Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the working class

 

Engels, Manchester, and the working class

Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the working class, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974.)

To cement the accuracy of the depiction of the Davenports and the slum communities of the 19^th century, it was important to explore Engels time there. Marcus’s study considers Engels presence in Manchester and the economic and social changes that happened rapidly during his time there.

Historical Prologue pp.3 – 28

Population

Increase in population, already explored slightly in Kirby’s study, the population of Manchester grew rapidly in a short time. By 1780 the population was 7.5 million; by 1801 it was 9 million, around 1850 it had reached 18 million.

Out of all the towns in the district Manchester had the largest middle class population, it had commerce, industry and finance. The cotton industry dominated Manchester, it was estimated that around 30%  of the town was directly engaged in the production of cotton.

Government

‘Manchester had almost no local government to speak of, and what little there was had almost no pertinence or meaning to the modern world. For more than five hundred years Manchester had remained as a manor, and was in one part of its legal existence ‘governed’ more or less as a feudal estate, or personal holding – which meant in effect that it did not go through legal evolution, into a municipality with municipal institutions, which corresponded in any real sense to its actual evolution, into an unmistakable super-modern urban center. It was neither a corporate town nor a town returning burgesses to Parliament – neither, that is to say, a municipal borough nor a parliamentary borough. Its judicial – administrative structure was utterly archaic.’

‘the Court Leet or heritable manorial court- with its officers of boroughreeve, Constables, etc. – remained essentially intact and in the hands of a traditional, compact Anglican Tory oligarchy until the middle of the nineteenth century.’

Not until reforms in the 1830s did things change.

1845 the town itself bought up the manorial rights from the Mosely family for the sum of £200,000, emancipating itself yet further into the ardors of self-government. 1847 granted a bishopric, becoming at last a city in 1853.

However it was due to this lack of privilege and rights that allowed Manchester to grow in the Industrial Revolution. ‘the place in which the entire process broke loose into open visibility, the locus of the revolutionary change, accelerated growth and ever increasing direct and subsidiary demand, as a world market for the mass production of goods for mass consumption was first brought into being, was one industry – cotton.’

Cotton Trade

Cotton was initially imported from India firstly as a raw yarn to be combined with flax to create fustian, and as woven calicoes which were meant to replace machine-made cloth. This resulted in overseas trade, and was inseparable to the slave trade and plantations of the West Indies.

After 1790 it was the slave states of the American South that became the producers for Lancashire mills.

Manufacturing the cotton was split into two operations, weaving and spinning. Middle of the 18^th century handloom weaving was more efficient than hand spinning. Handloom weaving declined after 1815 when power looms displaced them.

1830’s it was estimated that about a million and a half people were directly and indirectly dependent on employment in the production of cotton. Half of the people who worked in factories were women and nearly 15% were children under 14.

Radicalism in Manchester

Group of middle-class dissenting manufacturers who led an agitation for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which discriminated against them on religious grounds, and for parliamentary reform.

Formed the Manchester Constitutional Society, supported the Paris Jacobins.

Thomas Walker brought out the first part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, in 1791.

1799 and 1800 Combination Acts were passed prohibiting trade unions in any form in all industries.

1810 first great strike of factory workers, several thousand cotton spinners walked out in a concerted effort, organised their activities and weekly strike pay was raised and distributed.

Luddite riots

Peterloo massacre

Robert Owen, 1789 borrowed £100 and went into the cotton manufacturing business in Manchester. In 1800 he moved near Glasgow, within ten years he had made a fortune, he created and conducted a utopian experiment in his industrial village. First important socialist figure in Britain.

This fed into the trade union activities, now allowed to operate after an act was passed in the mid 1820’s.

The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, under Owen’s leadership was successful in the early months of 1834, then suddenly collapsed. The government transported to Australia for seven years 6 Dorsetshire labourers for trying to organise a union; the crime they were convicted for was for administering illegal oaths.

Chartism

The Town pp.28 – 67.

Dickens first impression of Manchester in 1838 ‘I have seen enough for my purpose, and what I have seen has disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure. I mean to strike the heaviest blow in my power for these unfortunate creatures.’

              Thomas Carlyle. ‘At five in the morning all was still as sleep and darkness. At half-past five all went off like an enormous mill-race or ocean-tide. The Boom-m-m, far and wide. It was the mills that were all starting then, and creishy drudges by the million taking post there. I have heard few sounds more impressive to me in the mood I was in.’

Disraeli Coningsby 1844. Calling Manchester the great metropolis of labour, the novel alikens Manchester to a modern world as Athens was in the ancient. ‘Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.’ Carlyle had noted a year before that Manchester was ‘as wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City.’

Notion that factories were like palaces, Coninsby enters a factory ‘He entered chambers vaster than are told of in an Arabian fable, and peopled with habitants more wondrous than Afrite or Peri. For there he beheld, in long-continued ranks, those mysterious forms full of existence without life that perform with facility, and in an instant, what man can fulfil only with difficulty and days.’

W. Cooke Taylor Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (1842) ‘the forest of chimneys pouring forth volumes of steam and smoke, forming an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the entire place. I felt that I was in the presence of those two mighty and mysterious agencies, fire and water, proverbially the best of servants and the worst of masters.’

‘It is essentially a place of business, where pleasure is unknown as a pursuit and amusements scarcely rank as secondary consideration. Every person who passes you in the streets has the look of thought and the step of haste.’

Leon Faucher 1843 Revue des Deux Mondes

Engels read Faucher’s account and noted that they formed ‘a better account than any hitherto given either by an English or a German author.’

Faucher ‘Nothing is more curious than the industrial topography of Lancashire. Manchester, like an industrious spider, is placed at the center of the web…, and send forth roads and railways towards its auxiliaries, formerly villages, but now towns, which serve as outposts to the grand center of industry.’

Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 travelled from Birmingham and noticed the radical disadvantage of Manchester. Noted the absence of government and the prevalence of the Irish.

‘Everything in the exterior appearance of the city attests the individual powers of man; nothing the directing powers of society. At every turn human liberty shows its capricious creative force. There is no trace of the slow continuous action of the government.’

‘The whole of English society is based on the privileges of money… There is not a country in the world where justice, that first need of peoples, is more the privilege of the rich… Intelligence, even virtue, seem of little account without money. It fills all the gaps that one finds between men, but nothing will take its place.’

Engels noted similarly ‘The miserable slavery in which money keeps the individual member of the middle classes is by means of the domination of the middle classes as a whole impressed even upon the language itself. Money makes up the worth of a man; this man is worth ten thousand pounds… he owns that sum.’

Friedrich Engels from 1820 – 1845 pp. 67 – 131

Engel’s experiences in Manchester may be divided into two conventional kinds; those that were expressed in physical activity and direct observation; and those that have primarily to do with reading and writing.

Plug Plot strikes – outbreak of textile workers, depression in trade was what seemed to strike Engels immediately. ‘When I arrived in Manchester at the end of November, 1842, there were everywhere crowds of unemployed still standing at street corners, and many factories were still standing idle. Between then and the middle of 1843 those who had been lounging at street corners through no fault of there own gradually disappeared, as the factories came once again into activity.’

Engels mills were located near the outlying district of Pendleton. He stated that during his stay in England he ‘forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working Men; I am both glad and proud of having done so.’

He wanted ‘to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your every-day life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors.’

It was only through an intimate acquaintance with the concrete realities of English social and economic existence and with the body of writings that had sprung up as the theory of that existence that such a transformation could be finally achieved. He wrote in his preface to the German edition that ‘England was the only place in which such a project could be undertaken. This was so because of the advanced character of its industrial and social development and because of the unique richness of documents and official reports and inquiries.’ The way Engels immersed himself into the workers lives were various. He introduced himself to the Chartists, attended meetings, read their literature and became friendly with one of the leading members James Leach.

He did not experience this alone, he gained popularity and acceptance with the working classes of Manchester through his acquaintance Mary Burns, an illiterate Irish factory girl.