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Monday 6 June 2011

How far did standards of living improve in the mid-Victorian period?

Improved standards of living during the mid-Victorian period owed more to greater stability in employment than a marked increase in wages.[1] The economy was characterised by high, relatively stable prices and high levels of consumption. This was, however, punctuated by years of inflation between 1853 and 1855 and 1870 and 1873. Food prices rose less than most others resulting in marked increases in the consumption of tea, sugar and other ‘luxuries’. In dietary terms, however, there was no significant advance in the standard of living until the falling prices of the 1880s.[2] Brewing apart, food remained a largely unrevolutionised industry in production and retailing until 1900. Real wages kept pace with food price rises, but rent proved increasingly expensive with particularly sharp increases in the mid-1860s. For some workers substantial and lasting advances in real wages did not occur until the late 1860s. The real wages of Black Country miners actually fell by a third during the mid 1850s and did not recover fully until 1869, after which there was a major advance carrying real wages some 30-40% above the 1850 level. Money earnings in cotton displayed a similar chronology. Advances in the 1850s were relatively modest but some spectacular advances occurred after 1865: between 1860 and 1874 weavers’ wages rose by 20% and spinners by between 30 and 50%. These figures suggest a widening of differentials.[3]

As a general rule in this period skilled workers earned twice those who were unskilled and were less vulnerable to unemployment. For skilled trade unionists in the engineering, metal and shipbuilding industries, there were only two occasions, in 1858 and 1868, when the unemployment rates reached double figures. For agricultural labourers, the mid-Victorian boom brought no real improvement in standards of living.[4] Ironically, improvement was delayed until the 1870s and 1880s, a period of falling profitability for farming generally. George Bartley’s study of The Seven Ages of a Village Pauper suggested that three out of four inhabitants of the typical village would require public relief at some stage in their lives.[5] In some industrial areas there was a similar lack of material advance. In the Black Country, only the skilled building trades enjoyed an increase in real wages despite peak production in local coal and iron industries. On Merseyside, wage rates for skilled and unskilled workers remained stable until eroded by particularly high food prices in the early 1870s. Women workers in sweated trades and casual employment probably gained least from the mid-Victorian period, though there is some evidence for an improvement in day rates for charring and washing in the 1870s.

Class 14

Few working-class families rose above economic insecurity and bouts of periodic poverty, despite the greater stability of employment and the belated improvement in earnings. At critical moments in the family cycle even the differential enjoyed by skilled workers proved inadequate to prevent considerable hardship. This was particularly severe at times of general distress when a downturn in the trade cycle or a harsh winter led to short-time working and unemployment. The can be seen particularly in the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-1865, a protracted period of distress and unemployment. [6] The ‘famine’ had its origins in the over-production of the late 1850s boom and the consequent saturation of markets at home and abroad. The Federal blockade of the Confederate ports after 1861 that resulted in an intermittent supply of raw cotton was not as many contemporaries believed the sole cause of the problem. During the winter of 1862-1863 49% of all operatives in the 28 poor law unions of the cotton district were unemployed with a further 35% on short-time. The depth and persistence of such mass unemployment was unprecedented: at Ashton the worst hit town where there was little industrial diversification, 60% of the operatives remained unemployed as late as November 1864, while at Salford the unemployment rate stood at 24%.

Unemployment on this scale had a disastrous impact on standards of living and posed considerable problems for the relief agencies, both Poor Law and philanthropic once workers had exhausted their savings. The Poor Law and the charities were unsuited to the needs of unemployed factory workers.[6] They had already come under scrutiny following events in London during the harsh winter of 1860-1861 when the temperature remained below freezing for a month causing severe privation for the casual work force. Across the East End, the Poor Law system simply broke down as the number of paupers increased from about 96,000 to over 135,000. To meet the emergency charitable funds had to be distributed without investigation, an exercise condemned in the investigative journalism of John Hollingshead as indiscriminate ‘stray charity’.[7] The Poor Law Board, already under investigation by the parliamentary select committee, was determined to prevent similar problems by insisting on the strict compliance with the Outdoor Relief Regulation Order. However, local Guardians refused to force the respectable unemployed to perform demeaning work tasks in the company of idle and dissolute paupers. They paid out small weekly allowances of between 1s and 2s per head on the assumption that this meagre non-pauperising sum would be augmented from other sources, short-time earnings, income from other members of the family or charitable aid.

After 1865, Lancashire operatives began to benefit from the mid-Victorian boom but others were less fortunate. Workers in the East End were hit hard by the crisis of 1866-1868, the result of an unfortunate conjunction of circumstances. The shipbuilding industry was dependent on government favour and foreign orders but it collapsed after the banking failures of 1866, a financial panic that brought an end to the boom in railway and building construction. The winter of 1866-1867 was extremely harsh and was accompanied by high food prices and the return of cholera. This added to the hardship and caused a breakdown of the seasonal economic equilibrium. The overall effect was to augment the casual labour problem.


[1] Church, Roy, The Great Victorian Boom, 1850-1873, (Macmillan), 1975 provides a brief analyses of this critical period.

[2] See, Clayton, Paul and Rowbotham, Judith, ‘An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part one: public health lessons from the mid-Victorian working class diet’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 101, (6), (2008), pp. 282-289, ‘An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part two: realities of the mid-Victorian diet’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 101, (7), (2008), pp. 350-357 and ‘An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part three: Victorian consumption patterns and their health benefits’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 101, (9), (2008), pp. 454-462.

[3] Hunt, E.H., Regional wage variations in Britain, 1850-1914, (Oxford University Press), 1973.

[4] See, for example, Williams, L.J. and Jones, D., ‘The wages of agricultural labourers in the nineteenth century: the evidence from Glamorgan’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, Vol. 29, (1982), pp. 749-761 and Horn, Pamela, ‘Northamptonshire agricultural labourers in the 1870s’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, Vol. 4, (1971), pp. 371-377.

[5] Bartley, George, The Seven Ages of a Village Pauper, (Chapman and Hall), 1874, pp. 2-5.

[6] Tanner, Andrea, ‘The casual poor and the City of London Poor Law Union, 1837-1869’, Historical Journal, Vol. 42, (1999), pp. 183-206.

[7] Hollingshead, John, Ragged London in 1861, (Smith, Elder & Co.), 1861, p. 244.

Thursday 2 June 2011

Working in factories, 1850-1875

Craft-like control persisted in amended form in the mid-Victorian factory, a privilege enjoyed by a new aristocracy of labour. John Foster argues that these new aristocrats derived their status from a change in employer strategy. Skilled workers were incorporated in a new authority structure designed to strengthen discipline and increase productivity. The introduction of the ‘piece master’ system in the engineering factories brought the skilled engineer into active involvement in the work of management as group leader and technical supervisor. In cotton factories, spinners retained skilled status as a crucial group after the introduction of the self-acting mule. These male workers forced an intensification of labour from juvenile and female time-paid assistants, an effective adaptation of traditional gender and family roles to the factory environment.[1]

There is some disagreement over the extent to which this position was secure. Gareth Stedman Jones insists that distinctions of status were purely formal and real control had passed to the employers with the restructuring of industry on ‘modern’ lines.[2] Skilled workers became defensive and collaborationist in approach seeking to preserve their status and differentials through the goodwill of their employers. However, in the absence of technical expertise, employers were often forced to concede considerable autonomy to skilled workers, though they generally derived some benefit from the arrangement. Allowing spinners to appoint their own piecers relieved employers of direct responsibility for labour recruitment and discipline. Apprenticeship operated in a similar way, providing employers with a skilled workforce trained at worker expense.

This pragmatic compromise between skilled workers and employers was usually negotiated locally and informally. Capital made production possible, but the actual details of production, workers insisted was the responsibility of labour.

Class 12

Domestic servants, c1900

Where no independence was allowed, workers were often reluctant to enter employment whatever the material advantages it offered. Domestic service, a comparatively well-paid occupation largely unaffected by cyclical unemployment, was shunned by working-class girls in factory districts and urban areas. Lancashire marriage registers show that servants tended to marry husbands from a lower social-economic status than their peers, an indication of the social stigma attached to service in an area where alternative female employment was readily available.[3] The middle-classes of the factory districts had to depend on rural migrants for domestic servants and some obtained cheap live-in servants from the local workhouse.[4]

Factory employment offered women some independence but they seldom held the most well-paid and responsible jobs especially supervisory tasks that carried skilled status and workplace authority. These male preserves were jealously protected by ‘closed’ trade unionism. There was some technical and physical basis that denied women access to the well-paid spinning sector. Women were physically quite capable of operating self-acting mules but they often lacked the necessary technical skills and experience.[5] They had been excluded from the spinning factories in the 1810s and 1820s when the use of ‘doubled’ mules put a premium on male physical strength. Without recent practical experience, women became the victims of discontinuity in the transmission of craft skills and knowledge from one generation to another. The cult of domesticity that sought to limit female paid employment to the brief period before marriage further hindered the acquisition of workplace skills. In some parts of Lancashire, married women went out to work in substantial numbers, but not in the southern spinning belt where the well-paid spinners and engineers feared a loss of status should their wives return to paid employment.

Unable to restrict labour supply through closed organisations, the weaver, male and female, united in ‘open’ trade unionism, a development resisted by paternal employers. The Preston lock-out of 1853-1854 brought confrontation between employers and workers in an attempt to reverse the 10% wage cuts of 1847.[6] The cotton workers were starved back to work after twenty-eight weeks, a decisive defeat that marked a turning-point in strategy as union leaders cultivated an image of moderation and respectability, a public relations exercise to secure recognition from reluctant employers.

Class 13

Gustave Dore: Loading Cargo at Thames Warehouse,

Blackburn employers granted union recognition and negotiating rights on the strict understanding that union officials would ‘police’ the agreement.[7] Though recognition was elsewhere delayed until the 1880s, the Blackburn weavers pointed the way forward towards modern collective bargaining. In already unionised industries, similar conciliation and arbitration schemes enjoyed considerable success in the late 1860s and early 1870s.[8] They were first introduced in the Nottingham hosiery industry and were of mutual benefit to unions and employers, an institutional expression of the mid-Victorian compromise in labour relations.[9] New sliding wage-scales were welcomed in the coal and iron trades where wage disputes had broken many unions: conciliation boards now automatically adjusted wages to product price.[10] Some of the other schemes clearly favoured employers: in the building trade, for example, employers took advantage of mutual negotiation to reassert and redefine managerial powers thereby curtailing the autonomous regulation of the trade. [11]


[1] Ibid, Foster. J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: early industrial capitalism in three English towns, pp. 224-238.

[2] Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society, (Oxford University Press), 1971, pp. 19-51. See his critique of Foster ‘Class Struggole and the Industrial Revolution’, in his ibid, Languages of Class, pp. 25-74.

[3] Anderson, Michael, ‘What can the mid-Victorian censuses tell us about variations in married women’s employment?’, Local Population Studies, Vol. 62, (1999), pp. 9-30.

[4] Horn, Pamela, The rise and fall of the Victorian servant, rev. ed., (Sutton Publishing), 2004, Higgs, Edward, ‘The tabulation of occupations in the nineteenth-century census with special reference to domestic servants’, in ibid, Goose, Nigel, (ed.), Women’s work in industrial England: regional and local perspectives, pp. 250-259, Drake, Michael, ‘Aspects of domestic service in Great Britain and Ireland, 1841-1911’, Family & Community History, Vol. 2, (1999), pp. 119-128 and Jamieson, Lynn, ‘Rural and urban women in domestic service’, in Gordon, Eleanor and Breitenbach, Esther, (eds.), The world is ill-divided: women’s work in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, (John Donald), 1990, pp. 136-157.

[5] Freifeld, Mary, ‘Technological change and the “self-acting” mule: a study of skill and the sexual division of labour’, Social History, Vol. 11, (1986), pp. 319-343.

[6] See, Dutton, H.I. and King, J.E., ‘Ten Per-Cent and no surrender’: the Preston strike, 1853-1854, (Cambridge University Press), 1981.

[7] Beattie, Derek, Blackburn: the development of a Lancashire cotton town, (Ryburn), 1992 provides the context but see also, Daumas, Jean-Claude et al, ‘Trade unionism in textiles towns and areas’, in Robert, Jean-Louis, Prost, Antoine and Wrigley, Chris, (eds.), The emergence of European trade unionism, (Ashgate), 2004, pp. 56-57, 64-65 and 70-73.

[8] The advent of arbitration is frequently understood only as evidence of a mid-Victorian social reconciliation that was ultimately based upon progress and the advance of capitalism. However, such a view is seriously misleading. A wide variety of trades, some as distinctive as handloom weaving, carpentry, printing, and coal mining, elaborated or participated in forms of industrial arbitration before this period while still others eagerly sought to adopt it. Different formats for collective arbitration developed during the early nineteenth century, either across a trade or among work groups, at the same time that more traditional forms of individual arbitration were still being actively pursued within the context of labour relations.

[9] Church, R.A., ‘Technological change and the Hosiery Board of Conciliation and Arbitration, 1860-84’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic & Social Research, Vol. 15, (1963), pp. 52-60.

[10] Loftus, Donna, ‘Industrial conciliation, class co-operation and the urban landscape in mid-Victorian England’, in Morris, R.J. and Trainor, R.H., (eds.), Urban governance: Britain and beyond since 1750, (Ashgate), 2000, pp. 182-197 and Porter, J.H., ‘Wage bargaining under conciliation agreements, 1860-1914’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., Vol. 23, (1970), pp. 460-475.

[11] Price, Richard, Masters, Unions, and Men: Work control in building and the rise of labour, 1830-1914, (Cambridge University Press), 1980, pp. 94-197 looks at the development of industrial relations from the late 1860s.