The Making of the English Working Class E.P. Thompson

 

E.P. Thompson

Standards and Experiences pp.347 - 387

The Making of the English Working Class

More context for how living conditions were in the Industrial Revolution

Bread

The rise in bread, corn laws. ‘When the Corn Laws were passed in 1815, the Houses of Parliament had to be defended from the populace by troops. ‘NO CORN LAWS’ was prominent among the banners at Peterloo, and remained so (especially in Lancashire) until the anti-corn laws of the 1840s.’

Meat

‘In the depth of the 1812 depression, it was the impression of an observer that the London poor fared better than those of the north and the west: The Poor of the Metropolis, notwithstanding the enormous price of the necessaries of life, are really living comparatively in comfort.’

Alcohol

Per capita beer consumption went down between 1800 and 1830, but tea and sugar consumption rose. 1820 – 1840 marked increase on the consumption of gin and whiskey. ‘Once again this is a cultural as well as dietetic matter. Beer was regarded – by agricultural workers, coal – whippers, miners – as essential for any heavy labour ( to ‘put back the sweat’) and in parts of the north beer was synonymous with ‘drink’. The home-brewing of small was so essential to the household economy that ‘if a young woman can bake oatcake, and brew well, it is thought she will make a good wife.’ ‘The decline was directly attributed to the malt tax – a tax so unpopular that some contemporaries regarded it as being an incitement to revolution.’

One magistrate in Hampshire argued in 1816 that ‘the labourer would go cheerfully to his daily employ, perform it with manly vigour and content, and become attached to his house, his family, and, above all, his country, which allows him to share, in common with his superiors, in a plain wholesome beverage, which a poor man look up to, more, indeed, than to any thing that could possibly be granted them by a British Parliament.’

Hush shops sprang up – Samuel Bamford was nearly murdered as a suspected exciseman.

‘The effect of the taxes was undoubtedly to reduce greatly the amount of home-brewing and home-drinking; and, equally, to make drinking less of a part of a normal diet and more of an extra-mural activity.’

‘All in all, it is an unremarkable record. In fifty years of the industrial revolution the working-class share of the national product had almost certainly fallen relative to the share of the property-owning and professional classes. The average working-man remained very close to subsistence level at a time when he was surrounded by the evidence of the increase of national wealth, much of its transparently the product of his own labour, and passing, by equally transparent means, into the hands of his employers.’

Homes

‘It is true that conditions in the rural villages or weaving hamlets may have been quite as bad as conditions in Preston or Leeds. But the size of the problem was certainly worse in the great towns, and the multiplication of bad conditions facilitated the spread of epidemics.’

‘The industrial town-dweller often could not escape the stench of the industrial refuse and of open sewers, and his children played among the garbage and privy middens.’

‘Conditions in the East End were so noisome that doctors and parish officers risked their lives in the course of their duties…. It was the boom towns of the Industrial Revolution that the worst conditions were to be found: ‘what London suffered [in the Commercial Revolution] Lancashire suffered at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Sheffield, an old and comparatively prosperous town with a high proportion of skilled artisans, almost certainly – despite the jerry-builders – saw an improvement in housing conditions in the first half of the nineteenth century, with an average, in 1840, of five persons per house, most artisans renting a family cottage on their own, with one day room and two sleeping rooms.  It was in the textile districts, and in the towns most exposed to Irish immigrations – Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Preston, Bolton, Bradford – that the most atrocious evidence of deterioration – dense overcrowding, cellar-dwellings, unspeakable filth, is to be found.’

‘Finally, it is suggested, with tedious repetition, that the slums, the sinking rivers, the spoliation of nature, and the architectural horrors may all be forgiven because all happened so fast, so haphazardly, under intense population pressure, without premeditation and without prior experience…. The argument is valid only up to a point – to the point in most great towns, in the 1830’s or 1840s, when doctors and sanitary reformers, Benthamites and Chartists, fought repeated battles for improvement against the inertia of property-owners and the demagoguery of ‘cheap government’ rate-payers. By this time the working people were virtually segregated in their sinking enclaves, and the middle classes demonstrated their real opinions of the industrial towns by getting as far out of them as equestrian transport made convenient.’

Life

‘It would seem that medical advances can only have had a minimal influence upon the life of expectation of working people before 1800…. It is also possible that the beginnings of the population ‘explosion’ date from the mid-century, and arise from the decline in epidemics resulting upon ‘changes in virulence and resistance upon which human effort had no influence.’ The initial population increase was supported by a long run of good harvests, and by an improvement in living standards which belongs, not to the later, but to the earliest years of the Industrial Revolution.’

Mothers

‘In a survey undertaken on behalf of the employers in Manchester in 1833, it was found that the married spinners investigated had had 3,166 children: of these children, 1,922, or 60%, of the whole were alive, and 1,244, or 39%, were dead…. This heavy child mortality among the children of workers who are often cited as beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution may be attributed in part to the general environmental health conditions. It may also have been due to the characteristic deformation and narrowing of the pelvic bones in girls who had worked since childhood in the mills, which made for difficult births: the weakness of infants born to mothers who worked until the last week of pregnancy: but above all to the lack of proper child care. Mother’s, for fear of losing their employment, returned to the mill three weeks or less after the birth: still, in some Lancashire and West Riding towns, infants were carried in the 1840s to the mills to be suckled in the meal-break.’

 

Liszt Collection, engraving, Hulton Archive, [accessed 21 July 2022]