Early Victorian Britain: 1832–51. Литагент HarperCollins USD

small collections of books in all their dwellings; several had wheel-barometers…. I have more than once gone down in the evening to Turton Mills, to see the operatives coming from work … The boys were as merry as crickets: there was not one of the girls who looked as if she would refuse an invitation to a dance.’⁴

      A very different impression is left by William Dodd’s account of a young girl factory worker in Manchester in 1841. After the watchman has knocked on the window at 4.30 in the morning, the girl’s mother:

      ‘rouses the unwilling girl to another day of toil. At length you hear her on the floor; the clock is striking five. Then, for the first time, the girl becomes conscious of the necessity for haste; and having slipped on her clothes, and (if she thinks there is time) washed herself, she takes a drink of cold coffee, which has been left standing in the fireplace, a mouthful of bread (if she can eat it), and having packed up her breakfast in her handkerchief, hastens to the factory. The bell rings as she leaves the threshold of her home. Five minutes more, and she is in the factory, stripped and ready for work. The clock strikes half-past five; the engine starts, and her day’s work commences.

      ‘At half-past seven … the engine slacks its pace (seldom stopping) for a short time till the hands have cleaned the machinery and swallowed a little food. It then goes on again and continues at full speed till twelve o’clock, when it stops for dinner. Previously to leaving the factory, and in her dinner-hour, she has her machines to clean. The distance of the factory is about five minutes’ walk from her home. I noticed every day that she came in at half-past twelve, or within a minute or two, and once she was over the half hour; the first thing she did was to wash herself, then get her dinner (which she was seldom able to eat), and pack up her drinking for the afternoon. This done, it was time to be on her way to work again, where she remains, without one minute’s relaxation, till seven o’clock; she then comes home, and throws herself into a chair exhausted. This [is] repeated six days in the week (save that on Saturdays she may get back a little earlier, say, an hour or two)…. This young woman looks very pale and delicate, and has every appearance of an approaching decline. I was asked to guess her age; I said, perhaps fifteen…. Her mother…. told me she was going nineteen … She is a fair specimen of a great proportion of factory girls in Manchester.’⁵

      Within the textile industry, where most of the factory operatives were to be found, wages and working conditions were affected by a number of factors. The particular branch of the industry (cotton, wool, worsted, flax, silk), the constant replacement of one machine or process by another, the relative use of women and children instead of men, and the vagaries of unemployment, all helped to determine the fortunes of any one group of operatives. In general, however, a male factory hand in Yorkshire or Lancashire (employed, say, as a third grade spinner) could hope to earn between 14s and 22s a week. If to this could be added the earnings of his wife and children the weekly family income would be raised to 30s or more, depending on the age and number of the children. The women were employed as throstle spinners (in cotton) and as power loom weavers, and their wages were 5s to 10s a week. Children were frequently used as piecers and paid 2s 6d to 5s weekly. In Leeds in 1839 male cloth pressers averaged 20s a week, cloth drawers 24s 6d, slubbers 24s and wool sorters 21s – which compared favourably with 16s for tailors and 14s for shoemakers.⁶ The situation in one Leeds spinning mill in the 1830s was summarised thus:⁷

      It was a characteristic of the factory operatives, as of some other sections of the labouring poor, that the unit of earning was the family, not a single breadwinner. No aspect of the factory system aroused more controversy than this, and the employment of women and children became a focus for agitation and legislation in the 1830s and 1840s. Some of the wider implications of this will be examined later. In relation to social stratification it provided another distinction between the élite of skilled workers and the majority of working people.

      As the textile mill operative was felt to be the representative type of worker in the machine age, so the handloom weaver was the representative figure from the past. The golden age of handloom weaving (still within the memory of the old weavers) had come to an end before the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, but the craft remained attractive despite a fall in earnings. It was an occupation which was pursued in the worker’s own home surrounded (and also assisted) by his wife and family. He could, and did, work at his own pace and to suit his own convenience. If he wished to work hard for four days and loaf for three, he was at liberty to do so. He was free from the irksome discipline of the factory, and if most yardage weaving was monotonous he could always break off for a smoke or a drink when he felt inclined. Traditionally many of the weavers of the West Riding had also been farmers, and the substantial stone houses with their third storey loom shops stood as reminders of a prosperous past. Handloom weaving was popular because of its freedom and because it satisfied the old artisan craving for independence. Unfortunately it was also, at least in its plain and coarser departments, a skill which was easily acquired. Little capital was necessary: a loom and lodgings could be hired in Burnley and Colne for a shilling a week. There were no restrictive apprenticeship regulations, and much of the work could be done by women and children. An assistant commissioner who enquired into the state of the industry in 1838–9, reported that in Barnsley thirty Irishmen entered the town one morning and set up as handloom weavers, though they had never done any weaving before. From 1815 to the 1830s the hand weaver’s earnings were reduced drastically, and he was forced to work longer and longer hours and accept more onerous conditions for the privilege of getting work. By 1838–9 in Manchester the total family earnings of weavers of coarse fabrics averaged only 8s a week, and similar figures were reported from Glasgow and Barnsley. Although there were important differences between cotton weavers in Lancashire, woollen and worsted weavers in Yorkshire, and silk weavers in London and Coventry, the trend was everywhere the same. Selected groups of weavers who did extra fine or specialised work were able to make up to 16s a week. But such earnings were a sad reward for a once-proud craft.

      The ‘distress’ of the handloom weavers in the 1830s and 1840s received a good deal of publicity, though little constructive help. They were, after the agricultural workers and domestic servants, the largest occupational group in the country, numbering with their families over 800,000 persons. Their reduction in status from respectable artisans to workers on the edge of starvation represented an important cultural shift within a significantly large section of the labouring population. It is easy to write them off simply as unfortunate casualties of the Industrial Revolution, outmoded handworkers who were unable to compete with the machine. But this is by no means the whole story, and obscures the essential nature of the impact of industrialism on the labouring poor. Only in the 1830s in the cotton, and in the 1840s in the woollen, industries did power looms in the factories compete fully and directly with handlooms. Until that time the two existed side by side, with the handloom weaver reduced to being an auxiliary of the factory, but not yet driven out of existence by competition. His role was to take up the slack in busy times, and to bear the first brunt of a recession. He also acted as a check on the wages of power loom operators, most of whom were women. The plight of the weavers was a vivid illustration of how helpless a section of labouring men could be when caught between the relics of the domestic system and the full force of competitive industrial capitalism. In classical economic theory the handloom weaver should no doubt, under the stress of severe competition, have transferred his labour to some other sector of the economy. But in fact this did not happen. Weavers for the most part would not, and could not, find other employment. ‘Too great attachment to the occupation is the bane of the trade,’ commented Dr Mitchell, one of the Assistant Handloom Weavers’ Commissioners, in the 1841 Report. Quite apart from their strong desire to cling to an occupation which enabled them to preserve something of their traditional way of life, their opportunities of alternative jobs were strictly limited. They were barred from entering, or apprenticing their children to, skilled handicrafts by the trade societies; they were not required in the mills, where power loom weavers were usually women and girls; and they seldom had the physique or strength for an outdoor labouring job. Their