Standards of Living 1815-1850: Rise or Fall?

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. [1] 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, especially in the period up to 1850, over, not simply whether living standards fell or rose, but over the whole revolutionary experience.[3]

There was a decline in real wages starting in the 1750s that persisted through the price peak of 1812-1813 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.[4] 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.

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 were more than a third higher than in Buckinghamshire, a differential that continued until the end of the century. This North-South divide[5] 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.[6]

Keighley, Yorkshire c1860

Standard of living statistics conceal important structural changes in the composition of working-class family income before 1850.[7] 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.[8] 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% 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 were affected by various forms of occupational disorder. The Sheffield fork-grinders killed off no less than a quarter of their workforce every five years.[9] 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.[10] 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[11], 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.[12] 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.[13]

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 production that was less labour intensive and they were determined to restrict cheap female competition.[14] 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.[15] 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.[16]

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, 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 2% of all infant children in industrial Lancashire were left to the mercies of professional child minders.

Female surface workers, Lancashire c1870

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 prospect of alternative employment. 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, wages were higher: 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.[17] Food was by far the most important item, accounting for up to three-quarters of the wage packet. Working people bought poor quality food in small quantities for immediate consumption and rarely received value for money. Food was often obtained from the Saturday night markets where dealers were able to off-load their otherwise unsellable produce: Engels commented that ‘the workers get what is too bad for the property-holding class.’[18] They were often dependent on credit and had to pay the higher prices of the obliging small shopkeepers. Provisions were dearer still where workers were victims of the truck system and the poor quality, adulterated foods of the ‘Tommy shops’.[19] 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 gang-masters supplied subcontract labour at the cheapest daily rates.[20]

As with food, so with housing: those at the bottom end of the market received scant value for money.[21] 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 while in Preston in 1851, lodgers were present in 23% of all households.[22] Many urban workers were also subject to the ‘house trucking’ system where housing was dependent on their employers, an extension of the ‘tied’ cottage system of rural England.

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 easily pawned as well as providing immediate enjoyment.[23]

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[1] Rubinstein, W.D., Wealth and Inequality in Britain, (Faber), 1986 and Kaelbe, H., Industrialisation and Social Inequality in Nineteenth Century Europe, (Berg), 1986 provide useful analysis of the issues.  Pollard, S., and Crossley, D.W., The Wealth of Britain 1085-1966, (Batsford), 1968 and Burnett, J., A History of the Cost of Living, (Penguin), 1969 provide chronological perspective. Floud, R., Wachter, K. and Gregory, A., Height, health and history: Nutritional status in the United Kingdom 1750-1980, (Cambridge University Press), 1990, a major contribution to the debate. Taylor, A.J., (ed.), The Standard of Living in the Industrial Revolution, (Methuen), 1975 contains articles by the major protagonists. Burnett, J., Plenty and Want, (Scolar Press), 1969, new edition, 1989 is central to the period 1832-1914. Crafts, N.F.R., ‘Some dimensions of the ‘quality of life’ during the British industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, Vol. 50, (1997), pp. 617-639 is valuable. Humphries, Jane, ‘Standard of Living, Quality of Life’, in Williams, Chris, (ed.), A companion to nineteenth-century Britain, (Blackwell Publishers), 2004, pp. 287-304 summarises the debate.

[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. Crafts, N.F.R. and Mills, Terence C., ‘Trends in real wages in Britain, 1750-1913’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 31, (1994), pp. 176-194 and Feinstein, C.H., ‘Pessimism perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 58, (1998), pp. 625-658 and ‘What really happened to real wages?: trends in wages, prices, and productivity in the United Kingdom, 1880-1913’, Economic History Review, 2^nd ser., Vol. 43, (1990), pp. 329-355.

[3] Weaver, Stewart, ‘The Bleak Age: J. H. Clapham, the Hammonds and the standard of living in Victorian Britain’, in Taylor, Miles and Wolff, Michael, (eds.), The Victorians since 1901: histories, representations and revisions, (Manchester University Press), 2004, pp. 29-43.

[4] Crafts, N.F.R., ‘English workers’ real wages during the industrial revolution: some remaining problems’; with reply by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 45, (1985), pp. 139-153.

[5] On this issue, see Baker, Alan R.H. and Billinge, Mark, (eds.), Geographies of England: the North-South divide, material and imagined, (Cambridge University Press), 2004.

[6] Harison, Casey, ‘The standard of living of English and French workers, 1750-1850’, in Rider, Christine and Thompson, Michael, (eds.), The industrial revolution in comparative perspective, (Krieger), 2000, pp. 165-178 provides a useful comparative study.

[7] Voth, Hans-Joachim’, Living standards and the urban environment’, in ibid, Floud, Roderick and Johnson, Paul A., (eds.), The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain, Volume 1: industrialisation, 1700-1860, pp. 268-294.

[8] Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, ‘The origins and expansion of the male breadwinner family: the case of nineteenth-century Britain’, International Review of Social History, Supplement, Vol. 5, (1997), pp. 25-64 summarises the debates.

[9] Williams, Naomi, ‘The reporting and classification of causes of death in mid-nineteenth-century England: the example of Sheffield’, Historical Methods, Vol. 29, (1996), pp. 58-71.

[10] Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865’, Economic History Review, Vol. 48 (1995), pp. 89-117 and ‘”The exploitation of little children”: child labour and the family economy in the industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 32, (1995), pp. 485-516.

[11] There were severe limitations on women’s roles in textiles; see, Valverde, Mariana, ‘“Giving the female a domestic turn”: the social, legal and moral regulation of women’s work in British cotton mills, 1820-1850’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 21, (1987-8), pp. 619-634.

[12] John, Angela V., By the sweat of their brow: women workers at Victorian coal mines, 1980.

[13] Verdon, Nicola, Rural women workers in nineteenth-century England: gender, work and wages, (Boydell), 2002 provides an overview while Ulyatt, Donna J., Rural women and work: Lincolnshire c.1800-1875, (Anderson Blake Books), 2005 and MacKay, John, ‘Married women and work in nineteenth-century Lancashire: the evidence of the 1851 and 1861 census reports’, in Goose, Nigel, (ed.), Women’s work in industrial England: regional and local perspectives, (Local Population Studies), 2007), pp. 164-181 provide valuable case studies. See also, Sharpe, Pamela, ‘The female labour market in English agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: expansion or contraction?’, in ibid, Goose, Nigel, (ed.), Women’s work in industrial England: regional and local perspectives, pp. 51-75.

[14] Clark, Gregory, ‘Farm wages and living standards in the industrial revolution: England, 1670-1869’, Economic History Review, Vol. 54, (2001), pp. 477-505, provides a valuable longitudinal study.

[15] Blackburn, Sheila, A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work?: sweated labour and the origins of minimum wage legislation in Britain, (Ashgate), 2007, ‘“Between the devil of cheap labour competition and the deep sea of family poverty?”: sweated labour in time and place, 1840-1914’, Labour History Review, Vol. 71, (2006), pp. 99-121 and ‘“Princesses and sweated-wage slaves go well together”: images of British sweated workers, 1843-1914’, International Labor and Working-Class History, Vol. 61, (2002), pp. 24-44.

[16] Schmiechen, J.A., Sweated industries and sweated labour: the London clothing trades: 1860-1914, (Taylor & Francis), 1984.

[17] Horrell, S. and Humphries, J., ‘Old questions, new data, and alternative perspectives: families’ living standards in the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 52, (1992), pp. 849-880.

[18] Ibid, Engels, Frederick, The condition of the working class in England, p. 104.

[19] On the operation of the truck system see, Hilton, G. W., ‘The British truck system in the 19^th century’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 65, (1957), pp. 237-256, and The truck system, including a history of the British Truck Acts, 1465-1960, (W. Heffer), 1960.

[20] Verdon, Nicola, ‘The employment of women and children in agriculture: a reassessment of agricultural gangs in nineteenth-century Norfolk’, Agricultural History Review, Vol. 49, (2001), pp. 41-55.

[21] Williams, Samantha, ‘Poor relief, labourers’ households and living standards in rural England c.1770-1834: a Bedfordshire case study’, Economic History Review, Vol. 58, (2005), pp. 485-519.

[22] Ibid, Foster. J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: early industrial capitalism in three English towns, pp. 125-131.

[23] Tebbutt, Melanie, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit, (Leicester University Press), 1983 and Hudson, K, Pawnbroking: an aspect of British social history, 1982.

From domestic to ‘modern’ production, 1815-1850

The subject of the working-classes in the nineteenth century is an enormous one.[1] It is difficult to overestimate the importance of work in working-class life. Work helped determine two fundamental elements of working-class existence: the ways in which workers spent most of their waking hours; and the amounts of money they had to their disposal. It also determined most other aspects of working-class life: the standards of living they enjoyed; standards of health; the type of housing they lived in; the nature of the family and neighbourhood life; the ways in which leisure time was spent and the social, political and other values that were held.[2]

The swing away from domestic forms of production was largely the result of three developments: the growth of population, the extension of enclosure with a consequent reduction in demand for rural labour and the advent of mechanised production boosting productivity and fostering the growth of new towns and cities. The result was a change in the structure of the labour market. However, this did not mean a linear progression to large-scale factory production nor did it necessarily entail the deskilling of labour, though there were notable exceptions.

The enclosure of common lands had a profound impact on the livelihood of rural workers and their families from the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It led to a reduction of resources available for many workers and a greater reliance on earnings. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic war, the spread of enclosure pushed rural labourers on to the labour market in a search for work, a situation worsened by falling arable farm prices and wages between 1815 and 1835.[3] The result of the growth in labour supply and agricultural depression was the collapse of farm service in the south and east of the country, a process that was already evident before 1800. It had been customary for farm workers to be hired for a year, to enter service in another household and to live with another family, receiving food, clothes, board and a small annual wage in return for work, only living out when they wished to marry. The norm now became day-labourers who had little job security and who were employed only when there were agricultural jobs to be done.

Added to this was the development of factory-based textile production that had a profound effect on the other source of earned income for rural workers involved in outwork. Different parts of the country were associated with different types of product: lace-making round Nottingham, straw-plaiting in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, stocking-knitting in Leicester and spinning and weaving of cotton and wool in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The appearance of the mills damaged the status and security of some very skilled branches of outwork. Many rural households were thrown into poverty as such work became increasingly scarce and available only at miserably low rates of pay. The fate of the handloom weavers, stocking-frame knitters and silk weavers in the 1830s and 1840s, all reflected the impact of technological change on the distribution of work.[4] Textiles were not the only industry to experience such structural changes. In both town and country, mechanisation had a marked impact on a wide variety of employment and the position of some skilled workers was undermined while the demand for new skills grew.

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

The Elizabethan Statute of Artificers (or Apprentices) 1563 provided a legal framework of craft regulation but had fallen into abeyance long before its apprenticeship clauses were repealed in 1811. [5] Under the old system of apprenticeship, the pupil was formally indentured at 14-16 and joined a master’s house for a period traditionally specified as seven years before being recognised as a journeyman, qualified to practice the trade. It was also usual for journeymen to ‘live in’, entitled to bed, board and wages in return to work, only moving out on marriage. Often journeymen tramped the country in search of work in part to extend their experience and knowledge of their trade but also to escape increasingly uncertain employment prospects in their immediate locality.[6] To become a master the journeyman had to produce his ‘masterpiece’, demonstrating his mastery of the skills of the specific trade. From the early nineteenth century, fewer apprentices were completing their indentures and journeymen’s wages were falling, both signs that employers were no longer bothered about hiring only men who had served their time. This led to a dilution in the labour force and an increased blurring of the boundaries between ‘society’ and ‘non-society’ men, a situation made worse by the mechanisation of production that required fewer skills than handwork.

The nature of training for skilled work changed; apprenticeships were shortened and concentrated on specific skills rather than on an extensive understanding of all aspects of production. [7] Lads worked alongside journeymen rather than being attached to a master’s household with various adverse results. The new system bore heavily on apprentices’ families, who frequently still paid for indentures while the apprentice lived at home and could expect little or no wages for his efforts until his time was served. Stipulated ratios between journeymen and boys were increasingly ignored and apprentices became a cheap alternative for adult labour further depressing the adult labour market. Such developments were resented by the journeymen expected to train recruits, souring relations and often making training uncooperative. The fate of boys was often instant dismissal as soon as they were old enough to command an adult rate.[8] These practices were more common during economic downturns. This abuse of apprenticeship provoked sporadic industrial disputes as skilled workers tried to protect their position and to prevent their trade from being diluted by excess labour. The independence of their ‘aristocratic’ status was upheld through the rhetoric of custom and the invention of ‘tradition’ to sanction and legitimise current practice. This excluded employers and market calculations from the opaque world of custom, tradition, craft mystery and skill, a separate culture upheld by secrecy, theatrical ceremony and, when necessary, ritualised violence. Through these means skilled workers defended their position at the ‘frontier of control’.

Reduced to wage-earning proletarians without rights to the materials and product of their labour, skilled workers fought hard to retain some control over the ‘labour process’ and to defend their workplace autonomy against the new time and labour discipline favoured by political economists, preachers and employers.[9] Even in new forms of work organisations, they often succeeded in safeguarding their status despite ‘deskilling’ technology and increased division of labour. But in defending or reconstructing skilled status, their actions were divisive: not just a line drawn against employers but against unfair or unskilled competition in the labour market. [10] Skill as property became skill as patriarchy that left women defenceless against the degradation of their labour and increasingly marginalised.

The most obvious impact of industrialisation was found in the more intense and strictly disciplined nature of work in those industries transformed by the new technology: textiles, coal-mining, metal-processing and engineering. Skilled workers may have been able to hold the ‘frontier of control’ in relation to their skills as property but they were unable to prevent, though perhaps delay, the inexorable march of discipline and compulsion within the workplace. None of the convivial culture of the workshop was allowed to interrupt the pace of factory work. Early mills were manned by convict and pauper labour, mostly children because the regularity of work was alien to the adult population used to a greater degree of autonomy in conducting their working lives.[11] The higher wages available in factories provided insufficient compensation for this loss of ‘freedom’. Impoverished handloom weavers would send their daughters to work on the power looms while resisting the prospect themselves. Hours in the early factories were probably no longer than those in the domestic trades but what made it far less acceptable was the monotony of the work involved, the loss of public feast days and holidays and, for middle-class commentators, the physical consequences of long hours and the appalling conditions in the factory towns.[12]

The growth of labour market conditions in the nineteenth century makes it difficult to make clear distinctions between the employed, the unemployed, the underemployed, the self-employed and the economically inactive. Sub-contracting was widespread, notably in the clothing trade where middlemen ‘sweated’ women to earn a profit. The ‘slop’ end of the fashion and furnishing trades competed frantically for available orders at almost any price. Casualism became more visible towards 1900 as cities spread in size. Short-term engagements and casual employment were particularly associated with the docks and the construction industries. The casual labour of the old East End was trapped within an economy of declining trades. Conditions of employment deteriorated. By the early 1870s, London’s shipbuilding[13] had slumped beyond the point of recovery and by the 1880s most heavy engineering, iron founding and metal work had gone the same way. Competition from provincial furniture, clothing and footwear factories could only be met by reducing labour costs and led to the increasing importance of metropolitan sweated trades.

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[1] The literature on the labouring population is immense.  Ibid, Hunt, E.H., British Labour History 1815-1914, Rule, J., The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750-1850, (Longman), 1986, ibid, Benson, J., The Working-class in Britain 1850-1939, (Longman), 1989, Hopkins, E., A Social History of the English Working-classes 1815-1945, (Edward Arnold), 1977, Belchem, J., Industrialisation and the Working-class, (Scolar), 1990, Savage, M. and .Miles, A., The remaking of the British working class, 1840-1940, (Routledge), 1994 and Brown, K.D., The English Labour Movement 1700-1951, (Gill and Macmillan), 1982 are good starting points.

[2] Ibid, Benson, John, The Working-class in Britain 1850-1939, pp. 9-38 is the best introduction to this issue. Ibid, Joyce, Patrick, (ed.), The historical meanings of work, is an excellent collection containing a seminal introduction by the editor. Ibid, Joyce, Patrick, ‘Work’ in Thompson, F.M.L., (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: Vol. 2 People and their environment, pp. 131-194 is a short overview.

[3] Richardson, T.L., ‘Agricultural labourers’ wages and the cost of living in Essex, 1790-1840: a contribution to the standard of living debate’, in Holderness, B.A. and Turner, M.E., (eds.), Land, labour and agriculture, 1700-1920: essays for Gordon Mingay, (Hambledon), 1991, pp. 69-90.

[4] See ibid, Bythell, Duncan, The Handloom Weavers and The Sweated Trades for a detailed discussion of this issue.

[5] Lane, Joan, Apprenticeship in England, 1600-1914, (UCL Press), 1996 and Wallis, Patrick, ‘Apprenticeship and Training in Pre-modern England’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 68, (2008), pp. 832-861 provide background.

[6] See ibid, Hobsbawm, E.J., ‘The tramping artisan’ in his Labouring Men, pp. 34-63 and ibid, E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working-class, pp. 259-296 and ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, Vol. 38, (1967), pp. 56-97 reprinted and revised in ibid, Customs in Common, pp. 352-403.

[7] Ibid, Humphries, Jane, ‘English Apprenticeship: A Neglected Factor in the First Industrial Revolution’, in David, Paul A. and Thomas, Mark, (eds.), The economic future in historical perspective, (Oxford University Press), 2001, pp. 73-102, Rose, Mary B., ‘Social policy and business; parish apprenticeship and the early factory system, 1750-1834’, Business History, Vol. 31, (1989), pp. 5-32, Lane, J., ‘Apprenticeship in Warwickshire cotton mills, 1790-1830’, Textile History, Vol. 10, (1979), pp. 161-174 and a valuable comparative study Elbaum, Bernard, ‘Why apprenticeship persisted in Britain but not in the United States’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 49, (1989), pp. 337-349.

[8] Honeyman, Katrina, Child workers in England, 1780-1820: parish apprentices and the making of the early industrial labour force, (Ashgate), 2007, Steinberg, Marc W., ‘Unfree Labor, Apprenticeship and the Rise of the Victorian Hull Fishing Industry: An Example of the Importance of Law and the Local State in British Economic Change’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 51, (2006), pp. 243-276 and Reinarz, Jonathan, ‘Learning By Brewing: Apprenticeship and the English Brewing Industry in the Late Victorian and Early Edwardian Period’, in Munck, Bert De, Kaplan, Steven L. and Soly, Hugo, (eds.), Learning on the shop floor: historical perspectives on apprenticeship, (Berghahn Books), 2007, pp. 111-130 and ‘Fit for management: apprenticeship and the English brewing industry, 1870-1914’, Business History, Vol. 43, (2001), pp. 33-53.

[9] That this was often unsuccessful is explored in Green, David R., From artisans to paupers: economic change and poverty in London, 1790-1870, (Scolar & Ashgate), 1995. See also, Levene, Alysa, ‘“Honesty, sobriety and diligence”: master-apprentice relations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England’, Social History, Vol. 33, (2008), pp. 183-200.

[10] This was especially evident in attacks, widespread in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, on new technology where it posed a threat to employment but was especially focused on the use of unskilled labour. See, for example, Brodie, Marc, ‘Artisans and dossers: the 1886 West End riots and the East End casual poor’, London Journal, Vol. 24, (1999), pp. 34-50.

[11] Honeyman, Katrina, ‘The Poor Law, the Parish Apprentice, and the Textile Industries in the North of England, 1780-1830’, Northern History, Vol. 44, (2007), pp. 115-140.

[12] Ibid, Boot, H.M., ‘How skilled were Lancashire cotton factory workers in 1833?’

[13] Rankin, Stuart, (ed.), Shipbuilding on the Thames and Thames-Built Ships: a symposium for researchers and authors held on Saturday 2 September 2000: supported by London Borough of Southwark, Department of Education & Leisure and the Greenwich Maritime Institute to mark the 130th anniversary year of the launch of “Lothair”, last large vessel built in Rotherhithe, 1870, (Rotherhithe & Bermondsey Local History Group), 2000.