The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (71 page)

In the face of such civil disorder, just as with Catholic Emancipation Wellington had the sense to realize that he had to bow to the will of the people. He gave up trying to form a government and, in a tense interview with the king at Windsor, told him to recall Earl Grey and accept the bill. To preserve the monarchy from the indignity of being forced to create peers against the king’s will, and save the peerage from being devalued, Wellington cajoled so many of his friends not to vote that on 4 June 1832 the bill went through the House of Lords with a large majority.

The first reformed Parliament sat in 1833. Strangely and symbolically a year later the old House of Commons burned down. On its site arose the magnificent pseudo-Gothic pile we see today, designed by Charles Barry. Its medieval air rightly reminds us of Parliament’s origins at the end of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, the reformed House of Commons had a new and modern spirit. Power had finally passed away from the few whose ancestors had entitled them to shields and quarterings. The new MPs were commercially minded, progressive and urban. Even so, the gentry and aristocracy still had an inbuilt majority in the House of Lords and remained the leaders of the county constituencies for many years to come.

What was immediately expressed by the House of Commons was what had become the most fervent belief of the newly enfranchised, religious middle classes: the wickedness of slavery. The trade had been abolished in 1807, but slavery itself had not come to an end–indeed it continued to underpin the economy of the West Indies. One of the Grey government’s first actions was to outlaw slavery throughout the British Empire, and the planters were compensated financially with the colossal sum of £20 million between them. William Wilberforce, the father of the anti-slavery movement, died that very year on the point of seeing his great work come to fruition.

The spirit of the new Whig administration was to seek improvement and change, and many of the MPs wanted it to mark the end of aristocratic
laissez-faire
and the beginning of interventionist government. A large number of commissions were set up by Lord Grey to investigate the state of the country–whether in schools, factories, the Church or local government–and identify areas where it could be improved. And on paper the Whig reforms were impressive. This Parliament was responsible for the beginnings of a national system of education. Funds for school buildings were granted to the two Church organizations, the Anglican National Society and the Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society, which were the chief providers of schooling for the poor. By 1839 there was an Education Department for the control of elementary education.

Under pressure from the Radicals and the Ten-Hour Movement, committees of local citizens dedicated to limiting the hours worked in factories, a new Factory Act was passed in 1833 which extended the cotton-mill legislation of 1819 and applied its provisions to all other textile factories. Children under the age of nine were not to be employed in any of them; a distinction was made between children, aged nine to thirteen, who were allowed to work nine hours a day, and young persons, aged thirteen to eighteen, who were allowed to work twelve hours. Employees under the age of thirteen had to spend half their hours being educated, by tutors to be provided by the mill-owners. And by creating a paid governmental factory inspectorate, the Whigs ensured compliance with the health and safety regulations in buildings in relation to ventilation and moving machinery.

One of the most urgent problems facing the Whig government was the agricultural depression, which had not let up since 1815, and the acute rural poverty that manifested itself in incessant rioting. Hayricks were burnt; threshing machines were sneaked out of farm buildings at night and attacked with hammers. But although the Whigs believed in rationalization and modernization, they dealt as savagely with the disturbances as the Ultra Tories. Nine men and boys were hung for burning farmers’ ricks, while many continued to be sent overseas to the penal colony of Australia. Nevertheless under the energetic direction of reformers such as the strenuous and controversial Sir Edwin Chadwick, whose innovative inquiries into the health of the working man transformed public health, the Whigs launched a commission to investigate the widespread discontent.

In the commission’s view the operation of poor relief was to blame. The Speenhamland system of supplementing agricultural wages from the rates which so many counties had adopted during the Napoleonic Wars had made the rates so burdensome that many farmers could not afford to keep their own land. An already distressing situation had begun to spiral out of control when farmers lowered wages as well as laying off labourers, and the local magistrates attempted to reduce the mountain of taxation by capping the poor relief. In 1834 the old Poor Law, which dated back to the reign of Elizabeth, was abolished. By the new Poor Law, assistance out of the rates (what would today be called unemployment benefit) could be doled out only to the ‘aged or infirm’. Any healthy man or woman who was sufficiently ‘able-bodied’ to work but needed assistance from the parish rates had to live in the workhouse, a large local institution set up to house the indigent. The new system also standardized the administration of the Poor Law, which had varied from parish to parish, and made it easier to look after vagrants and orphaned children. By removing the agricultural subsidy, in the long term the Poor Law forced farmers to put up wages.

In December 1834, however, the king suddenly felt that he had had enough of all this busybodying. He was sick of the Whigs’ progressive ideas, mainly because they showed no respect for the Church of England. Melbourne, the new leader of the Whigs–for Grey had retired in protest against a new Coercion Bill to limit crime in Ireland–had just reduced the number of Irish Protestant bishops by ten. Parliament might have acquired a far greater middle-class component, but William IV used the royal prerogative to dismiss the Whigs for meddling with the Church. He made Sir Robert Peel prime minister in the hope of some respectable Tory policies.

In fact Peel was attempting to form a different Tory party, one with liberal leanings. He wanted to change it from a party of protectionist landowners to one that could represent manufacturers as well. If the Tories were to survive, Peel believed, they would have to reach out to where the new power lay, to middle-class opinion. It would take him the best part of ten years to rebuilt support in the country for the Tories, or Conservatives as he now called them. They were conservative because they wished to conserve the best ancient institutions, but they also looked to the future. At the next election, however, the Tories were still in a minority in the Commons, so the Whigs under Lord Melbourne returned.

As William Lamb, Lord Melbourne had been married to the notorious Lady Caroline Lamb of Byronic fame. Brought up among the racy Whig hostesses of the late eighteenth century, for his aunt was Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, he was in some ways an anachronism. He was concerned with the old abstract Whig ideas of liberty but not much with improving the conditions of working men, from whose predicaments he was in every way quite insulated. Nevertheless the detached and intellectual Melbourne was a modernizer, and a series of innovative acts improved the nation’s efficiency.

The Municipal Reform Act of 1835 removed control of the towns from secretive, self-perpetuating oligarchies and gave it to the middle classes, just as the Great Reform Act had done with Parliament. In the pursuit of religious freedom, the Whigs continued to cut back the Church of England’s hold over the country’s institutions. In England and Wales the thousand-year-old custom of the local vicar being entitled to the tithe or tenth of his neighbours’ earnings was abolished. From 1836 marriages could be solemnized in Nonconformist chapels. Though religious tests would not be abolished at the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge until 1871, in 1836 the University of London was founded in order to grant degrees without them. Now Nonconformists, Catholics and Jews could study in England instead of being forced to go to Scotland or the continent. Stamp duties on newspapers were reduced to a penny. The first compulsory civil registration of births, deaths and marriages took place in 1837, supplementing the parish registers invented in 1538 by Thomas Cromwell. In 1839, thanks to the efforts of Rowland Hill, the penny postage was adopted: any letter could be carried for a penny to every part of the British Isles.

But despite these modernizing laws, much anguish pulsated beneath the surface. The 1834 Poor Law was disastrous in the short run.
Oliver Twist
, which Dickens wrote three years after the new system began, exposed workhouses as places of institutionalized cruelty whose inmates were treated like prisoners though their only crime was poverty. Every little bit of individuality, every bright touch, whether it was just a bunch of daisies in a jar or a treasured knitted shawl, was banned. Meals were taken in silence; couples were split up from one another and from their children; and all slept in dormitories. Workhouses survived until the early twentieth century when the 1906–14 Liberal government introduced old age pensions, national insurance and unemployment benefit.

As for the factory legislation, it might have improved conditions, but the reformer and philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury revealed that Britain had no reason to feel proud of herself when there were five-and six-year-olds working down the mines. By allowing the evangelical Shaftesbury to lead an investigation into factories, the Whig government unleashed the whirlwind. Though he had been the driving force behind the 1833 Factory Act, he was not satisfied with it, and decided to broaden his remit into investigating coalmines. His reports into what he found there reduced some MPs to tears when extracts were read to the House of Commons in 1840.

Shaftesbury’s ‘blue books’, the reports to Parliament of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment in Mines and Manufactures, sent a shudder through Britain. In unemotive, official language which made its subject matter all the more chilling, they detailed how six-year-olds spent twelve hours a day under the earth harnessed to trucks of coal, dragging them along tunnels knee-deep in water, while their mothers heaved coal on their heads up to the top of the mine. That was how Britain was obtaining the coal which made her ‘the workshop of the world’.

The result was the 1842 Mines Act, which ended the employment of women and girls and boys under ten in the pits, and the Second Factory Act of 1844, which reduced the hours women worked to twelve and children to six and a half hours a day–though children were now allowed to be employed from the age of eight. Still shocking to our eyes, it was a great step forward to contemporary opinion. Friendless and parentless apprentices, and young boys of ten or more whose parents needed their money, continued to be sent down the mines for thirty years to come. Their tiny, blackened, undersized figures for some reason did not evoke the same pity and fury among MPs that their sisters did. The ten-hour day Shaftesbury campaigned for so tirelessly remained out of reach for years, defeated by economists’ predictions about a fall in manufacturing, a loss of markets and wages, and by the power of the manufacturers. Though the ten-and-a-half-hour day came in in 1850, it was not until 1874 that the ten-hour day was at last made the legal maximum.

Sir Edwin Chadwick’s
Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain
in 1842 revealed the filthy urban slums so many Britons were living in, which had been thrown up cheaply everywhere round the textile mills and coalmines. Factory workers lived like animals, herded indecently ten to a room. The new streets were built so quickly, and there were so many of them, that the sewerage practice of the old midden heaps which had been acceptable in small numbers in a village or hamlet became positively hazardous in the new towns.

Textile workers suffered from lung diseases brought on by inhaling cotton fumes in ill-ventilated buildings. The fires and smoke belching out from the factory chimneys besides which they lived darkened the skies for miles around. Natural sunlight rarely penetrated, and life was carried on in a perpetual sulphurous glow to the sound of machines pounding night and day. Even at midday it felt like midnight. The striking change from the ‘green and pleasant land’ which the mystical poet William Blake had known as a boy had made him wonder two generations before whether a better, more Christian life could ever take hold again in the face of the new capitalism. Blake had been considered a dangerous radical in his time, but his views were becoming mainstream.

Now that people knew more about the hell-like misery so many workers endured in the ‘satanic mills’, the industrialization process which had been hailed with such excitement as the beginning of the modern age began to be questioned. In 1844 the son of a German cotton manufacturer Friedrich Engels, in a striking indictment of the industrial process, delineated the lives of the poor in Manchester in his book
The Condition of the English Working Class
. The suffering that Engels saw convinced him that only revolutionary change would stop the masses from being exploited by their masters. Robert Owen, the son-in-law of Arkwright’s partner, as long ago as 1799 had made his mills at New Lanark in Scotland co-operative, with the profits being shared among the workers. Though the experiment failed, Owen was so disillusioned by the toll that the industrial revolution was taking on people’s lives that he concluded trade unions were the only answer.

J. M. W. Turner would be one of the last important artists to celebrate the power and glamour of steam in his painting
Rain, Steam and Speed
in 1844. By 1848, obeying the precepts of the century’s most influential art critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters would self-consciously hark back to the world portrayed by fourteenth-century Italian painters as a revolt against their own time. A misty medievalism became the mode as artists and intellectuals retreated from machines and modernization. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century William Morris had created the utopian Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated both the individual artistry of the traditional craftsman over the machine made and a revivified idea of the community.