The Industrial Revolution saw an explosion of the urban population, as landless peasants and Irish immigrants sought to escape their wretched existence by flooding into the towns and urban areas of England. Industrial centres such as Bristol, Hull, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and Liverpool, expanded beyond all recognition, creating horrific over-crowding and insanitary conditions. The sixty years prior to the Reform Act of 1832 saw the population of England almost double in size. If you take the census figures for the years 1801, 1831, and 1851, for some towns of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, the pattern and pace of expansion is graphically illustrated:
| 1801 | 1831 | 1851 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manchester and Salford | 90,000 | 237,000 | 400,000 |
| Leeds | 53,000 | 123,000 | 172,000 |
| Sheffield | 46,000 | 92,000 | 135,000 |
| Bradford | 13,000 | 44,000 | 104,000 |
| Oldham | 22,000 | 51,000 | 72,000 |
| Bolton | 18,000 | 42,000 | 61,000 |
| Blackburn | 12,000 | 27,000 | 65,000 |
| Halifax | 12,000 | 22,000 | 34,000 |
The remorseless speed of change shocked contemporary observers. The towns now had large populations of men and women who had passed within a single generation from the life of the village to the life of the slum – from the occupations of the peasant to those of the urban worker. In scenes that beggar belief, overcrowded slums sprung up like mushrooms overnight, lacking sanitation, clean water and ventilation. Filthy open cesspits, the standard form of primitive sanitation, became a breeding ground for all kinds of diseases such as cholera and typhoid, resulting in periodic epidemics. The polluted rivers, coloured with chemicals and dyes, that ran through these industrial towns were used for both drinking water and sewage. Under these conditions, infant mortality was very high, although reaching adulthood was also a risky business. The average age at death for a labourer in Bolton was 18, in Manchester 17 and in Liverpool 15.
The seething cauldron of factory life sucked in labour from all quarters, above all from across the Irish Sea. In 1827, for four or five pennies, the Irish could cross the waters to Liverpool. Geographically close to Lancashire, a prime centre of the Industrial Revolution, Ireland was described by Engels as “the mainspring of all the workers’ movements.” By 1841, the Irish population of Lancashire was around 133,000. Within a decade the county had swollen to 200,000 Irish. According to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, “the Irish emigration into Britain is an example of a less civilised population spreading themselves as a kind of substratum beneath a more civilised community.”[4]
In 1841 this “substratum” composed a tenth of the population of Manchester, and a seventh of Liverpool. After the failure of the Irish potato crop in the Forties, this great flood of humanity became a deluge.
“During the last two or three months,” wrote the registrar of a Manchester district, “large numbers of the poor from Ireland have crowded themselves in this district, droves of them rambling about the streets seeking lodgings and no doubt being exposed to the severe and inclement weather. Many of the poor creatures have died from cold producing fevers and diseases.” In Liverpool there were “thousands of hungry and naked Irish perishing in our streets,” and in South Wales they were described as “bringing pestilence on their backs, famine in their stomachs.”[5]
The hungry Irish, desperate for food and work, were cynically used by employers to undermine wages and blackleg on strikes. However, as the Hammonds noted, the same employers regarded the Irish with trepidation, speaking of them in much the same manner as a Roman master spoke of the slaves from turbulent Sardinia. “The Irish,” stated an employer, “are more disposed to turn out, to make unreasonable demands, to take offence at slight cause and to enforce their demands by strikes or bad language.” A Catholic priest noted that Irish workers were much keener to be involved in trade unions. In fact, many union and radical leaders came from Irish stock, most notably John Doherty and Feargus O’Connor. Marx once commented to the effect that the red blood of revolution flowed through Celtic veins.
Rapid changes in production forced large numbers of workers out of domestic industry into the newly constructed factories and mills. Cottage industry soon gave way to the factory system of large-scale production.
“The great mass of people collected in Lancashire, Cheshire, and the western borders of Yorkshire were working in 1830, not for a multitude of small masters, but for a comparatively small number of large masters,” noted the Hammonds. “The Industrial Revolution produced a new powerful rich class, the class of the capitalist manufacturer.”[6]
This new bourgeoisie strove to assert its domination and concentrate all economic and political power into its hands. Great fortunes made from foreign trade were ploughed back into industry. In their search for greater profits, the British bourgeois rapidly developed the new productive forces of industry and technique. The real history of the period between 1688 and the middle of the eighteenth century was dominated by the capitalist accumulation of capital. In the 70 years up to 1840, the power of production in Britain increased by a remarkable twenty-seven times over.
“Commerce which has enriched the citizens of England has helped to make them free…” observed Voltaire. Of course, this only referred to the upper classes. The working class lost any independence they might have once held, as old customs, traditions and family ties were shattered by capitalist industrialisation. In place of traditional customs, which even included a rest-day on Mondays (St Monday, as it was called), came the new brutal rigours, discipline and regime of factory exploitation. From the age of seven children in factories were forced to work twelve to fifteen hours a day, six days a week, at best in monotonous toil, at worst in a hell of human cruelty.
“The workman was summoned by the factory bell; his daily life was arranged by factory hours; he worked under an overseer imposing a method and precision for which the overseer had in turn to answer to some higher authority; if he broke one of a long series of minute regulations he was fined, and behind all this scheme of supervision and control there loomed the great impersonal system,” wrote the Hammonds.[7]
The intensification of labour that accompanied the introduction of large-scale machinery strained the nerves and sinews of the working class to breaking point. They existed solely to work for the masters and the production of surplus value. They had no other purpose in life, but to become an appendage of the machine. “The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness”, stated James Kay in 1832.[8]
Work had lost all meaning compared to the past. The workers were alienated from the labour they were forced to perform, as well as from society. “In England,” said Heinrich Heine, “the machines are like men and men like machines.” With this strange “new world”, bitter class hatred developed for the masters who mercilessly exploited them and their families.
This class antagonism was reflected in the tracts that circulated widely in radical circles. In one article we read the following dialogue:
People: What labour do you perform in the society?
Privileged Class: None: we are not made to labour.
People: How then have you acquired your wealth?
Privileged Class: By taking the pains to govern you.
People: To govern us! … We toil, and you enjoy; we produce and you dissipate; wealth flows from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men, class distinct from the people, form a nation apart and govern yourselves.[9]
The bourgeoisie regarded the workers as little more than pack animals. At the mercy of the owners, they were reduced to so many “hands” for the production of commodities. In the North East of England, in the coalmines of Lord Londonderry and Lord Durham, the miners laboured under conditions of virtual slavery. At the Felling coalmine near Gateshead in the North East of England, boys’ hours were from eighteen to twenty hours a day. They worked in inhuman conditions deep underground, in sweltering heat, from the age of seven until they were physically incapable of work, if they managed to survive at all. For the capitalists, labour power was plentiful and life was exceedingly cheap. The English working class became like the wretched refugees in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables who lived in the sewers of Paris.
“It is too high wages that many of the criminal habits, so often ascribed to the character of a collier, may in part be ascribed…” states the haughty Rev. Thomas Gisborne. “To economy, he is, in general, an utter stranger.” When he receives his wages, the collier and his family may be seen “indulging themselves in the use of animal food three times a day.”[10]
The inventions of Stephenson, Arkwright, Crompton, and Hargreaves revolutionised the methods of work, and transformed the factory system. “The age is running mad after inventions”, noted Dr. Johnson. “All the business of the world is to be done in a new way: men are to be hanged in a new way…”
In contrast to handlooms, the power-looms were massed together in huge buildings, and worked incessantly around the clock. This change was made possible by the introduction of gas lighting into the factories from 1805 onwards. Men, women and children were forced to adapt to the new rhythm of these machines. As stated, conditions in these factories – William Blake’s infamous Dark Satanic Mills – were abominable. The first volume of Capital by Karl Marx graphically describes these hellish establishments. In work, there were very few or no meaningful legal restrictions on the exploitation of millions of workingmen, women and children. Nightshift, double-shifts, weekend work, and 24-hour working, seven days a week, which increased absolute surplus value to the absolute limit, were introduced with a vengeance. The thirst for profits by the masters was insatiable. In winter, very few workers saw the light of day. Women workers frequently gave birth on the workplace floor and returned to their job within days. Hungry families, like beasts of burden, were forced to endure excessive hours simply to survive. Human material was used up rapidly. Workmen were called old at forty years.
“Talk of vassals! Talk of villains! Talk of serfs!” complained William Cobbett. “Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who, in the ‘enlightened’ north, are compelled to work fourteen hours a day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out at a window of the factory!”[11]
Exploited at work and robbed in the “tommy” shops, workers were also under constant fear of being evicted from factory housing. The tommy shops, or truck system, were stores established by employers where workers were forced to buy their goods at extortionate prices and inferior quality – hence the phrase “tommy-rot”. As a condition of employment men were compelled to spend much of their wages in these shops. Another variation was the employer-owned beer shops, where, on payday, wages were handed out on the stipulation that workers would spend a certain proportion on drink. In South Staffs, the practice of paying a set amount of wages in beer was known as “buildas”. These were deliberate measures not only to swindle workers, but also to increase the domination of the owners over the lives of their hands. Many workers were in debt to these tommy shops, and in the words of the American mining song, “owed their soul to the company store.” The colliers of the North East composed a special prayer:
“Unto thy care and protection, O most unmerciful master, I commit myself this day. Preserve me from all fines, cheatery, deductions, either by weight or measure, or from anything contrary to the justice of my labour, by they grace assistants, enable me to receive my pay without any subtraction, division or reduction from its true and rightful amount…”[12]
These were the harsh methods employed to extract relative and absolute surplus value from the unpaid labour of the working class.
“Machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour,” stated Marx, “but, in the service of capital, lengthens them; in itself it lightens labour, but, when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour; in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature, but in the hands of capital, makes men the slave of those forces; in itself it increases the wealth of producers, but, in the hands of capital, it makes them paupers.”
Once the capitalist purchases the labour power of the worker, he puts it to use, squeezing as much surplus labour-time as possible from him. But the length of the working day has certain physical limits. The total daily rotation of the earth takes twenty-four hours. The worker has to rest and eat to replenish his energies, which places a limit both physical and social on the working day. In the course of the Industrial Revolution anything up to eighteen hours a day was not uncommon, ruining the health of men and women, youths and infants alike. As Ferrand, a Member of Parliament, remarked in 1863: “It (the cotton trade) has existed for three generations of the English race, and… during that period it has destroyed nine generations of factory operatives.” The prolongation of the workers’ exploitation served to shorten his life as a whole. “Capital is dead labour, which, like a vampire, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks up,” wrote Marx.
The struggle between capital and labour over the length of the working day has existed since the beginning of capitalism. Eventually, as the resistance of the working class developed, restrictions were gradually introduced to regulate the hours of labour. The battles over the working day were the most heroic struggles of the workers’ movement, in Britain and internationally. Most notable were the ten and nine-hour day campaigns, followed in 1856 by the demand for the eight-hour day, championed later by the First and Second Internationals.
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Quoted in Hammonds, The Bleak Age, p.37, London, 1947
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Ibid, p.37
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Hammonds, The Town Labourer 1760-1832, p.7, London 1995
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Ibid, p.19
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Ibid, p.21
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Volney’s Ruins of Empire, Quoted in Thompson, op. cit, p.108
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Quoted in The Skilled Labourer, p.20, London 1995
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Quoted in David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, p.12, London 1970
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Quoted in Challinor and Ripley, The Miners’ Association, p.58, London 1968