stages of economic growth in the life of industrial societies are identified by W. W. Rostow and vividly labelled in language appropriate to the space age.5 According to this nomenclature Britain by the 1830s had long since completed her ‘take-off’ (1783–1802) and was more than half-way through her ‘drive to maturity’. During the forty years or so of this stage (which would be completed by 1850) the economy made sustained, if fluctuating, progress as it moved beyond the narrow range of industries (textiles, coal and iron) which had powered the original take-off. A high proportion of the national income went into investment (thus ensuring that production kept ahead of population increase) and full use was made of the most advanced technology of the day. As yet however the main thrust of the economy was in the basic industries sector and the shift to consumers’ goods and services was still in the future.
Whether we talk of take-off or prefer the older and more familiar term, Industrial Revolution, there are two aspects of the economic history of early Victorian Britain which have briefly to be considered. First is the pattern of industrial development. Porter’s statistics, supplemented by the census of 1851, make it clear that the largest industry was still agriculture. Over one and three-quarter million people were directly engaged in it, and when harvests were reasonably good Britain was virtually self-supporting in food supplies. With only a small increase in the labour force, agricultural production during the 1830s and 1840s was almost able to keep pace with the expanding demands of the town population. In the non-agricultural sector of the economy the textile industry dominated the life of the nation, as it had done for the previous sixty years. The numbers employed in the main branches of the trade were large (probably about 1,100,000, excluding hosiery and lace), but even more important was the role of textiles, especially cotton, as a pace-setter for the whole of industry in matters of economic organisation, industrial relations and technological innovation. In conjunction with coal, iron and engineering, textiles provided the basis of British achievement. ‘It is to the spinning-jenny and the steam-engine,’ observed Porter, ‘that we must look as having been the true moving powers of our fleets and armies, and the chief support also of a long-continued agricultural prosperity.’ Mechanical engineering had by the 1840s developed most of the machine tools necessary for precision work: James Nasmyth’s steam hammer could forge a huge casting or gently crack an egg in a wineglass, while Joseph Whitworth produced gauges which were accurate to a ten-thousandth of an inch. No such technical progress was observable in the coal industry, which increased output simply by sinking deeper shafts and employing more men. In 1836 the mines produced 30 million tons of coal, and ten years later this figure had increased to 44 millions. Closely geared to coal as a main consumer was the iron industry. Continuous innovation in the iron-making processes greatly improved efficiency, and total output rose spectacularly from about 700,000 tons per year in 1830 to 1 million tons in 1835 and 2 millions in 1847. The basic sector of the economy (sometimes called the Great Industry) comprising manufacturing and mining probably did not employ more than 1·7 million workers. This was less than a quarter of the occupied persons listed in 1851, and only a fraction of the total population. Yet it provided the motive force for ‘the workshop of the world’.
The second aspect to be noted is the fluctuation of the economy. In the years following the Reform Bill of 1832 harvests were good and the price of wheat (always taken as an index of food prices) fell drastically. Investment in home industries was stimulated and there was a boom in railway construction after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester line (begun in 1826) became apparent. The prosperity, however, was shortlived: in 1836 the good harvests and the trade boom came to an end, and by 1837 the country was plunged into a prolonged depression lasting until 1842. These six years were the grimmest period in the history of the nineteenth century. Industry came to a standstill, unemployment reached hitherto unknown proportions, and with high food prices and inadequate relief the manufacturing population faced hunger and destitution. At no time did the whole system seem nearer to complete breakdown. Revival began in 1843 and continued into the 1850s, though broken by another recession in 1847–8. A second railway boom in the mid-forties contributed largely to the recovery (between 1843 and 1848 the length of line in the United Kingdom was extended from 2,000 to 5,000 miles), and by 1851 the Great Exhibition was able, with some plausibility, to suggest that the ‘Hungry Forties’ were no more than a temporary interruption in the rapid progress of the nation towards prosperity for all.
That economic developments are closely related to social institutions and actions should not perhaps require much emphasis. But in early Victorian Britain the relationship was unusually prominent. The very rapid rate of economic development meant that relatively few people were fully abreast of what was going on in the country, the more so as ‘Progress’ proceeded unevenly between different parts of the country and in different sections of the same industry. It is hard to escape the impression that very large numbers of people in the 1840s were completely bewildered by the environment in which they found themselves. They were required to make adjustments of a far-reaching nature: moving to a strange new place, starting a new type of job, suddenly being unemployed. Their past experience had given them few of the social skills required to cope with such situations. Small wonder that the period overflowed with social tension and frustration. The period 1832–51 saw an unprecedentedly large number of people involved in a variety of movements of social protest, which ebbed and flowed according to (among other things) the cycle of booms and slumps. It is in fact possible to construct a rough social tension chart,6 correlating periods of maximum radical protest with unemployment and the price of bread – though it would be unwise to draw simplistic conclusions from such data.
To say that contemporaries were bewildered by the events of the 1830s and 1840s is not to deny that they had definite views about things. They could not, as individuals, do much about the fluctuations of the economy, but they could and did express themselves about the ‘social problem’ or the ‘condition-of-England question’. In so doing they were trying to comprehend the nature of the changes which acceptance of an industrial way of life demanded. The fateful initial steps which led inevitably to the ‘industry state’ had been taken long ago, and there was now no turning back. The potentialities of the new economy of growth seemed enormous, but if they were to be realised there would have to be acceptance of fundamental changes in ways of life and habits of thought. The Industrial Revolution was at this stage essentially a social experience. At the time contemporaries made many different diagnoses of the problems, depending upon their stations in life and ideological positions. If we are to avoid ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’7 we have to take seriously what they were saying, even though sometimes we may think that they were mistaken. After all, they were there and we were not. They lived through this phase of the Industrial Revolution and they tried to express their experience in meaningful terms. The problems identified by Chartists and professors of political economy, by factory reformers and Whig mill owners provide the key to the social experience of industrialism.
From an economic point of view the prime characteristic of industrialism is economic growth. This is the main evidence on which Porter relied to establish the Progress of the Nation – but he was well aware that this was not the whole of the story. Associated with economic growth are certain forms of social organisation and also (as was very evident in the 1830s and 1840s) social disorganisation, without which the expansion cannot take place. Industrialism therefore implies social change, and the context in which this change takes place is indicated by the ‘problems’ which the participants identify – overpopulation, poor laws, great cities, the factory system. There need not in principle be any necessary connection between an industrial revolution, urbanisation and a factory system. Great cities existed in ancient times long before industrialism or factories; and historians have shown that ‘manufactories’ predated the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. In Britain the three have usually been regarded as inseparable, but this is an assumption which is not very helpful in exploring the nature of early Victorian society in the first instance. For purposes of analysis the process of urban growth and the development of a factory system can be considered as independent factors.8
