almost a separate nation. It was the future Conservative prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who in 1845 in his novel Sybil wrote of the two nations, the rich and the poor. Adventurous social investigators had to discover working class England almost as a foreign land – in much the same spirit as General Booth of the Salvation Army wrote In Darkest England and the Way Out at the end of the century.
The third general characteristic of the labouring poor was the great diversity within the category as a whole. Social stratification was dependent upon a number of factors, of which earnings, regularity of employment, type of skill, trade or industry, training and education and geographical location were all important. The crucial factor was earnings, which were a pretty accurate guide to the state of the other variables. Thus if an artisan earned 40s a week it was highly likely that he was also a skilled man with a steady job in an urban environment. Conversely if a man was earning 10s a week or less, it would be a safe guess that he was unskilled, subject to periodic unemployment and without much education. Within each stratum or occupational group enjoying the same income, other factors could produce considerable modifications. Old age was almost invariably accompanied by loss of earning power, resulting from bodily infirmity or decay of skills. Size of family determined for many labourers whether or not they were above or below the subsistence line. The rhythm of family life produced a poverty cycle which was inescapable for most lower paid workers. A child in a labourer’s family grew up in poverty. Then as he and the other older children began to earn, the family income rose and a period of relative prosperity followed. As a young single man, and during the early months of married life while his wife was able to continue earning, he enjoyed a modest sufficiency; but when his children began to multiply and his wife could no longer earn, he fell again into the state of poverty he had known as a child. By middle age his children had become young adult wage-earners, the economic strain on the family was eased, and a period of comparative comfort could normally be expected. But with old age came a renewed time of hardship. No longer able to earn as formerly, dependent on the good graces of a son or daughter, the closing years of many an old person were darkened by fears of the workhouse, and, most shameful of all, a pauper funeral.
Most Victorian writers, when describing their society, divided it into the upper, middle and lower (or working) classes. They realised the rough and ready nature of this categorisation, and usually referred to the working classes or lower orders in the plural. Unfortunately the convenient threefold division stereotyped a view of British society which has persisted down to the present day, but which is more a statement of ideology than a useful description of social stratification. The three class model is inadequate for comprehending early Victorian society because, among other things, it does not permit sufficient account to be taken of the very important group of ‘middling’ people who were distinct from both the more affluent middle class and the bulk of the working class; and because it obscures the great diversity within the working class. When Henry Mayhew carried out his great investigation of labouring people in London in 1849–51 (subsequently republished in 1861–2 and 1864 as London Labour and the London Poor) he had to employ quite other categories in order ‘to enunciate for the first time the natural history, as it were, of the industry and idleness of Great Britain’. He found it ‘no easy matter … to classify the different kinds of labour scientifically’, and his four volumes document the detailed and complex arrangements which he discovered among different sections of the working classes. Seeking, as a pioneer social scientist, for a general categorisation of what he called the social fabric he devised a fourfold classification: those who will work, those who cannot work, those who will not work, and those who need not work. The first three comprised the labouring poor. Mayhew’s material was limited to the metropolis, and it has therefore to be supplemented by surveys and observations from the provinces, rural and industrial. From these various sources we can construct a typology of the labouring classes.
At the top of the hierarchy was the labour aristocracy. This was a small group of highly skilled artisans, earning 30s to 40s a week, with fair regularity of employment and superior working conditions. Many of them were handicraftsmen in traditional industries and had served a long apprenticeship. They inherited the pride and prestige of being masters of their craft or ‘mystery’. In many trades there was a distinction between the ‘society’ and ‘non-society’ men, or between the ‘honourable’ and the ‘dishonourable’ sections. Among cabinet makers in London, for instance, a small group of six or seven hundred produced high quality work while the majority of four or five thousand supplied the mass market with cheaper goods. The former were all members of a trade society (or union) and their wages, work-methods and marketing arrangements were regulated by custom; the latter were less skilled, unorganised and forced by competition to accept lower earnings. It was estimated that the ‘society men’ of every trade comprised about one-tenth of the whole. They were printing compositors, breeches-makers, jewellers, watchmakers, scientific instrument makers, some cutlery workers, hatters, ironmoulders, shipwrights and carpenters. The new industries also contributed their quota of highly paid artisans: locomotive engineers, first class fine cotton spinners, calico printers and dyers. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the labour aristocracy and the lower middle class. The economic and social position of a small shopkeeper or independent master was very close to that of a skilled and experienced artisan – as witness the career of Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross who began his career as a leather-breeches maker, and whose shop became a meeting place for artisan and middle class reformers. In the metal working trades of Birmingham and the Black Country, and in the cutlery trades of Sheffield, little masters and skilled journeymen intermingled in a complex series of economic and social relationships, varying from craft to craft and between one subdivision of the trade and the next. Similarly at the lower level the labour aristocracy shaded off into ordinary skilled workers, whose wages would be in the range of 20s to 30s per week. Many building trades craftsmen, tailors, shoemakers, skilled engineers and lower grade spinners fell into this category. They were artisans and had the habits and attitudes of handicraftsmen, yet without the superior pay and security of the very first class men.
Below them came the great divide in working class life: the complete separation of the artisans from the labourers, of the skilled from the unskilled and semi-skilled:
‘The transition from the artisan to the labourer [commented Mayhew] is curious in many respects. In passing from the skilled operative of the west-end to the unskilled workman of the eastern quarter of London, the moral and intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race.’3
Mayhew saw the difference mainly in terms of education and higher intelligence. He defined an artisan as an educated handicraftsman, in contrast to a labourer whose occupation needed no educational apprenticeship. And he noted great differences in the interests and life styles of the two groups. The trade unions (which, until much later in the century, were virtually confined to skilled workers) fiercely maintained the privileged status of their members. It was quite unthinkable that a labourer should ever be allowed to do a craftsman’s job, or that the ‘mate’ or ‘helper’ should earn more than a half or a third as much as the skilled man by whose side he worked. In Bradford the skilled woolcombers did not drink in the same pubs with more lowly members of the textile fraternity.
When we turn to the non-artisan section of ‘those who will work’, we are met with a bewildering range of jobs and conditions that cannot be defined entirely by stratification. Relative degrees of skill are hard to estimate and do not necessarily correspond with earnings: thus more skill is required for handloom weaving than for navvying, yet the poor handloom weaver earned much less than a railway navvy. Regional, occupational, even ethical, variations were vertical factors modifying the general pattern of stratification. Factory hands, for example, were really characteristic only of the northern industrial counties; most of Mayhew’s street traders were not found outside the metropolis; and Irish immigrants were concentrated in a relatively few occupations and centres. We have therefore to bear in mind that the following picture of the less fortunate sections of the labouring poor is impressionistic, a series of more or less localised types, rather than an overall description which is universally applicable.
