Factory Reform: The problem and the 1833 Act

The industrial revolution cannot be viewed as a simple transition from an agricultural and domestic economy to one dominated by factory regimes but rather as a restructuring of economy and society equivalent to that of the 1920s and 1930s and which entailed the decline of old industries as much as the growth of new ones. For individual workers this meant the abandoning of old skills as well as the development of new ones, while increasing regional specialisation of industry created differing impacts from one locality to another. Although contemporaries placed considerable emphasis on the development of large-scale factory production, domestic production and small workshops dominated manufacture until the mid-nineteenth century [1].

The Factory problem

Technological change and the development of new work conditions had gained sufficient strength by the 1830's to necessitate a serious and sustained effort by the state to regulate their application. Both employers and workers believed themselves locked into a system of attitudes, actions and responses. Employers regarded their position as defined by the laws of a competitive market of which they had no control. Insensitive, repressive and largely indifferent to the conditions of their workers, many were motivated by a belief in profit, a belief buttressed by their subversion of religious piety.  Endemic drunkenness among the workforce, as escape from these pressures, seemed to confirm employer belief that the workforce could and would not respond to better treatment.  These attitudes percolated down into the workforce itself and there is ample evidence of the exploitation of and cruelty towards workers, especially children, by fellow workers.  Masters and workers had been related to each other by simple contract and face-to-face contact  but industrialisation had created a new set of relationship patterns. Workers had become 'operatives', human extensions of new technology, 'dehumanised' and 'dehumanising'.

By no means were all factories similar and there was a wide range of work experience within any one factory unit. Many late eighteenth and early nineteenth century textile mills were rural and recruited labour from the local domestic industries. Families often moved together to a new factory so that all members of a household could gain employment. A weaver used to the workings of a small weaving shed would be familiar with many aspects of the work environment -- if not the scale -- within a factory. Boys would probably be apprenticed to weaving, power spinning or in the machine shop; girls might work in the carding room before moving to other low-technology jobs within the mill. Generally, as new technology was adopted, men took control of the new processes in spinning and weaving while women were left with the older machines and more poorly paid jobs.

Increasingly, as factories moved to steam-powered sites, the labour force moved from rural mills to towns. The new large urban mills offered greater opportunities and a wider range of employment in towns was some insurance against recession and unemployment. But factory work altered labourers' lives in a variety of ways. Most obvious was the loss of freedom and independence, especially for men who had previously been their own masters. Factory workers could no longer intersperse industrial work with agricultural labour or other activities. Many factory masters introduced rigid and draconian regulations to keep the workforce at their machines for long hours and to break their irregular work patterns.

The Ten Hour Movement and the 1833 Factory Act

The emergence of the short-time or Ten Hour movement after 1830 has its origins in the late eighteenth century when concerns about the deteriorating conditions in child employment initially developed. Early legislative efforts, however, depended largely on benevolent individuals. Sir Robert Peel senior was behind both the 1802 and 1819 Acts but he received considerable popular support from Lancashire cotton spinners, in liaison with at least three distinguishable groups:

1. Old labour aristocracies such as the east Midland framework-knitters, Yorkshire woollen croppers and the ubiquitous handloom weavers saw the factories with their technological innovations as threats to both their social status and their incomes.
2. Some pioneers of social medicine drew attention to the pernicious effects of factory labour on health.
3. Northern clergymen played important roles in successive factory campaigns. Both clergymen of the old High Church tradition and those tinged with new Evangelical enthusiasm took part. Oastler wrote in 1836 that 'his only object was to establish the principles of Christianity, the principles of the Church of England in these densely people districts....the Factory question was indeed .... a Soul-question -- it was Souls against pounds, shillings and pence....'

The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802 was extended in 1819 from pauper apprentices to cover all cotton factory children restricting them to twelve hours daily labour.  A further burst of agitation in the 1820s by the cotton spinners led only to John Cam Hobhouse obtaining minor improvements to existing legislation in 1825 and 1829, as the Lancashire cotton operatives became disillusioned with the lack of enforcement of existing law and demoralised by the collapse of strikes against wage reductions. It is, however, clear that the Factory Movement began in Lancashire rather than with the better known Yorkshire agitation begin by Richard Oastler in 1830 and that it was the militant Cotton Spinner's Union that first created the rudiments of a popular organisation and gained support from the radical press.

The early industrial reformers had little or no organisation. The campaign between 1825 and 1829 had achieved little but it was at this stage that Richard Oastler, a Tory land steward from Huddersfield, burst upon the scene when he sent his celebrated letter to the Leeds Mercury on 'Yorkshire Slavery'. Most of the founders of the Ten Hour Movement were Tories and Anglicans from northern industrial towns, committed to a romantic and paternalistic model of society which, if necessary, might be promoted through state intervention. They were as deeply hostile to parliamentary reform and workers' organisations as they were to Dissenters, orthodox political economy and the newly rich manufacturers. Many of those who financed the movement, like Michael Sadler, were themselves well established factory owners and members of the Tory urban elite facing a challenge locally from Dissenting entrepreneurs.  It is possible to identify four principal pressure groups in favour of factory reform[2]:

1. There were the mill operatives themselves and their supporters, of whom Richard Oastler was the most prominent. Their demands for a 10-hour working day used to debate over child labour both as a way of exposing the hardship of the children and as a way of seeking a limitation on the working day of adults. In the laissez-faire atmosphere of the period, any direct attempt to achieve State regulation of the hours of adult males was doomed to failure. But because juveniles aged 10-13 were an essential part of the workforce it was hoped that restrictions on their hours would percolate through to the rest. The reformers did not opposed child labour as such but were merely against unregulated labour. They judged legislation not by its direct effect on child labour but by its indirect effect on the position of adult workers.
2. Secondly, there were the Tory humanitarians among whom Lord Ashley was most active. They were concerned about the moral and religious deprivation of young workers and the ineffectiveness of existing protective legislation.
3. Romantics like William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and William Cobbett looked back to a pre-industrial 'golden age' and blamed the industrial revolution for alienating workers from the land and forcing children to play a major role in the workforce.
4. A fourth body of reformers came to the fore in the debates over amendments to the factory legislation that occurred in the 1840s. They included active supporters of laissez-faire principles, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, but who argued for regulation on economic and moral grounds. Child labour, they suggested, damaged the health of youngsters who were then later in life not able to achieve their potential productivity. Restricting child labour was a rational means of promoting investment in the country's future workforce.

During the winter of 1830-1 there was a furious controversy in the Yorkshire press and rival views became polarised. Oastler acted as the pivot and central organiser. He possessed considerable oratorical skills and journalistic gifts; he controlled the central funds and he imparted a crusading verve to the movement. The question of child exploitation was a 'moral' one and he became head of a network of 'short-time committees' that demanded the ten-hour day. Pamphlets, petitions and tracts were issued by the thousand, as 'missionaries' were despatched throughout the textile areas of England and Scotland to highlight the horrors of child labour in the mills. Thousands of workers were willing to ignore the hostility of the Factory Movement's leaders to their political aspirations (1830-32 also saw the agitation for parliamentary reform) and put aside their hostility to the Church of England and turned a blind eye to the darker side of paternalism with its insistence on a harsh penal code, savage game laws and low wages and living conditions for the rural labourer and support the Movement[3].

In the event, Oastler and his movement had little success with the Whig government and Peel and the Conservative opposition kept the agitation at arm's length. When Michael Sadler moved a Ten Hour Bill in March 1832 he was obliged to accept the appointment of a Select Committee to take evidence from the operatives. Meanwhile the factory masters organised a vigorous lobby to resist further legislation, arguing that shorter working hours could result only in a victory for foreign competition, leading to lower wages and unemployment. The dissolution of Parliament in 1832 led to Sadler's defeat at Leeds in December and to his replacement, at the suggestion of the Reverend George Bull, by the young Evangelical Anthony Ashley Cooper as parliamentary spokesman for the Ten Hour campaign. The publication of Select Committee report in January 1833 brought the stark realities of conditions and led Anthony Ashley Cooper to introduce a factory bill. Criticisms, largely justified, that the 1833 report was somewhat one-sided  as it had only heard the workers' views resulted, in April 1833, in the government setting up a Royal Commission to investigate the employment of children in factories.  The Whigs had effectively taken reform out of the hands of the Ten  Hour Movement and became a government sponsored issue.

Why did the Whigs take control of factory reform? Extra-parliamentary agitation occurred not only in the context of conflict between capital and labour but of other economic and social rivalries.  Social, ideological, religious and political rivalry  between industrialists and neighbouring agriculturalists was exploited by operatives who turned for protection  from millowners to county JPs. The result was an Anglican Tory-Radical alliance on the factory question, grounded in notions of paternalism rather than the tenets of political economy and less inhibited in their support of the industrial poor than Whig Radicals. This alliance was weakened by the reform agitation of 1831-2  but remained important till the late 1830s and the onset of Chartism.  Parallel to this Tory paternalist approach was one supported  by some Whig radicals and a  group  of  philanthropic millowners in which nonconformist belief was a unifying  force.

The agitation in Yorkshire had already convinced the Whigs that a factory  act was inevitable. Determining the composition of the Royal Commission ensured that the range of options available  to them would be wider and less unpalatable to manufacturers than a Ten Hours bill. The Royal Commission Report was placed in the hands of Edwin Chadwick.  The report, produced in forty-five days, looked at factory  conditions far less emotionally than the Select Committee.  Its conclusions were not based on humanitarian grounds, the position adopted by the Ten Hour Movement,  but on the question of efficiency. Chadwick argued that human suffering and degradation led to less efficient production and that a good working environment would lead to health, happiness and an efficient workforce. Its recommendations were firmly placed on the question of children's employment and it was consequently criticised  for failing to deal with the issue of  adult  labour.

The Factory Act 1833 that implemented its recommendations restricted:

• children aged 9-14 [by stages] to 8 hours actual labour in all textile mills [except lace-manufacture], with 2 hours at school
• young persons under 18 to 12 hours
• four Factory Inspectors were appointed to enforce the Act

It was confined to children's work and applied only to textile mills but it did establish a small inspectorate to enforce the legislation. Inspection was the prime condition of effectiveness  making enforcement possible and, perhaps in the early stages  more importantly, providing a continuous stream of information about the conditions of workers in a range of industries.  Despite the intense criticism of the 1833 Act and the problems encountered in enforcement, it would be unfair to underestimate the Whig achievement in the area of factory reform. The debates in 1832 and 1833 led to the issue being publicly aired as never  before. The extra-parliamentary movement may have been frustrated by what had been achieved and the 1833 Act may have not been based on any real principles, but it did mark an important stage in the emergence  of effective factory legislation and underpinned the developments of the 1840s.

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[1] The  shortest introduction to factory reform is U. Henriques The  Early Factory Acts and their Enforcement, The Historical Association, 1971. J.T. Ward  The Factory Movement 1830-1850, Macmillan, 1962 is the most detailed study though it has, in part, been superseded by R. Gray The Factory Question and Industrial England 1830-1860, CUP, 1996.  C. Driver Tory Radical: A Life of Richard Oastler, OUP, 1946 and A. Weaver John Fielden and the Politics of Popular Radicalism 1832-1847, OUP, 1987 are useful biographies which go beyond factory reform.  Geoffrey  Finlayson The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury 1801-1885, Methuen, 1981 is a detailed biography  which contains much on factory conditions. Clark Nardinelli Child Labour and the Industrial Revolution, Indiana University Press, 1990 examines the most contentious of the questions surrounding factory conditions. J.T. Ward (ed.) The Factory System, two volumes, David & Charles, 1970 contains primary material.

[2] P. Horn Children's Work and Welfare 1780-1880s, Macmillan 1994 and Eric Hopkins Childhood Transformed. Working Class Children in Nineteenth Century England, Manchester University Press, 1994 are excellent on child labour. They need to be considered in relation to the contested study by Clark Nardinelli Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution, Bloomington, 1990.

[3] For a short summary of the issues see J.T. Ward 'The Factory Movement' in J.T.Ward (ed.) Popular Movements 1830-1850, Macmillan, 1970, pp.78-94.

Work in Victorian Britain

 

The advent of mechanisation and the spread of more specialist forms of farming helped changed both the nature of work and household structures. By 1800 the earning of wages became increasingly important for the survival of working class families. The process of manufacture moved outside the home though the transition had never been total. Earlier forms of domestic production, in clothing, toy-making and now even computer services, are still visible today. Employment was as diverse and the locations for that employment.  It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of work in working class life. Work helped determine two fundamental elements of working class existence: the ways in which workers spent many, if not most, of their waking hours; and the amounts of money they had to their disposal. Work also determined most other aspects of working class life: the standards of living they enjoyed; standards of health; the type of housing they lived in; the nature of the family and neighbourhood life; the ways in which leisure time was spent and the social, political and other values that were adopted[1].

A transition in work

The swing away from domestic forms of production can be roughly explained by three developments: the growth of population, the extension of enclosure with a consequent reduction in demand for rural labour and the advent of mechanised production boosting productivity and fostering the growth of new towns and cities. The result was a change in the structure of the labour market.

1. The enclosure of common lands had a profound impact on the livelihood of rural workers and their families. It led to a contraction of resources for many workers and a greater reliance on earnings. The spread of enclosure pushed rural labourers on to the labour market in a search for work that was made the more frenzied by falling farm prices and wages between 1815-35, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic war. The result of the growth in labour supply and agricultural depression was the collapse of farm service in the south and east of the country. It had been customary for farm workers to be hired for a year, to enter service in another household and to live with another family, receiving food, clothes, board and a small annual wage in return for work, only living out when they wished to marry.
2. Added to this was the development of factory-based textile production that had a profound effect on the other source of earned income for rural workers: outwork. Different parts of the country were associated with different types of product: lace-making round Nottingham, stocking-knitting in Leicester, spinning and weaving of cotton and wool in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The appearance of the mills damaged the status and security of some very skilled branches of outwork. Many rural households found themselves thrown into poverty as such work became increasingly scarce and available only at pitifully low rates of pay. The fate of the handloom weavers, stocking-frame knitters and silk weavers in the 1830s and 1840s, all reflected the impact of technological change on the distribution of work[2]. Textiles were not the only industry to experience such structural changes. In both town and country, mechanisation had a marked impact on a wide variety of employments and the position of some skilled workers was undermined while the demand for new skills grew.

Urban workers had always been more reliant on the cash nexus [wages] than had their rural counterparts. Pre-industrial towns had tended to be commercial centres [markets] rather than centres of manufacture and employment there had been more specialised than elsewhere. Small units of production in which worked skilled artisans, providing local services and goods rather than commodities for export operated largely on a domestic basis through frequently under the control of the craft guilds. These stipulated modes of recruitment and training and the quality of products and founded the vocabulary of the rights of 'legal' or 'society' men who worked in 'legal' shops that permeated craft unions in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century saw the position of the skilled urban artisan increasingly under threat from semi-skilled and less well-trained workers.

The Elizabethan Statute of Artificers [or Apprentices] 1563 provided a legal framework of craft regulation but had fallen into abeyance long before its apprenticeship clauses were repealed in 1811. Under the old system of apprenticeship, the pupil was formally indentured at 14-16 and joined a master's house for a period traditionally specified as seven years before being recognised as a journeyman, qualified to practice the trade. It was also usual for journeymen to 'live in', entitled to bed, board and wages in return to work, only moving out on marriage. Often journeymen tramped the country in search of work in part to extend their experience and knowledge of their trade but also to escape increasingly uncertain employment prospects in their immediate locality[3]. To become a master the journeyman had to produce his 'masterpiece', demonstrating his mastery of the skills of the specific trade. From the early nineteenth century fewer apprentices were completing their indentures and journeymen's wages were falling, both signs that employers were no longer bothered about hiring only men who had served their time. This led to a dilution in the labour force and an increased blurring of the boundaries between 'society' and 'non-society' men, a situation made worse by the mechanisation of production that required fewer skills than handwork.

The nature of training for skilled work changed; apprenticeships were shortened and concentrated on specific skills rather than on an extensive understanding of all aspects of production. Lads worked alongside journeymen rather than being attached to a master's household with various adverse results

• The new system bore heavily on apprentices' families, who frequently still paid for indentures while the apprentice lived at home and could expect little or no wages for his efforts until his time was served.
• The old stipulated ratios between journeymen and boys were increasingly ignored and apprentices became a cheap alternative for adult labour thus depressing the adult labour market.
• Such developments were resented by the journeymen expected to train recruits, souring relations and often making training uncooperative.
• The fate of boys was instant dismissal as soon as they were old enough to command an adult rate

Such practices were more common during depressed times. This abuse of apprenticeship provoked sporadic industrial disputes as skilled workers tried to protect their position and to prevent their trade from being flooded [or diluted] by excess labour.

At the same time, new mechanised processes facilitated cheaper forms of bulk production. As a result the market became saturated with semi-skilled workers, who knew something of the trade but did not possess the full range of skills expected of the qualified man. Henry Mayhew[4], chronicling London's labour market in the 1840s, contrasted the position of the 'honourable' tradesman with the 'slop' workers whose wages and product undercut old recognised prices and reduced job security long assumed to belong to the man with an established craft.

The most obvious impact of industrialisation was found in the more intense and strictly disciplined nature of work in those industries transformed by the new technology: textiles, coal-mining, metal-processing and engineering. Early mills were manned by convict and pauper labour [mostly children] because the regularity of work was alien to the adult population used to a greater degree of autonomy in conducting their working lives. The higher wages available in factories provided insufficient compensation for this loss of 'freedom'. Impoverished handloom weavers would send their daughters to work on the power looms but resisted the prospect themselves. Hours in the early factories were probably no longer than those in the domestic trades but what made it far less acceptable was the mind-crushing tedium of the work involved, the loss of public feast days and holidays and, for middle class commentators, the physical consequences of long hours and the appalling conditions in the factory towns.

The growth of labour market conditions in the nineteenth century makes it quite impossible to make clear distinctions between the employed, the unemployed, the underemployed, the self-employed and the economically inactive. Subcontracting was rife, notably in the clothing trade where middlemen 'sweated' domestic women to earn a profit. The 'slop' end of the fashion and furnishing trades competed frantically for such orders as were available at almost any price. Casualism became more visible towards 1900 as cities spread in size. Short-term engagements and casual employment were particularly associated with the docks and the construction industries.

Diversities

Variations in standards of living, wages and working conditions were at least as great in towns as in the countryside. Average urban wages were certainly higher but so were rent and food so that urban dwellers were not necessarily better off than their rural counterparts. Women's wages were invariably well below those of men and families dependent on a sole female wage earner were among the poorest of the urban population[5]. Jobs guaranteeing a regular weekly wage, with little cyclical unemployment, were rare, highly prized and jealously guarded. Cyclical unemployment was the norm for most workers and was a major factor in the urban labour market and in turn had a significant impact on standards of living, quality of housing and the residential areas to which people could aspire.

The urban population was organised in hierarchical terms, largely in terms of levels of skill[6]:

At the base of the urban labour hierarchy were the genuinely casual workers who formed a residual labour force that was often entered on initial migration to a town when no other work was available. Such work as hawking and street trading, scavenging, street entertainment, prostitution and some casual labouring and domestic work fell into this category. Below these were begging and poor relief.

1. Casual trades were largely concentrated in large cities, especially London, and the number fluctuated considerably.
2. Very low and irregular incomes condemned families dependent on casual work to rooms in slums, but in London they would emerge from the rookeries of St Giles to sell their goods in the cities or in middle class residential districts.
3. Large numbers of street traders in prosperous middle class areas caused antagonism and sometimes fear so that the police were often called to control street trading activities helping to reinforce middle class stereotypes of a dirty and dangerous sub-class that should be confined to the slums.

Above the casual street traders was a whole range of unskilled mainly casual occupations in which workers were hired for a few hours at a time and could be laid off for long periods without notice. These included labourers in the building trades, in sugar houses and other factories, carters, shipyard workers and especially dockers. All towns had such workers but they were especially important in port cities such as London, Liverpool, Bristol and London and in industries like coal mining or clothing that had a partly seasonal market.

1. Precise numbers involved in casual work are impossible to determine. In Liverpool over 22 per cent of the employed population in 1871 were general, dock or warehouse labourers, many casual. When in work Liverpool dockers earned high wages, ranging from 27s for quay porters to 42s for a stevedore but few maintained such earnings for any length of time and in a bad week many earned only a few shillings.
2. Conditions changed little between 1850 and 1914. They were frequently in debt and regularly pawned clothes. In good times they would eat meat or fish but normally their diet consisted largely of bread, margarine and tea. Illness or industrial injury [common in dangerous dockland working conditions] would have led to financial disaster.
3. Casual workers needed to live close to their workplace since employment was often allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Liverpool dockers mostly lived close to the docks and this limited their housing choice to old, insanitary but affordable accommodation.

Factories provided more regular employment after 1830 as did public services as railway companies and many commercial organisations. Skilled manual labour was relatively privileged: a Lancashire skilled cotton spinner earned 27-30s per week in 1835 and a skilled iron foundry worker up to 40s. In coal mining skilled underground workers earned good wages and in key jobs such as shot-firing, putting, hewing and shaft sinking usually had regular employment although this often meant moving from colliery to colliery and between coalfields.

1. Textile towns like Manchester, Bradford and Leeds and metal and engineering centres such as Sheffield and the Black Country tended to suffer less from poverty from irregular earnings than cities like Glasgow, Cardiff, Liverpool or London.
2. Skilled engineering trades were amongst the earliest to unionise, along with artisans and craftsmen, particularly in London and northern industrial towns[7]. They protected their interests jealously and, despite some dilution in their position, they commanded higher wages and regular employment. This conferred many advantages: renting a decent terrace house in the suburbs thus avoiding the squalor of Victorian slums but with a long walk to work or the use of the 'workmen's trains'.

After 1850 the number of workings in white-collar occupations increased and a lower middle class emerged among the petit-bourgeoisie of small shopkeepers and white-collar salaried occupations of clerks, commercial travellers and schoolteachers. White-collar employment increased from 2.5 per cent of the employed population in 1851 to 5.5 per cent by 1891.

1. Such employment was found in all towns but especially in commercial and financial centres such as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol.  White-collar workers were a diverse group: insurance and bank clerks commanded the highest incomes of over £3 per week and the greatest prestige; in contrast railway clerks often earned little more than skilled manual workers but had greater security of employment. White-collar employees certainly perceived themselves, and were perceived by others, to be in a secure and privileged position.
2. White-collar workers could afford not only a decent terrace house, but by 1880 could commute over longer distances by public transport, especially after 1880 when the suburban railway and tram network were established.
3. Despite long hours of work for clerks and shopkeepers, their occupations were less hazardous than most factory employment and, with more regular incomes and better housing, they were more likely to enjoy good health than most industrial workers.

Women were employed in all categories of work and in textile districts female factory employment was very significant. Single women often entered domestic service but married women who needed to supplement a low male wage or widows supporting several children, were severely limited in choice. Away from the textile districts most found work as domestic cleaners, laundry workers, in sewing, dressmaking, boot and shoemaking and other trades carried on either in the home of small workshops. Wages were always low with piece rates producing incomes ranging from 5s. to 20s per week.

• The proportion of women in industry declined from the 1890s, except in unskilled and some semi-skilled work but their role in higher professional, shop and clerical work increased.
• The telephone and typewriter revolution from the 1880s saw the army of male clerks replaced by female office workers.
• The revolution in retailing provided additional employment for women and by 1911 one-third of all shop assistants were female.

The number of women in commerce and many industries increased between 1891 and 1951, but the proportion of women in paid employment hardly changed and remained around 35 per cent. But the characteristics of female employment changed substantially. Before 1914 domestic service was still the overwhelming source of employment for women and girls, though the clothing and textile trades employed more women than men. Women, however, were also beginning to infiltrate the lower grade clerical and service occupations. In 1901 13 per cent of clerks were women, but by 1911 this had risen to 21 per cent, though the higher clerical grades remained almost exclusively male. Nevertheless the employment status of women remained inferior to that of men: in 1911 52.1 per cent of women occupied semi-skilled or unskilled jobs compared to 40.6 per cent of men.

The major restructuring of the British economy brought significant changes in the working conditions and operation of the labour market after 1890. Women played an increasingly important role in the workforce, new technology and machinery created different jobs demanding new and often less individually crafted skills. Older workers, particularly in heavy industries, often found it difficult to adjust to new work practices. The years 1890-1914 were a transitional period that retained many of the characteristics of the nineteenth century economy whilst signs of the new work patterns of the inter-war years began to develop.

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[1] John Benson The Working Class in Britain 1850-1939, Longman, 1989, pp.9-38 is the best introduction to this issue. Patrick Joyce (ed.) The historical meanings of work, CUP, 1987 is an excellent collection containing a seminal introduction by the editor. Patrick Joyce 'Work' in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: volume 2 People and their environment, CUP, 1990, pp.131-194 is a short summary of recent research.

[2] See Duncan Bythell The Handloom Weavers, CUP, 1969 and The Sweated Trades, Batsford, 1978 for a detailed discussion of this issue.

[3] See E.J. Hobsbawm 'The tramping artisan' in his Labouring Men, Weidenfeld, 1964, pp.34-63 and E.P.Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, 1963, Penguin, 1968 and 'Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism', first published in Past and Present, no.38 [December 1967], reprinted in Customs in Common, Merlin, 1991, pp.352-403.

[4] Henry Mayhew London Labour and the London Poor, 1861-2, 4 volumes, New York, 1968 and E.P.Thompson and E. Yeo (eds.) The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849-50, Penguin, 1971 provide evidence for the 1850s and should be used in conjunction with the six volumes of his The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor, 1849-50, Caliban, 1980. Anne Humpherys Travels into the Poor Man's Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew, University of Georgia Press, 1977 is the most recent biography.

[5] On this see Elizabeth Roberts Women's Work 1840-1940, Macmillan, 1988.

[6] For a classification of the labouring population up to 1850 see Richard Brown Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850, Routledge, 1991, pp.323-328.

[7] On the emergence of trade unions see Henry Pelling A history of Trade Unionism, Penguin, 5^th., ed., 1990, Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (eds.) Trade Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years, Longman, 2^nd., ed., 1991 and the more specific John Rule (ed.) British Trade Unions 1750-1850: The Formative Years, Longman, 1988.