emphatically a pleasure rather than a business let alone an industrial town, had been the fastest growing town of the previous decade, and when an important group of water-powered cotton mills were in semi-rural locations, it was of diminishing relevance over the rest of the century. The general tendency was for the mechanization of a broadening range of industrial activities, the adoption of steam power, and a gravitation towards coalfield sites; while all the larger towns supported some manufacturing industries, even if these might in some cases be geared only to their own internal markets. What continued to be important in the shaping of social structures was the diversity of developments within and between industries, in timing, technologies, and organization, and the variety of different occupations and activities forming the economic base of towns.
Industrialization, even considered in the restrictive and potentially misleading sense as something that happened simply to manufacturing industry rather than to all sectors of the economy, was far from being a one-way procession into the factory. Mechanization of one sector or process in an industry, and its move into the factory, could well generate increased demand for handwork and outwork in other sectors. The classic example was in the cotton industry, where from the later eighteenth century the rise of the spinning mills had led to an enormous expansion in the number of handloom weavers, most of them outworkers (a minority were pseudo-factory workers, working in large weaving sheds for a single employer), and many of them rural workers with dual employments in farming. In cotton that expansion was over by the mid-1820s, and the decline in the number of handloom weavers as weaving moved swiftly into the mills in the 1830s and 1840s was little short of catastrophic in material hardship and social dislocation. In spite of the evident triumph of the powerloom, however, there were still nearly 50,000 cotton handloom weavers left in 1850, many of them in extreme destitution at the lowest paid and coarsest end of the industry, but some of them working upmarket on fancy designs in short runs which were still beyond the technical capacity, or economics, of power weaving. A few lingered into the 1860s, but by then the surviving handloom weaver in cottons was no more than a curiosity. The worsted industry followed much the same pattern as cotton, although barely one fifth as large in terms of total employment, and by the early 1830s worsted spinning was almost entirely a factory occupation; the key preparatory process of combing, however, remained a manual operation, and the woolcombers were among the cream of skilled workers until combing machinery undermined their scarcity and status extremely rapidly from the mid-1840s. Worsted weaving, indeed, became a factory industry even more rapidly and conclusively than cotton: until the mid-1830s there were virtually no powerlooms in worsteds, and by the mid-1850s handloom weavers had all but vanished. In the process the industry, spinning and weaving branches alike, achieved a far more complete geographical concentration than the cotton industry which had an important secondary base in Lanarkshire centred on Paisley as well as its Lancashire-Cheshire heartland. Worsted workers, by the 1850s, were almost all to be found in the West Riding, strongly localized in the Bradford area, and this sharp focus of a particular kind of factory experience was not without social significance.
The woollen industry, by contrast, took to the mills later, much more slowly, and in a pattern which permitted factory work and outwork – at least in the handweaving of tweeds in the Highlands and Hebrides – to continue to coexist until the end of the century. The preponderance of the West Riding was firmly established long before 1830; it continued to become more pronounced over the century but did not achieve complete concentration to the exclusion of locally significant branches of the industry in Stroud, the West Country, Cumbria, or the Scottish Borders region. It was in the West Riding that factory methods and organization made most rapid progress, and even there half those engaged in the manufacture of woollens were still in 1850 non-factory manual and domestic outworkers. Spinning itself was not completely mechanized, although leading firms had adapted the mule to woollen yarns by the 1820s; and the intermediate process of preparing rovings from the carded wool, before mule-spinning them, was firmly in the hands of the billy slubbers working their little wooden machines called billies, within the mill precincts but not properly factory workers. These handworkers were, in their turn, displaced by machinery, the condenser; but it was a very gradual matter. The condenser was known, and in use, from the mid-1830s, but it was not until the end of the 1870s that the billy slubbers vanished and woollen spinners became entirely factory workers. Woollen fabrics came in such a profusion of types and qualities that it is not surprising that in the early decades of their adoption powerlooms were as much complementary to as competitive with handlooms. Until mid-century it is probable that the numbers of handloom weavers, at roughly 100,000, had scarcely declined at all, at which point there were no more than 9439 powerlooms in woollens, giving work to 5–6000 factory weavers; there being at the same period over 32,000 powerlooms in worsteds, and 250,000 in cotton. Plenty of handloom weavers remained in the West Riding in the third quarter of the century, their numbers only gradually falling, and on the whole there was a reasonable amount of work for them at the fancy end of the trade. It was not until the 1880s that weaving was fully consolidated in the mills and virtually all the quarter million men and women employed in the woollen and worsted industries, taken together, could be classed as factory workers.
In the lesser but traditional textile industries, linen and silk, outwork remained at least as important in relation to factory work as in woollens. Jute, practically speaking a new industry of the 1850s and strongly localized in Dundee, was by contrast a mill industry from the start; the few handloom weavers still there in the late 1860s were a sad leftover from Dundee’s earlier linen-working phase. For a while the linen industry operated with something of a national division of labour, machine-spun yarn from English mills, epitomized by Marshall’s great flax mill in Leeds of the 1820s, being woven by the cheaper domestic labour of Scotland and Ulster. By mid-century there may have been about 70,000 handloom weavers of linens in Scotland, clustered mainly around Aberdeen and Dundee, and in Dunfermline where much fine table-linen was woven. Thereafter the English section of the industry went into decline, but the Scottish held its own until the 1870s by switching into power weaving; in the late nineteenth century growth was Ulster’s province. The silk industry grew rather rapidly from the 1830s, practically doubling its workforce between then and the early 1860s; at that time nearly two thirds, or about 100,000 people, were domestic outworkers, chiefly weavers. Silk weaving was expanding fast enough in the 1840s, indeed, to be able to absorb many of the displaced handloom weavers from cotton, so that by 1851 there were about 25,000 silk workers in Lancashire, a county where they had been almost unknown twenty years before. From the 1860s the silk industry declined continuously, so that by the end of the century its labour force, at around 40,000, was back to half the size of the mid-1830s; from the 1880s this shrinking industry was predominantly a factory industry.
The general impression from this survey of the textile industries is that there was a succession of bursts of demand for outworkers, mainly handloom weavers, at different dates in different sectors, triggered either by the mechanization of spinning or by general expansion in the industry; and that these bursts were followed by periods of contraction of very variable duration, leading to the ultimate disappearance of non-factory workers. The conclusion that it was not until the 1880s that textiles in general were firmly settled in factories is less important than the lack of synchronization or uniformity in the process of shedding outworkers or in the speed at which factory work expanded; those were the factors which affected the work experience of the people involved, and hence their lives and those of their families.
The textile industries as a whole were the leading edge of the transformation of manufacturing from home and hand to power and mill, and it is therefore especially significant that outside cotton the decisive phases of this transformation took place after the overall expansion of textiles, as a provider of jobs, was over. Total employment grew rapidly in the decade after 1841, when the census occupation returns first make it possible to measure numbers, and the proportion of all manufacturing workers who were involved in textiles rose from one third to two fifths. After 1851, however, the numbers of textile workers ceased to expand and remained more or less constant at around 1.3 million for the rest of the century, while in relation to total employment in manufacturing they entered a period of continuous decline, their share falling back to one third by 1881 and one quarter by 1901. The overall stability of numbers in the textiles group in the second half of the century was clearly the statistical
