is not hard to appreciate, for the changes demanded by the new order were terrifyingly fundamental and aroused men’s deepest responses. The factory integrated men and machines in a way that had never before been attempted. ‘Whilst the engine runs, the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine … is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness.’13 Reactions to this phenomenon varied according to a man’s position in life and his social and temperamental attitudes. To some the factory system was the practical application of Adam Smith’s principle of the division of labour; others saw it as a system of gross immorality in which sexual appetite and precociousness was fostered by the overheated atmosphere of mills; working men complained that too often it meant the introduction of machines that put them out of work; and reformers denounced it as a system of child slavery. The factory system was all of these things, but was not bounded by any one of them. It was more than simply an aggregate of individual factories; it was a new order, a completely new way of life. The spread of power looms was for Porter an important symbol of Progress. For thousands of textile operatives factory life was their social experience of industrialism.
2 Patterns of Poverty: Labouring People
The pyramid of English society in the eighteenth century had been made up of ranks and orders rather than classes. From the 1790s, beginning with the middle ranks, the language of class crept into general usage, and by the early Victorian age it was accepted as a useful method of dealing with some aspects of the social structure. Very soon, however, the idea of social class became entangled with political struggle and theories of social change. Radical reformers began to talk of class conflict, and the concept of class acquired an emotional connotation. Awareness of social class spread from ‘the middling and industrious classes’ of the 1790s to the working classes by the 1830s, and a new, subjective element of class consciousness made its appearance. The arguments of Chartists and Anti-Corn Law Leaguers were conducted along these lines, though other reformers, such as the Owenites or the millenarians, largely ignored the element of class consciousness. The new terminology of class did not immediately supersede the language of an older, pre-industrial society, but continued side by side, just as the handloom co-existed with the power loom or the watermill with the steam factory. Early Victorian society cannot be completely characterised in terms of class (whether used as an objective description of observable social strata or subjectively to take account of class consciousness), because of the survival of pre-industrial types of labour and earlier attitudes towards it. In the 1830s and 1840s the problems associated with an accelerated rate of economic and social change encouraged the new way of thinking, but the switch to class terminology was not yet complete.
The progress of this change can be charted in the evolution of the labouring poor into the working class or proletariat. For several hundred years the great majority of ordinary people in Britain were known simply as ‘the poor’. A poor man was one who had to work with his hands to support himself and his family. He was not by definition indigent, though he was always liable to fall into indigency for some reason, culpable or otherwise (in which case, if he had no means of livelihood, he became a pauper). The Poor Law of 1834, for instance, affected the whole working population; everyone, that is, who at some period in his or her life might be in need of assistance. This vast army of the people of England was called the labouring poor. It was not a class in any significant sense, for it included everyone except a tiny minority of gentry, industrialists and commercial and professional men. In comparison with modern Britain, the whole of traditional and even Victorian society was economically poor: the average real income per head in 1855 was perhaps £20, compared with £78 in 1959. The share of the labouring poor was seldom more than a bare subsistence – a position which was defended by Arthur Young, the agriculturist, with the traditional argument that the lower orders ‘must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious’.1 The great challenge to this position came as a result of the Industrial Revolution, when for the first time a vast increase in economic wealth opened up the possibility of escape from the ceiling of poverty which had dogged all earlier societies. First the rising expectations of a rapidly expanding middle class and then the creation of an industrial working class began to dissolve the age-old concept of the labouring poor. Poverty was still the lot of the majority of early Victorians, but the patterns of poverty (and also of prosperity) were more complex and the range of diversity was greater than in earlier societies.
Before looking at the details of social stratification it is useful to bear in mind the general position of the labouring poor in relation to the rest of society. Statistically the situation in 1841 was as shown in the table on page 33.2
Unfortunately the census tables do not distinguish between employers and employees; but if we deduct about one million and a quarter as the number of employers of all kinds, we are left with four millions as the size of the labouring classes in Great Britain. To these should be added their wives and children, and also the one million domestic servants, giving a very high percentage of the total population. The overwhelming size of the labouring population and the numerical tininess of all other sections of the community are important factors in explaining contemporary attitudes towards labour, as reflected for instance in social policy or the apprehensions of the more comfortably off. It does not need much imagination to appreciate why the middle classes in the 1840s often thought of themselves as an island, surrounded by vast seas of poverty. In their factories, in their homes, in the streets they were continually aware of (because so dependent on) the labouring poor. Truly they agreed that, in more senses than one, ‘the poor have ye always with you’.
| Engaged in Trade and Manufacture | 3,000,000 |
| Engaged in Agriculture | 1,500,000 |
| Engaged in Mining, Quarrying and Transit | 750,000 |
| Total Employers and Employed | 5,250,000 |
| Domestic Servants | 1,000,000 |
| Independent Persons | 500,000 |
| Educated pursuits (including Professions and Fine Arts) | 200,000 |
| Government Officers (including Army, Navy, Civil Service, and Parish Officers) | 200,000 |
| Alms-people (including paupers, prisoners and lunatics) | 200,000 |
| 7,350,000 | |
| Residue of Population (3,500,000 wives and 7,500,000 children) | 11,000,000 |
| 18,350,000 |
After its sheer numerical size, the most striking aspect of the labouring population was its separateness from other classes. Between manual and non-manual occupations a great gulf was fixed. The distinctive mark of the labouring man was that he worked with his hands. No matter how skilled he was, nor how high his earnings, his social status was determined by the kind of job he performed. The most lowly, ill-paid clerk in Dickens’ England considered himself socially different from the most highly-paid, skilled artisan. The manual worker was further distinguished by his receipt of daily or (usually) weekly wages, and by a fairly high degree of insecurity in his job. Labouring people in many respects lived in a world of their own, remote from the experience of the literary, articulate middle classes. Increasingly segregated in working class districts of the cities, with a mortality rate twice that of middle class areas, eating different food, wearing different clothes, and observing different
