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© - Raphael Samuel, "Mechanization and Hand Labour in
Industrializing Britain", in Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., The
Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth Century Europe (London:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 26-40. Mechanization and Hand Labour in Industrializing Britain By
Raphael Samuel Introduction
by Lenard R. Berlanstein The distinguished economic
historian, David Landes, provided a working definition of the Industrial
Revolution which enjoyed universal acceptance. He identifies three areas of
fundamental change: '(1) there was a substitution of mechanical devices for
human skills; (2) inanimate power--particularly steam--took the place of
human and animal strength; (3) there was a marked improvement in the getting
and working of raw materials'. 1 Such is the Industrial Revolution which all textbooks have
made familiar. How relevant was this definition
to the lives of millions of nineteenth-century wage-earners? Raphael Samuel
questions whether substituting machines for human labour was truly the
central feature of nineteenth-century economic development. Demonstrating an
impressive grasp of production methods in dozens of trades, the author
describes change that was still centred on hand labour and small-scale
production. He also explains why progress in mechanization was so uneven.
Samuel's case is especially thought-provoking because he examines
mid-nineteenth-century Britain, presumably the most successful case of industrial
revolution as Landes defined it. Readers should ponder the sort of
socio-economic transformation Samuel emphasizes. Subsequent essays will
follow up on his argument. Whatever their disagreements about
the origins of the Industrial Revolution, economic historians are in little
doubt about its effects. Steam-power and machinery transformed the labour
process, and acted on society as an independent or quasi-independent force,
demonic or beneficent according to the point of view, but in any event
inescapable. Commodities were cheapened and new markets opened up for them;
labour was made enormously more productive at the same time as the physical
burden of toil was eased; mechanical ingenuity took the place of handicraft
skill. David Landes's summary in The Unbound Prometheus is both
influential and representative: In
the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of
cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode of production--the factory
system. During these years, other branches of industry effected
comparable advances, and all these together, mutually reinforcing one
another, made possible further gains on an ever-widening front. The abundance
and variety of these innovations almost defy compilation, but they may be
subsumed under three principles: the substitution of machines--rapid,
regular, precise, tireless--for human skill and effort; the substitution of
inanimate sources of power ... thereby opening to man a new and almost
unlimited supply of energy; the use of new and far more abundant raw
materials, in particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal
substances. This account has the merit of
symmetry, but the notion of substitution is problematic, since in many cases
there are no real equivalents to compare. The fireman
raising steam in an engine cab, or the boiler-maker ranging plates in
a furnace, were engaged in wholly new occupations which had no real analogy
in previous times. So too, if one thinks of the operations they were called
upon to perform, rather than the nature of the finished product, were the
mill-hands of Lancashire and the West Riding a. And if one looks at technology from the point of view of
labour rather than that of capital, it is a cruel caricature to represent
machinery as dispensing with toil. High-pressure engines had their
counterpart in high-pressure work, endless chain mechanisms in non-stop jobs.
And quite apart from the demands which machinery itself imposed there was a
huge army of labour engaged in supplying it with raw materials, from the
slave labourers on the cotton plantations of the United States to the tinners
and copper-miners of Cornwall. The Industrial Revolution, so far from
abridging human labour, created a whole new world of labour-intensive jobs:
railway navvying is a prime example, but one could consider too the puddlers
and shinglers in the rolling mills, turning pig-iron into bars, the alkali
workers stirring vats of caustic soda and a whole spectrum of occupations in
what the factory legislation of the 1890s was belatedly to recognize as
"dangerous" trades. Working pace was transformed in old industries
as well as new, with slow and cumbersome methods of production giving way,
under the pressure of competition, to overwork and sweating b. Nor is it possible to equate the
new mode of production with the factory system. Capitalist enterprise took
quite different forms in, for instance, cabinet-making and the clothing
trades, where rising demand was met by a proliferation of small producers. In
agriculture and the fisheries it depended upon an increase in numbers rather
than the concentration of production under one roof.
In metalwork and engineering c--at least until the 1880s--it was the workshop rather than the
factory which prevailed, in boot and shoemaking, cottage industry. The
distributive trades rested on the broad shoulders of carmen and dockers, the
electric telegraph on the juvenile runner's nimble feet. Capitalist growth
was rooted in a subsoil of small-scale enterprise. It depended not on one
technology but on many, and made use, too, of a promiscuous variety of
profit-making devices, from the adulteration of soot 2 (in which there was an international trade with the West
Indies, as well as a local one with farmers for manure) 3 to the artificial colouring of smoked haddocks 4. Labour
Power Capitalism in the nineteenth
century grew in various ways. Mechanization in one department of production
was often complemented by an increase of sweating in others; the growth of
large firms by a proliferation of small producing units; the concentration of
production in factories by the spread of out-work in the home. Sugar was
refined in factories, like Messrs Tate and Lyle's at Silvertown 5; but sweets were manufactured for the million in back-street
kitchens and courts, as also were such popular children's purchases as ginger
beer, sarsaparilla and ice-cream (among the manufacturers, in 1890s East
London, were out-of-work dockers, victimized by the employers as a result of
their activities in the dock strike) 6. Timber was sawn at the saw mills, where steam-driven
machinery was, by the 1850s, very general; but it was shaped at the
carpenter's bench, on the cabinet-maker's tressles and at the cooper's
coke-fired cresset. In ironmaking, the giant furnaces of the Black Country
existed cheek-by-jowl with thousands of backyard smithies, complementary in
their action, yet radically distinct. The same was true of steelmaking and
the cutlery trades in Sheffield, where thirty or forty rolling mills supplied
the working material of some sixty handicraft trades in which production was
organized by outworking journeymen-masters 7. Textiles were mechanized and accounted for far more
steam-power than any other trade, but the clothing trades, which increased by
leaps and bounds in the 1840s and 1850s, depended on the poor needlewoman's
fingers. The most complete triumph of the
machine was in the cotton trade of industrial Lancashire. Elsewhere its
progress was more halting, and there were major sectors of the economy where
down to the 1870s steam-power had made very little impression at all. Often
its effects were secondary, applying only to the preparatory process of
manufacture--or to the finishing--while leaving the main body of the work
untouched: the case, for example, with firebricks 8. In other instances it served to make handicraft labour more
productive without impairing its skill--as in the example of glass-cutting,
where steam-power turned the grinding wheels, previously worked by a man or
boy assistant, but the delicate work of grinding, smoothing and polishing
remained in the hands of the craftsman who had traditionally performed it 9. In yet other instances steam-power and machinery were
chemical rather than mechanical in their action, and fuel-saving rather than
labour-saving in effect. This was the case, in ironmaking, with Neilson's Hot
Blast, which cut down coal consumption by about a half 10, and in glassmaking Siemens's tank furnace. Even when
machinery was extensively applied it by no means necessarily reduced workers
to the status of mere hands; often its role was ancillary rather than
commanding, and it may, be useful to suggest a broad line of distinction
between the textile industries on the one hand where, by mid-Victorian times,
repetition work largely prevailed, and metalwork and engineering on the
other, where the production process was discontinuous, and depended on
craftsmanly skill. Mechanization and steam-power, in short, were by no means
inseparably linked, and a vast amount of nineteenth-century work was affected
by them only at second or third remove. In coal-mining, steam-power
transformed the scale of operations, while leaving the technology of hewing
unchanged. Steam-driven fans were applied to ventilation, and allowed working
places to proliferate, instead of being tied to the foot of the shaft.
Steam-driven pumps were applied to underground drainage, and allowed the
mining engineers to explore new and deeper levels, more especially in the
second half of the century, as the shallower seams showed signs of
exhaustion. But there was a total absence of mechanization at the point of
production, where the coal was still excavated by shovel and pick--'tools of
the most primitive description, requiring the utmost amount of bodily
exertion to render effective' 11. Mechanical coal-cutters were frequently patented and in
times of strike high hopes were entertained by employers of the 'revolution'
they might affect 12, but in 1901, forty years after the first wave of patents,
only 1½ per cent of total output could be attributed to them 13--a percentage which had still only risen to 8½ in 1913 14. Output was increased not by mechanization but by recruiting
extra men. More and more hewers were needed as workings were extended both
laterally and in depth. The numbers of hauliers (mainly boys) also increased:
there was more coal for them to handle, and longer galleries to travel.
Longer galleries also meant more roofs to prop, more roads to keep up, more
rails to be laid down, while the increased use of blasting meant more
hand-bored holes. The nineteenth century saw the creation of whole new
classes of underground worker--'stonemen' or rippers who had the job of
extending the levels, timbermen to do the propping 15, shot-firers to bore the holes. The mining labour force,
which had stood at little over 200,000 in 1841 rose to 1,202,000 by 1911 16. Animal power, too, was brought to production's aid, with the
introduction of pit ponies for underground haulage: there were an estimated
11,000 of them in 1851, 25,000 in 1881, 70,000 by
1911 17. Food processing in mid-Victorian
England was perhaps less subject to technological improvement than any other
branch of production. Vegetables were dressed for the market by hand.
Earth-stained crops, such as celery and radishes, were washed and bunched by
women and children, working for market gardeners in their sheds 18. At Covent Garden, peas were podded in the market itself and
sold 'ready for the saucepan' according to their respective size (the work
was chiefly in the hands of old women, working at the rate of 1s. or 18d a
day and recruited by salesmen from the local workhouse) 19. Pickling, too, though increasingly a factory trade, was
mostly done by hand. The vegetables had to be soaked in brine, diced or
sliced to size, liberally sprinkled with vinegar and then 'artistically
arranged' in jars 20. It was cold winter work (the vegetables had to be kept in
the cold for fear that they would rot) and chapped hands and cuts are
remembered occupational hazards 21. Onions were particularly labour-intensive as they had to be
individually peeled. 'Consequently in a bottle of pickles every onion is
always visible from the outside though perhaps a cabbage may fill up the
middle--an onion is never allowed to enjoy oblivion.' There was more
machinery in jam-making, where by the 1880s steam-jacketed boilers reduced
the fruit to pulp, but the preparatory stages were performed by hand. The
fruits were sorted out into their respective qualities and the damaged parts
cut away, oranges peeled, lemons squeezed, soft fruit separated from
brambles. Extra labour was taken on at the jam factories during the height of
the fruit-picking season, and sacked when it was over 22. The building industry, like mining
and agriculture, was labour-intensive and increased output was achieved by
putting on extra men: the workforce recorded in the census was 376,000 in 1841, by 1901 it had risen to 1,216,000. Building and
construction was one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy in
mid-Victorian times, and accounted for between 20 and 30 per cent of gross
domestic fixed capital formation, rather more than twice the amount
attributed to cotton 23. But the scale of enterprise was characteristically small,
and investment, whether by master-builders or subcontractors, went on labour
and materials, not on plant. The main thrust of technical innovation, such as
it was, came in the direction of labour-saving materials rather than of
mechanical devices. In the 1850s and 1860s their influence was comparatively
slight. The painter still mixed his own colours; bricklayers still cut and
shaped their own bricks, (so late as 1874 it was
considered a more important part of their work than setting); carpenters and
joiners worked, very often, to their own designs 24. In the leather trades, every
process of production, from the preparatory work to the finishing, depended
on manual dexterity and strength. The industry employed some quarter of a
million people in the 1830s and McCulloch, in his Statistical Account of
1837, estimated it as third or fourth in the kingdom, 'inferior only ... to
... cotton, wool, and iron'. But then and down to a much later date the
peculiar nature of its raw material seemed to make it impervious to the
machine. "I do not think you will ever get machinery into our
trade", a clicker told the Royal Commission on Labour in 1892,
"until you can grow all the animals of one size with just the same
blemishes". Tanning (the preparation of leather from raw hides) was a
dirty business, and for the yardsmen who had the job of lugging heavy animal
carcasses in and out of pits, it was also a wet one, which needed a strong constitution
(in Bermondsey, Mayhew tells us, the majority were Irish). The hide took a
tremendous beating when it was not soaking in the pits. The flesher and the
unhairer slashed away at it with their pokes and knives, the shedman
pummelled it with a double-headed stave, while at the end of the process the
creases were taken out of the leather by a triangular steel pin, with a
labourer's weight behind it. Tanning was a protracted process, though the
period varied according to the stoutness of the hide, and the manufacture for
which it was destined: in the case of sole leather it could take a year or
more to complete. Patent improvements abridged the period of the work
('almost every tanner has some process peculiar to his establishment') but
they did not alter its essential character. Even in such a large tannery as
the Avonside works of Messrs Evans, 'the most modern and complete' in the
Bristol region, according to the Boot and Shoe Trade Journal in 1887,
it took more than twelve months for a hide to progress through the successive
stages of its treatment. The firm used a Tangye pump for pumping water; there
was a machine for grinding bark; and there were three boilers, though more
than one was rarely used at a time. But beyond these the sound of machinery
was 'scarcely heard'. In wood, as in leather, the
variability of the raw material, and the delicacy, in many cases, of the
finished product, made mechanization problematical, and, as in the case of
shoemaking, there was a superabundance of labour ready to take up new
openings on the basis of handicraft skill. Economic growth took place almost
independently of the machine. Steam-power was applied at the saw mills,
turning timber into deals, or slicing them up thinly as veneers. And in the
1860s and 1870s steam joineries began to appear, supplying ready-made
mouldings and parts. But woodworkers themselves, with the exception of the
sawyers, were only indirectly affected by these changes. In metallurgy steam-power was
massively harnessed to the primary processes of production, notably in
puddling and rolling; but at the same time new fields were opened up for
handicraft skills. In foundry work machine moulding d was introduced in the 1850s (during the lock-out of 1852 some
engineering employers fondly believed that it would deliver them from their
men) 25, but it remained confined to the most inferior branches of
the trade, such as the making of cast-iron drain-pipes 26. Moulders--'the wildest, the most grimy, the most
independent, and, unfortunately, the most drunken and troublesome of any
English workmen who have any claim to the title of "skilled" ' 27 were virtually untouched by it and for the most part worked
with the very simplest of tools, whilst their brethren, the dressers,
smoothed the rough castings with hand-files 28. The Friendly Society of Iron-moulders was composed uniquely
of handicraft workers right down to the 1900s and (as employers complained)
maintained a high rate of wages, restrictive shop practices and unsleeping
hostility to the machine-based class of worker 29. Combined
and Uneven Development The foregoing epitome, though
necessarily abbreviated, may be enough to suggest that in speaking of the
primacy of labour power one is referring not to single instances, or to
curious survivals, but to a dominant pattern of growth. In manufacture, as in
agriculture and mineral work, a vast amount of capitalist enterprise was
organized on the basis of hand rather than steam-powered technologies. In
Marxist terms, the labour process was dependent on the strength, skill,
quickness and sureness of touch of the individual worker rather than upon the
simultaneous and repetitive operations of the machine. The restraints
'inseparable from human labour power' 30 have not yet been cast aside. On the contrary, a great deal
of entrepreneurial ingenuity was employed in turning them to advantage.
Commercial progress depended quite largely on the physical adaptability of
the worker, whether it involved crawling on all fours to gather the woad
harvest 31, climbing up and down perpendicular ladders (in a Cornish tin
mine the ascent would take an hour or more each day) 32 or working, like boilermakers on repair jobs, upside down in
tanks 33. The lungs of the glass-blower, working as bellows, or those
of the gas-fitter, soldering pipes, were not the least of the forces of
production which nineteenth-century capitalism summoned to its aid, nor were
there any more important in the clothing trades than the needlewoman's
fingers and thumbs. In the Potteries, dinner plates were shaped by dextrous
jerks of the flat-presser's wrists, and surfaces varnished with the dipper's
bare arms in a glaze tub (in 1861 Dr Greenhow estimated they were immersed
for 8 of a 12-hour-day). Ironmaking depended on violent muscular exertion, and
an ability to withstand white heat, engineering on precision of judgement and
touch. In the metalworking trades no action was more highly valued than the
ability to deliver well-directed blows with the hammer, while those engaged
in press-work were in almost perpetual motion with their arms and wrists:
'practiced workers' in the metal button trade were said to make from 14,000
to 20,000 strokes a day, 'the whole strength of a woman' being needed on the
heavier class of press 34. The slow progress of mechanization
in mid-Victorian times had many different causes, but one of them was
undoubtedly the relative abundance of labour, both skilled and unskilled. In
striking contrast to the earlier years of the Industrial Revolution, every
branch of employment was over-stocked. In agriculture there was a huge labour
surplus, men, women and children who never had full employment except in the
harvest months. Railway building and construction sites depended upon a great
army of freelance, tramping navvies, who took up employment only for the
duration of a job. The reserve army of labour was no less less a feature of
the workshop trades. The supply of needlewomen was infinitely elastic--the
number recorded in the census tripled between 1841 and 1861--whilst that of
carpentry and joiners, tailors and shoemakers, printers and bookbinders was
always far greater than the number of regular berths. 'Tramping artisans' e were very much a feature of the
labour market in the new industrial crafts, such as boiler-making 35. In iron shipbuilding, where most employment was on a
job-and-finish f basis they constituted the bulk of the labour force: Samuel
Kydd in 1858 described the Clydeside shipbuilders, restlessly scouring the
riverside for work, as being more like 'wandering tinkers' than regular
mechanics 36. The trade union records of the mid-Victorian ironmoulders
show that there were seldom less than 5 per cent of members out of work, and
often more than 10 per cent 37. Another reason for the slow
progress of mechanization was the possibility of increasing productivity
within a hand technology, either by the introduction of improved tools, or by
a more systematic exploitation of labour, or both. Agriculture provides a
prime example, with the change from sickle to the scythe, the extension of
soil-improving crops and manures and the mid-Victorian improvements in field
drainage. Coalmining, too, advanced on the basis of improved hand technology.
Between 1850 and 1880 output in the industry doubled, and this was due not
only to the increase in the number of underground workers, but also to
improved haulage methods, harder work and improvements in the miner's pick,
with the substitution of steel for iron 38. At the same time better transport, both by sea and land,
helped to end local monopolies, and brought down prices to the industrial and
domestic consumer. Another striking example, to which Eric Hobsbawm drew
attention some years ago, is that of gas-making, an industry which down to almost
the end of the century was entirely dependent on the physical strength of the
stokers. The amount of coal carbonized in the London gasworks rose by some 75
per cent between 1874 and 1888, while the labour force increased by under a
third. A third alternative to
mechanization--and another avenue to more rapid workmanship--was the division
of labour and simplification of the individual task. In mid-Victorian times
it was just as likely to take place off the master's premises as on them. A
prime example is the introduction of 'riveting' in the boot and shoe trade
which brought a new and cheaper class of boot on to the market, and
revolutionized the wholesale trade. Under the new system of work the soles
were nailed to the uppers, instead of being stitched, and the work of
'making', previously performed by one man, was now divided between two--the
riveters and the finishers 39. Riveting was a spectacular commercial success, and
Leicester, where the invention was patented in 1861, rapidly established
itself as the largest producer of ready-made footwear 40. Skill was reduced, labour costs fell and there was a sharp
increase in productivity. 'The old crafts would make about three boots or two
pairs a day ... the riveter and finisher can produce ten pairs in the same
time.' 41 The new labour, however, was unmistakably handicraft in
character. No machinery was used; the soles
and uppers were cut by hand, then the upper was moulded round a last, with
the edges pulled inwards. A 'nailer' or 'riveter', as he was variously
called, would fill his mouth with 'sprigs', and taking them one by one would
hammer on the sole and heel. When this had been done, the edges were trimmed
with a sharp knife. Finally, the sole and edges were ... polished with a hot
iron and a heelball." 42 Another obstacle to mechanization
was the gap between expectation and performance. In many cases the machines
failed to perform the 'self-acting' miracles promised in the patents, and
either needed a great deal of skilled attendance, or failed to execute their
appointed tasks. Even if brought 'nearly ... to perfection' 43 by its inventor, a machine would often prove difficult to
operate. Unexpected snags would be encountered, unintended effects would
appear and it was possible for patent to follow patent without anything like
continuous flow production being achieved. Wright's pin machine of 1824,
which, according to its promoters, 'during a single revolution ... produced a
perfect pin' 44, turned out to be so far from perfect that forty years later,
despite thousands of pounds spent on costly experiments, the 'nobbing' or
heading of the pin had still very often to be done by hand (in Gloucester
this was a cottage industry, though the body of the pin was made in
factories) 45. Wall's 1880 machine for manufacturing cheap pottery failed
more quickly, though causing a brief sensation among the operatives. 'There
was one defect in nearly all the ware independent of the want of polishing;
air cracks almost invariably made their appearance in the backs of the ware
after firing.' 46 The steam-powered 'Jolly', which had caused such a panic in
the Potteries thirty-five years earlier (the Potters' Union set up an
Emigration Society, and planted a colony in America, as a way of escaping it)
47 failed 'partly, it is supposed, through the desire of the
employers not to come into conflict with the men', but chiefly 'owing to some
defects in ... construction' 48. (Later it resurfaced, and by the 1890s was in general use.) 49 Another obstacle to mechanization
was the irregular nature of demand, and its often limited character.
Steam-power and machinery were only profitable if they were geared to
large-scale production. But in the workshop trades short production runs were
endemic, and output fluctuated sharply not only with the trade cycle, but
also from season to season and in many cases from week to week. 'Little
makers' like the Willenhall locksmiths, the Sheffield cutlers or the
cabinet-makers of Bethnal Green, could only afford to make up goods in small
quantities at a time, because they had to meet wages and costs out of weekly
earnings. Warehousemen and buyers-up, for their part, were niggardly in their
purchases, and preferred, as a matter of policy, to trade from week to week
rather than to run the risk of carrying unsold stock on their hands. Consumer
demand also tended to favour limited production runs, alternating between
periods of heavy pressure, when there was a helter-skelter rush of work (as
in the 'bull' weeks immediately preceding Christmas) and others when trade
was dead 50. In conditions like these it was easier, when faced with a
rush of orders, to take on extra hands, or subcontract the work, than to
install expensive machinery and plant: less risky in the long run, and in the
short run at least a great deal more profitable. The position was not necessarily
different in heavy industry, despite the vast scale of many works. Tin
plates--the most recent historian of the south Wales industry tells us--'were
not manufactured ahead of demand but were rolled to order' 51. According to Menelaus, the manager of the Dowlais Works,
this was also very frequently the case in heavy iron. 'When rolled iron is
wanted either in large masses, or of difficult sections and ... lengths', he
told the south Wales Institute of Engineers in 1860, 'the quantities
generally are so small that even if you have suitable machinery, before you
get properly to work ... the order is finished' 52. In shipbuilding and engineering, a great deal of work was
done to order rather than for stock, while the willingness of British
engineering firms to make large numbers of products in small quantities--and
to fit them up, if necessary, on site--was the very basis of the worldwide
reputation for excellence they enjoyed 53. Conclusion Steam-power and hand technology
may represent different principles of industrial organization, and to the
historian they may well appear as belonging to different epochs, the one
innovatory, the other 'traditional' and unchanging in its wavs. But from the point
of view of nineteenth-century capitalist development they were two sides of
the same coin, and it is fitting that the Great Exhibition of 1851--'the
authentic voice of British capitalism in the hour of its greatest triumph' 54--should have given symbolic representation to them both.
'Steam power', an admiring commentator noted, 'wholly turned the mahogany
which runs round the galleries of the Crystal Palace' 55. But the 300,000 panes of glass which covered it were blown
by hand 56, and so was the Crystal Fountain which formed the
centre-piece of the transept, 'glittering in all the colours of the rainbow' 57. The promoters were intoxicated with the idea of 'self-acting
machinery', and the technological miracles it might perform. But they devoted
a great deal of their space to--among other things--needlework; and in
demonstrating the competitive capabilities of British industry they were
heavily dependent on artisan skills. Most of the manufactures on display were
handicraft products, and even in the Machinery Court many of the exhibits
were assembled from hand-made components. The orthodox account of the
Industrial Revolution concentrates on the rise of steam-power and machinery,
and the spread of the factory system. It has much less to say about
alternative forms of capitalist enterprise (such as those to be found in
mining and quarrying), about the rise of sweating or the spread of backyard
industries and trades. Nor does it tell us much about the repercussions of
technology on work. Landes's picture has the compelling power of paradigm, with
mechanization on an 'ever-widening front' and steam-power--'rapid, regular,
precise'--effortlessly perfoming labour's tasks. But if one looks at the
economy as a whole rather than at its most novel and striking features, a
less orderly canvas might be drawn--one bearing more
resemblance to a Bruegel or even a Hieronymus Bosch g than to the geometrical regularities of a modern abstract. The
industrial landscape would be seen to be full of diggings and pits as well as
of tall factory chimneys. Smithies would sprout in the shadows of the
furnaces, sweat-shops in those of the looms. Agricultural labourers might
take up the foreground, armed with sickle or scythe, while behind them troops
of women and children would be bent double over the ripening crops in the
field, pulling charlock, hoeing nettles or cleaning the furrows of stones. In
the middle distance there might be navvies digging sewers and paviours laying
flags. On the building sites there would be a bustle of man-powered activity,
with house-painters on ladders and slaters nailing roofs. Carters would be
loading and unloading horses, market women carrying baskets of produce on
their heads, dockers balancing weights. The factories would be hot and
steamy, with men stripped to the singlet, and juvenile runners in bare feet.
At the lead works women would be carrying pots of poisonous metal on their
heads, in the bleachers' shed they would be stitching yards of chlorined
cloth, at a shoddy mill sorting rags. Instead of calling his picture
'machinery' the artist might prefer to name it 'toil'. Nineteenth-century capitalism
created many more skills than it destroyed, though they were different in kind
from those of the all-round craftsmen, and subject to a wholly new level of
exploitation. The change from sail to steam in shipping led to the rise of a
whole number of new industrial crafts, as well as providing a wider arena for
the exercise of old ones. The same may be said of the shift from wood to iron
in vehicle building, and of horse to steam in transport. In the woodworking
trades a comparatively small amount of machinery supported a vast
proliferation of handicraft activities, while in metallurgy the cheapening of
manufacturing raw materials led to a multiplication of journeymen-masters.
The mid-Victorian engineer h was a tool-bearer rather than a machine minder; the
boiler-maker was an artisan rather than a factory hand. In coal-mining
activity increased by the recruitment of a vast new class of workers who were
neither exactly labourers, nor yet artisans, but who very soon laid claim to hereditary craft skills. Much the same was
true of workers in the tin-plate mills and ironworks. The number of craftsmen
in the building trade increased by leaps and bounds, though the rise of new
specialities led to a narrowing of all-round skills. In juxtaposing hand and
steam-powered technologies one is speaking of a combined as well as of
an uneven development. In mid-Victorian times, as earlier in the
nineteenth century, they represented concurrent phases of capitalist
growth, feeding on one another's achievements, endorsing one another's
effects. Both were exposed to the same market forces; both depended for their
progress upon the mobilization of wage-labour on a hitherto unprecedented
scale; and both were equally subject to the new work discipline, though it
affected them in different ways. The Industrial Revolution rested on a broad
handicraft basis, which was at once a condition of its development and a
restraint on its further growth. EDITOR'S NOTES
NOTES Reprinted from 'The workshop of
the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain' in History
Workshop, 3: 6-72 (spring 1977) by permission of Oxford University Press. 1 - David
Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, 1969): 41. 2 - George
Elson, The Last of the Climbing Boys (London, 1900): 78-81; Charles
Booth Manuscripts, the London School of Economics: B160, fol. 16. 3 - Liverpool
Mercury (10 October 1845): 400. 4 - Henry
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1861). 5 - W.
Glenny Crory, East London Industries (London, 1876). 6 - Charles
Booth Manuscripts: A. 24 part A, fols 17-23; B. 10, fol. 125; B. 16, fols 43,
91; B. 44, fols 26, 41; B. 45, fols 60, 147. 7 - Parliamentary
Papers (hereafter PP) (1876) (c.
1443-1) XXX, Rep . . . Fact. & Workshops Act, QQ 12058-61; Frank Hill,
'Combinations in Sheffield', Trade Societies and Strikes (London,
1860): 564-5. 8 - PP (1876), XXX, Rep . . . Fact. & Workshops Act, QQ
5529, 5644; Webb Collection, the London School of Economics: sect. A, vol. X,
fol. 386; A. B. Searle, Refractory Materials (London, 1917): 144. 9 - Morning
Chronicle (Birmingham, 23 December 1850). 10 - Ellis A.
Davidson, Our Houses (London, 1869): 96; Prof. Barff, 'Glass and
silicates', in George Bevan (ed.), British Manufacturing Industries,
14 vols (London, 1876), 7: 76-7. 11 - C. W.
Waring, 'On the application of machinery to cutting coal', Transactions of
South Wales Institute of Engineers, III (1862-3): 95. 12 - Manchester
Examiner (26 July 1865): 5, cols 2-3; cf.
also Barnsley Chronicle (September 1866); Capital and Labour
(15 April 1874); Iron and Coal Trades Review (15 May 1872): 386. 13 - J. E.
Williams, The Derbyshire Miners (London, 1962): 174. 14 - H. J.
Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, 1962): 200. 15 - In
earlier years the hewers had been expected to do their own propping, but in
the second half of the nineteenth century they were vigorously resisting this
because it cut down on their piece-rate earnings. The Times (5 July
1873): 5; Iron and Coal Trades Review (13 March 1872). 16 - B. R.
Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics
(Cambridge,1971): 60, 119. 17 - F. M. L.
Thompson, 'Nineteenth-century horse sense', Economic History Review
2nd ser., XXIX, I, appendix (1976): 80. 18 - Charles
Whitehead, 'Report . . . market garden competition', Journal of the Royal
Agricultural Society (1879): 841, 848; Charles Whitehead, Market
Gardening for Farmers (London, 1880): 12. 19 - Andrew
Wynter, Curiosities of Civilization (London, 1860): 235; C. W. Shaw, The
London Market Gardens (London, 1879): 159-60. 20 - Oral
history: interviews of the writer with Mrs Annie McClough of Liverpool, April
1972. 21 - Charles
Booth Manuscripts: B. 117, 34. 22 - Charles
Booth, London Life and Labour 1st ser., IV (London, 1904): 288-9. 23 - R. A.
Church, The Great Victorian Boom, 1850-1873 (London, 1975): 34. 24 - E.
Dobson, Rudiments of the Art of Building (London, 1849): 25, 42-3,
261. 25 - H. J.
Fryth and Henry Collins, The Foundry Workers (Manchester, 1959): 44. 26 - Andrew
Ure, Dictionary of Arts, Manufacturers, and Mines, 3 vols (London,
1860), II: 203. 27 - Recollections
of English Engineers
(London, 1868): 218. 28 - Ure, Dictionary. 29 - For the
trade union, Fyrth and Collins, Foundry Workers; for the restrictive
practices, Capital and Labor (April 1874); W. G. Riddell, Adventures
of an Obscure Victorian (London, 1932): 33-6; Charles Booth Manuscripts:
B, 89 fol. 55. 30 - Karl
Marx, Capital, 2 vols (London, 1949), 1. 31 - Norman
T. Willis, Woad in the Fens (Lincoln, 1970); J. B. Hurry, The Woad
Plant and its Dye (Oxford, 1930). 32 - PP (1861) (161) XVI, 3rd rep. M. O. Privy C.: 130-1; PP
(1864) (3389) XXIV, Comm. on non-insected Mines: xiii, xiv-xv. 33 - Alfred
Williams, Life in a Railway Factory (London, 1915): 115. 34 - J. S.
Wright, 'On the employment of women in factories in Birmingham', Transactions
of the National Association of Social Science (1857): 539-40. 35 - E. J.
Hobsbawm, 'The tramping artisan', in his Labouring Men (London, 1964)
is the fundamental article on this subject. 36 - Samuel
Kydd, 'The condition of the people', Goldsmith Collection (University of
London): fol. 88. 37 - Fryth
and Collins, Foundry Workers: 44 n; Howell Collection, Bishopgate
Institute, Friendly Society of Iron Founders, Annual Report (1887):
10. 38 - Church, Great
Victorian Boom: 44; A. J. Taylor, 'Labour productivity and technical
innovation in the coal industry 1859-1914', Economic History Review,
2nd ser., XIV (1961). 39 - Alan
Fox, A History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Trade Operatives
(Oxford, 1958): 14-15. 40 - C. P. R.
Mountfield, 'The footware industry of the East Midlands', East Midlands
Geographer, IV, I (1966). 41 - Boot and
Shoe Trade Journal, XXVII (23 April 1892): 535. 42 - Oliver's,
1869-1950 (Leicester, 1950): 8; Northampton
Reference Library, Recollections of William Arnold: 20-3. 43 - Pottery
Gazette, VI (1 April 1882): 343. 44 - Thomas
Phipson, 'The pin industry', in Samuel Timmins (ed.), The Industrial
Resources of Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District (London, 1866):
601; S> R. H. Jones, 'Price associations and competition in the British
pin industry', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXVI, 2 (1973); Ure,
Dictionary, III: 458-9. 45 - C.
Violet Butler, 'Pins', in William Page (ed.) Victorian County History of
Gloucestershire 11 vols (London, 1907), II: 207. 46 - Pottery
Gazette, VI (1 April 1882): 343; Harold
Owen, The Staffordshire Potter (London, 1901): 311. 47 - Owen, Staffordshire
Potter: 63-71; An Old Potter, When I Was a Child (London, 1903):
186-7. 48 - S. J.
Thomas, 'Pottery', in F. Galton (ed.), Workers on their Industry
(London, 1895): 191. 49 - Pottery
Gazette (1 November 1879): 428; Pottery
and Glass Trades Gazette, V (April 1881): 305. 50 - Public
Record Office, HO 45/9833 /B 9744/2; Labour News (28 November 1874, 2
January 1875); Ironmonger, II (31 December 1860): 209, V (31 December
1863): 353. 51 - W. E.
Minchinton, The British Tinplate Industry, a History (Oxford, 1957):
40. 52 - Menelaus,
'On rolling heavy iron', Transactions of South Wales Institute of
Engineers, II (1860-1): 78. 53 - Roderick
Floud, The British Machine-Tool Industry 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1976):
51, 55-6, 67. 54 - Francis
Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1975): 144. 55 - George
Dodd, Curiosities of Industry (London, 1852): 18. 56 - G. M. L.
Strauss et al., England's Workshops (London, 1864): 186. 57 - Illustrated
Exhibitor (7 June 1851). |