The working-classes: Living standards 1830-1875

The subject of the working-classes in the nineteenth century is an enormous one and all that is offered here is a stock-taking exercise to assess the significance of some of the most important recent historiography.[1] These issues will be considered in three chronological periods -- 1830-50, 1850-75 and 1875-1914 -- corresponding to the main economic divisions of the period.

Discussion of living standards, especially the so-called ‘standard of living debate’ in the period before 1850, is bedevilled by a range of methodological problems. What is the meaning of ‘living standards’? Is it a qualitative or quantitative concept? What evidence can be used? Statistics, one of the main fuels in the debate, obscure much of the diversity and harshness of working-class experience. Should historians be using ‘actual’ wages or ‘real’ wages as the basis for their arguments? [2] These issues have given rise to a debate between pessimists and optimists over, not simply whether living standards fell or rose, but over the whole revolutionary experience. It is in this context that the discussion of living standards across the period must be grounded.

1830-1850

There was a decline in real wages starting in the 1750s that persisted through the price peak of 1812-13 and the distress of the post-war years. In London this downward trend was not reversed until the 1820s, though it was not until the 1840s that the levels of the 1740s were regained and exceeded. The national index compiled by Lindert and Williamson also situates the upturn in the 1820s but their figures are far more optimistic suggesting that real wages nearly doubled between 1820 and 1850. By 1830 therefore the worst excesses of the pessimist scenario seem to have been at an end and real wages for the bulk of the working population seem to have been rising, though whether Lindert and Williamson’s optimistic assessment is entirely valid is questionable.[3]

So what did people earn? In the 1760s most high-wage counties were in the south east. By 1850 they were in the Midlands and north: Lancashire wages stood more than a third above the level in Buckinghamshire, a differential that continued until the end of the century. This North-South divide and wage payments must be assessed in the context of family income and the higher cost of living for the working-classes, a hardship aggravated by the family poverty cycle and the devastating impact of recurrent short-term crises.

Standard of living statistics conceal important structural changes in the composition of working-class family income before 1850. The assumption on which the figures were based, especially the dominance of money-wages and of the male breadwinner, lack validity until 1850 by which time workers had been deprived of traditional perks and rights and the working-class family had been forced to redefine gender roles and functions. The imposition of monetary form of wage payment marked a fundamental change in employers’ attitudes to property and labour. What had previously been accepted as a customary right now became crime: employers could no longer allow workers to appropriate any part of the materials or product of their labour, no matter how small. What was a stake for workers was not simply a traditional source of ‘extra’ income, but the maintenance of some independence at the workplace, some control over the product and the labour process. Age was probably the most important factor in determining output and earnings. In the 1830s the youngest and fittest of the handloom weavers could earn 25 per cent more wages in the same time as a weaker person could earn on the same machine. Throughout the trades, the elderly or rather the prematurely old were often forced to give up the better-paid tasks as they fell victim to various forms of occupational disorder. The Sheffield fork-grinders killed off no less than a quarter of the workforce every five years. Differences in output and earnings were kept to a minimum where group solidarity and trade societies were strong, but these forms of mutual protection did not apply to the so-called ‘dishonourable’ trades or in the over-stocked outwork industries. Here, in the absence of day rates or ‘legal’, union-backed piece prices, opportunistic middlemen and commercially minded masters were able to exploit cheap, unskilled labour through the piece-rate system. Even in ‘honourable’ trades, few workers were fortunate enough to enjoy full-time work throughout the year.

The focus on the adult male ‘breadwinner’ in terms of the standard of living debate has diverted attention away from the notion of the family income. Earnings in this period were assessed in family, not individual, terms with the family often functioning as a unit of production. By 1830, however, the prospects for women and hence family earnings deteriorated considerably. The first victims of technological or structural unemployment were women who encountered the new prejudice and sexual division of labour and the harsh economic costs of the new male breadwinner ideal.

Sexual segregation was rigorously enforced in the textile mills where women were denied access to the best-paid skilled jobs. Skill was a male preserve in the modern factory, protected by trade union organisation and internal subcontracting that gave mule spinners and their like a supervisory role for which women were deemed ineligible. Textile mills apart, mechanisation and the factory system brought few new opportunities for women: female employment was derisory in iron and steel, railways, chemicals and the expanding heavy industries. Legislation in 1842 restricted female work in the mines. Sexual segregation was by no means restricted to the factory districts and occurred wherever men were confronted with changes in the location or process of work. In rural England, for example, female participation was limited to haymaking and weeding the corn by 1830. The family income suffered as a result but most men on their own economic grounds welcomed the new sexual specialisation. They were increasingly vulnerable to seasonal unemployment with the expansion of grain product (that was less labour intensive) and they were determined to restrict cheap female competition. Yet in many cases the wife’s contribution to the family income remained indispensable but the force of the new convention against working women confined their employment to the lowest paid ‘dishonourable’ and sweated trades. Here their cheap labour was exploited in such a way as to reinforce still further the male hostility towards ‘unfair’ competition. Relations between the sexes in the London tailoring trades were at crisis point in the early 1830s when the Owenite socialists championed the rights of working women and called on the London tailors union to adopt a policy of ‘equalisation’ in order to unite all the workforce. The resulting strike was, however, a disastrous failure and led to further marginalisation of female workers in the trades.

Domesticity was probably the best in a narrow range of options for working-class married women, but for those employed in the sweated trades it was a cruelly illusive ideal. Until their children were old enough to contribute to the family income, there was no release from the double burden of unpaid housework and ill-paid waged work. Unable not to work, married women were driven lower and lower into the sweated trades or prostitution by the forces of social convention that condemned but continued to exploit their labour. The middle-classes deplored the ‘unnatural’ behaviour of young working mothers and condemned them for leaving their children with incompetent child-minders. However, recent research has shown that only a quarter of female mill workers were married and of those with children utmost care was taken to ensure that they were looked after by a close relative, lodger or neighbour. Less than two in a hundred of all infant children in industrial Lancashire were left to the mercies of professional child minders. The middle-classes imposed their views of the ‘proper’ role of women on the working-classes, a view that reinforced the economic arguments of working men that the role of working women should be reduced. Working-class family earnings seem to have declined most where market competition intensified but there were no alternative employment prospects open. In the arable east and de-industrialising south, the removal of traditional controls in agriculture and the trades led inexorably to discrimination against women and inadequate pay for men. In the north higher wages prevailed: new employment opportunities in hand-domestic and mechanised trades developed alongside the survival of traditional institutional frameworks and hiring practices in farm service and apprenticed trades.

The expenditure or cost of living for working-class families was significantly higher than for the middle and upper-classes. Food was by far the most important item, accounting for up to three-quarters of the wage packet. They bought poor quality food in small quantities for immediate consumption and rarely received value for money. This was often obtained from the Saturday nigh markets where dealers were able to off-load their otherwise unsaleable produce: Engels commented that ‘the workers get what is too bad for the property-holding class’. They were often dependent on credit and had to pay the higher prices of the obliging small shopkeepers. Provisions were dearer still were workers were victims of the truck system and the poor quality, adulterated foods of the ‘Tommy shops’. Despite stringent legislation from 1831, the truck system remained common practice into the 1850s in south Staffordshire and in much of rural East Anglia where gangmasters supplied subcontract labour at the cheapest daily rates.

As with food, so with housing: those at the bottom end of the market received scant value for money. Accommodation accounted for anything up to a quarter or even a third of a labourer’s wages compared to about a sixth of the income of the middle-classes. The nuclear family, the sacred cow of English social history, was too expensive for many families who lived with kin or in lodgings for the first few years of marriage. John Foster found that the proportion of families living with relatives ranged from a third in Northampton to over two-thirds in South Shields. In Preston in 1851 lodgers were present in 23 per cent of all households. Many workers fell victim to the ‘house trucking’ system where housing was dependent on their employers. The ‘tied’ cottage system of rural England was a logical extension of this.

For working-class teenagers, clothes and accessories were the first call on income after they had paid their contribution to the family income. Many poor families, however, relied on cast-off, second-hand or stolen goods. Clothes could be easily pawned or fenced and there are many recorded cases of petty theft: in Manchester there was an average of 210 reports a year of stolen clothing from hedges or lines. Extra income was often spent on clothes since they were a highly pawnable commodity as well as providing immediate enjoyment.

1850-1875

Improved standards of living during the mid-Victorian boom owed more to greater stability in employment than to a marked increase in wages.[4] 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 per cent 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 per cent and spinners by between 30 and 50 per cent. These figures suggest a widening of differentials.

As a general rule in this period the wage ratio between skilled and unskilled stood at 2:1. In terms of actual earnings the skilled fared better still since they 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, whose numbers now fell absolutely, the mid-Victorian boom brought no real improvement in standards of living. 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, published in 1874, calculated that three out of four inhabitants of the typical village would require public relief at some stage in their lives.

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 the early 1870s, when the general advance was eroded by particularly high food prices. 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.

The mid-Victorian economy was characterised by high, relatively stable prices and high levels of consumption. This was, however, punctuated by spectacular inflationary spells in 1853-5 and 1870-3. 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. 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.

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 1861-5, a protracted period of distress and unemployment: 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 per cent of all operatives in the 28 poor law unions of the cotton district were unemployed with a further 35 per cent 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 per cent of the operatives remained unemployed as late as November 1864, while at Salford the unemployment rate stood at 24 per cent.

Unemployment on this scale had a disastrous effect on standards of living and posed considerable problems for the relief agencies, both Poor Law and philanthropic once the independent and thrifty operatives had exhausted their savings. The Poor Law and the charities were unsuited to the needs of unemployed factory workers. They had already come under scrutiny following events in London during the harsh winter of 1860-1 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 Hollingshead’s Ragged London as indiscriminate ‘stray charity’. 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.

Charity was more stringently controlled through the Central Executive Relief Committee that issued strict regulations, drawn up by James Kay-Shuttleworth. Well below normal working income, relief was to be paid partly in kind in the form of tickets to be exchanged only at certain shops to prevent squandering and misuse of funds. Recipients were to be regularly visited and there was to be some form of work in return for the relief granted. This proved very unpopular and serious riots ensued at Stalybridge and the disturbances reached as far north as Preston uniting Irish and English workers in indignant anger. As a result the government introduced the Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act in 1863. It was an interventionist measure in direct contradiction to the individualist premises of the Poor Law and, although it did not eradicate the bitter memories of 1863, this public works programme prevented further serious unrest.

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.

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[1] The literature on the labouring population is immense.  E.H. Hunt British Labour History 1815-1914, Weidenfeld, 1982, J. Rule The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750-1850, Longman, 1986, J. Benson The Working-class in Britain 1850-1939, Longman, 1989, E. Hopkins A Social History of the English Working-classes 1815-1945, Edward Arnold, 1977, J. Belchem Industrialisation and the Working-class, Scolar, 1990 and K.D. Brown The English Labour Movement 1700-1951, Gill and Macmillan, 1982 are good starting points.

[2] ‘Real’ wages related the actual wages earned to the level of prices. Real wages will therefore increase if wages remain constant and food prices fall: the money available will go further.

[3] W.D. Rubenstein Wealth and Inequality in Britain, Faber, 1986 and H. Kaelbe Industrialisation and Social Inequality in Nineteenth Century Europe, Berg, 1986 provide useful analyses of the issues.  S. Pollard and D.W. Crossley The Wealth of Britain 1085-1966, Batsford, 1968 and J. Burnett A History of the Cost of Living, Penguin, 1969 provide chronological perspective. R. Floud ‘A Tall Story?  The Standard of Living Debate’, History Today, May 1983 is the simplest introduction. This should now be supplemented by R. Floud, K. Wachter and A. Gregory Height, health and history: Nutritional status in the United Kingdom 1750-1980, CUP, 1990, a major contribution to the debate. A.J. Taylor (ed.), The Standard of Living in the Industrial Revolution, Methuen, 1975 contains articles by the major protagonists.   J. Burnett Plenty and Want, Scolar Press, 1969, new edition, 1989 is central to the period 1832-1914.

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

Differentiation by other means

Historians have identified three further ways in which individuals were differentiated in society between 1832 and 1914 that transcended, but contributed to, the ‘paternalist-class’ debate: religion, gender and race.

Religion

In 1832 the language of religion was part of a common culture. By 1914 this situation was under considerable attack from the external challenge of secularism and science and the increasingly pluralistic nature of religious observance and experience. Three aspects of religious life can be identified. At one level, religion is made up of a quest for individual truth and salvation. Faith, belief and piety were seen by many as important features of their lives. At a second level, that of organised religion, Christianity was an institution and religion a social and moral force providing a generally agreed framework for the ‘Christian life’. Very few people in 1832 denied all religious ties and did not belong, at least nominally, to a Church or sect. Finally, there was the level that transcended sectarian boundaries, a non-denominational heritage of Christianity that influenced social and personal relationships. Churches, chapels and cathedrals provided visible symbolism of history, heresy and heritage. The Bible was a constant presence in people’s minds and hearts -- Bible quotations, Bible language and Bible picture -- providing a common mental landscape.

It is the ‘associational’ dimension of religiosity that is of particular important here. In broad terms the social appeal of the churches in 1832 can be compared to a ‘sandwich’. The Church of England corresponded to the top and bottom slices: the aristocratic elite and the working-classes. The meat in the sandwich consisted of middle-class nonconformists. Roman Catholicism took up a similar position to the Church of England. In practice, however, social responses to religion were less clear-cut. Methodism penetrated into working-class areas and both town and country and there was an extension of Anglican activity among the middle-classes. By the 1850s, as shown in the religious census of 1851, religious observance had already declined and this process continued down to 1914.

Gender

The most obvious means of differentiating between individuals within society was on the basis of gender. In 1832 men of all social classes discriminated against women legally, morally, economically and politically. Society clearly differentiated between the worlds of men and women. Status and power lay with the former.

Race

People could also be differentiated by race. To be ‘successful’ in the nineteenth century meant being ‘English’, culturally if not by nationality. To become part of the ruling elite necessitated adopting the cultural values and practices of the Establishment politically, socially, linguistically and religiously. This opened a cultural gap between those who ruled and those who were governed. Irish immigrants stood outside this because of their religion, language and cultural attitudes.

Conclusions

Reaching conclusions about the nature of English society between 1832 and 1914 is a difficulty process. There were a range of ways in which individuals saw themselves and their worlds and they expressed their perceptions through a range of concepts. Class, paternalism, community, race, sex and religion each played their part in this process of self-definition and group identity. To view society simply in terms of ‘class’ is to deny the richness and diversity of contemporary experience.

A ‘class’ perspective

An alternative to the vertical relationships of a paternalistic hierarchical society lay in the horizontal solidarities of ‘class’.[1] Richard Dennis, in his study of nineteenth century industrial cities, sums up the problem of class in the following way: ‘Evidently the road to class analysis crosses a minefield with a sniper behind every bush.... it may not be possible to please all the people all of the time...’ What did contemporaries understand by the idea of ‘class’? How many classes were there? What do historians understand by ‘class consciousness’ and how, if at all, does it differ from ‘class perception’? When did a working-class come into existence? Despite all the literature on the subject, the years since the publication of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working-class in 1963, have done little to clarify the situation. Answers to the central questions of ‘when?’, ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ have been surprisingly inconclusive. [2]

‘Two nations’?

Many contemporaries interpreted early Victorian society in terms of two classes. Disraeli popularised the idea of ‘two nations’, the rich and the poor. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote of Manchester that she had ‘never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.’ Tory Radicals were not alone in using the two-class model. Engels referred to the working-class in the singular and offered a model dominated by two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in which other classes existed but were becoming increasingly less important. Recent Marxist historians, E.P. Thompson and John Foster, have also used this model. For Thompson class experience was largely the result of the productive relations into which people entered. The essence of class lay not in income or work but in class-consciousness, the product of contemporary perceptions of capital and labour, exploiter and exploited.

John Foster, in his study of three industrial towns, found that 12,000 workers sold their labour to 70 capitalist families. There was a middle-class of tradesmen, shopkeepers and small masters but despite deep divisions in their social and political behaviour they aligned with the working-class on most political issues.[3] The working-class, Foster argues, went through three stages of developing consciousness. It was, first, ‘labour conscious’: consumer prices ceased to be a major concern for workers and the focus shifted to the levels of their own wages. Then ‘class conscious’ where attempts to resolve industrial and economic problems became politicised. This can be seen in the 1830s and 1840s in working-class support for the Chartist movement. Political reform was seen as a necessary prerequisite for the resolution of economic problems: only a Parliament elected on the Charter would be prepared to legislate in favour of working-class concerns. Finally ‘liberalised consciousness’ by which the bourgeoisie, aided by growing economic prosperity after 1850, was able to attach important sections of the working population to its consensus ideology grounded in individualism and ‘respectability’.

It is possible to criticise the two-class model in a variety of ways. It assumes a model for change based on antagonism between two competing classes. It recognises, but neglects other social groupings or subsumes them within the two-class perspective. It assumes a significant degree of ideological homogeneity that may have validity in the vibrant social magma of the industrial factory towns but that has little validity in rural areas and the older urban areas. Diversity of experience within the working population led to diversity of responses.

Three classes: the Perkin thesis?

The majority of contemporary and modern analysts have adhered to the three-class model. Harold Perkin argues that, as the result of industrialisation, urbanisation and the midwifery of religion, a class society emerged between 1789 and 1833 or, more precisely between 1815 and 1820. Class was characterised not by class consciousness but ‘by class feeling, that is, by the existence of vertical antagonism between a small number of horizontal groups, each based on a common source of income.’ [4] The paternal view of society was not, however, destroyed by these class antagonisms and the potential conflict of emergent class society was contained by modification of existing institutions. For Perkin, compromise was a central reason for the persistence of older social values and structures and only an ‘immature’ class society was characterised by violence. Each class developed its own ‘ideal’ and, by 1850, he believed, three can be clearly seen: the entrepreneurial ideal of the middle-classes, a working-class ideal and an aristocratic ideal based respectively on profits, wages and rent. The ‘struggle between ideals’ was ‘not so much that the ruling class imposes its ideal upon the rest, but that the class that manages to impose its ideal upon the rest becomes the ruling class.’ [5] In Perkin’s model, the mature class society that emerged by the 1850s was, despite the differences that existed between classes, not marked by overt conflict but by tacit agreement and coexistence under the successful entrepreneurial ideal.

Between 1880 and 1914 class society, according to Perkin, reached its zenith. [6] The rich, both large landowners and capitalists, drew together in a consolidation of that new plutocracy that had already begun to emerge in the 1850s. The middle-classes, ever more graduated in income and status, came to express those finer distinctions in prosperity and social position physically, both in outward appearance, in dress, furnishings and habitations, and even in physique, and in their geographical segregation from one another and the rest of society in carefully differentiated suburbs. So too did the working-classes, in part involuntarily because they could only afford what their social betters left for them, but also, within that constraint, because those working-class families who could chose to differentiate themselves equally, by Sunday if not everyday dress, and by better and better furnished houses in marginally superior areas. Only the very poor, the ‘residuum’ as Charles Booth called them, had no choice at all and were consigned to the slums. They were the most segregated class of all because all the rest shunned them and their homes. Segregation, by income, status, appearance, physical health, speech, education and opportunity in life, as well as by work and residential area, was the symbolic mark of class society at its highest point of development.

Class society in Britain in 1880 already contained the seeds of its own decay. The three classes each had their own powerful ideals of what society should be and how it should be organised to recognise and reward their own unique contribution to the welfare of the community. Each class believed that its contribution was the most vital one and should be rewarded accordingly. The landowners, capitalists and middle-classes saw themselves as providing the resources and organising ability that drove the economic system to provide the goods necessary for the survival and civilised life for the whole community. Those in the working-classes who thought about it saw themselves as providing the labour, the sole source of value, without which the resources and management would be in vain. The increasing class conflict of the late Victorian and Edwardian period was the struggle for income, status and power arising from this clash of incompatible ideals. It was into this tripartite struggle that ‘the professional class’ came contributing both to the struggle and to the means of resolving it.

As long as professional men were few in numbers and depended mainly on the rich and powerful for their incomes, they tended to temper their social ideals to the values of their wealthy clients. With the development of industrial and urban society, however, the professions proliferated, their clients multiplied and, in certain cases, for example in preventive medicine, sanitary engineering and central and local government generally, the client became in effect the whole community. They became much freer to act as critics of society and purveyors of the terminology in which people came to think about the new class society. In a range of ways they attacked the laissez faire individualism of the entrepreneurial ideal. Through social legislation, the development of trade union immunities, the changing attitudes to poverty and the emergence of the welfare state under the Liberals after 1906, they challenged the ‘amateur’ spirit of society and enhanced the position of the professional expert.

Between the constitutional class between the Lords and the Commons between 1909 and 1911 and the General Strike of 1926, class society in Britain underwent a profound crisis. The crisis was essentially to decide whether Britain was to continue along a path of increasing class conflict culminating in social breakdown or revolution or whether there was to be, not merely an accommodation between the classes of the kind that gave mid-Victorian Britain its viable class society. The crisis was largely one between the classes of capital and labour, in which the government became reluctantly involved, by no means wholly on the side of capital. It was complicated by the co-existence of three other crises, any one of which was a potentially violent challenge to the established order. Connected or not, the co-existence of threats of violence from the Suffragettes, from the Irish Nationalists in Ireland were partitioned and from the Ulstermen backed by the Tory leadership and the majority of the Lords if it were not, and from the more aggressive trade unionists, gave colour to the fear of social revolution before 1914 just as the co-existence of revolutions in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey as well as Ireland gave colour to the same fear after 1918. The crisis was also complicated by the intervention of war in 1914. In the short term the war suspended all four crises but it ruthlessly laid bare the shortcomings and deficiencies of society, the economy and the political system. It confirmed the appalling effects of poverty on the mass armies recruited to fight it, the weakness of British industry and management in producing the munitions of modern battle and the incompetence of the minimalist state to conduct modern warfare on the grand scale.

This is a very brief synopsis of an elegant and far more complex argument but does give a favour of Perkin’s position after 1880. Perkin has not been without his critics but his argument, in both books, is ultimately more convincing than the doctrinaire approaches associated with Left and Right.

A class society?

If it is legitimate to speak of a class only when a group is united in every conceivable way then the concept is rendered meaningless. Classes are not and never were monolithic blocks of identical individuals. The critical question is whether working people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consciously acted as members of a class as well as in other roles. Historians have interpreted class in different ways. At one extreme are those who argue that class and class action were abnormal and that individual interest was more powerful than class loyalty. On the other there are historians who see social developments in terms of a scenario in which class conflict played an integral and inevitable role.

So what conclusions can be reached from this tendentious debate? By 1850 it is possible to identify a middle-class(es) with clearly defined ‘consciousness’ based on notions of respectability and self help and with a strong organisational base. That consciousness had percolated down and reinforced traditional, independent artisan values. There were important distinctions within the working population, for example rural/urban, agricultural/industrial, skilled/unskilled, technologically obsolete/innovative occupations, that helped to determine attitudes and perceptions. It is possible to identify different levels of class-consciousness within the working population that found itself in a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the more homogeneous middle-class ideology. Changes in social attitudes and values were the result of dialogue and conflict between the older notion of paternalism and the newer conceptions of class.

The period between 1832 and 1914 can be viewed in terms of three broad phases of ‘class development’. The first, what Foster calls it the period of ‘class consciousness’ and Perkin ‘an immature class system’, was over by the early 1850s. It was characterised by the confrontational politics of Chartism, a consequence in part of the depressed state of the economy from the mid 1830s through to the late 1840s, and the emergence of middle-class pressure group politics as a means of challenging the aristocratic hold over government and policy-making. The second phase, corresponding to Perkin’s ‘mature class system’ and Foster’s ‘liberalised consciousness’ covers the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. Confrontational politics became less important though pressure groups, whether in the form of middle-class campaigns or working-class ‘new model unionism’, became increasingly effective. Overall the economy was prosperous, at least until the 1870s, and there was increasing standards of living among all sections of society. ‘Distress’ ceased to be a motive force for working-class action. Individualism and respectability reigned supreme. The third phase began in the 1880s and led to the social ‘crisis’ of the Edwardian era. There were cogent challenges to the existing system from socialism and Marxism and a growing awareness of the failure of the industrial economy to compete effectively against newly industrialised states like Germany and the United States, or to provide the necessary resources to resolve the twin problems of poverty and unemployment. Mass or ‘new’ unionism led to the re-emergence of confrontational politics and to recognition by government, at local and national levels, that the issues raised by the embryonic Labour party could not be addressed successful through existing mechanisms. The Liberal reforms after 1906 can be seen as a belated attempt both to provide support for the existing system and to head off the threat from Labour. In both respects they failed. The 1830s began with the existing social and political system under concerted attack from those who were, by the partial nature of the voting system, excluded from what they saw as their right to participate in the system and benefit from that participation. By 1914 things had gone full circle.

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[1] The literature on ‘class’ is immense but theoretical perspectives can be found in P. Calvert The Concept of Class, Hutchinson, 1983, A. Giddens The Class Structure of Advanced Societies, Hutchinson, 1973 and R.S. Neale (ed.), History and Class: essential readings in theory and interpretation, Basil Blackwell, 1984.

[2] R.S. Neale Class in British History 1680-1850, Basil Blackwell, 1983 and Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 1972, the useful bibliographical essay by R.J. Morris Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution, Macmillan, 1980 and his ‘Class  and Common Interest’, History Today, 1983 are good starting points for the period before 1850.  The review essay by N. McCord ‘Adding a Touch of Class’, History, October 1985 provide ‘state of the art’ analysis. A. Briggs ‘The language of "class" in early nineteenth century England’ printed in M.W. Flinn and T.C. Smout (eds.), Essays in Social History, OUP, 1974 and G. Steadman Jones Languages of Class, CUP, 1983 are useful starting points. Patrick Joyce Visions of the People: Industrial England and the question of class 1840-1914, CUP, 1991 takes the question of language further and questions the veracity of a view of society grounded simply in ‘class’. E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working-class, Gollancz, 1963, Penguin, 1968 should be read, ideally in full. Other essential studies include H. Perkin op.cit., J. Foster Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: early industrial capitalism in three English towns, Weidenfeld, 1974, I. Prothero Artisans  and  Politics in Early  Nineteenth-Century London, Dawson, 1979, D. Smith Conflict and Compromise: Class Formation in English Society 1830-1914, 1982 and C. Calhoun The Question of Class Struggle, Basil Blackwell, 1982. Alastair J. Reid Social Classes and Social Relations in Britain 1850-1914, Macmillan, 1992 is the best and briefest starting-point for this period. J. Benson The Working-class in Britain 1850-1939, Longman, 1989 is the most recent general survey. R. McKibbin The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950, OUP, 1990 is an excellent collection of articles. H. Perkin The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, Routledge, 1989 extends his earlier work in a masterful study. Stanish Meacham A Life Apart: The English Working-class 1890-1914, 1977 and Joanna Bourne Working-class Cultures in Britain 1890-1960, Routledge, 1994 are excellent. C. Smout (ed), Victorian Values, British Academy, 1993 is a mine of information and ideas.

[3] Foster’s view of the petit bourgeoisie and his attempts to explain it away have been criticized by historians like R.S. Neale who interpose a ‘middling’ class between the middle and working-classes in his ‘five-class model’.

[4] H. Perkin The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880, page 37.

[5] Ibid., pp. 218-270 for discussion on the ‘struggle between ideals’.

[6] H. Perkin The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, Routledge, 1989.

Nineteenth century society: introduction

All societies are, to some degree, stratified or divided into different social groups. These groups may be in competition with each other for social control or wealth. They may be functional, defined by their contribution to society as a whole. They may share common ‘values’, have a common ‘national identity’ or they may form part of a pluralistic society in which different ‘values’ coexist with varying degrees of success or conflict. They have different names like ‘castes’ or ‘ranks’ or ‘classes’. British society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century has been called a ‘class society’ but there are some differences between historians about its precise meaning or whether it is meaningful at all[1]. Were there two classes or three or five or any classes at all? Were there any common values? They do, however, agree that society in 1914 was different from the society that existed in the 1830s. It is important to have some understanding of the ‘wholeness’ of society, whether nationally or within a given locality because it was the overall structure of society that people were reacting against or attempting to preserve.[2] Individuals must be understood, given meaning and significance, not in isolation but within their web of social relationships. Individual biographies can be explained only by reference to the whole of society.

A question of ethics

The underlying basis of the elitism of the aristocracy in the 1830s was one of mutual and reciprocal obligation within a hierarchical framework. Harold Perkin writes that ‘The old society, then was a finely graded hierarchy of great subtlety and discrimination, in which men were acutely aware of their exact relation to those immediately above and below them, but only vaguely conscious except at the very top of their connections with those on their own level .... There was one horizontal cleavage of great import, that between the ‘gentleman’ and the ‘common people’, but it could scarcely be defined in economic terms.’ [3]

This elitist view of society had two important dimensions. First, it was paternalistic. What mattered here was not what was later parodied as ‘forelock tugging’ but sympathetic involvement by the elites in the lives of the rest of society. There was an expectation of reciprocity, a common outlook and identification of interests and, if necessary, sheer coercion to maintain the civil stability of a hierarchical social structure. A Christian faith and moral code was a common possession of all of society and rank, station, duty and decorum were central social values. David Roberts provides a useful model of paternalism in early Victorian society.[4] A paternalist saw society in the following ways. First, it should be authoritarian, though tempered by the common law and ancient ‘liberties’. Secondly, it should be hierarchical. Thirdly, it should be ‘organic’ with people knowing their appointed place. Finally, it should be ‘pluralistic’ consisting of different hierarchical ‘interests’ making up the organic whole. Within this structure paternalists had certain duties and held certain assumptions. First was the duty to rule, a direct result of wealth and power. Parallel to this was the obligation to help the poor, not merely passively but with active assistance. Paternalists also believed in the duty of ‘guidance’, a firm moral superintendence. Paternalism governed relationships at all levels of society. Apprenticeship, for example, was more than induction into particular skills; it was an immersion in the social experience or common wisdom of the community. Practices, norms and attitudes were, as a result, reproduced through successive generations within an accepted framework of traditional customs and rights that have been called ‘the moral economy’.

Secondly, patronage was a key feature. Patronage was central to the paternalist ethic and it retained its importance throughout the nineteenth century. It was characteristic of an unequal face-to-face society, crossing social barriers and bringing together potentially hostile groups. Patronage involved a ‘lopsided’ relationship between individuals, a patron and a client of unequal status, wealth and influence. It could be called a ‘package deal’ of reciprocal advantage to the individuals involved. It is true that by the 1830s much of the ‘politically useful’ forms of patronage like jobs for electors and rewards for supporters had declined but to assume that there was a general decline in patronage is to fundamentally misconceive the issue. Many of the political, social and economic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century greatly increased the amount of patronage that was available. There was a dramatic increase in the number of ‘administratively necessary’ offices. The prison, factory, health and schools Inspectorate were all staffed, at least initially, through patronage. This was paralleled in local government where ‘efficient’ patronage was used by rival elites within communities as an extension of party politics. Finally, offices may have been filled by personal nomination but individuals had to possess some basic competence. This notion of ‘merit’ received a wider and fair application after the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854, though patronage comfortably withstood much of the onslaught of merit until the 1870s. Only the urban middle-classes of the north were apathetic towards patronage. The bulk of the middle-classes were located in the genteel world of the professions and of propertyless independent incomes, far less entrepreneurial and competitive than their industrial equivalents. As long as a common area of shared values existed patronage continued to have broad application and utility.

A process of change

For a variety of reasons this paternalist view of society began to break down from the early nineteenth century. Thomas Carlyle, a contemporary social theorist, saw this as ‘the abdication on the part of the governors’. This process had the following features. The changing focus of the economy away from land and towards manufacturing and service industries led to a gradual decline in the economic power of the paternalist elite. Agriculture may have declined relative to other sectors of the economy but the aristocratic tone of British society was still set by the great houses and the large landowners. As J.F.C. Harrison says ‘Landed England did not survive unchanged. Had there not been flexibility in coming to terms with the economic realities of the industry state, and a willingness to retreat gradually and quietly from untenable positions of political privilege, landed society might not have outlived the end of the century. In fact it displayed remarkable powers of tenacity and adaptation: it sought to engulf and change some of the new elements in society, though in the process it was itself changed.’ [5]

Urbanisation occurred broadly outside the paternal net. There is evidence that many people moved to towns because they perceived them as ‘free’ from the social constraints of rural society. In addition as towns and cities burgeoned in size after 1850 they ceased to be face-to-face societies and became places of anonymity. Changing religious observance, especially the declining support for the Church of England and the growth of secularism broke the ‘bond of dependency’ between squire, parson and labourer. Paternalism was grounded in reciprocal obligations, like ‘just wages’ and ‘fair prices’, many of which were given a statutory basis in paternalist Tudor and Stuart legislation. From the 1770s this legislation was either allowed to lapse or deliberately repealed. The principles of ‘the free market’ could not accommodate the protectionism inherent in paternalism. The aristocracy and gentry gradually ‘cut’ their lives off from those of their labouring workers. The layout of country houses and gardens demonstrated a move towards domestic privacy. Client relationships became less important as labour became more mobile and became centred in urban communities.

The economic and political power of the landed elite came from their ownership and control of land. The same applied to the industrial entrepreneur in terms of their ownership and control of manufacturing. For both these elites the nineteenth century saw important changes. First, the emergence of managers as a segment of the economic elite reflected changing rates and channels of social mobility. Education became a more important medium as a channel of recruitment into managerial occupations and consequently the chances of those from working or middle-class backgrounds of moving into the economic elite improved. The emergence of bureaucratisation, with the clerk as a dominant occupation after 1830 reflects this process. Secondly, the emergence of a managerial sector introduced an important source of potential conflict within the economic elite as a whole. The moral solidarity of the old property-owning elite was undermined. The result of the separation of ownership and control in industry produced two sets of roles that increasingly saw the incumbents move apart in their outlook on and attitudes towards society in general and towards enterprise in particular. The ‘individualistic’, profit-seeking entrepreneur is contrasted with the managerial executive, whose values stress efficiency and productivity rather than profits. Such a difference in ideals and values tended to reinforce divergence in styles of life and social contacts. This in turn produced a certain conflict of interests, sometimes leading to open struggles, since the pursuit of maximum returns on capital was not always compatible with safeguarding the productivity and security of the enterprise. Finally, the separation of ownership and control was held to introduce important shifts in the structure of economic power. Within the large joint-stock companies that emerged in the 1850s and 1860s effective power increasingly devolved into the hands of managers and the sanctions held by the ‘owners’ of the enterprise were merely nominal.

This separation of ownership and control is not the only factor that led to the decomposition of the old ruling class. There was a general rise in rates of mobility, particularly intergenerational mobility, into elite positions in many institutional spheres during the late thirty years of the nineteenth century. There was some redistribution of wealth and income after 1850 as levels of ‘real’ wages rose that helped to redress the balance of power in favour of those in the lower social classes. Parliamentary reform in 1832, 1867 and 1884-5 gave initially the middle-classes and latterly the upper working-class a stake in the existing political structure. This needs to be seen in relation to the rights of organisation in the industrial and political sphere for the mass of the population. The growth of trade unions, especially after 1851, the expansion in the range of political pressure groups and the emergence of the Labour Party in the early years of the twentieth century constituted both potential limitations on the power of elite groups as well as perhaps changing the structure of those elite groups themselves.

Harold Perkin characterised the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a ‘one-class society’. Only the aristocratic elite could, he maintained, be seen as a ‘class’. This view of a unitary capitalist ruling class certainly did not exist by 1830. Karl Marx viewed the British ruling class as an ‘antiquated compromise’ in which, while the aristocracy ‘ruled officially’; the bourgeoisie ruled ‘over all the various spheres of civil society in reality’. [6] The aristocracy, that Marx thought had ‘signed its own death warrant’ as a result of the Crimean War (1853-1856), proved to be much more resilient than this in maintaining a strong foothold in the Cabinet, Parliament and the Civil Service. The proprietary fortunes and power of the large landowners remained virtually intact until the end of the century and the relatively amicable inter-penetration of aristocratic landowners and wealthy industrialists remains one of the striking features of British society in the latter half of the century.

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[1] On methodology see P. Burke History and Social Theory, Polity, 1992, P. Abrams Historical Sociology, Open Books, 1982 and two books by C. Lloyd Explanation in Social History, Basil Blackwell, 1986 and The Structures of History, Blackwell, 1993.

[2] What follows extends arguments developed initially in Richard Brown Change and Continuity in British Society 1800-1850, CUP, 1987, republished 2008 and Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850, Routledge 1991, especially pp. 342-367.

[3] H. Perkin The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880, Routledge, 1969, page 24.

[4] David Roberts Paternalism in Early Victorian England, Croom Helm, 1979.

[5] J.F.C. Harrison The Early Victorians 1832-1851, page 123.

[6] Karl Marx ‘The Crisis in England and the British Constitution’ in Marx and Engels On Britain, Moscow State Publishing House, 1953, pp. 410-411.

Orwell. unemployment and 1984: 2

Orwell and the totalitarian myth

In 1946, three years after beginning Animal Farm, Orwell wrote “It is not easy to believe in the survival of civilisation…” and a year later “If you had to choose between Russia and America which would you choose?” Like many of his contemporaries, Orwell feared that the world would fall apart into two or three super-states, each holding the atomic bomb and that within each state there would be a strong authoritarian strand. This was the result of the realisation by scientists and others of the potential for destruction of the atomic bomb and of the emergence of the ‘cold war’. Both Animal Farm and 1984 have been used to promote viewpoints with which Orwell had no sympathy; for example, that both books are pro-Russian. In the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, Orwell said that  “Nothing has contributed as much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated…for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential…”

Later Orwell wrote of 1984 “My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already be partly realised in Communism and Fascism.”  Yet his vision of power politics seemed convincing. His vision of official ‘allies’ and ‘enemies’, who have become stereotypes has happened since he wrote. The idea of a world divided into three blocs (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) of which two are always at war with the third is too close for comfort. It is sometimes possible to believe that, in Orwell’s words “what had been called England or Britain had simply become Airstrip One”. But there is little doubting the allegorical nature of both Animal Farm and 1984 and it is significant that Orwell took as his model of a controlled and military society from Soviet Communism, even including detailed elements of its past such as the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky in his fictional account of the conflict between Big Brother and Goldstein.

So what does 1984 say to us in 1984? On 19^th June 1941, three days before Hitler invaded Stalin’s Russia, Orwell published an article called ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’ in The Listener. In it he wrote that “Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative but positive. It not only forbids you to express – even to think – certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have not standards of comparison. The totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it controls their actions.”

The society in 1984 in many of its essential features resembled this critique of totalitarianism: no freedom of thought, control of personal belief, creation of right opinions, isolation from the outside world with a concomitant stereotyped view of that world and an insulation from any issue requiring thought. Hence, Winston Smith’s belief that salvation lay with the ‘proles’ whom the Party sees as “natural inferiors…like animals”. Orwell agrees. They are the redeemers, “the people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world….out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come”. Orwell posited revolution into apathy and revolution out of apathy: a reassertion of personhood, of humanity and of true feeling, awareness that issues were not clear-cut, that people were not either good or bad but a combination of the two. But he is not making a prediction and wrote in 1949 that: “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could arrive” and that “This is a novel about the future….it is in a sense a fantasy.”

There are three layers in 1984. First, there is the internal structure that, like Orwell’s other fiction sees a hero-victim moving through a squalid world trying to find, achieving sight of but failing to hold on to the possibility of a better life. Secondly, there is a structure of argument in which Orwell describes and examines the nature of totalitarianism. Finally, there is a structure grounded in method ranging from fantasy to satire and parody through which the cruelty and repression of society are explored. It is the structure of argument that is central to Orwell’s value as a theorist of power and its abuse. He believed that, “Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.” It is this I want to follow through in more detail.  It was the atomic threat that Orwell saw as the cause of totalitarianism. He wrote in October 1945 “The great age of democracy and self-determination had been the age of the musket and rifle….we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-powers, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.”

The idea of an atomic war in the 1950s – a scenario explored in 1984 – was common enough in the mid- and late-1940s. It was seen as virtually inevitable once more than one state possessed atomic bombs by several writers including James Burnham in The Struggle for the World on whom Orwell wrote two substantial essays in the years he was writing 1984. Burnham believed that the United States, while in sole possession of the atomic bomb, should move to prevent any other nation of any size from acquiring it. Orwell considered the various possibilities emerging from Burnham’s thesis: “he is demanding, or all but demanding, an immediate preventative war against Russia”. He argued that this would be a crime and would solve little. The other possibility was a cold war until several nations had the atomic bomb, then almost at once a war would wipe out industrial civilisation. Orwell, however, took a deterrent view: “The fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them. This seems to me the worst possibility of all. It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast super-states….the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything that the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phoney war against rival states. Civilisations of this type might remain static for thousands of years.” We will not be released from the danger of the dangers he and others foresaw by the mere passage of the fictional date. It’s not that Orwell was wrong since, when it comes down to it 1984 is fiction, it’s just that his assessment of the global-political future was too simplistic.

What have emerged are not unitary super-states but a more complex form of military superpowers and military alliances. Reading the papers and listening to some political broadcasts, I sometimes think that Orwell’s vision has been realised: the monolithically presented images of ‘East’ and ‘West’ with China as the shifting ‘partner’ of either. The full political realities are very different. There is, for example, a coexistent and different hierarchy of economic power with Japan and West Germany as major forces; western society is pluralist in character and, unlike in 1984, the East appears to be moving in that direction although their pluralism is institutionalised and bureaucratised.

Orwell could not have foreseen how the elements of political autonomy and diversity within very narrow margins in the Warsaw Pact, within the broader margins of NATO are radically qualified by the nature of modern nuclear-weapon systems. The atomic war of 1984 was damaging not disastrous. The result is the ‘perpetual limited war’ in which the super-states are unconquerable because the rulers cannot risk all-out atomic war. Orwell certainly underestimates the effects of atomic war. Nations have never made a tacit agreement not to use the nuclear bomb as Orwell believed they would. On the contrary, the predominant policy had been one of mutual threat: the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine of the 1960s and 1970s. There has not been technical stagnation but the upward spiral of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems.

It is easy to argue from this to the Orwellian super-state. But this is not inevitable. The monopoly of nuclear weapons by major industrialised states has not prevented major advances towards autonomy in the old colonial world, the so-called movements for national liberation. Orwell’s projection is particularly unreal here. The rest of the world has not become a passive quarry of mineral and cheap labour. Yes, there has been economic intervention in the affairs of the Third World by the superpowers and by national corporations and attempts at destabilisation have occurred but not through the ‘perpetual war’ Orwell envisaged. The notion of ‘the Party’ as a singular structure has proved to be far less valid that Orwell believed. The political monopoly of the Party gives it legitimacy as does the consensus that supports this monopoly. It is significant that during the recent Solidarity crises in Poland different parts of the hitherto effective ruling group were shown, under pressure, to have crucially variable interests. The recent succession of Chernenko in the Soviet Union showed a similar diversity of viewpoint.

It is interesting that what has really survived is Orwell’s understanding of propaganda and thought-control. But even he would have been surprised by the sophistication of this today. In 1946, he had written that “the immediate enemies of truthfulness and hence of freedom of thought are the press lords, the film magnates and the bureaucrats.” The slogan in 1984 is ‘Ignorance is Strength’ is a central proposition for government today. This was understood by nineteenth century radicals with their slogan ‘Knowledge is Power’. There is little doubt that he who controls information possesses power. It is difficult to argue against ‘cotton wool’ and if you do not possess ‘the facts’ then it is difficult to argue at all. Orwell saw clearly that history could easily be selected and packaged to show the present as inevitable, the action justifiable and the ruling future as desirable. He wrote in 1947 that: “Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.”

The essence of totalitarianism is that it distorts the past to justify the present. Truth becomes an expensive luxury. It is expediency that determines action and that expediency justifies all. In his interrogation of Winston Smith, O’Brien stated that: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” All else is meaningless since it not only lacks meaning but does not have any rational form at all. Acceptance of that power is taken as read. Resistance is irrelevant since it is un-coordinated and essentially individual. O’Brien again “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power….Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of our own choosing.”  But is O’Brien wrong? Orwell believes that the individualism of the proles will one day lead to a new revolution: “What mattered, Winston Smith thought, were individual relationships; a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles ….were not loyal to the Party or to a country or to an idea, they were loyal to each other”. Unhappily the evidence of history comes down strongly against this vision. Europe may have been convulsed by workers’ movements but they have been marked by their almost complete failure: from Hungary in 1956 to Poland today. A recent comment by Irving Howe stated that: “Orwell’s treatment of the proles can be questioned on….fundamental grounds. The totalitarian state can afford no luxury, allow no exception; it cannot tolerate the existence of any group beyond the perimeter of its control; it can never become so secure as to lapse into indifference…To do so would be to risk disintegration. It must always tend towards a condition of self-agitation, shaking and re-shaking its members.”

The picture Orwell painted in 1984 struck most responsive readers as an unprecedented torment when it was published in 1949. Frederic Wasburg, whose firm published it, stated that: “This is amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read. It is a great book but I pray that I may be spared from reading another like it for years to come”. V.S. Pritchett in the New Statesman said: “I do not think I have ever read a novel more terrifying and depressing”. Has 1984 today lost its sinisterness, its vision of the horrible? Some people believe that as its predictions have not be borne out, that it has simply not worn well; its vision, once so compelling has turned out to be too far-fetched and too crude to disturb the reader still. I don’t agree with this view and still feel that Orwell is making a statement for individualism against collectivism and bland uniformity. Winston Smith may well come to love Big Brother and he may betray Julia and himself but the words of 1984 still possess immense power, its images of horror and corruption a real vision. But the horror and corruption may seem diminished in these days of ‘video nasties’ and pornography, terrorism and distrust, electronic surveillance and push-button information, a subject perhaps dealt with better by Aldous Huxley. These themes and emphases mark 1984 out as a class expression of anti-totalitarianism. Rousseau in his Discourse on Political Economy, written, in the mid-eighteenth century to supply the basic guidelines of the ideal political order argued that “If it is good to know how to deal with men as they are, it is much better to make them what there is need that they should be. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s inmost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions. It is certain that all people become in the long run what the government makes them: warriors, citizens, men when it so pleases; or merely populace and rabble, when it chooses to make them so.”

Orwell gives the clearest possible statement of this view. Winston Smith becomes what the government makes him. But the government ignores the proles, their feelings an irrelevance in the ideology of the State. Seizing power and staying in power can both be a brutal business. Totalitarianism is neither pretty nor benign. It was the peace that tyrants brought, after all, that was once called the peace of the grave. Byron wrote

“Mark! Where his carnage and his conquests cease!

He makes a solitude and calls it, peace.”

And Andrew Marvell almost two centuries earlier

“The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas,

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.”

Such is the power of thought!

Orwell, unemployment and 1984

In his study of Democracy in America, the nineteenth century French political and social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville said that:

“The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike…Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power that takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild…After having this successively taken over each member of the community in its powerful grasp, that supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform…The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided. Such power does not destroy, but it does prevent existence; it does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

It is appropriate in this ‘year of the book’ to examine the issues raised by de Tocqueville of dehumanisation and state power in relation to the works of George Orwell[1]. It is my intention to concentrate on these two aspects, which I believe underpin much of Orwell’s thinking and to consider Orwell’s contribution to our perceptions of unemployment and totalitarianism. However, to begin with I will examine Orwell’s place in the tradition of ‘radical earnestness’ that has been the basis of much English social theory since the mid-nineteenth century and arguably earlier.

Orwell and the ‘English tradition’

There is a strand in English social theory of which Orwell is a late exponent that can be traced back to the Levellers and Diggers of the mid-seventeenth century through Rousseau and Paine to the Owenite Socialists of the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the cosmopolitan influences of the last two hundred years, it is very much an ‘English tradition’. This tradition is itself powerful and, though substantial, elusive. It has a conservative element, what may be seen as Tory radicalism, is strong and binding, whose meaning and power of adhesion cannot be traced precisely back to social structure or system of ideas or the relations of production but which has penetrated all these with an unmistakable endurance and presence. T.S. Eliot, especially in his Four Quartets provided the most conveniently compressed expression of this tradition:

“This is the use of memory:

For liberation – not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.”

It is not enough Eliot says to state the facts of continuity to justify that continuity. It is in the provision of meaning that the justification of continuity and the consequent resistance to change can be found. Continuity provides identity, shape and location devoid of moral precepts: “History may be servitude, History may be freedom”. Meaning brings liberation but not liberation from the past but an almost metamorphic symbiosis of self and history. The past is used to justify the present, not just to explain it. Sir Isaiah Berlin writes of this that: “Most men wander hither and thither, guided and, at times hypnotised by more than one model, which they seldom trouble to make consistent, or even fragments of models which themselves form a part of some none too coherent or firm patterns or pattern. To drag them into the light makes it possible to explain them and sometimes explains them away.”

It is this conservative aspect of the tradition, which people move in and out of almost at will, that Orwell and many of his contemporaries were reacting against. They reasserted the ‘Englishness’ of a tradition that they saw as being corrupted by foreign especially Hegelian influences. They saw this conservative tradition not as ‘liberation’ but ‘serfdom’, elitist not democratic, ossification not dynamism. Above all, they saw it as incapable of dealing with the twin problems of the inter-war period, unemployment and totalitarianism of both left and right. Though the conservative tradition was, as Eliot says, “never indifferent”, it did preach that action was of “little importance”. However, both unemployment and the threat from totalitarianism required action.  Orwell and others redefine the ‘English tradition’. Hey argued that tradition was to culture as personality was to the individual. Orwell reiterated the values of individualism to society: individualism gave fulfilment, freedom, sincerity, honesty, personal dignity, choice, creativity, happiness and rights. This means the right of choice, of self-determination. Orwell wrote in his essay England, your England “The English are outside the European culture. For there is one art in which they have shown plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is also the only art that cannot cross frontiers.”

Orwell was born in 1903. His father was in the Indian civil service and Orwell described him as one of “the genteelly impoverished middle class whose like in England was an always faltering effort to maintain a maidservant, the bric-a-brac and the prestige which only the vacant, transplanted Wimbledons of the plains of India made possible”. He went to Eton but as a scholarship boy and joined the Imperial Police at the age of nineteen. In 1946 in Why I Write, Orwell discusses his life in the 1920s and 1930s: “I spent five years in an unsuitable profession in Burma, and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred to authority and made me fully aware for the first time of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.”

It is difficult to know or understand the experiences Orwell was living at this time. The contradiction of an old Etonian imperial police officer becoming first a temporary derelict and then a worker militiaman in Spain is obvious. But to Orwell, it was an individual almost egocentric problem. Many of those who knew him on his visits to Lancashire in the early 1930s when preparing material for what became The Road to Wigan Pier speak of his humourless detachment from other people and his reluctance to commit himself to friendship at any more than a superficial level. It was an isolation that Orwell never really got over. His faith gave him individual revelations that he converted into actions: “The Spanish Civil War and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it”.

Orwell’s ideas on politics and society are best exemplified in essays such as Charles Dickens, Decline of English Murder, Raffles and Miss Blandish and especially in his study of smutty postcards The Art of Donald McGill. These are essays in popular culture in which Orwell identified a sense of national character and a sense of justice. In The Art of Donald McGill, written in 1941 Orwell said: “I never read the proclamations of generals before battles, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties…without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal…Their whole meaning and virtue is their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of ‘higher’ influence would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm’s eye view of life”.

Orwell’s outstanding contribution to developing political and social awareness was his assertion of a conception of socialism not based on economic analysis nor on rational social and political organisation but on a specific analysis of English culture and character, on a sense of national character and of the justice owing to the English people. Orwell wrote in 1941 in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius that it was necessary “to try and determine what England is before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening…” To Orwell, the best and essential characteristics were found among the working population. Their culture was in opposition to established ruling-class culture: “in all societies, the common people must live to some extent against the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities.”

While the working class may set the standard for change, their role as agents in that change was far more ambiguous. In The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 Orwell portrays them as honest, kindly and he frequently uses the word ‘decent’, but they were also adaptable: “Instead of raging against their destiny, they made things tolerable by lowering their standards…Some people hardly seem to realise that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God; others rail against their landlords bitterly; but all cling desperately to their houses lest worse should befall them”.

Is it here the case of Orwell seeing working-class situations and solutions through middle class eyes? I think not. He argues against the notion “that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums”. There are two beliefs at work here. First, that the people, though deprived of many of the benefits of material culture are the repositories of the true and most truly valuable English culture. In In Defence of English Cooking, he says “If you want, say a good, rich slice of Yorkshire pudding you are more likely to get it in the poorest English home than in a restaurant”. Secondly, even though tolerance of and adaptability to their deprivations was an aspect of popular culture, the people had perceptions of a better way of life. This meant a fairer redistribution of material advantage that Orwell did not see being brought about by middle class political leadership. His hostility to arm-chair socialists was greater than that which he displayed towards the existing ruling class. To him, they were condescending, patronising and presumptuous: “they would never dream of eating their soup nosily or wearing their caps in the house”. The disparity between the mass of the population and the wealthy minority gave his arguments a sharp edge. Again, almost despairingly in The Lion and the Unicorn: “At some point or another you have got to deal with the man who says ‘I should be no worse off under Hitler’. But what answer can you give him – that is, what answer could you expect him to listen to – while common soldiers risk their lives for two and sixpence a day and fat women ride around in Rolls-Royce cars nursing pekineses”.

So how is this impasse resolved? Orwell says that “It is only by a revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean street fighting and red flags, it means a fundamental shift of power”. Salvation comes from within. Leadership had to be the leadership involved in participation, a leadership that involved a negation of everything normally associated with the concept and privileges of leading. 1984 is an indisputable rejection of any attempt to save the people from above by the sole power of the centralised collectivist state. Orwell’s view is a populist one with all the democratic participation that implies.

Orwell and unemployment

Given Orwell’s populist position, how valid was his analysis of unemployment in the 1930s? This decade saw an explosion of documentary literature, journalism and comment. It saw the emergence of Mass Observation using trained observers to collect information and report on all aspects of social behaviour and practice including evidence dealing with social habits such as dress, drinking and leisure activities. The cinema newsreels showed images of deprivation: vivid, poignant and immensely powerful. But Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was part of that great era of the travelogue literature not about exotic parts of the globe but about the far corners of ‘Darkest England’. The Picture Post, the first documentary picture magazine marked a new step forward in documentary journalism with the salacious, sensational and sordid mixed with serious profiles of social problems including unemployment. It represented the 1930s equivalent of the modern use of television ‘soap operas’ like Eastenders and Coronation Street making valid social comment.

The written word was, however, central. The first sixpenny Penguins were published in 1935, the Left Book Club was founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936 and both brought books about social conditions to a mass market of unprecedented size. Public libraries expanded and, it is likely that the reading habit was more widespread than ever. Cheap editions made people far more aware of living and working conditions. Given that unemployment was the problem of the inter-war years, it is remarkable that government made no real attempt to investigate its social consequences. The furthest it went was to examine the distribution of industrial population in the Barlow Report in 1938 and various reports of the Ministry of Labour on industrial conditions. Almost all the work on social conditions was conducted by voluntary groups or on the initiative of individuals or publishers.

The study of mass unemployment was left to the mainstream of academic inquiry and it was not until the late 1930s that the serious government investigations began to make an appearance. In the interim, a literary genre dealing with the problems of unemployment and depression made its appearance. Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, a novel set in depression-scarred south Lancashire, Ellen Wilkinson’s The Town That Was Murdered about Jarrow and Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier are the most famous. These books formed one horn of a generally left-wing attack on the performance of the National government, the other being on appeasement of the European dictators. It is not surprising that the outpouring of ‘dole literature’ as it was called was not always well received. Arthur Bryant, the historian reserved a fairly stern reception for Orwell’s classic in his preface to an autobiography of G.A. Tomlinson, a coal-miner:

“The Road to Wigan Pier…was written by a young man of refined tastes who at some apparent inconvenience to himself had ‘roughed it’ for a few weeks in Wigan and Sheffield. The impression left by the first part of the book is that Wigan and Sheffield are Hell; the corollary, worked out with great skill in the second part, that every decent-hearted man and woman, sooner than allow such conditions to endure a day longer, should at once enrol in the ranks of those who are seeking change by revolutionary means…The weakness of the argument lies in the fact that revolutionary change…involves not only a blood-bath…but the loss of individual freedom of choice and the end of democratic government: the experience of Russia and Spain proves this. But there is an even more fatal weakness in his premises, for though Wigan and Sheffield may genuinely seem Hell to a super-sensitive novelist, they do not seem Hell to the vast majority of people who live there.”

Bryant provides a clear statement of the ‘adaptability of the working-class’; ‘revolution’ in the blood-bath sense was never an option in the 1930s any more than it is today[2]. A comparison of the rhetoric of extremism of both left and right in the 1930s and the actual numerical basis of support for extremism shows the validity of this conclusion.

What ‘dole literature’ did was to add an important dimension to the study of social problems akin, in its impact to the effects on early Victorian society of the ‘social novels’ of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Kingsley. But it reached a much wider audience that the more scientific, and perhaps more impartial studies of the academic investigators and in that sense has done more than any other single source to shape our perceptions of the ‘Hungry Thirties’ or what A.J.P. Taylor called ‘the Devil’s Decade’.  We live in an age of almost instant communication and it is easy to forget that in the 1930s, just as a century earlier, the major barrier to people taking action on behalf of the unemployed and the deprived was sheer ignorance[3]. Unemployment was concentrated geographically in areas of heavy industry and this was, in itself sufficient to disguise the enormity of the unemployment problem. Orwell’s writings on this and what he saw as the evils of rampant fascism both at home and in Spain, helped to bring these problems into the realms of reality and gave them the flesh and blood lacking in official statements. He helped to put unemployment and fascism on the political agenda.

It is interesting that much of the ‘dole literature’ dates from the mid-to late-1930s – Orwell is no exception here – when the worst of the depression was over. It was also the case in the 1840s. Orwell attempted some analysis of this in the 1940s. He concluded that first, it took time to undertake the research; ‘dole literature’ could not be instantly created. Secondly, the thirties opened with unemployment as a social problem and it was not until it was politicised and the alternative Keynesian view took root that anything positive could really be done. The classical economic policy of budgetary control and retrenchment led to popular economic tracts like The Riddle of Unemployment. Government was concerned not with removing the problem of unemployment but only with mitigating its effects through unemployment relief. Orwell was at his most powerful when describing the hated ‘means test’:

“The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it breaks upon families. Old people, sometimes bed-ridden are driven out of their homes by it. An old-aged pensioner, for example, if a widower would normally live with one or other of his children; his weekly ten shillings given towards the household expenses and probably he is not badly cared for. Under the Means Test. He counts as a ‘lodger’ and if he stays at home his children’s dole will be docked. So, perhaps at 70 or 75 years of age, he has been turned out into lodging, handing his pension over to the lodging-house keeper and existing on the verge of starvation…It is happening all over England at this moment, thanks to the Means Test…There is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single and upon men more than women...how the devil is he to fill up his empty days?”

Orwell’s value as an analyst of unemployment lies not in his analysis of its causes of which he says little new or of the totality of people’s experience in the 1930s. J.B. Priestley’s An English Journey gives a far clearer view of the regional nature of unemployment. Orwell only makes one statement in The Road to Wigan Pier about unemployment elsewhere: “In the South, unemployment exists but it is scattered and queerly unobtrusive. There are plenty of rural districts where a man out of work is almost unheard-of and you don’t anywhere see the spectacle of whole blocks of citizens living on the dole.”  It is his perception of the debilitating effects of unemployment and his response to government inaction that is most valuable. Statements like these still have a pronounced impact today. In response to occupation centres, Orwell said: “Keep a man busy mending boots and he is less likely to read the Daily Worker” and “Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone has access to the radio…It is quite likely that fish and chips, art-silk stocking, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate, the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.”

The social conditions that Orwell described and the existence of poverty and unemployment became the relevant evidence in the political debate that was to have profound consequences for the post-war world. Orwell contributed but one dimension to this debate that was accentuated by the outbreak of war in 1939. His belief in ‘social justice’ was echoed in the Beveridge Report of 1942, in the Butler Education Act of 1944 and in Archbishop William Temple’s Christianity and the Social Order with its arguments for minimum social standards acceptable in a Christian community. The Welfare State was a logical consequence of Orwell’s writing and the present debate on the role of the state in welfare provision makes his ideas doubly important[4]. Seebohm Rowntree concluded his The Human Needs of Labour with the prophetic statement: “I submit that the day is past in which we could afford to compromise between the desires of the few and the needs of the many or to perpetuate conditions in which large masses of the people are unable to secure the bare necessities of mental and physical efficiency.”

Orwell too asserted the ‘needs of the many’ as opposed to the ‘desires of the few’ and nowhere more clearly than in 1984.

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[1] This paper was written early in 1984 and given at a conference in Aylesbury in the spring of that year. I have not altered the text though have added footnotes in places by way of revisions or further comment.

[2] Looking back from the perspective of 2003, this was perhaps an overstatement in respect of the ‘anti-revolutions’ of the eastern bloc as communism collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s but an under-statement in relation to the declining revolutionary fervour of the left. ‘New Labour’ is far from revolutionary in its ideology having espoused the language of the ‘market’ as central plank of its ‘reforms’.

[3] This was written before the days of the email and text-message, of video-conferencing and the immense and accessible knowledge-base that is the Web. The major barrier to people taking action today is not sheer ignorance, but deliberate indifference. ‘Live-Aid’ occurred quite soon after I wrote the paper but over twenty years later, we are no closer to solving the problem the ‘Third World’ deprivation or debt. ‘Red-Nose Day’ reminds people graphically of the need for action but familiarity through the media with famine, disease and war has bred an intense indifference among many people to their effects. We live in a ‘balkanised’ world in which ‘nimbyism’ is increasingly the norm.

[4] The debate on the Welfare State under Thatcherism was all about establishing a positive link between the market and health provision, targeting welfare where it was most needed and stigmatising those individuals who failed to live up to their responsibilities. Under New Labour, the debate is all about establishing targets (to give the impression that things really are improving), giving hospitals and by extension patients more freedom (within the market-place), targeting welfare where it is most needed and introducing ‘inducements’ to compel those who are not living up to their social responsibilities to accept them. So little new there then!! Health care is still ‘free at the point of delivery’ which is more than can be said for higher education. The safety-net that Beveridge saw as the basis of any humane society is wearing thin. The arrogance of power means that the ‘desires of the few’ are increasing the dictats that shape the ‘needs of the many’. ‘Spin’ not ‘social justice’ is now the determinant of policy and politics as the ‘art of the possible’ has become ‘the science of the sound-bite’ and the ‘dialogue of the deaf’.

‘Alone and in a stranger scene’: Alienation and John Clare

 

The phrase used on the title of this paper[1] comes from The Flitting, a poem Clare wrote in the 1840s when he had already been confined to an asylum in Northamptonshire for nearly ten years. The focus of this poem was his sense of loss and is reiterated throughout his writings:

“Strange scenes mere shadows are to me”[2]

“Life is to me a dream that never wakes.”[3]

“The past it is a magic word

Too beautiful to last…”[4]

Alienation or detachment from the world as it is is a recurring theme in Clare’s poetry certainly from the early 1820s.

‘Nature’s Threads’

The pastoral poets of the eighteenth century, particularly Oliver Goldsmith and George Crabbe wrote of the lost peace and virtues of country life. Yet the poems of the happy tenant as the idealised and independent self of the reflective pastoral tradition are succeeded by poems of loss, change and regret, poems that express the sense of appalled withdrawal. The identification of a Golden Age of rural life with humble and worthy characters in a rural setting contrasted with the wealth and ambition of the city and the court was the creation of the mid-eighteenth century. It can be seen in Gray’s Elergy

“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strike

Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;

Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.”

And in Goldsmith’s most famous and yet baffling poem The Deserted Village (1769)

“A time there was, ere England’s griefs began

When every road of ground maintained its man.”

The old village was both happy and productive, while the new conditions of change were both unhappy and unproductive.

“No more thy glassy brook reflects the day

But choked with sedges, works its weedy way;

Along they glades, a solitary quest

The hollow sounding bittern guards its nest

Amidst they desert walk, the lapwing flies

And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.”

The result is a shift in focus away from the landscape to seeing people in their environments and how change affected them. There was a gradual rejection of the ‘pastoral’ and the emergence of a powerful social and psychological sense of alienation. George Crabbe wrote in 1811,

“No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain

But own the Village Life a life of pain.”

The imperative shifts from one of beauty to one of morality and the degeneration of moral values and moral support within society as a consequence of economic change. Oppression becomes the key concept as the humanitarian values of paternalism with its passionate insistence on care and sympathy and an implied standard of plain and virtuous living was deliberately and progressively dismantled. This was Thomas Carlyle’s “abdication on the part of the governors” and George Crabbe’s “where Plenty smiles – alas she smiles for few”.

A sense of change

The notion of a ‘Golden Age’ is, and has always been a rhetorical device, a means of giving nostalgia respectability. It is used, frequently by those who do not wish to change or who see change as a threat to their own vested interests. It is a concept of extreme selfishness. Yet change in rural England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did bring substantial ‘loss’.

First, there was a decline in the living standards of agricultural labourers as they were denied access to commons and wastes as grazing for their few animals and as sources of fuel. Thomas Bewick wrote in his autobiography of the division of waste lands in 1812: “the poor man was rooted out and the various mechanics of the village derived of the benefit of it”. Secondly, there was a growing sense of resentment against farmers and landowners felt across the political spectrum from the Tory Robert Southey to the radical Shelley. The focus for this resentment was largely, though not exclusively the enclosure of land. “All I know is, I had a cow and Parliament took it from me”, Arthur Young imagined a poor man saying and Thomas Bewick described Anthony Liddell in the following terms: “He maintained that the fowls of the air and the fishes in the sea were free to all men; consequently, game-laws or laws to protect the fisheries had no weight with him…”

The notion of a ‘Golden Age’ constructs a mythical sense of community where all, despite social and economic inequality were happy and contented. Enclosure destroyed this sense of ‘oneness’, Yet it is a community always in retrospect, a community in which mutuality of interest had begun to break down, if it had ever existed before John Clare began to write and arguably even before he was born in 1793. In this period of change, it mattered greatly where you were looking from. Points of view, interpretations, selections from reality revolved around a complex of different ways of seeing even the same rural life.

A green language

William Wordsworth moved view of rural life away from the essentially descriptive perspectives of pastoralists like Goldsmith and Crabbe. While the latter provided evidence of lack of community, of the village as a life of pain Wordsworth saw communities as separated from life in any direct way. It is the essential isolation and silence and loneliness that became the only carriers of nature and community against the rigorous and selfish ease of ordinary society. The labourer now merges with his landscape, is seen at a distance as a part of the much larger romantic conception of Nature. It is no longer the will that will transform nature, it is the lonely creative imagination alone through which it is possible to recreate the pastoral idyll, if not the reality. This is the ‘green language’ of poetry, a phrase first used by Clare in his Pastoral Poesy:

“A language that is ever green

That feelings unto all impart

As hawthorn blossoms soon as seen

Give May to every heart.”

Closer descriptions of nature – of birds, trees, the effects of weather and of light – are a marked element in Clare’s writings and clearly related to lived experience and intense observation.

The rural bard

Clare thought that his Richard and Kate made him “first of the Rural Bards in the country”. In his early poem Helpstone, he contrasted the ‘industry’ of the old world with the ‘wealth’ of the new:

“Accursed Wealth! O’er bounding human laws,

Of every evil though remains’t the cause:

Victims of want, those wretches such as me,

Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee:

Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed

And thine our loss of labour and of bread.”

This was written in 1809 when Clare was sixteen and connects a lost phase of living, lost identity, lost relations and lost certainties. It is reinforced in Joys of Childhood,

“Dull is that memory, vacant in that mind

Where no sweet vsion of the past appears.”

Nature, the past and childhood are powerfully fused. This is an experience of pain, of withdrawal into ‘nature’, into the Eden of the heart and the past. Eventually, it was to lead to the speaking silence of a neglected past, a man alone with nature, with poverty, with ‘madness’ recreating a world in his green language:

“I am, but what I am

None cares or know?

My friends forsake me

As a memory lost

I am the self-consumer of my woes

They rise and vanish in oblivious hope

Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost

And yet I am….”

Clare was born in Helpstone near Peterborough in 1793. His parents were barely literate and, according to the law of averages he should have become an agricultural labourer earning a basic subsistence wage. When he learned to read and write, he became an exception; when he committed to writing poetry, he became an anomaly. His first book Poems Descriptive of Rural Life Scenery was published in 1820 and quickly went into four editions. Clare became a nine-day wonder. He married Patty Turner though he was haunted by memories of Mary Joyce, a local farmer’s daughter until he died. A second volume The Village Minstrel appeared in 1821 and two years later he began work on a long, ambitious poem The Shepherd’s Calendar that appeared in 1825.

He visited London in 1820, 182 and 1824 and was lionised by the literati as the ‘green man’. However, health problems began to have a serious effect on him. From 1823, he suffered bouts of severe melancholia, doubt and hopelessness that were diagnosed as manic depression. In 1828, he made his last visit to London. In 1830-31, he suffered severe and prolonged illness and moved to a larger cottage at Northborough, a few miles from Helpstone with the support of his friends. Though intended to ameliorate his plight, this proved the last straw completing his sense of alienation. He was taken to an asylum in Epping in 1837 but escaped four year later returning home in search of his first ‘wife’ Mary Joyce. He stayed at home from June to December 1841 but was then confined to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he died on 20^th May 1864.

Until 1825, his work was a prolific celebration of delight in perceiving and re-presenting natural life and an exploration of the relationships of a hardworking, lowly human society to a rural environment and the cycle of the year with its swings from summer to bleak winter. The relationship between word and world was harmonious and unstrained. By the early 1830s, however, difficult truths had shaken his delicate and vulnerable sensibility. The shift from a primarily oral to a literate and literary culture, though necessary to reach a wider audience increasingly cut Clare off from the people he lived among for whom poetry was a closed book. His own wife could not share his life as a poet and Mary Joyce became and remained the emblem of what might have been.

Clare discovered himself adrift and in limbo. Even his sacral landscapes had proved impermanent, despoiled beyond recognition by the ‘improvements’ of enclosure. This led to a deepening sense of disenchantment and alienation. This threatened to overwhelm the impulse to affirm the joys and delights of Nature. It proved an irreconcilable dilemma as Clare swung between bouts of mental instability and relative sanity. His own inner dialectic was played out in his later works where the positive and negative features of his psyche battle for supremacy within the same works. The dialectic between past and present, childhood and age, nature and wealth were only resolved for Clare in death. As he wrote in I Am in 1848

“I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where women never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator God

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.”

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[1] This paper was initially written in 1997 and was revised in 2008.

[2] From The Flitting

[3] This extract comes from Written in a thunderstorm July 15^th 1841

[4] From Childhood