, on Tyneside and Clyde, on the Warwickshire and Staffordshire heaths, the landscape was growing black, the villages were turning into towns and the towns were running into one another. Lady Shelley, after a journey in the West Midlands, wrote of "that disagreeable, cold and manufacturing county which for twenty miles smokes from a thousand steam engines, so that at night the whole country from Birmingham to Wolverhampton appears to be on fire": "all the shining jewels of this wondrous cave,"

¹
Bamford, 1,
227;
See
Ann. Reg.
1815,
Chron.,
71,91;
Lady Shelley, II,
15;
Partington, 1,
139.

another traveller wrote of Sheffield, *'shrouded in smoke and glaring red fire." In Burslem the smoke was so dense that the potters had to grope their way to work.
¹
A traveller from Rochdale to Manchester in the year after Waterloo found the houses as thick as in the environs of London, and " smoke and trade and dirt" everywhere. The trout streams were being poisoned by dye-vats and the valleys studded with smoke-stacks; the willows and hazels of the Irk blackened and laid waste, the groves of birch* wild rose and rowan and the green hills with the classical names and haunting rustic deities —Babylon Brow and Stony Knows—desecrated by money-grinders.

The character of economic relationships was changing with the appearance of the countryside. The weaver, spinner, stockinger, working in his own cottage with the help of his family and, perhaps, an apprentice, owning or hiring his own tools and selling the finished article to a capitalist wholesaler in the nearest town, from whom he also obtained the raw materials of his trade, was being superseded by the proletarian factory worker operating expensive power-machines owned by others and owning nothing himself but his labour. With every advance of the technological revolution the control of the capitalist over the conditions of work tightened. Before the end of the war the East Midland hosiers we
re letting out frames to stock
ingers in the Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire villages at thirty per cent per annum of their capital cost. Workmen who, rather than pay such rentals, tried to buy their own machines, found themselves shut out from both raw materials and markets. If they could not sell their wares promptly, their families starved. The decent hosier's standards were constantly forced down by the price- and wage-cutting of his less scrupulous rivals. So were the good craftsman's.
²

This process of transformation had still a long way to go. There were at least a quarter of a million handlooms in the country at the time of Waterloo. The three thousand domestic clothiers who rode every market day into Leeds, Bradford and Huddersfield to sell their wares were still essential to the nation's economy; "at Hathersage," wrote Bamford, "we heard the sound of a shuttle and my wife said we were getting near home." The "weaver's trade" was as much

¹
Wedgwood,
Staffordshire Pottery and its History,
65,
cit.
Hammond,
Town Labourer,
46.
See Newton,
25-6;
Bamford, 1,
60,71,168,223;
II,
50-3, 80-2, 86,115, 333;
Clapham, I,
36;
Darvall,
24:
Newton,
25;
Lady Shelley, II,
41;
Simond, II,
76, 83.

2
Darvall;
30-1, 35-7,
4h
47-8;
Klingender,
42.

part of the English tradition as husbandry or seamanship; when the poet Blake wished to explain the mystery of life,
he wrote that joy and woe were
"woven fine A clothing for the soul divine."

In 1811 four-fifths of the Midland stockingers' frames were scattered in more than two hundred and fifty villages with an average of twenty-two stockingers apiece, each operating three or four frames. Yet whenever markets dried up and competition intensified—during the Continental Blockade and American War, and in the more sustained deflation that followed the peace—the undercutting of the machines and of the capitalists who exploited them forced down the living standards of domestic workers and drove increasing numbers from their traditional life, hi the trade depression of 1812 the average family earnings of Nottinghamshire silk workers dropped by a third, and the wages of Bolton cotton weavers fell to five shillings a week. Though a recovery always followed, each successive slump took its toll of independent "manufacturers"—a word which was ceasing to denote a craftsman and becoming applied solely to employers.

It was a tragedy that at the moment when the introduction of labour-saving machinery effected this social revolution, the prevailing economic philosophy should have been so fanatically opposed to any protective regulation of conditions of employment. There were many regulations on the statute book dating from Stuart, Tudor and even mediaeval times, but the political economists, who since the time of Adam Smith had monopolised the ear of Parliament, held them in contempt. Even where they were not repealed, they were becoming a dead letter. The idea of regulating men's morals and social behaviour for their own good ran counter to the whole spirit of the age. Jeremy Bentham, father of utilitarian radicalism— the creed of every progressive for the next quarter of a century— maintained that all law was evil, since law was an infraction of liberty, and devoted his well-endowed life to exposing the unreason of past legislation. To him, as to Josiah Child before him, the laws of England were "a heap of nonsense compiled by a few ignorant country gentlemen." Every intelligent man subscribed to Burke's dictum that the chief inlet by which oppression entered the world was by one man pretending to determine the happiness of another.

"The right of the State to interfere to prevent a man from injuring himself," wrote the economist, Nassau Senior, "supposes that the legislator knows better how to manage the affairs of an individual than the man does himself."

The effects of this theory could be best seen in places where the new industrial workers lived. "The triumphs of the olive crown," boasted a contemporary topographical guide, "are not over kings or dynasties, but over material, inconsumable elements of nature, which, educated by a Newton, analyse the sunlight, or, directed by a Watt, force fire and water to the work of a thousand men's hands and unite the ends of the earth, bringing the scattered family of man into close and brotherly proximity."
¹
The closeness of that proximity had to be seen to be believed. In the first two decades of the century the population of Manchester increased from 94,000 to 160,000, of Bolton from 29,000 to 50,000 and of Lancashire from 672,000 to 1,052,000. The houses were put up by jerry-builders as cheaply as possible, with bricks so thin that neighbours could hear one another speaking, with roofs and floors supported by planks, without water pipes or drains.
²
In the sinister, sunless city beside the filthy Sheaf, whose forges, set against the bleak Derbyshire hills, made the world's finest cutlery, Bamford and his wife Mima were driven from their inn by the bugs which swarmed off the dirty walls and' bedding. Fever caused more deaths in the industrial towns every year than Wellington's armies suffered in the Peninsular War. Thousands, particularly where the Irish "bog-trotters" congregated in search of subsistence, lived in foetid cellars and airless courts. Within a few months of their migration from a moorland village to Manchester, Bamford's entire family was stricken down by typhus.

In all the steam-engine towns—"oppressive, smoky, noisy, riotous"—the creation of wealth and the perpetuation of poverty went hand in hand. In the vicinity of an inexhaustible supply of coals in South Wales the mouldering remains of Neath Abbey were populated by the families of the workmen employed in the neighbouring copper-smelting works. Obsession with external display was wholly lacking in the industrial districts. Despite the vast scale on which manufactures were conducted, the power and perfection of the machines, the capital invested on them, nothing was spent on

¹
J. F. Murray,
Environs of London,
205-6.

²
As late as
1842
four out of five houses in Birmingham were without water. Clapham, I,
164-5;
Simond II,
199;
Woodward,
445.

appearance. The factory buildings were shabby and ugly, and added at different times without attempt at design or reference to convenience or beauty. Industrial capital was only employed in the creation of new capital. The sole end of all activity was profit. Success or failure turned on not spending sixpence more than was necessary.

Unfortunately the end was too narrow for the purposes of a continuing communal life. Cotton manufactory and coal mining—the trades on which England's new wealth was principally founded— were inherently unhealthy. The one confined men, women and children for long hours in hot, vitiated, humid air which clogged the lungs with floating particles of cotton; the other banished them from the daylight. Accidents with primitive, unfenced machinery were common; Puckler-Muskau saw workers with thumbs crushed into formless lumps of flesh. They were even more frequent in the mines, where explosions, floods and landslides engulfed whole companies of colliers.
¹
Half the workers in the Cornish copper mines, Ayton was told when he visited them in 1814, suffered from tuberculosis. Every year increased the numbers employed in the mills, mines and foundries; every year their surroundings grew more squalid, insanitary and hideous. And every year machines exerted a greater tyranny over men's lives, forcing them to work yoked to automata which neither wearied nor rested.
²

For the overall effect of machinery, though immeasurably multiplying and cheapening consumer goods, was disastrous for man considered as a producer. No longer was his work adapted in long-proved ways to his nature—to his physical needs, pride, skill, affections. Instead he was forced into the unnatural mould of forms of work dictated by the capacity of machines and the figures of machine-made accountancy. He was deprived alike of liberty, the control of his tools and of his familiar home, of access to the fields and of the fresh fruits of the earth. Herded into factories like prisons and fever-haunted squatter towns like pig-styes, he saw his children grow up to a life utterly unlike that in which he and his forebears had lived. The old mould from which "God's Englishman" had been made was broken. It was not surprising that the new mould did not always

¹
For a terrible explosion in the year after Waterloo in the Heaton coal-pit, resulting in the death by starvation of nearly eighty men and boys, see
Ann. Reg.,
1816,
Chron.
31.

2
In one Manchester factory any spinner being sick and unable to find an adequate substitute had to pay six shillings a day for wasted steam. Hammond,
Town Labourer,
20.

seem to cultured contemporaries a Christian or a kindly one.

Through the substitution of mechanical processes for human skill, it became possible to grow rich by employing unskilled women and children at low wages instead of craftsmen at high. Women and children had always been accustomed to work at wheel or loom in their own homes, where the "drudgery of the bobbin wheel'' was often enforced by the housewife's "stout rod." There seemed to contemporaries no harm in their doing so in factories. Work was regarded as the best of all activities for body and soul, and an extended means of employment was hailed as a national blessing. What was forgotten was that, while a woman working in her own home with her children around her could teach them the lessons of piety and good husbandry that she had learnt from her own mother, when she and they worked for twelve hours a day in a factory the home and its culture were bound to be sacrificed. In his
Letters from England
Southey described how he watched children tending spinning jennies in the Manchester mills from five in the morning till six in the evening, till he was giddy with the noise and motion.

The early cotton-spinning mills, driven by water power, were mainly operated by child-apprentices hired from poor-law overseers. Situated in the lonely upper reaches of Pennine rivers, there was no other way of staffing them. Steam power transferred the mills to large centres of population—generally in the neighbourhood of coal mines—where a plentiful supply of unskilled labour could be obtained, often from the families of skilled artisans who, being thrown out of work by machine competition, were forced to let their wives and children enter the factories. The process was exploited with ruthless realism. "When a manufacturer," wrote Walter Scott, "wishes to do a particular job he gathers one or two hundred weavers from lanes, streets and garrets without the slightest attention to character or circumstances or to anything but that they have ten fingers and can drive a shuttle. These men are employed perhaps for a fortnight and then turned off, the employer knowing no more or caring no more than if they were so many old pins or shuttles."

Few of those who, by the power of employment, controlled this new society had been trained to lead or had been responsible for anyone save themselves and their families. They had been educated only for their craft, of which they were usually past-masters. Many were decent and kindly men, like the Manchester counterpane and bed-quilt manufacturer for whom Bamford worked at the beginning of the century, or his successor, who read prayers to his family and apprentices every Sunday night, and whose wife nursed the latter through their illnesses. Peter Dixon, the "Druid's" father, who had a cotton mill in Shaddongate, Carlisle, visited his workpeople in their homes, looked after the sick and taught their children in Sunday school. Simond was much struck by the good nature and politeness of the large Birmingham industrialists round whose works he was escorted in 1811.

But most factory owners were small men, little removed in upbringing or education from those they employed. They sprang from a rough, primitive, passionate folk who loved fighting, hard drinking and simple, sensual pleasures. They had been uprooted from the pastoral communities of their forebears whose standards and beliefs they had either forgotten or repudiated as irrelevant in the wider world of clanging machinery and smoking chimney. With great virtues of energy, courage, native shrewdness and industry, they were mostly thrusting, ambitious, ruthless types who succeeded because they were. As the machinery in which they had so boldly invested undercut their rivals and drove them into their factories, they found themselves in possession of great public and personal power. They used the former without a thought for the national good and the latter in pursuit of further wealth or the gratification of low, ignorant pleasures. "They resembled," wrote one who knew them, "the man in the
Arabian Nights
tale whose eye had been touched with magic ointment and which presented to his mental vision an endless display of wealth."

Under such circumstances the relations between employer and employed were bound to deteriorate. The old handloom weavers who worked for Messrs. Broadbent of Manchester would rest after their tramp from their moorland homes on the seat thoughtfully provided for them before having a friendly check-up with the firm's "putter-out," neither party trying to drive a hard bargain because of the other's necessities; perhaps afterwards buyer and seller would sit down together to a friendly glass of ale and a pipe at the "Hope and Anchor." Often in such old-fashioned firms, Bamford records, the master would take his men home to dine with his family on broth, dumpling and baked pudding. But as machinery came in, the gap between capitalist and artisan widened. The snobbery that vitiated