History of England 1-6

Grafton became the effective leader of the government while Chatham was out of commission; Charles Townshend was chancellor of the exchequer who in 1767 seemed entirely to have forgotten the lesson of the Stamp Act. He devised what became known as the ‘Townshend Acts’ which imposed duties on certain items imported into America, among them tea, glass and paper, with the precise intention of paying for the expenses of the colonial administration. The money would go into the pockets of the governors and the military, giving them a large degree of independence from what were still called the colonists. ‘Every man in England’, Benjamin Franklin wrote, ‘seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America, seems to jostle himself into the throne with the king and talks of our subjects in the colonies.’ The American reaction to the new Act was one of thorough rejection. Court records were destroyed, and merchants refused to do business with England.

Yet this reaction was less vociferous than that against the Stamp Act. Economic prosperity, and an instinct for moderation or compromise, guided counsels on both sides of the Atlantic and led to three years of relative inactivity. There was in any case now little interest in London concerning American affairs. A much more interesting, and apparently more dangerous, conundrum had emerged in the shape of John Wilkes.

He had returned from his self-imposed exile in France, in February 1768, and if he hoped to cause a scandal he was disappointed. The authorities were not interested in arresting him. It would cause too much trouble. Yet he was determined to make an impression and decided to stand for the City of London in the forthcoming general elections, to be held between March and May, but came last in the voting list; the support of the craftsmen and City masters had not been enough. Not dismayed or deterred he turned his attention to the more radical neighbourhood of Middlesex which, with its market traders and small businessmen, was in a sense an outcrop of London. He managed the election at Brentford Butts, on 28 March, with a consummate sense of theatre: 250 coaches, filled with Wilkes’s supporters sporting blue cockades and brandishing ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ placards, set out for the hustings. He came at the head of the poll, much to the fury of the king and the delight of the populace. The citizens were obliged to light their windows in celebration or watch their glass being shattered, and it was reported that the number ‘45’ was scrawled on every door from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner; the seed of the scandal had appeared in the forty-fifth issue of the North Briton. It was reported in the Annual Register that ‘the rabble was very tumultuous’.

Wilkes had an instinctive understanding of London life ever since his adolescence in Clerkenwell; he could connect himself with the innate radicalism of the crowd in a city where dissident opinion was commonplace. Radical clubs and fellowships met in alehouses and taverns, where they loudly proclaimed their fight against the threats to liberty and freedom by an arbitrary executive. The citizens who followed him were small men of property, urban freeholders, tradesmen, shopkeepers, craftsmen and labourers who were all ostensibly at the mercy of the larger powers of the City and the nation.

‘45’ became a war cry in the streets of the city, therefore, but it was also a symbol of the cause. It was perhaps not coincidence that the last Jacobite rising had occurred in 1745. A candlestick of forty-five branches was manufactured for a publican in Newcastle upon Tyne. The Newcastle Journal reported that a Wilkes dinner in April, just after the election, consisted of forty-five diners who ‘at 45 minutes past one drank 45 gills of wine with 45 new laid eggs in them’. Five courses were served with nine dishes each, making up the magic number, while in the middle of the dining table rested a sirloin of beef weighing precisely 45 pounds. And so it went on. It became a craze – forty-five toasts, forty-five pipes of tobacco, forty-five sky-rockets, wigs of forty-five curls. On the flags his supporters had carried into Brentford were inscribed the words ‘FREEDOM. LIBERTY! BILL OF RIGHTS. MAGNA CHARTA!’ It was the ancient discourse of the English.

The king demanded that this seditious and disruptive scandal-monger should be prevented from taking his seat in parliament and there was much debate whether a convicted criminal, albeit one sentenced in his absence, should be able to disport himself in public. Wilkes himself then took the initiative and announced that he would surrender himself to the judiciary, and waited for the verdict in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark. His partisans crowded the district and the tumult grew so violent in the adjacent St George’s Fields that on 10 May 1769, a regiment of Scottish soldiers was sent in to keep the peace. In the subsequent disturbances a group of soldiers shot an innocent passerby; the Riot Act was read for the second time and as a result some five or six others were killed, among them ‘Mr William Redburn, weaver, shot through the thigh, died in the London Hospital’ and ‘Mary Jeffs, of St Saviour’s, who was selling oranges by the Haymarket, died instantly’.

In June Wilkes was fined and imprisoned for twenty-two months on the old charge of seditious libel; his confinement was relatively comfortable, however, bolstered by gifts of food and money from his more wealthy supporters. The Commons tried to compound his disgrace by depriving him of his new seat in Middlesex. His expulsion provoked some sporadic rioting in London, and the 2,000 freeholders of Middlesex determined to nominate him once more for parliament. There then ensued a political comedy in which Wilkes was returned unopposed before once more being disqualified; he stood again, but his victory was annulled. He was once more chosen by the electors of Middlesex, but then promptly expelled on the grounds of his ‘incapacity to be elected’. He stood for the fifth time and was again victorious in the ballot, but the Commons proceeded to invite one of his opponents to take the seat.

In the spring of the following year he was duly released from the King’s Bench Prison to wild acclaim from the crowd for a popular hero who had shown both bravery and imagination in confronting the forces of authority. He had no political programme as such, and can hardly be claimed as a radical let alone a revolutionary; he appealed to what were considered the traditional liberties of the people, but he did so with an acute awareness of what might be called the power of the press. He orchestrated the political sense of the nation by a mixture of mockery, satire and denunciation. He was a symbol of defiance and independence. When canvassing in Middlesex, in his days of freedom, he was told by one householder that ‘I’d rather vote for the devil’. ‘Naturally,’ Wilkes replied, ‘but if your friend is not standing, may I hope for your support?’ His statue now stands at the bottom of Fetter Lane, the only cross-eyed effigy in London.

The power of the press was not lost upon others. There had been a growing awareness in the middle decades of the eighteenth century of public opinion ‘out of doors’ as evinced in the circulation of the newspapers. The Morning Chronicle was established in 1770 and the Morning Post two years later; by 1777 there were seventeen newspapers published in London, seven of which were printed daily. A year later the Sunday Monitor became the first Sunday newspaper in England.

It was in any case a great age for political excitement. The long decay of the earl of Chatham came to its culmination with his withdrawal from office in the autumn of 1768, confirming Grafton’s supremacy. It was Grafton who weathered the storms over Wilkes and the American tax revolt, but he was not made for leadership at a time of riots, petitions and the ridicule of the press.

One anonymous contributor to the press created a sensation. A correspondent by the name of ‘Junius’ suddenly emerged in the public prints. He had a talent for scurrility and vicious abuse, but it was his anonymity that prompted the greatest excitement. As Samuel Johnson wrote, ‘while he walks like Jack the Giant-Killer in a coat of darkness, he may do much mischief with little strength’. Was this a minister or ex-minister telling secrets from behind the curtain? His essays were printed in the Public Advertiser from 1769 to 1772, at the very height of the Wilkes affair, and he did much to inflame public opinion. The duke of Grafton was ‘a black and cowardly tyrant’, one ‘degraded below the condition of a man’, while the king is described by inference as ‘the basest and meanest fellow in the kingdom’. The king’s mother, the Dowager Princess Augusta, was denominated ‘the demon of discord’ who ‘watches with a kind of providential malignity over the work of her hands’. When the dowager was dying of cancer Junius wrote that ‘nothing keeps her alive but the horrible suction of toads. Such an instance of divine justice would convert an atheist.’ It was lurid and sensational, morbid and maleficent, and acted as a perfect complement to the fashion for political caricatures by Gillray and others in the 1780s.

Their cartoons revealed a world of political horror and degradation, Westminster was consigned to Sisyphus where monstrous growths and wens disfigured all the bodies politic, where huge and pendulous arses squirted shit and where all the participants were crooked or disfigured. The so-called statesmen slavered over their spoils while spectators pissed themselves with excitement or fear. You can almost smell their foul breath. Political opponents blow each other apart with enormous farts, liberally mixed with excrement, or vomit out their greed or venom in vast waterfalls of sick. One politician is crowned with a chamber pot of piss, while another waits for a flagellation. It was a pictorial world of degradation that had no parallel in other centuries, unless we count the ‘babooneries’ sketched in the margins of medieval manuscripts. It was the tradition of salacious and scabrous English humour whipped up into delirium. There was also much horror in the real world. The duke of Grafton offered the lord chancellorship to Charles Yorke; Yorke accepted the office but then, overwhelmed by anxiety, cut his own throat.

It was a time of riot, compounded by the agitation over Wilkes and the example of defiance demonstrated by the American rebels. Insurrection was in the air. Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1769, declared that ‘I have seen, within a year, riots in the country, about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers, riots of weavers, riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of smugglers, in which customs house officers and excisemen have been murdered, the king’s armed vessels and troops fired at’. In the previous year merchant seamen mutinied at Deptford, Newcastle upon Tyne and other key ports, while the hatmakers of Southwark struck for higher pay. In the year before that, there had been food riots, looting and general disquiet.

Political clubs and fraternal associations emerged in greater numbers, particularly in the larger cities. Yet we may guess that every inn and tavern had its local Cromwell or Hampden inveighing against the squire or the parson or ‘them at Westminster’. Between May 1769 and January 1770 petitions were addressed to St James’s Palace from thirteen counties and twelve borough towns, all of them asking for or demanding a speedy dissolution of parliament. Public meetings, rather than crowds or riots, became for the first time an aspect of political life. In the summer of 1769, 7,000 people congregated in Westminster Hall to express their grievances against the administration.

The duke of Grafton gave way under the pressure of events, and in his place the king nominated Frederick North, the 2nd earl of Guilford, who had climbed the greasy pole without as yet falling to earth. Lord North, as he was commonly known, has often been viewed by posterity as a dunderhead who managed to lose America in an act of clumsiness; but in fact he was a shrewd political agent not unlike Robert Walpole in his command of parliament. He was of an unfortunate appearance, rather like a caricature of the king himself; his bulging eyes and flabby cheeks gave him, according to Horace Walpole, ‘the air of a blind trumpeter’. But he had a broad bottom, as the phrase went, of sense and good humour that gave him balance and composure in times of crisis. When one member castigated him for running or, rather, ruining the country while he was asleep on the treasury bench, he opened one eye and replied, ‘I wish to God I were.’ He was circumspect, cautious, patient and methodical. ‘He fills a chair’, Johnson remarked.

In England he was by some act of political magic able to induce a mood of somnolence or lethargy upon what had been a heated populace. ‘After a noted fermentation in the nation,’ Burke wrote, ‘as remarkable a deadness and vapidity has succeeded it.’ The violent agitation followed by sullen torpor is not readily explicable, except on some analogy with individual human psychology. Certainly Lord North did not have the same effect on the American colonies, where his efforts to calm the agitation served only to inflame the situation.

On becoming first minister in 1770 he decided to abolish all the taxes Townshend had imposed upon American imports, except that upon tea. The measure was supposed to be a palliative, like the commodity itself, but it acted as a very plausible grievance. The lifting of the duties could be claimed as a moral victory by the Americans but the surviving tax on tea could be used as a call for further action; it was a token of American servitude.

On 5 March 1770, a crowd of Bostonians surrounded the English soldiers who had been ordered to guard the customs house of the port; the Americans insulted, threatened and finally attacked them. The order was given to fire; three Bostonians died immediately and two expired later from their wounds. The English withdrew from the customs house under a persistent hail of stones, but a town meeting demanded that they leave the area altogether; consequently they were ordered to remove to Fort William on an island 3 miles away. The Americans had won another token victory. The event inevitably became known as ‘the Boston Massacre’ and inspired much magniloquent rhetoric. One oration to commemorate the occasion described ‘our houses wrapped in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery; our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion …’. The incident was never entirely forgotten, and it has been considered to be the single most important incitement to the coming war of independence. Yet other Americans at the time were not so stirred, and deplored the passions of the Bostonian crowd; the New York Gazette declared that ‘it’s high time a stop was put to mobbing’.

So the drift of events was unclear and uncertain even to those closest to it. Some on both sides believed that a show of force would make the other party back down. Some Americans cried ‘Tyranny!’ while some English cried ‘Treason!’ Each side had a false impression of the other, and such mutual misunderstanding could be a source of conflict.

Three small incidents are suggestive. In 1770 a customs collector was beaten up in New Jersey. In June 1772 a vessel being used by the British revenue ran aground off the coast of Rhode Island; it was promptly burned by the inhabitants. In March 1773 the assembly of Virginia suggested that all the colonial assemblies engage in correspondence, to which Benjamin Franklin responded that ‘a congress may grow out of that correspondence’. A congress would represent common concerns and ambitions that would greatly alarm the ministers at Westminister. The force of events could now silently do its work.

22

The magical machines

Two brothers, John and Thomas Lombe, erected a manufactory in 1719 on an island in the River Derwent. It housed a silk engine which became the subject of popular curiosity and amazement, ‘a new invention’ combining, according to the original patent, ‘three sorts of engines never before made or used in Great Britain, one to wind the finest raw silk, another to spin, and the other to twist …’. An application for the renewal of the patent, fourteen years later, referred to ‘97,746 wheels, movements and individual parts (which work day and night)’. Malachy Postlethwayt, in his The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, reported ‘this little being, not above five or six feet in height, with two arms, will dispatch as much work as a giant’.

The genteel came in coaches from all over the county to witness the marvel. The manufactory, a stone edifice of five storeys, was powered by a large water-wheel; within the building tall cylindrical machines whirred and rotated. One man was responsible for sixty threads. It was the principal sight of Derby and, with its machinery, its continuous operation and its specialized workforce, can be considered as the prototype for the silk mills and cotton mills of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was said that the Lombes had stolen the idea from Italy, and that as a result John Lombe was poisoned in 1722, but this was no doubt part of the romance of the new age. By the early nineteenth century it sat on the landscape with all the authority of an ancient monument.

Other wonders abounded. Daniel Defoe, writing in the year after the silk mill was constructed, remarked upon the ‘new undertakings in trade, inventions, engines, manufactures, in a nation pushing and improving as we are’. There was yet no concept of the factory as a powerhouse; it was generally used to describe a building inhabited by foreign merchants. But these solid, grim edifices began to enter social and economic calculations. Matthew Boulton completed his Soho manufactory, on Handsworth Heath in north-east Birmingham, in 1769; it was used for the manufacture of various ‘toys’ or small goods such as buckles and buttons. The main warehouse was nineteen bays wide, and three storeys high, with a Palladian front. But it looked more like a prison than a country house. This was the site where in 1776 James Watt began the manufacture of steam engines. Seven years before, Watt’s separate condenser and Richard Arkwright’s water-frame had been granted patents; new engines powered by steam could now be developed, and the water-frame could create miles of inexpensive cotton for cheaper and cheaper clothing.

Again in 1769, at a time when the political world was exercised by ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’, Josiah Wedgwood opened his vast pottery works of some 350 acres beside the Trent and Mersey Canal in Staffordshire and named it Etruria in homage to its classical predecessors; thus the factory could be given the illusion of a picturesque past, even if its principles were thoroughly modern. Wedgwood effectively inaugurated the age of beautiful china in England. It was he who introduced neoclassicism to the English consumer and customer. This was one of the more aesthetic consequences of industrial change, but one which had taken place without any great technological innovation.

Two years after the establishment of Etruria Richard Arkwright built a factory at Cromford in Derbyshire to accommodate his newly invented machinery, and then constructed a village to house his hundreds of workers, men, women and children. The water-frame itself, built in units of 1,000 spindles, created the first pure English cotton cloth. As a result cotton became the paramount product of the textile industry. By the early nineteenth century cotton was king. An anonymous poem, The Temple of Nature, published in 1803, celebrated the mighty change:

So Arkwright taught from cotton-pods to cull,

And stretch in lines the vegetable wool;

With teeth of steel, its fibre knots unfurl’d

And with the silver tissue cloth’d the world.

If the Dutch could erect a statue to the man who taught their nation how to cure herring, it was asked, surely a statue might be raised for the creator of a great national manufacture and manufacturing system?

Some observers, however, tilted at the first factories in the manner of Don Quixote riding at windmills. They were compared to workhouses, which indeed in certain respects they resembled; workhouses themselves were known as ‘houses of industry’, and the first factory for the production of steam engines was known in 1702 as a ‘workhouse’. There was a connection perceptible to contemporaries between the forced regulation of the poor and the treatment of industrial workers. The manufactories were also compared to army barracks, with the same emphasis on strict timing, order and efficiency.

The new industrial system, still in its very early stages of growth, came out of a practice that has become known as ‘proto-industry’ or ‘primitive capitalism’. It centred upon domestic labour, whereby agricultural workers and their families spun and wove as well as worked the land. Daniel Defoe described it well in the course of his tour of Britain when he crossed the Pennines. He visited the premises of a large clothier and found ‘a house full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, some dressing the cloth, some in the loom’. In the immediate area were innumerable cottages ‘in which dwell the workmen who are employed, the women and children of whom are always busy carding, spinning etcetera’. Any child over four years old was gainfully employed.

It was in a literal sense a cottage industry with a small merchant, or small capitalist, putting out the raw material for spinning or weaving to the families of agricultural workers before collecting the finished yarn or cloth at a stated time. The farmer’s wife, and the farmer himself, would work the loom at all hours; the carding, spinning and weaving took place at the same time as the harvesting of wheat, peas and beans. The independent cottagers might sell socks and cheese, hogs and cloth. In Lincolnshire cow dung could be used to make fuel, while hog dung was used as a bleaching agent for cloth; hence the saying about Lincolnshire, ‘where the hogs shit soap and the cows shit fire’.

Clothmaking was ill-paid labour, dependent upon seasonal change, and generally took place in cramped and filthy conditions. The cottagers worked through the night, and in darkness, because they were too poor to own a light. They worked through the frost and cold, when the fields yielded nothing. The weavers and tailors called the summer ‘cucumber time’, because that was all they could afford to eat. Industrialism did not seem at the time to be the greater evil.

The origins of industrialism are hard to find precisely because they are ubiquitous. Some say that the small merchants who became ‘putters out’ to the agricultural workers in time became master manufacturers by bringing twenty or thirty looms within one building. Others say that the pressure of an ever-growing population led ineluctably to cities and to mass employment in the industry of cities. Between the years 1760 and 1830 the population grew from 6.1 million to 13.1 million; it had in other words more than doubled in size. The land did not need the people. So they gathered in urban conurbations where employers were happy to use cheap labour on a larger and larger scale. Other consequences inevitably followed; more houses had to be built, and transport improved.

Some say that technical change and innovation were the spark of industrialism, an incremental process sometimes interrupted by giant leaps forward like the introduction of the steam engine or of complex and efficient textile machinery. It was often claimed, in this context, that the British were in any case a thoroughly empirical and practical people, free of the French and German predilection for theory; that is one generalization which has in fact been accepted over time. Louis Pasteur once remarked that ‘chance favours only the mind that is prepared’. It was said that every factory had its own inventor.

Others say that industrialism was fuelled by cheap credit and that its rapid growth was prompted by the abundance of capital combined with an interest rate of approximately 3 per cent. England was a rich country, made evident in the subscriptions to the Bank of England and the myriad ‘bubbles’ on the Stock Exchange. An opportunity had now come to invest in industries that had an illimitable future. The remarkable increase of foreign trade in the last six decades of the eighteenth century has also been invoked as the motive for further industrialization.

Another incentive came from the absence of government intervention; it cleared the ground a little, with low interest rates, but it did not attempt to direct industrial policy. There was no active opposition to technological change or improvement, and what obstruction there was came from irate workers who found their livelihoods being taken away by machines. The government did nothing.

Other causes for the speed of industrialism have been adduced. There were no wars on home soil; the political system remained infinitely adaptable, and there was no revolution like that within France. Politics is only part. The factories encouraged economies of scale but, more importantly, they increased specialization of labour.

The power of science, and rational calculation, mightily impressed the commercial classes; watches, clocks and precision instruments, like lathes and planing machines, were the appurtenances of the age. It was not unusual to see microscopes and telescopes in the grander homes; the barometer became a conversation piece. From 1675 to 1725, the proportion of richer London homes with clocks on display rose from 56 per cent to 88 per cent. By 1800, 8,000 men worked on watches in Clerkenwell, each with his own particular speciality. John Harrison, the man who solved the problem of longitude in 1759, fashioned the chronometer that Captain Cook took with him on his voyages around the world.

One other, perhaps more spiritual, cause may be mentioned for radical industrial change. The ubiquity of dissent among experimentalists and innovators, and the role of the dissenting academies in training young men in practical skills, has led many to conclude that the Protestant spirit of independent thought and practice had been a contributing fact to the rise of industrialism. The Catholics were believed, quite unfairly, to be incapable of facing new frontiers. It would be unwise to pick out any one of these putative causes or themes, however, as the most significant. If we may steal from Romans 8:28, all things worked together for good, at least for those who considered it good.

The nature of the change has also been interpreted in a hundred different ways. It is now described as ‘the Industrial Revolution’, but the phrase was never used at the time. It was coined by a French socialist, Auguste Blanqui, in 1837 and was then taken up seven years later by Friedrich Engels in an essay entitled ‘The Condition of England’. It was then widely publicized by Arnold Toynbee in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England, published posthumously in 1884. If this indeed were a revolution there was nothing sudden or shattering about it. It can best be seen as part of a cycle that lasted for approximately a hundred years. The increase in national growth seems to have started in the 1740s, and then made rapid advances in the 1780s and 1790s, with a further increase in the 1830s and beyond.

If the term did not exist, how was the reality to be interpreted by contemporaries? Were they even aware that something surprising or unfamiliar was happening all around them? Arthur Young in his Political Arithmetic, published in 1774, asked his readers to ‘consider the progress of everything in Britain during the last twenty years’; the sentiments were repeated two years later in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations where he contemplated ‘the natural progress of England towards wealth and improvement’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of the same period noted that ‘the discoveries and improvements’ of the age ‘diffuse a glory over this country unattainable by conquest or dominion’. The solid foundations of the change were also understood. In 1784 it was reported that ‘Britain is the only country hitherto known in which seams of coal … iron ore and limestone … are frequently found in the same fields and in the neighborhood of the sea’. So the observers of the time were aware of a decisive change in the state of the nation.

What became clear was the sheer continuity of change, bolstered by one innovation following another in an almost evolutionary form. Periods of social or technical change had at some stage, in preceding centuries, reached an equilibrium; but in the latter part of the eighteenth century there seemed no end to the process of innovation. E. J. Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire, published as late as 1968, remarked that ‘no change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialization’.

The most profound, and most elusive, manifestations of change can really only be seen in retrospect. Perhaps it did not occur to inventors, engineers, or scientists that they were seeking power over nature. It might have seemed blasphemous. Yet that power was indeed the result. The substitution of coal for wood provided what seemed at the time to be an inexhaustible source of supply. The soil that had previously been devoted to growing timber could now be harnessed for the supply of food. When the forests and woods had been cleared for fuel, there was a biological limit to the period of their renewal; with the source of power under the ground, the problem no longer arose. As a result of the country’s natural resources, the scale of energy available to Britain was for a crucial period greater than that of any other European economy. This is one of the keys to industrialism.

It has been estimated by the celebrated historian of the Industrial Revolution, E. A. Wrigley, that the output of 10 million tons from the coal industry in 1800 provided energy equivalent to that produced by 10 million acres of land. The escape from the limits of an organic economy meant in turn the escape from the constraints upon growth. No more time and tide, no more wind and water. The coal was to all intents and purposes limitless, incalculable, mineral ‘gold’ packed to blackness within caverns measureless to man. England had once been known as a land of woods and forests; now it had become a realm of coal.

The improvement, however, was slow and imbalanced. While some parts of the economy, such as iron-smelting, textiles and mining, experienced rapid change, much of Britain’s work and workforce remained in the traditional economy for a further hundred years. Bakers, millers, blacksmiths and tanners stayed essentially in the mid-eighteenth century well into the reign of Victoria. Many workshops were still in the seventeenth century. Different levels of time, and experience, existed simultaneously.

The increase in the production of coal was gradual but inexorable; in the course of the eighteenth century the output rose from 3 million tons to 10 million tons before rising fivefold between 1800 and 1850. As a result the landscape was changed for ever. The Birmingham Mail recorded that ‘blue skies change to a reeking canopy of black and grey smoke. The earth is one vast unsightly heap of dead ashes and dingy refuse. Canals of diluted coal dust teach how filthy water may be and yet retain fluidity. Tumbledown houses, tumbledown works, tottering black chimneys, fire-belching furnaces, squalid and blackened people.’ The same Sisyphean vision of sublimity or horror is recorded by Charles Dickens in his study of the midlands in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).

When Little Nell and her grandfather pass through the region they see ‘paths of coal ash and huts of staring brick … trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour which hung in a dense ill favoured cloud above the housetops and filled the air with gloom’. The two pilgrims are taken into an ironworks ‘echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingling with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard before’. The wild imagination of the novelist is as powerful as his observation, but he was right in at least one respect; such noises had never been heard on earth before, except, perhaps, during a volcanic eruption.

Dickens describes the iron workers as ‘moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires’. Some slept among the ashes and cinders while others drew out the glowing sheets of metal ‘emitting an insupportable heat, and a dull deep light like that which reddens in the eyes of savage beasts’.

Yet heat and light represented more, much more, than the conditions of a working life. It was the manifestation of a great change. Coal could not simply be used to fashion metal. It could create iron. The centre of that alteration was the vale of Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire. Nowhere could look less like a vale of pastoral verse.

A Quaker iron-master, Abraham Darby (the first of three), settled in Coalbrookdale where in 1708 he leased an old blast furnace with some attendant forges. Within a year of his arrival in this vale of unhealth he became the first man to produce pig iron of quality smelted with coke. The area had numerous advantages, among them the fact that it harboured coal with fewer sulphuric impurities than elsewhere, thus improving the quality of the iron manufactured by its means. Darby fed his furnaces with coal, and with the coke produced the iron for casting pots. Coke out of coal took the place of charcoal out of wood. The making of iron was no longer dependent upon the life and death of organic things. These were the procedures that would lead in time to the bridges, the railway engines, the pipes, the cylinders, the cannon, the shot, and the machine parts that would create the life of the nineteenth century.

The first iron rails were cast at Coalbrookdale in 1767. The technology of the time was now entering an expansive and self-sustaining phase that would never pause or rest. In the course of this history we will come to remark upon the stunning interdependence of techniques and inventions; all things seem to come together, so that one cannot exist without the other.

The significance of the change was not immediately realized; Abraham Darby himself was of a modest and quiet nature, and his Quaker brethren seem happy to have kept the new technique within the religious family. But to their credit the Darby family never took out a patent, unlike most of their colleagues, on the grounds that it would be wrong ‘to deprive the public of such an acquisition’.

The possibilities of the human sublime are nowhere more evident than in Philip Loutherbourg’s painting Coalbrookdale by Night (1801), where sulphuric flames belch into the night sky only faintly illuminated by a pale moon. It is a landscape of fire in which the only source of light is the inferno; it is apposite that one of the names for this manufactory was ‘Bedlam’. Yet the spiritual connotations of the flame and fire do not impede the recognition that this is also a place of industry and production; in the foreground horses are pulling away a filled wagon while a dog trots beside them.

Turner’s Limekiln at Coalbrookdale (c.1797) is also ravished by light, with a white, blue and orange glare drawing the attention to the left side of the painting; a small line of light travels down the hillside, illuminating two workers with horses, while an arch into the kiln itself reveals fire and shadow as if it were some enchanted cavern. This was the significance of the beginnings of what became known as the Industrial Revolution. It was a time of vast possibility, not unlike that suggested by the alchemical magic of the sixteenth century, whereby the womb of the earth might bring forth new life. In The Old Curiosity Shop one old worker, tending the furnace, remarks to Little Nell that ‘it’s my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life’. The fire would never go out.

The steady progress of industrialism was itself bound by the unwritten laws of mutual interdependence. Examples of simultaneous invention and change are suggestive. It so happened, for example, that in the summer and autumn of 1815 George Stephenson in Newcastle upon Tyne and Humphry Davy in London both hit upon the construction of the safety-lamp for miners; one of Stephenson’s collaborators conceded that the two men ‘were original and separate discoverers of the principle’. Clusters of inventions with similar purposes occurred within a matter of years or even months. The ‘puddling’ of iron, allowing bar iron to be made without charcoal, was developed within months both in South Wales and in Fontley near Plymouth; neither inventor knew of the other. Was this more than a happy accident?

The elements of reciprocity are everywhere apparent. The technique of boring cannon, for example, was used for the making of steam-engine cylinders; the invention of a coke-blast furnace led to cast iron; cast iron led to Newcomen’s first steam engine; the steam engine then permitted the large-scale production of iron. When it was discovered that a steam engine was too powerful for wooden machinery, iron machinery was for the first time employed in its place; this allowed for the construction of heavier machinery which in turn demanded a more powerful engine. Everything worked together, pushing on the rate and nature of technological change. Machines were employed to make larger and better machines. We may be reminded of the development of robots.

The growing demand for steam, at the forge and the factory, helped to create more efficient steam engines. The use of iron rails for the wagons carrying coal, to the furnaces at Coalbrookdale, had a direct influence upon the first railway lines. The mass manufacture of pottery pipes played an important part in the sanitary provisions of the nineteenth century; more importantly, perhaps, it allowed the proper drainage of fields, which in turn increased the yield of the land. The increase in agricultural production in turn supported a larger and larger industrial population. The massive increase in the manufacture of cloth made it vital to devise a new form of rapid bleaching; so the chemists turned their attention to oil of vitriol, or sulphuric acid, rather than the chimerical elixir vitae.

Machine production ensured large-scale manufacturing which in turn encouraged wider and wider markets; so does mass production lead to popular consumption, or consumption encourage production? It is a familiar dichotomy. Other questions arise. How was it possible, for example, that two entirely different industries, cotton manufacture and iron-making, could advance simultaneously? It resembles some of the problems of natural evolution, as if machinery itself had the characteristics of a biological entity. We may even begin to parrot Darwin’s theories of organic evolution to account for the slow, gradual and inexorable process of the ‘Industrial Revolution’.

None of these developments would have been possible without the diffusion of what might be called the scientific attitude, descended directly from the example of Isaac Newton who in the previous century had been an instrument-maker as well as a theoretician; at the age of twenty-six he constructed his own telescope, and made its parabolic mirror from an alloy of tin and copper that he himself had devised. As president of the Royal Society he emphasized the central roles of reason and experiment that would become crucial in the industrial world of the next century. By the early eighteenth century scientific lectures, under the aegis of the Royal Society, were being heard in London and elsewhere complete with ‘barometers, thermometers and such other instruments as are necessary for a course of experiments’. A disciple of Newton, the Reverend John Harris, delivered lectures on mathematics at the Marine Coffee-House in Birchin Lane ‘for the public good’. John Theophilus Desaguliers, a British natural philosopher, lectured on experimental philosophy but included a disquisition on an early steam engine that ‘was of the greatest use for draining mines, supplying towns with water, and gentlemen’s houses’. By the 1730s the magical properties of electricity were being thoroughly examined.

One group of scientists and industrialists formed a club in which to converse and to share their experimental learning. The Lunar Society of Birmingham had first been established in the late 1760s by a group of innovators, radical in politics and religion as well as in science. Among them were botanists, manufacturers, philosophers, industrialists, natural scientists and geologists eager to harness the unrivalled curiosity and experimentation of the period. The members included Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Joseph Priestley; industrialists, iron-masters and men of science exchanged information on matters of practical technology as well as more intellectual concerns. It was a forcing house for change, a collective endeavour in the application of science. Most of the members owned laboratories for their enterprises and Wedgwood, for example, was intent upon mineral analysis and the chemistry of colour.

Matthew Boulton at the age of eighteen created a technique for inlaying steel buckles with enamel, but he also cultivated what he called the ‘philosophic spirit’; in his notebook he jotted down entries on the human pulse and the movement of the planets. This was the spirit of enterprise which drove the scientific culture of the eighteenth century. No human knowledge was alien to the inventors. Joseph Priestley has been awarded the palm for identifying ‘phlogiston’ or oxygen and for discovering photosynthesis; Boulton prompted and assisted Watt in the construction of the steam engine.

The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce had been established in 1754 as a sure token of the advance in national understanding. It was designed, in the words of its charter, ‘to embolden enterprise, to enlarge science, to refine art, to improve manufacture and to extend our commerce’. It established premiums as an award for mechanical invention, as well as artistic enterprise, confirming the general movement of innovation; art and science were not considered to be necessarily separate activities, and in the notebooks of the society are minute investigations into blue cobalt and red madder. Those constituents could also be used in industrial dyeing. So once again everything came together.

It has been described as an aspect of the ‘Enlightenment’, although that essentially European movement of thought did no more than touch English shores. It was clear, however, that in Walpole’s words ‘natural history is in fashion’. The figure of the virtuoso, and assemblies of virtuosi discussing such matters as human anatomy, were noted in the Spectator not without mild irony. Jonathan Swift satirized the tendency in ‘A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan’, the third part of Gulliver’s Travels written between 1706 and 1709, when he describes ‘the grand academy of Lagado’ where its experimenters are engaged in such pursuits as extracting sunbeams from cucumber, transforming ice into gunpowder, and reducing ‘human excrement to its original food’.

Yet the new spirit of scientific change could not be denied in areas such as mechanics, metallurgy and industrial chemistry. An experimental coal-gas system for public lighting was ready by 1782. The emphasis was always upon industry and commerce, and Adam Smith believed that those engaged in industry were ‘the great inventing class’; we may include among them the chemists and the new professions of electricians and engineers. Samuel Smiles wrote at a later date that ‘our engineers may be regarded in some measure as the makers of modern civilisation’.

The level of inventiveness may also be gauged by the rise in the number of patents applied for and granted. Before the middle of the century approximately a dozen patents were issued each year; the number reached 36 in 1769 and 64 in 1783. In 1792 it reached 85. The inventions ranged from newly designed pumps to the process whereby alkalis might be derived from salt; shaving materials, false teeth, fire alarms and washing machines, burglar alarms and water closets were among the items proposed for patenting. The saving of labour and, more importantly, the saving of time were the results intended. Greater efficiency, accuracy and uniformity were also the goals of the patentees; in that sense they reflect the spirit of industrial change itself.

It may be termed the age of improvement but the word of the day was innovation. ‘The age is running mad after innovation’, Samuel Johnson said, ‘and all the business of the world is to be done in a new way …’ Incremental change of a practical kind was the soul of eighteenth-century endeavour. ‘Almost every master and manufacturer’, Dean Tucker wrote of Birmingham operatives in 1757, ‘hath a new invention of his own, and is daily improving on those of others.’

The awareness of progress was nowhere more apparent, perhaps, than in the changes in transport. The state of the old roads was considered to be a national disgrace. Daniel Defoe reported that in Lewes a lady went to church in a coach drawn by six oxen, since no horses could manage the stiff and deep mud. Many of the roads had not been repaired for fourteen centuries, ever since the Romans first built them. The main road of a parish was often a mere horse-track, but the mud was so soft that the horses sank to their bellies. Even the road from Kensington Palace to the centre of London was a treacherous gulf of mud, with ruts and potholes and loose stones. It took a week to travel from York to London, and one Yorkshireman made his will before venturing on the journey. Arthur Young, in his Northern Tour of 1771, said of the roads to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne that ‘I would advise all travellers to consider this country as sea, and as soon think of driving into the ocean as venturing into such detestable roads.’

The remedy lay in private improvements on a local scale, with the profit motive well in evidence. A series of ‘turnpike trusts’ was established, by which the members were charged with the duty to construct and to maintain a certain stretch of road; to recuperate their costs, and any loans they raised, they were permitted to collect tolls at either end of their route. Some said that there was no discernible change and others complained that the tolls were extortionate but, slowly and haphazardly, the roads improved. They were of course helped enormously by engineers such as Telford and McAdam who rivalled the Romans in their genius for road-making.

In Richard Graves’s Columella, a novel of 1779, a character asks, ‘Who would have said that coaches would go daily between London and Bath in about twelve hours, which, twenty years ago, was reckoned three good days’ journey?’ In 1763 six stagecoaches made the journey from London to Exeter; ten years later, there were four times that number. An advertisement promised that ‘however incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in four days and a half after leaving Manchester!!’ Some passengers grew sick with the speed; it was called ‘being coached’. As a result the mail posts became quicker and more frequent, shaping the ambience of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary fiction. Everything went faster, from the carriage of grain or coals to the improvements in agriculture.

Other advances in transportation occurred at the same time. In the early decades of the eighteenth century there was a concerted effort to improve the rivers of the country by widening and deepening their channels and by strengthening their banks. They were joined from the mid-eighteenth century by the network of canals that created one great transport system; between 1755 and 1820 3,000 miles of canal were constructed. In 1755 the first industrial canal, the Sankey, was carved from the River Mersey to St Helens; three years later the duke of Bridgewater created a canal between his coal mines at Worsley to Manchester, a distance of 7 miles; the fact that the price of coal in Manchester was halved as a result concentrated the industrial mind wonderfully. Between 1761 and 1766 another canal was completed from Manchester to the Mersey above Liverpool. By the last decade of the eighteenth century London, Birmingham, Bristol, Hull and Liverpool were all joined together with innumerable smaller destinations. The artificial rivers carried coal, iron, wood, bricks and slate; they transported cotton, cheese, grain and butter.

The economic activity of the country was transformed, and Adam Smith noted that ‘good roads, canals and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town’. Local and regional centres came together to create a national market, which in turn helped participation in international markets. Another consequence followed. The fact that various regions of the country were now brought in closer communion, one with another, helped to sustain the burgeoning national consciousness of the people in times of war and foreign revolution.

23

Having a tea party

In the spring of 1773 the administration of Lord North was moved to pass a Tea Act which allowed tea to be sold directly to the Americans by the East India Company, but with a duty of threepence per pound that had first been introduced six years before. Tea was still much cheaper in America than in England but for the colonists this was tantamount to a direct tax imposed by parliament, arousing all the old fears of imperial dictation. It was considered by some to be a scheme to erode American liberties. The Boston Gazette of 11 October, serving the port to which most of the tea was shipped, urged that the commodity be sent back as a mark of ‘the yoke of slavery’. The first of the tea ships, the Dartmouth, arrived at Boston Harbor on 27 November, and two days later a mass meeting of Bostonians resolved to take charge of any others that docked. The activists became known as ‘the Body’.

On 16 December a group of Bostonians, disguised as Mohock Indians, approached the door of the local assembly and gave a ‘war whoop’ which was answered by some in the building itself. They then made their way to the wharf where three tea ships now lay and began the systematic destruction of their cargo, with 342 chests of tea thrown overboard.

The question was now one of power, and the challenge to parliament could not be ignored or evaded. Lord North laid the matter before the House of Commons on 7 March 1774, and demanded that the port of Boston be closed. A number of other measures were passed by parliament, principally to teach the rebellious Americans a lesson. They came to be known as the ‘coercive’ or ‘intolerable’ Acts. The Boston Port Act closed the port and customs house; the Massachusetts Charter Act was designed to curb the elected legislature; the Justice and Quartering Acts were introduced to impose order upon the populace. Lord North declared that ‘convince your colonies that you are able, and not afraid to control them, and, depend upon it, obedience will be the result of your deliberations’. It seems that the majority of the population was behind him, and Edmund Burke reported that ‘the popular current, both within doors and without, at present sets strong against America’.

Burke himself will reappear in this history as the exponent of conservatism and tradition in the face of innumerable challenges; he was an Irishman with the gifts of a supreme advocate for the preservation of the principles of the past which emerge from ‘the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation and improvement of property’. Institutions and customs were rendered sacred by longevity and continual use. It was a uniquely reasssuring doctrine for those opposed to change or frightened of chance.

The response of the Americans to the ‘intolerable’ Acts was perhaps inevitable. In early September 1774 a congress of the old colonies was held in Philadelphia, and became known as the First Continental Congress; in the following month it proposed a bill or declaration of rights to the effect that American assemblies had the right and duty to determine legislation in all domestic matters without the intervention of the English parliament. The delegates declared that Americans ‘were entitled to their life, liberty and property’. George Washington wrote that ‘the crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us’. By the end of the year local associations or revolutionary committees were piling up supplies of arms and gunpowder while at the same time enforcing what were now called ‘the laws of congress’. Imports from Britain and its colonies were prohibited. The prospect of outright war, and of a trade embargo, seemed to paralyse the English merchant class who wavered between the desire for uninterrupted trade and the instinct of national loyalty.

The call to arms gathered strength, and bodies of volunteers became known as ‘minute men’ for the speed with which they could muster with their rifles. Meanwhile 10,000 fresh British troops disembarked on American soil. If they had struck at once they might have done considerable damage; instead under the command of General Gage they rested. It was the Americans who acted first. This was the moment that heralded serious conflict.

In America local committees and hastily called provincial congresses began to plan for military action, and groups of citizens took matters into their own hands. At the beginning of April 1775, the commander of the English forces in Boston received orders from London to suppress what were called the rebels. The main supply of American weaponry was stored in Concord, 16 miles from Boston, and the English advanced upon it. They were stopped by militiamen at Lexington Green, where eight Americans were killed. The English kept on moving towards Concord but the fire of the militiamen, hiding in houses or concealed behind trees and hedges, scattered them. They retreated in haste to Boston but by the time they had reached the relative safety of that city 273 of their number were dead. The god of war had risen once again, calling for more blood.

Some colonists, as they were still called, were alarmed by the violent turn of events, and urged restraint while others distrusted the calls for independence. It might be a step too far. But the more committed and the more passionate of the members of the Second Continental Congress, called at Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, overwhelmed the more moderate voices. It was resolved that an army, representing the ‘united’ and ‘confederated’ colonies, should be established; a Virginian gentleman, George Washington, was granted the command. He was reticent and not a good public speaker but he was resourceful and methodical; he had an innate dignity which, combined with moderation and self-control, could make him a master of men. He took the command itself with extreme reluctance, but a sense of duty and of his own honour persuaded him. Even at this stage he was not at all convinced that he could win the war against the English redcoats or, as they were known, ‘lobsters’.

On the night of 16 June – the night following the first day of the congress – a contingent of Americans silently and stealthily took occupation of Breed’s Hill, a prominence beside Bunker Hill overlooking Boston on a peninsula north of the River Charles. On discovering their presence a battery of six guns opened on the insurgents from an English vessel, and a detachment of redcoats was ferried across the River Charles to reach them. As the English forces climbed Breed’s Hill, they were met with prolonged and accurate firing from the entrenchments; many of them fled back to their boats. At this juncture Gage and a group of other officers crossed the river and rallied or forced them to climb the hill again. The soldiers were confronted by the same onslaught of bullets but bravado or good fortune forced them forward. The Americans then fled towards Bunker Hill, but not before inflicting severe casualties; more than 1,000 soldiers and officers lay dead or wounded, while the American losses were in the low hundreds.

The news of the defeat alarmed and shocked the English who had believed fondly that the colonials would never meet the English army on open ground. It was considered to be a calamity, a national humiliation and a military disgrace. A force of volunteers had overcome a trained and disciplined army. Some now speculated that this battle was an omen of eventual American triumph. General Gage was replaced by General Howe, a transfer which turned out to be that of a blockhead succeeding a dunderhead.

The two sides now confronted one another, with no chance of conciliation. The king declared that ‘the die is now cast, the colonies must either submit or triumph’. At the beginning of 1776 a pamphlet was being passed among the colonials. The effect of Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ was immediate and profound; in his history of the American revolution, George Trevelyan remarked that ‘it would be difficult to name any human composition which had an effect so instant, so extended and so lasting’. It was in essence a clarion call for America to declare its independence from a brutal foreign power, with the sentiment that ‘the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind’. How could a tiny island arrogate to itself the control of a great country? America had become a haven for all nations, and should no longer be shackled to England which merely dealt with the colonists for its own benefit and its own interests. To call itself the ‘mother country’ was a gross scandal, for what mother would treat her children so brutally? The king ‘hath shewn himself such an inveterate enemy to liberty and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power’ that he must be resisted. Paine added that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’. His tone and language were sharp and to the point, thus undermining decades of rational or inconsequential political discourse.

His appeal was irresistible to the general populace, and at a later date John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that ‘history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine’. History does not perhaps deal in coincidences but, seven months after the publication of ‘Common Sense’, the continental congress declared its independence with twelve affirmative votes and one abstention from New York. The congress had come to its decision after much hesitation and opposition from delegates who feared that the Declaration was premature and that they needed foreign allies before coming to open confrontation. Yet the final text was passed on 4 July 1776, ever afterwards known to Americans as Independence Day. The Americans absolved themselves from fealty to the Crown, and declared themselves to be free states that had no connection to England, with a ringing endorsement of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Burke said that he had anticipated that the Americans might disturb authority but ‘we never dreamt that they could of themselves supply it’.

It became known as ‘the king’s war’ with the obvious presumption that those who opposed it were disloyal subjects; the people were asked to rally to the cause of Church and Crown against rebels and revolutionaries. George III was in fact the driving force of the war against Americans, believing that his crown and country would not be secure if the colonists were able to secede from English rule. Yet there were some in England who supported the American cause. The principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ found an echo among the disenfranchised of a nation where half the towns had no voice in parliament. In the later riots at Peterloo and Manchester, this was the slogan inscribed upon many banners.

It was believed by many radicals that the attempt to crush the movement for liberty in the thirteen colonies was an experiment that, if successful, could be repeated in England itself. The king and his ministers were supposed to be intent upon invading the rights of the individual, curtailing the liberty of the press, misusing the public funds and engaging in open and widespread corruption of members of parliament. There was even talk of the imposition of military government. Even if these charges were ill-founded they found an audience ready and willing to believe in a conspiracy by the ruling class against the people of England. These were the men and women who supported the Americans.

Those who supported the king’s war, however, were aware of the historical parallel in the fight against king and Church by the Puritan enthusiasts of an earlier age. They believed the Americans to be traitors and seditionaries, ungrateful for the benefits that had accrued to them and unwilling to pay a fair contribution to the expenses of empire. There were still others who just wanted peace, peace at almost any price to maintain trade and good relations.

While Washington began to equip and train a voluntary militia, the administration in London found it hard to make up the numbers of soldiers and sailors. A savage ‘press’ for sailors took place in the streets of London and the port cities in 1776; 800 men were seized in the capital alone. A third part of the army to be employed against the rebels were Hessian soldiers, recruited through George III’s German allies; the others were English recruits or loyalist Americans, but a large number of convicted criminals had been released from prison in order to serve their country.

Despite this show of strength it is not clear that the English administration knew how formidable its difficulties were. The supply lines from England to America were 3,000 miles in length; weapons, ammunition, horses, men and provisions had to be shipped across the Atlantic in a journey that often took two or three months of misery. The men were then faced with an ocean coast many hundreds of miles in length, where the population was distinctly hostile to their presence. The terrain of the interior was also inhospitable both to professional soldiers and to raw recruits. John Hayes, an English combatant, described ‘a country full of marshes and small rivers, woods and insects, and a sun so powerful in heat’ that many men fell sick of a putrescent fever.

In the summer of 1776 General Howe captured New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island. The failure of the Americans thoroughly demoralized Washington, whose letters are filled with complaints about the unruliness and indiscipline of his troops. It would seem that on paper the English held the advantage, and there were real fears among the Americans that their revolution was close to being lost. But Howe did nothing to build on his success, and during the winter months the English remained in their entrenchments. Paine described it as ‘the gloomy campaign of 1776’, and at the end of the year Washington confessed that without a new army ‘the game is pretty near up’. Yet eight days later he organized a swift descent upon the Hessian troops guarding Trenton, New Jersey, and seized the town; it was only a temporary victory but it restored the morale of his soldiers and officers.

The air on the other side of the Atlantic was also filled with gloomy prognostications. General Howe had demanded 20,000 men for the next year’s campaign, but he received only 2,500. Parliament had little money, and the king himself was badly in debt. The difficulties of organizing a war at such a distance were becoming more and more obvious. A quick victory had become necessary, but how was it to be achieved?

The English command sought to regain the initiative by isolating the rebellious New England colonies. An English army under General Burgoyne would sweep downwards from Canada, and an army under Howe would march upward from New York; when they met the colonies would be encircled. But it did not quite go according to plan. By a mixture of bad communications and incompetence the two armies missed each other. Howe had decided to capture Philadelphia instead. Burgoyne and his army, isolated from any possible help, were surrounded by the American forces at Saratoga in what is now New York State. He had no choice but to surrender, in the autumn of 1777, and at the same time gave up any hope of an eventual British victory. It was simply a matter of time.

The defeat of the English forces brought joy to Versailles and in early February 1778, the French, finding the convenient moment, officially joined the United States in its war against Britain. This of course brought a different complexion to the conflict that now assumed a global aspect. It was the outcome that the British had most feared. The ministry was bankrupt of ideas, and one army was still imprisoned in the United States. The British now had to defend their possessions in India and the West Indies against the French while at the same time pursuing a war in the inhospitable territory of North America. The Spanish joined the new alliance in the following year, with the express intention of reclaiming Gibraltar and Minorca. The English had no allies left, and were hard stretched to cover all the possible theatres of war.

They offered concessions, including the repeal of the controversial Tea Act and the promise not to levy more taxes on the colonists. The announcement astonished and alarmed the faithful followers of the ministry, who now saw that they had been fighting for nothing but an illusion. But the Americans, having tasted victory, demanded complete independence. Almost at once they appreciated the value of the French alliance, because the British had to divert troops and ships for the defence of the West Indies; the Americans then advanced into Philadelphia and Rhode Island. It was less than likely that the British would eventually prevail.

Lord North had had enough. His management of the war had been a dead failure. He had made demands only to abandon them under pressure. He had lost an army and a continent. He was forty-six years of age, but he felt tired and much older. In March 1778, at the time France sealed its treaty with the Americans, North wrote to the king that ‘capital punishment itself is, in Lord North’s position, preferable to that constant anguish of mind which he feels from the consideration that his continuance in office is ruining his majesty’s affairs’. Two months later he wrote once more to the king that ‘every hour convinces me more of the necessity your majesty is under of putting some other person than myself at the head of your affairs’. Yet the king did not agree. He needed North. He distrusted and despised most of his political opponents, but knew that he could still rely upon the loyalty of his principal minister; North was, as it were, a bulwark against chaos at Westminster.

It was at Westminster in this period that Pitt the elder, the earl of Chatham, rose to speak for the last time. There was a sentiment abroad that the time had come for Britain to withdraw all its forces from America. To this the earl was implacably opposed. He came into the chamber on crutches, wrapped in flannel to protect his skin, and supported by friends; to some he looked as if he were already dead. His voice was feeble at first but rose in eloquence. ‘My lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed over me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy!’ The mouth of the grave closed a month later.

The course of the war in 1779 was neither warm nor cold for either party. The attention of the British was in any case turned to their adjacent seas rather than to the Americas, since the combined forces of the French and Spanish promised some form of invasion. But the ships and the men were needed across the Atlantic. Sir Charles Hardy, commander-in-chief of the Channel fleet, could muster thirty-seven ships against the combined enemy force of sixty-six; the English fleet was in any case poorly maintained and in bad condition. Many guns were without powder. The situation was so grave that the French and Spanish practically controlled the Channel and one MP, Sir William Meredith, wrote of a ‘fatal torpor which hangs like the nightmare over all the powers of this country’. Yet Hardy was saved by chance or good fortune; the season was one of storms, and the conditions aboard the French and Spanish ships were dominated by sickness. He waited them out, remaining for much of the time in the safe haven of Spithead, until they sailed away. And so the summer passed. Hardy died of a seizure in the following spring. The first speech of Sheridan’s The Critic suggests the atmosphere of the time. Mr Dangle is reading from a newspaper: ‘“It is now confidently asserted that SIR CHARLES HARDY” – Pshaw – Nothing but about the fleet, and the nation! – and I hate all politics but theatrical politics.’

North was once more deep in depression, and he wrote that ‘nothing can be more miserable than I am … all is confusion and each department blaming another’. A colleague, William Eden, perhaps exasperated by his continual self-lacerating complaints, wrote to him that ‘if you cannot rouse the powers of your mind you ought to quit as immediately as is consistent with the urgent circumstances in which we find ourselves’. Yet the king was immovable. North had to stay. The chief minister said that he was kept to his task ‘by force’.

The possibility of a long war without peace or resolution provoked dismay and disquiet among the merchants, the shopkeepers and the taxpayers. Only the iron-masters had some reason to be happy, with the constant demand for ships and munitions. To make matters infinitely worse, Ireland seemed to be going the way of America in the demand for independence. It had occurred to the Irish that the English were in no position to defend them from enemy fleets; so they established Volunteer Associations to protect their shores. Both Catholics and Protestant dissenters joined the cause of national self-defence, and thus created a national army that had more authority than the parliament in Dublin.

The Volunteers now demanded freedom of trade with England and the ministers, in no position to face riot and insurgency on a neighbouring island, promptly gave way. The Irish did not stop here but, in imitation of their cousins across the Atlantic, also demanded legislative independence. In April 1780, Henry Grattan moved a resolution that ‘no power on earth but the kings, lords and commons of Ireland was competent to make laws for Ireland’. The controversy was of course long and vociferous but the independence of the Irish parliament was formally agreed. At the beginning of 1783 the English ministry accepted ‘the right claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the Parliament of that kingdom’. Grattan rose to his feet in the Parliament House in Dublin and declared that ‘Ireland is now a nation’.

The controversies in Ireland had in turn an effect upon the English. A movement for the cause of ‘National Revival’ emerged in this period, instigated by the prevailing fear that parliament was becoming subservient to the bribes and corruptions of the government. At the end of 1779, from a county meeting in Yorkshire, emerged the Yorkshire Association which had as its aims shorter parliaments, more equal representation of the people, and a reduction in taxes. It was led by Christopher Wyvill, a cleric and landowner, who soon proved himself to be an expert organizer and propagandist. He drew up a petition and persuaded other counties and county committees to participate in it. He represented the landed interests of the country, not the London crowd that had followed Wilkes with slogans and cat-calls, and thus had to be taken more seriously by the masters of the country. The London Courant carried a letter from ‘The Whig’ in November who observed that ‘the people of original right, as a free people, will vindicate their country, correct their parliament, and reform their throne … In England every man is a politician.’ In a similar spirit, in the spring of 1780, the Society for Constitutional Information was established with the express purpose of restoring the ‘lost rights’ of ‘our ancient constitution’ by distributing texts and pamphlets.

This is the appropriate context for a parliamentary debate of 6 April on the motion that ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. It was carried by 233 to 215 votes, but it was what a military observer might call a forlorn hope. The very fact that the motion had passed suggested that the Crown was not as omnipotent as it was proclaimed to be. Nothing came of it, in any case, and in the following month Lord Camden wrote that ‘our popular exertions are dying away and the country returning to its old state of lukewarm indifference’. The radical societies themselves slipped out of view until they were once again aroused by the spectacle of the revolution across the Channel.

Any movement of popular or urban radicalism was in any case fatally tainted in June 1780, with the worst mob riots of the eighteenth century. Lord George Gordon was a born incendiary of extreme, and almost insane, views. Like the salamander he was born to live in fire. He called himself the ‘people’s pilot’, and no more so than in his denunciation of the Roman Catholic menace in the wake of a parliamentary measure known as the Catholic Relief Act. He was part revolutionary, part radical and, if the anachronism may be allowed, part Romantic. He attempted to adopt the status and attributes of all those who had fought through history against tyranny, and became known to his followers as the ‘English Brutus’.

He established an ‘association’, in the style of the time, and the Protestant Association soon came to include men of property, artisans, London apprentices and all those elements of the city that were known as the mobile vulgus or more colloquially ‘the mob’. On 2 June they accompanied Gordon’s petition to parliament with the burning desire to repeal all the late concessions to the Catholics; only six members of the Commons concurred with them, setting off among the petitioners a lightning bolt that came close to blasting London. About midnight, as the cry of ‘No Popery’ rang through the streets of the city, the irate crowds invaded Broad Street and Golden Square; the chapel of the house of the Bavarian ambassador was put to the torch among what William Blake, a willing or unwilling participant in the riots, described as ‘Howlings & hissings, shrieks & groans, & voices of despair’.

Five days later Blake was caught up in the rush of an overpowering mob which was careering down Holborn and towards the Old Bailey with the sole intent of destroying Newgate beside it. The huge gates of the prison, sometimes known as the gates of Hell, were attacked with swords, pickaxes and sledgehammers while the building was itself enveloped in fire begun by arsonists. The prisoners shrieked in terror of being burned alive but the rebels swarmed over the walls and the roof to tear off the very stones and slates. The prisoners were dragged away from the fires, or crawled out by their own volition, the fetters still clinking about their legs. The mob made a path for them shouting ‘A clear way!’, ‘A clear way!’ before leading them to any blacksmith they could find. On the same day houses of wealthy Catholics or Catholic supporters were sacked and burned to the ground.

On Wednesday, 7 June, long to be known as ‘black Wednesday’, the fears of the populace reached fever pitch. The mob sent warning that it would storm the Bank of England and distribute its contents, that the lions of the Tower’s zoo would be set free, that no prison or Catholic chapel would be safe and that they would tear down Bedlam and release its inmates into the streets. One priest, the Reverend O’Donoghue, watched the inmates of Bedlam dancing and shrieking ‘in the glare of writhing flames … in the glass of the hospital window’. This provoked especial fears. A contemporary Londoner, Richard Burke, wrote that ‘the metropolis is possessed by an enraged, furious and numerous enemy … What this night will produce is known only to the Great Dispenser.’ He watched as a boy, no more than fifteen, mounted a house in Queen Street and began to demolish it, throwing down the bricks and wood to two young accomplices. Yet some semblance of order was retained. While a huge fire burned in the churchyard of St Andrew’s in Holborn, where many were later killed by drinking burning spirits, a watchman went by calling the hour with a lantern in his hand.

Eventually the military restored order with some judicious threats and violence. Many of the ringleaders were hanged on the spot where they had committed their crimes. Lord George Gordon was taken into custody, and eventually converted to Judaism. No one believed that such frantic and fanatic violence could still erupt in the streets of the eighteenth century; the scenes of destruction and violence were from a different world. London had become a different city.

But it was not a case of the mob attacking the poor Catholics and their priests; it was an attack of the poor against the rich. The London poor did not attack their own. The Catholics who were pursued were wealthy gentlemen, lawyers and merchants. It came as an unwelcome surprise to those who placed their hopes in popular resistance to a corrupt administration, and confirmed the beliefs of those who believed that savage anger lay just below the surface of the century. Edward Gibbon, the chronicler of the decline of the Roman Empire, noted that he had witnessed ‘a dark and diabolical fanaticism which I had supposed to be extinct’. He referred here to the religious extremism that was supposed to have been rendered obsolete a hundred years before. Many now sought the safety of the established order in the supposedly reassuring shape of Lord North who was even then writhing in his shackles of government.

Despite the victory at Saratoga, the advance into Providence and Rhode Island, and the alliance with the French, George Washington was downcast. He wrote at the beginning of 1781 that ‘I see nothing before us but accumulating distress … we have lived upon expedients till we can live no longer’. There was no food, no money and few reinforcements. The Americans had come to rely almost entirely upon the support of their new allies, but many in the French government were alarmed at the mounting expense. In turn the war weariness of the English was compounded by the fears of radicals that the prospect of American rebels and the Gordon mob would lead ineluctably to an absolute monarchy. The more practical realized that the war against the erstwhile colony was a pointless waste of money.

Such was the mood on both sides before Yorktown. In the late summer and autumn of 1781 an English army under the command of General Charles Cornwallis had been out-marched and outmanoeuvred by Washington, until it was isolated at Yorktown in Virginia. With a French fleet at his back, surrounded by 8,000 French troops and 5,000 Americans, Cornwallis had no choice but to surrender. The English troops marched away from their broken and abandoned positions to the tune of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. With American victory assured, independence could not be far away.

Just before the news of Yorktown had reached London the king had written to Lord North that ‘the dye is now cast whether this shall be a great empire or the least dignified of European states’. The defeat seemed definitively to have answered the question. The surrender of the English army caused outrage and sorrow. The report reached London on 25 November 1781, just days before the opening of parliament. Lord North is reported to have cried out, ‘Oh God, it is all over!’ He knew that the end of his political days was coming.

Yet the king, the architect of the American policy, seemed prepared to fight on. In his speech from the throne at the opening of the session he reaffirmed his belief in the justice of the cause and refused to surrender the rights and interests of the country in the search for a febrile peace. There then rose up Charles James Fox, a leader of the Whig interest and a firm supporter of the American cause. He upheld the supposed fiction that George III’s speech had been composed by a cabinet council only to attack the king more vehemently as ‘an arbitrary and unfeeling monarch, who, having involved the slaves, his subjects, in a ruinous and unnatural war, to glut his enmity or satiate his revenge, was determined to persevere, in spite of calamity and even of fate’.

These were hard words, but they bear the spirit of Fox. He has only made a passing appearance in this history as yet, having been part of a larger chorus of disapproval against the Crown and its ministers. He has been described as a born oppositionist, an aristocrat who moved in the highest Whig circles without being in the least impressed by considerations of rectitude. He was drunken and profligate, paying as much attention to gambling as to politics; but this was not unusual in eighteenth-century politicians. His charm lay in his happy and buoyant personality, often compared to that of a child. Burke confessed that he was ‘of the most artless, candid, open and benevolent disposition’. The duchess of Devonshire, a Whig grandee and devotee, described ‘his amazing quickness in seizing any subject’ and added that ‘his conversation is like a brilliant player at billiards: the strokes follow one another, piff! paff!’

But he was not born to rule a party or lead a faction. He was careless and ill-organized; his speeches in the Commons were impetuous and impromptu, and he was utterly impervious to public opinion. He made no attempt to marshal the ranks of his followers. Politics was for him, as for so many of his contemporaries, a game of Hazard. He was, according to a German observer, Karl Philipp Moritz, ‘dark, small, thickset, generally ill-groomed’, his plump face overset by thick, shaggy eyebrows. His nickname was ‘the Eyebrow’ and his fat, dishevelled appearance became the object of a thousand caricatures. He would come to the chamber from a night of dissipation, perhaps still the worse for wear from drink, and deliver an oration of two hours that enchanted all who heard it. He was one of the greatest politicians of the age.

The war with America, to which Fox had always been opposed, was ‘put down’ rather than concluded. On 27 February 1782, three months after the news of Yorktown had reached London, the House of Commons voted against the pursuit of military actions across the Atlantic. That was the equivalent of surrender. A month later the Commons prepared a vote of no confidence in Lord North and his ministers, a humiliation that North escaped by precipitate resignation. He wrote to the king that ‘the torrent is too strong to be resisted’. He had been first minister for twelve years, but he could no longer bear the perpetual anxious strain of administration at the time of the American war. The king was not impressed. He was of the opinion that North had somehow deserted him at a time of peril. ‘At last,’ he wrote, ‘the fatal day is come.’

He was faced with competing factions and personalities who were avid for the benefits of office. In one period he even entertained the possibility of abdication, and drafted a speech declaring his imminent departure for Hanover. But it was never delivered. With the collapse of the Tory war faction, he was obliged to turn to sundry Whigs who were united only in their desire for peace with America. Even as they took over the administration they were divided, and four ministries emerged in the next two years. One of those who bobbed to the top was William Petty, 2nd earl of Shelburne. He was considered ‘slippery’ and an ‘arch-deceiver’ as well as being excessively ambitious, but that was practically the definition of any politician in the period. He is remembered principally, if at all, for his conduct of the negotiations for peace with the Americans.

The negotiations did not concern the Americans alone; settlements with France, Spain and Holland, who had all taken the offensive against Britain in its time of crisis, involved intricate diplomatic niceties. The preliminary articles of peace with America were signed in Paris in January 1783, with the most important clause that Britain acknowledged the thirteen united states to be free, sovereign and independent. The Americans made no concessions to the loyalists among them who had fought for the British; they were left to the mercy of Congress, a decision that infuriated many at Westminster. What kind of treaty was it that abandoned the allies? Further treaties with France and Spain were signed at Versailles. France surrendered Grenada, St Vincent and other islands in exchange for Senegal in Africa, Pondicherry in India, and several islands. Spain gave up the Bahamas but obtained Minorca and the two Floridas. A cartoon of 1783 was entitled ‘The General Piss of Peace’ in which all the protagonists, including a Native American, urinate into a common pot:

A little time past, sirs, who would have thought this

That they’d so soon come to a general piss?

So ended the American war that had created the first newly independent nation in the world that had full control of its common destiny. In the process of the fighting George Washington had in the face of extreme need managed to create a national army; his was the model followed by revolutionary France that inspired a new form of warfare. Another consequence followed. For the first time a group of people had advanced the cause of a nation without a king, without an aristocracy and without a national Church.

The British truly believed that their empire was now in decline but in fact their commercial and maritime links remained intact and would lead to ever greater prosperity in future years. The French had emerged from the conflict with mixed fortunes, but the truth was that their subvention of the American colonists led to a grave financial crisis that found its culmination in the revolution of 1789. The foreign trade and domestic production of the United States were enlarged by the successful outcome of the war. In England, too, the cessation of hostilities encouraged the development of industry and commerce on a scale not seen for twenty years. The army and navy were cut back, to the great relief of the taxpayers, but the popularity of George III himself increased. He represented the still point in a turning world.

That popularity did not attach itself to his ministers. A resolution concerning the treaty devised by Shelburne was put before the Commons by Lord John Cavendish; it stated that ‘the concessions made to the adversaries of Great Britain … were greater than they were entitled to, either from the actual situation of their respective possessions, or from their comparative strength’. The atmosphere was perhaps not conducive to strenuous debate. Karl Philipp Moritz noted that ‘it is not at all uncommon to see a member lying stretched out on one of the benches, while others are debating. Some crack nuts; others eat oranges.’

The condemnation was passed by seventeen votes, and Shelburne resigned. It is unlikely that any other politician would have negotiated a more favourable peace, but he fell victim to a general mood of dissatisfaction and weariness. At a later date Benjamin Disraeli would acclaim Shelburne as the greatest statesman of the eighteenth century, but in his lifetime the earl was never thanked by a grateful nation for an unpopular but indispensable peace.

The departure of Shelburne left the king in the unenviable position of being surrounded by men whom he either distrusted or hated. One parliamentarian, James Grenville, later recalled that George III exhibited all the signs of his anxiety; he remarked that ‘the feelings which then agitated his mind were strongly pictured in his countenance and gestures’; Grenville observed ‘the quick step and disordered motion of his body, his rapid utterance, his eager and uninterrupted speech, admitting neither of pause nor answer, and shifting perpetually in unconnected digressions’ which were perhaps a harbinger of his later nervous collapse. Yet he had some reason to be angry and alarmed.

To popular amazement, and much disgust, Lord North and Charles James Fox had entered an arrangement; the dissolute Whig and the fatigued lord had in the past traded insults with abandon. Fox, for example, had accused North of ‘unexampled treachery and falsehood’ as well as ‘public perfidy’. But now they found themselves to be the very best of friends, staunch allies ready to form a ministry. James Gillray portrayed the two men on a roundabout, or the ‘new state whirligig’, while robbers plunder the house behind them; the inscription read: ‘Poor John Bull’s house plundered at noon day’. But they had the numbers, Fox with 90 votes and North with 120 against a combined ministerial alliance of 140. They had in the phrase of the time ‘stormed the [royal] closet’. The king had a particular hatred of Fox, whom he despised as a wanton reprobate, and was disgusted by what he considered to be the treachery of Lord North who had deserted him. He could not stop their alliance but he was clear that he would make it very difficult for them to continue; he barred them from using any sources of patronage, which was the lifeblood of a successful government. But even to the end he struggled to find an alternative.

In his extremity the king approached William Pitt, son of the ‘great commoner’, who at the age of twenty-four was already chancellor of the exchequer. He bore a famous name, but in the course of his career he made it more illustrious still. ‘He is not a chip off the old block’, Burke said. ‘He is the old block itself.’ He had been brought up in the purple of the political aristocracy and had been marked out early for high office; it was said that he had never been a boy and knew nothing of men or manners except through the distorting mirror of Westminster. He was characterized by his pale face and his stiff, formal bow; tall and thin, he had all the hauteur of one who knows his destiny. He could be stern, supercilious and supremely uninterested; he had what Lord Holland called ‘an eye in the air’. He entered the chamber of the Commons without looking either to the right or to the left, and he sat in his place without nod or greeting to those around him.

That was the public man. In private, after a few glasses of port, he was good-natured and even humorous. One of his colleagues, Sir William Napier, recalled an occasion when Pitt was playing with some children of his acquaintance; his face had been blackened with cork, and he was throwing cushions with abandon. It was suddenly announced that two great ministers wished to see him on an urgent matter. He called for a basin, washed his face, and hid the cushions under a sofa. Napier recalled the change that came over him. ‘His tall, ungainly, bony figure seemed to grow to the ceiling, his head was thrown back, his eyes were fixed immovably.’ He listened to them, answered with a few curt sentences, ‘and finally, with an abrupt stiff inclination of the body, but without casting his eyes down, dismissed them. Then, turning to us with a laugh, caught up his cushions and renewed our fight.’ His temperament was in that sense unstable. It was said that he was ‘always in the cellar or in the garret’.

When the king approached the young man with the offer of being first minister, Pitt rejected it out of hand. He could not command a majority, and he could not work either with Fox or with North. So he waited. He realized that the new ministry was so unstable, so riven by internal weakness, that it could not hold. He could bide his time. Richard Porson summed up the characters of Fox and Pitt with an observation. ‘Mr Pitt conceives his sentences before he utters them. Mr Fox throws himself into the middle of his, and leaves it to God Almighty to get him out again.’

Balloons were the rage of the early 1780s. For the first time in human history it seemed that men could fly. Excited crowds in Paris and London watched the ascents, and for a moment seemed to be exhilarated by a sense of liberation from the woes of the world. This was freedom, or at least the promise of freedom, for future generations. At the time of the French Revolution a political writer, Etienne Dumont, remarked that ‘the people of Paris were filled with inflammable gas like a balloon’. In the spring of 1785 Horace Walpole wrote, less dramatically, that ‘Mr Windham, the member for Norwich, has made a voyage into the clouds, and was in danger of falling to earth and being shipwrecked. Three more balloons sail today; in short we shall have a prodigious navy in the air, and then what signifies having lost the empire of the ocean?’

24

The schoolboy

The first British Empire, largely consisting of the thirteen American colonies, had gone. Yet many were glad to be rid of it. Its surcease had become inevitable. It was better to trade with the Americans than attempt to rule them, and this salutary lesson became the single most important principle of the second British Empire which was even then being created. It was not in England’s interests to have colonies scattered over the globe; it was more important to have a line of trading posts that could create a worldwide commercial empire along the routes of the oceans. These markets and factories would then be guarded by the navy in the world’s first maritime empire.

Trading posts were set up in Borneo and the Philippines, while Lord Macartney led a commercial mission to the imperial court at Peking [Beijing]. The forts and factories of Britain stretched out to Penang and Malaya, to Trinomali [Tiruvannamalai] and Kandu, to Cape Town and central Africa. And of course the Indian subcontinent beckoned with its riches. It was said that the Tudor spirit of ocean-going adventure had revived, and indeed the idea of the British Empire was first raised in the Elizabethan period. John Dee had prophesied an empire that would unite all the peoples of Britain in its acquisition, a remarkably accurate vision of the future. Where could the ships and sailors not go? To Greece? To Araby? To the dark continent of Africa or to the realms of the Orient?

The memories of the old empire had not entirely faded; Britain held on to Quebec and to Canada. It also established New South Wales as colony and prison compound. But the Pacific and Indian oceans were to become the bearers of merchants with commodities to buy and to sell. In the process the nature of empire changed. The first empire had been essentially an English enterprise with the reminders of the old home in names such as New York and New England. The second empire was truly British in scope with areas such as Bengal, and eventually the whole of the Indian subcontinent, patrolled by native troops strengthened by Scots, Irish and Welsh regulars.

It was in many respects a ramshackle empire, made up of separate constitutions and agreements. One territory was supervised by informal pacts, while another might be guarded by troops or circumscribed by treaties. Different types of colony had different types of constitution. Indian provinces were situated beside the older trading posts. There was really no guiding plan or intention in the acquisition of a second empire. There may have been some general feeling that English authority was ‘good’ for the native peoples, but there was also a great deal of hypocrisy and greed in the arrangements. This was not intended to be a political invasion but a mercantile policy in which British governors would work with the local elites to preserve good administration and flourishing trade.

This sounded to many like the old empire in all but name. The pursuit of trade in India, for example, led ineluctably to a policy of conquest and dominion by the East India Company. Trade could not be separated from power. And power fed upon itself. Ceylon was therefore annexed to protect the trade routes to India. By 1816 Britain possessed forty-three colonies, compared to twenty-six in 1792; the territories comprised 2 million square miles and contained some 25 million people, the majority of them non-white and non-Christian. This was a unique phenomenon that the ministers in London found it hard to grasp or to control. How could the power implicit in empire be reconciled with traditional British liberties? They approached the problem with extreme caution and an innate conservatism.

As early as 1782, when peace negotiations were being pursued between England and America, the king informed the Commons that ‘the regulation of a vast territory in Asia opens a large field for your wisdom, prudence and foresight’. Asia was in fact the major problem for the administration at Westminster. Since wisdom and prudence were too feeble a match for cupidity and cunning, there seemed to be no way to supervise or to control the workings of the East India Company.

Its administrators had grown too rich and too powerful. They needed to preserve their trade by imposing political stability upon the territories with which they negotiated; they required alliances with local princes or rulers, and they needed to master the complex procedures of both Koran and Hindu law; they needed an army, preferably of friendly natives. The government in Westminster was uneasy at this abrogation of its powers, and distressed by the news of exploitation and even of violence that reached it.

The ministers were no doubt also eager to get their hands on the surplus revenues that the company was accruing from its flourishing trade. The ‘nabobs’, the Englishmen who returned rich from Indian service, were treated with considerable disquiet; the combination of ‘new money’ with greed and exploitation was not considered suitable. They had become so familiar, and so despised, that Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) became a great success at the Haymarket Theatre. ‘With the wealth of the East,’ one character laments, ‘we have, too, imported the worst of its vices. What a horrid crew!’ The nabob has ‘grown great from robbing the heathens’. This was also the perceived problem of the East India Company itself.

With his usual mixture of self-assurance and optimism Charles James Fox believed that he could resolve the problems of India. He proposed that the existing Court of Directors that administered the company should be replaced by seven commissioners. It soon became clear that the chosen commissioners were all supporters of the administration, and of Fox in particular; it was widely believed that Fox wished to transfer the patronage and wealth of the East India Company into his own political service. A cartoon was published at the end of 1783 showing him, wearing a turban and riding an elephant, trampling upon India House and its directors with the caption ‘Carlo Khan’s Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street’.

It was a moment of peril for Fox, who could be accused of purloining the king’s bounty, and his opponents were ready to fall upon him. The supporters of Fox and North were able to press the measure through the Commons but, at this juncture, on 11 December, the king let it be known through an intermediary ‘that whoever voted for the India Bill were not only not his friends, but he should consider them as his enemies’. It seems more than likely that William Pitt had a certain responsibility for this intervention since, if the bill fell, it effectively signalled the demise of the coalition. And so it proved. As the debate moved on, Thomas Orde, a Tory member, reported that Fox’s ‘countenance, gesture and expression were in the highest degree ludicrous from the extremity of dejection and rage, going off with an exclamation of despair’. As soon as the Lords objected to Fox’s measure, and voted it down on 17 December, the king asked for the resignation of his two principal ministers. They were gone by the next day. Pitt came forward almost at once. He was still only twenty-four.

The shambles of the coalition, the effrontery of Fox’s proposal to appoint the commissioners, the growing unpopularity of the government, gave Pitt his opportunity to strike where he had not struck before. He gambled that he could survive a combined opposition just long enough to be ready to go to the country. Fox, on the contrary, believed that ‘we shall destroy them almost as soon as they are formed’. It was nicknamed ‘the mince-pie administration’ fit only to last for the festive season. A verse was circulated:

A sight to make surrounding nations stare;

A kingdom trusted to a schoolboy’s care.

Parliament reassembled on 12 January 1784, and Pitt would remain in office for the next eighteen years.

From the beginning he was cool, precise and determined; his aims and methods were clear, his calculations cogent and his command of the Commons exemplary. He had from the beginning the support and loyalty of the king, who opened for him the gates of patronage; some of his supporters were immediately made peers. But he was not above the convenient lie. When Fox charged that his India bill had been rejected by the Lords as a result of ‘secret influence’, Pitt replied that ‘he knew of no secret influence, and his own integrity would be his guardian against that danger’. It would not be the last time that he invoked his ‘integrity’.

He chose to be the only member of his cabinet in the Commons, and soon demonstrated his mastery of that assembly; he believed that innate loyalty to the king, his own new powers of patronage, and his steadiness in the face of fire, would allow him to survive until the next election. Slowly he whittled down the number of his opponents while keeping a grave and composed face.

His principal purposes, apart from the obvious necessity of staying in power, were to reform the national finances and to extend national commerce. These were the two props for safety and peace. In matters of money he was a master, and knew that the first priority must be to pay off or pay down the national debt incurred after years of warfare. It was also vital, as far as he was concerned, to cut expenditure by a process of careful and lengthy clearance of superfluous offices and sinecures. Of what, then, might Fox and his Whig colleagues complain? They had in any case given every sign that they would be profligate with the nation’s revenues. Pitt’s oratory was precise, cogent and irrefutable. As one of his opponents, Dr Parr, put it, ‘the dog talks grammar’; or, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, Pitt manifested ‘a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words’.

The long-anticipated elections took place in the spring of 1784, with a campaign that lasted for five weeks; it soon became clear that the advantage lay with Pitt and the king over Fox and his adherents. ‘We are cut up root and branch,’ one MP, William Eden, confessed, ‘the country is utterly mad for prerogative.’ It was not a battle between Crown and parliament; it was a struggle for or against a parliament sanctioned by the throne. Pitt had on his side the landowners and the manufacturers, the merchants and the clergy. All wanted efficiency, security and, if possible, honesty in the administration. More than a hundred Whig members lost their seats; they became known as ‘Fox’s martyrs’ after Foxe’s Book of Martyrs published 200 years before. Pitt regained office as first minister, more powerful than any of his predecessors. Thomas Paine wrote, at a later date, that ‘Mr Pitt had merited nothing, but he promised much.’

He was not given to visionary plans or solutions; he did not press too far into matters of principle and was loath to question the status quo. He dealt principally with practical, administrative and factual details. It was hard to know whether he was a Whig or a Tory, but the distinction made very little difference. He had been brought up as a Whig but the party he commanded was now essentially Tory in nature. In any case, he was not a ‘party man’. He relished his independence, and confided in very few of his colleagues. On the question of India, he was pragmatic. He set up a Board of Control, composed of six members of the privy council, to oversee the affairs of the East India Company; the new governor general of India, the Earl Cornwallis, was sent out two years later. The idea of imperial trusteeship was in the air. Pitt’s proposals did not differ markedly from those of Fox, but they were regarded as more honest and more open than any projected cabal of Fox’s friends.

In matters of finance Pitt was in his element. His private secretary, the Reverend George Pretyman, gave a sermon before the House of Commons in St Margaret’s, Westminster, where he expatiated on the perils of the national debt and the critical state of the country ‘especially with regard to its revenue’. So the raising of taxes became a national endeavour. Pitt did not invent the window tax, but he made sure that it yielded much greater sums. He taxed horses and carriages; he taxed bricks, hats and perfumes; he increased the cost of postage and the taxes on newspapers; he invented probate and legacy duties. What could be squeezed was hard pressed. For the national debt itself, Pitt had a novel solution; the cutting of expenditure, together with the raising of taxes and customs duties, had led to a surplus in the public funds. Instead of spending that surplus, Pitt decreed that it would become part of a sinking fund to pay off the national debt. The fund could not be used for any other purpose.

For these measures Pitt relied upon tranquillity at home and abroad. He could not afford war, and wished to avoid public protest. He had decided upon a new tax on the cotton industry but a procession of 2,000 marched through Manchester with banners proclaiming ‘Let commerce flourish for ever!’, ‘Freedom restored’, ‘May Industry never be cramped’. To all these sentiments, Pitt was in fact thoroughly sympathetic and after much agitation and parliamentary protest, he gave way. From the mid-1780s there was indeed a recovery in the building trade and elsewhere, and consequently something of a ‘boom’.

Defeats in parliament did not seem to injure him in the least. He had in a sense already risen above party. In matters of Europe he was also a conciliator and negotiator by nature. It was said that he had no interest in, or knowledge of, foreign affairs, but his study in Downing Street was decorated with four sets of maps and his library was stocked with gazetteers and atlases.

He did believe in pursuing diplomacy through commerce, however, and in the autumn of 1786 he concluded a trade treaty with France that allowed the products of both countries to pass with the minimum of interference. Given the scale of English manufacture, the balance of trade would be inevitably favourable to Britain. Over the next few years Pitt also attempted to devise trade treaties with seven other countries. As the Public Advertiser put it, ‘it is no less than a general arrangement of the commerce of the greatest commercial power that ever existed with all the great commercial powers of the world’. As with many grand schemes, however, it came to nothing.

The problems of empire were never far removed and the trial of Warren Hastings, formerly governor general of Bengal, illustrated the deep uncertainty and confusion which still surrounded Britain’s imperial status. Fox had already stated in the Commons that India should be governed ‘by those principles of equity and humanity implanted in our hearts’. If this was the dream of empire, the reality was sometimes very different.

On his return to Britain, having spent most of his life in India, Hastings was charged by Edmund Burke and others with high crimes and misdemeanours: he was accused of accepting, and giving, bribes; he was accused of selling the aid of his troops to a local despot; he was accused of extortion against the begums of Oudh and the nabob of Benares who had been forced to flee his territory. The names were not familiar to the English, and suggested an alien subcontinent of which they understood very little, but all of Hastings’s supposed crimes could be seen to represent the East India Company itself.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a politician as well as a playwright close to Burke, rose in the Commons in February 1787, to appeal to his colleagues ‘to wipe off the disgrace affixed to the British name in India, and to rescue the national character from lasting infamy’. Many were not happy with the country’s imperial role, especially when it was no longer seen as guardian of a white Protestant empire. The accusations could also be used to diminish the standing of George III and Pitt who might be accused of seeking to use the company’s revenue for themselves. Sheridan spoke for five and a half hours and, at the conclusion of his speech, he was greeted by a ‘universal shout’ of approbation.

The impeachment of Hastings had become inevitable and, for a few months, it afforded the spectacle of an empire questioning, and deciding upon, its destiny. Everybody flocked to Westminster Hall for the proceedings which began on 13 February 1788. No one could then have guessed that the process would last for a further seven years. It became the sensation of the season, with the leading orators of the day – Sheridan, Burke, Fox – launching tirades against an old man in a blue French coat. Macaulay wrote that ‘the grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or gratified the emulation of an orator.’ The queen and the court were there; the leaders of fashion and art were there; the ambassadors were there; ‘society’, in all its manifestations, was there. A ticket might be sold for 50 guineas.

The speeches of denunciation would have given credit to the Haymarket or Covent Garden. Burke opened the proceedings with a speech that lasted four days; in the excitement he created, several ladies fainted in the galleries. Sheridan went one further; at the end of his final speech he fell, fainting, into the arms of Edmund Burke. The noted actress, Sarah Siddons, fainted simultaneously. It was a festival of fainting. Gibbon visited Sheridan on the following day. ‘I called this morning, he is perfectly well. A good actor!’ Burke himself seems to have fainted five times in the course of his orations. ‘Your lordships will spare my weakness,’ he said, ‘I have not spared myself … I cannot command strength to proceed further at present.’ It was all very stirring, but nothing came of it in the end.

Hastings was after seven years acquitted on all counts, but national attention had already turned elsewhere. The impeachment can best be construed as a momentary spasm of conscience in a country still ambiguous over its imperial role. It would take the greater self-belief of a later generation to quell all doubt.

Another source of doubt and disquiet, in the face of empire, was the continuing survival and prosperity of the slave trade. Not many people cared about it. It was believed that if the English gave up the selling or bartering of slaves, then the French would take over. The country needed the gold, the elephants’ tusks and the slaves. The merchants of London, Bristol and Liverpool sent out gaily coloured clothes, hats, rum, powder and flint. In return they were given men, women and children often taken in tribal wars. By 1750 the numbers of slaves had reached over 270,000 per decade. By 1793 Liverpool handled three-sevenths of the slave trade of all Europe. Who would willingly let them go? From their slave labour in the West Indies came tobacco, cotton and sugar. They were vital tributes to the great god of commerce that ruled the nation.

Yet a small band of persistent opponents of slavery was active in its efforts and, during the course of the reign of George III, several petitions had been presented to parliament on the total abolition of the trade or on the more humane treatment of slaves in the West Indies. William Wilberforce, one of the founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, stated to the Commons that no more than half of the transported slaves lived to see their destination; some plunged into the sea and were said to hold out their arms in joy for the brief sensation of liberty before they sank beneath the waves.

Conversations and committees ensued but nothing was achieved until 21 May 1788, when Sir William Dolben proposed a bill to monitor the transportation of the captives who were forced to endure irons, putrid fever and scant space to move or breathe. It was the first measure against slavery to be tabled at Westminster and the ensuing legislation – one slave to be carried for each ton of the ship’s burthen – was passed by a considerable majority in both houses. The victory pleased the supporters of the bill, and in particular William Wilberforce. Pitt made brave speeches against the trade, admitting that ‘the perversion of British commerce carried misery instead of happiness to one whole quarter of the globe’, but was cautious with legislative action. As first minister he relied upon the immense popularity of a national cause before he committed himself to it. This was not the case for slavery. Its abolition was not given legislative force for another forty-five years. The slaves were part of the engine of trade.

And were there not, some people argued, enough and more than enough slaves at home?

25

The steam machines

In the spring and summer of 1788 George III visited a pin manufactory in Gloucestershire as well as a carpet works and china factory in Worcestershire; he also took in the new Thames–Severn canal southeast of Stroud. In the following year he visited the carpet manufactory at Axminster and, according to its owner, ‘attended to the workers and asked many questions concerning the principles and processes of the manufacture’. It was the first time, perhaps, that the king had given his consideration to the industry and manufactures of the country which in his reign were growing at an accelerated rate. By this date the steam engine and the power loom were in full operation, with the astonishing revelation that a mechanical hammer could strike 150 blows per minute. It seemed to summarize or represent the remarkable change.

Everyone dreamed and spoke of steam. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, eulogized it in his long poem, The Economy of Vegetation (1791):

Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER’D STEAM! Afar

Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;

Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear

The flying chariot through the fields of air.

Matthew Boulton had written in 1781 to his partner, James Watt, the great pioneer of the steam engine, that ‘the people in London, Manchester and Birmingham are steam mill mad’. Charles Babbage, one of the first proponents of the computer, declared at a later date that ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam’. Its uses seemed to be infinite. It blew the furnaces and punched the metal; it drove the lathe and rolled the iron; it raised the water and drained the mines. It lent the power for spinning and weaving. It was used in flour mills, in malt mills and in flint mills. It was of course also used to make more steam engines. The first steam engine for a textile mill was installed in 1792; eight years later, eighty engines were being employed for the same purpose.

In 1803 a steam carriage made its way through the streets of London. A year later the first railway locomotive in history made its maiden journey of 10 miles from the Penydarren Ironworks by Merthyr Tydfil to the Glamorgan Canal. Lord Jeffrey wrote of the steam engine that ‘it can engrave a seal, and crush obdurate masses of metal before it; draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble into the air’. What was once done by wind and water, by human effort and animal strength, could now be accomplished by heat alone.

The Albion Mill had been constructed in 1786, on the south side of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge, with the intention of expediting the manufacture of flour by means of steam; it was the great mechanical spectacle of the age, a wonder of modern life, sporting the most powerful machines in the world, and was described by Erasmus Darwin as ‘a grand and successful effort of human life’. It led directly, however, to William Blake’s condemnation of ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ in ‘Jerusalem’ (1804–10). It burned down three years later in what may have been suspicious circumstances. The millers danced and sang on Blackfriars Bridge. Not everyone was enamoured of the age’s mechanical marvels.

All this activity was propagated by a delicate and melancholy mechanic, James Watt, who was described by the historian, William Lecky, as ‘a slow, shy, plodding, self-concentrated boy, with weak health and low spirits, entirely without brilliancy and fire but with an evident natural turn for mechanics’. Watt once said that ‘of all things in life there is nothing more foolish than inventing’. He added, on another occasion, that ‘I find myself out of my sphere when I have anything to do with mankind’. It was this somewhat lugubrious individual who changed the shape of the age, since his sudden intuition that the two stages of the engine’s life, the heating and the cooling, could be disconnected provided the breakthrough. With a separate condenser, the engine was more efficient and more stable. The idea came to him in a flash while walking on College Green in Glasgow, but it is doubtful whether the fully conceived scheme would have come to fruition without the active and energetic assistance of Matthew Boulton; Watt himself extolled the ‘active and sanguine disposition’ of the manufacturer and industrialist who drove him forward.

It was Boulton who had told James Boswell, on a tour of his manufactory, ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – Power.’ Power was the source and origin of what would soon become the full-blown factory system that spread across the midland and northern counties so that the whole aggregation was considered to be one vast factory. Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Denbighshire and Cheshire became the home of the machine. At a later date Andrew Ure, author of The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), compared the factories to ‘the boasted monuments of Asiatic, Egyptian and Roman despotism’. There was therefore a hint of the sublime about their construction, with suggestions of darkness, terror and despair.

They were constructed from solid brick or stone while some of them contained an iron frame; the same care and ingenuity went into their making as that of the great cathedrals, with which they were sometimes compared. Previous industrial buildings had been almost always domestic in scale which lent them a human dimension; the factories with their several storeys, their iron pillars, their windows grouped vertically rather than horizontally, were a new presence in the landscape. They looked as if they were trying to free themselves from the shackles of the land, like the great single-span iron bridges. Early in the new century the factories were some of the first public buildings to be illuminated by gaslight, so that the brilliancy of their achievement could be seen from far off. An historian of Stockport, Henry Heginbotham, wrote that ‘the drivers of London coaches when passing the mill slackened their speed in order to tell of the miraculous operations performed therein’. Others were not impressed. A contemporary diarist, John Byng, after visiting the silk mills in Derby wrote that the mills ‘quite bewildered me; such rattlings and twistings. Such heat, and stinks!’

The change was slow, and not fully completed until the middle of the next century, but gradually in the last decades of the eighteenth century great spreads of industry and manufacture were established that had their centre in the mills and in the factories. Many of them were constructed at a distance from the old cities and guilds, so the industrialist was able to create new communities that could service his creations; rows of cottages, chapels, churches, schools, kitchen gardens and even public houses were built on-site. Benefit schemes and rudimentary health insurance were also established; organized sports were encouraged as well as annual outings to some local beauty spot or another. When some industrial rioters threatened Arkwright’s factory at Cromford, he armed his employees with guns and spears.

The purpose of the new factories was of course readily apparent. By congregating all the workers under one roof it was easier to control and to supervise them; it also led to more efficiency so that a series of ‘shops’ or workrooms could concentrate on one part of the industrial process. Only the factories could house and maintain the great engines that were now being introduced. One external source of power, such as a river, could create the energy for a thousand machines. The forbidding walls could also protect the industrialist from the theft of his trade secrets. But the large number of workers – men, women and children – meant that there was room for experimentation with time and divisions of labour; it was possible now for the working life of factories to be maintained throughout the night as well as the day.

The great advantage was that of speed. Everything was running faster. The workers were obliged to quicken their pace in order to keep up with one another, while the wheels and belts ran faster. The old guild legislation and medieval ordinances disappeared under the onslaught of this new form of production; the relationships between workers and employers, together with the customary rhythms of life, were changed for ever. It is not surprising, therefore, that this revolution provoked enormous hostility among those whose lives and livelihoods were threatened by it. The building of the first steam mill in Bradford, Holme Mill, was plagued by protests and riots. Staverton Mill, near Totnes in Devon, was sabotaged by its own operatives.

The machines were meant to save labour, but the flood of cheaper goods meant that the market grew faster than the available labour force. In turn the relative shortage of labour led to more and more persistent attempts at efficiency and innovation. Robert Owen, the great mill-owner and philanthropist, declared in 1816 that ‘in my establishment at New Lanark … mechanical powers and operations superintended by about two thousand young persons and adults … now completed as much work as sixty years ago would have required the entire working population of Scotland’.

The key lay in the successful division of labour, a concept that Adam Smith had extolled in the first chapter of his Wealth of Nations (1776). He contemplates the nature of pin-making under the industrial system.

One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations …

Eighteen men could perform in a few seconds a task that would absorb the energy of one man for a whole day. This in turn required the presence of specialized workmen who were all the time seeking more and more technical efficiency; their goal was greater accuracy and precision. But this division of labour also needed the efforts of many hundreds of women and children who were put to the most routine and repetitive tasks. So the changes in national industry created new divisions among the working population.

The other great shibboleth of industrial change was the need for standardization. This was the context for mass production, and was part of the drive for accuracy, regularity, efficiency and speed. The elimination of variability was indispensable for the creation of a national market. And for this, of course, mechanization was essential. As the Scottish engineer and inventor James Nasmyth put it:

the irregularity and carelessness of the workmen … gave an increased stimulus to the demand for self-acting machine tools … The machines never got drunk; their hands never shook from excess; they were never absent from work; they did not strike for wages; they were unfailing in their accuracy and regularity, while producing the most delicate or ponderous portions of mechanical structures.

So by default the men and women themselves had to be trained to behave and work in the same way as machines. The Edinburgh Review noted that ‘the human operative, in imitation and by the aid of the machine, acquires a perfection little less than marvellous’. But what of these men and women and even children? The last word had been said more than 2,000 years before by Xenophon, the Greek historian, who in Oeconomicus condemned the arts of manufacture that ‘utterly ruin the bodies of workers and managers alike, compelling men as they do to lead sedentary lives and huddle indoors, or in some cases to spend the day before a fire. Then as men’s bodies become enervated, so their souls grow sicklier.’

It is clear enough that many of those who entered the doors of the factory were being introduced to a more intense or at least more visible form of servitude. Social historians have argued for many years over the relative privation involved in agricultural labour or domestic service, but the factory represented coercion and discipline on a much larger and more organized scale. The personal tie had been broken, and the illusion of independence had disappeared. To enter the new sphere of unfreedom, to be introduced to a world of strict routine and discipline, to work for set hours in a set pattern, marked a profound change in status. The wage labourers were believed by many to have lost their rights as free-born Englishmen. In 1765 Adam Ferguson wrote that ‘we make a nation of helots, and have no free citizens’. The men and women had become ‘hands’ or instruments totally at the disposal of the master industrialist who considered them to be part of his great machine. Once such workers had been known as ‘souls’, and the change in discourse is notable. It was reported to parliament that the operatives expressed ‘the utmost distaste’ for regular hours and regular habits. It was against nature.

William Hutton was placed in the Derby silk mill at the age of seven where, as he reported, ‘I had now to rise at five every morning during seven years, submit to the cane whenever convenient to the master …’ The factory system was known on the continent as the ‘English system’, and a contemporary commented that ‘while the engine runs, the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained fast to the iron machine which knows no suffering and no weariness.’

Their work was continually supervised by overseers, and a strict code of discipline was generally introduced. Anyone found straying from his or her own ‘alley’, or talking to another employee, was fined. Any worker who struck or abused an overseer immediately lost his job. Anyone found smuggling liquor into the factory was fined 2 shillings. A list of misdemeanours, from the mills owned by Jedediah Strutt at Belper in Derbyshire, included ‘Idleness and looking thro’ window … calling thro’ window to some soldiers … riotous behaviour in room … riding on each other’s back … telling lies … throwing bobbins at people … using ill language … quarrelling … rubbing their faces with blood and going about the town to frighten people’. The ebullition of high spirits was not permitted. Other crimes were ‘running away … being off drinking … going to Derby fair … sending word she was ill when in fact she was not’.

It was not difficult to understand the motives of those who ran away. The factories were generally stinking and filthy, filled with the constant clamour of harsh machinery; the workshops on the premises were often dark and narrow, suffocating in summer and too frosty in winter. One report, of a later date, stated that ‘altogether I never saw a [work]shop in more filthy or wretched condition … Mr Wallis objected to my examining the children in his counting house because he stated “it would make the place stink so, that his customers could not stay in it”’.

The precision and regularity of their working hours had all the characteristics of a military drill. At Tyldesley Mill, not far from Wigan and Manchester, the operatives worked fourteen hours a day, including a nominal hour for ‘dinner’; the doors were locked in working hours, except for half an hour at teatime, and the workers were not allowed to ask for water despite the heat of the factory. It was reported that in some instances the managers cheated, and stretched the hours as far as they could go; as a consequence, no workman was allowed to wear a watch on the premises. Working hours gradually improved from thirteen and a half to twelve hours in the course of the century based on a six-day working week. There was no more talk of ‘St Monday’, the day when in an earlier period the operatives were allowed the leisure of the tavern or the green. When at the end of the century coal gas became a source of light, many workers were obliged to work through the night hours. This had become a world of bells, clappers, hooters, horns and clocks.

It seems that a relative rise in wages differentiated this work from the labour of the farmers or the casual slavery of the domestic system, but this was not appreciated by some observers. In 1771 Arthur Young, a writer and traveller, remarked that ‘every body but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious’. Surplus cash encouraged only idleness and drunkenness. Sir Willam Temple made a similar point fifteen years later when he observed that the only way to make labourers sober and industrious ‘is to lay them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from meals and sleep, in order to procure the necessities of life’. The usefulness of poverty was widely accepted; since wealth and power depended upon the combined labour of the vast mass of the population, then those masses must be set to work at the lowest possible cost. It was, as some thought, the law of God as much as the law of man.

For some observers the condition of the mills and factories became a metaphor for society itself, where social relations were bound by laws of obedience and discipline. Was this the way the world was about to go? In many respects it was. It has been observed that in the eighteenth century there emerged a greater interest in punctuality and the constant demand for more rapid and expeditious methods. The wheels of machines and carriages revolved faster. Sir John Barnard, successful London merchant and lord mayor, advised in A Present for an Apprentice in 1740 that ‘above all things learn to put a due value on Time, and husband every moment as if it were to be your last; in Time is comprehended all we possess, enjoy, or wish for; and in losing that we lose them all’.

It was observed that in London and in the larger industrial cities greater hurry was noticeable in the crowds, and Londoners became well known for their punctuality. By the 1730s one third of the inhabitants of Bristol owned a watch, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to state that every respectable citizen of London had a timepiece in his waistcoat pocket. The public buildings of the cities more often than not supported a large clock which broadcast the hours to the teeming thousands who passed beneath them. Benjamin Franklin once more caught the spirit of the age when in 1748 he coined the phrase ‘time is money’.

Of course it must also be true that some of the woes and hardships were exaggerated by those who were opposed to the industrial system, but the direct testimony of the workers themselves suggests that there was more than a modicum of truth to even the harshest allegations. The workers did not rise up, however, because they were being paid more, fed better and clothed better. The theorists invoked the laws of God and man, but the laws of the market were in the end more powerful.

The growth of manufactures and the extension of the transportation system required an increase in labour that could not simply be satisfied with a expansion in population; so general complaints were made about workers leaving the land, and domestic servants abandoning their former employment, to make up the deficiency. Corbyn Morris, a customs administrator and economist, noted in 1750 that farmers throughout the kingdom were complaining ‘of the excessive increasing prices of workmen, and of the impossibility of procuring a sufficient number at any price’.

The increase in wages implied a rise in living standards. The roughest estimates, the only ones possible, suggest that in the 1760s and 1770s, home consumption increased at a faster rate than exports and that between 1784 and 1800 the increase in demand for mass commodities, such as soap and printed fabrics, tobacco and beer, was twice the rate of population growth. It has been calculated that as a result of these changes, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, industrial output was almost twice that of 1770.

Many workers enjoyed the benefit of tied cottages, schools and hospitals provided by the management. But of course conditions were attached to this apparent beneficence. Henry and Edward Ashworth, two mill-owners of Turton in Lancashire, told a government enquiry that ‘we exercise a control or superintendence over them, for their moral and social improvement … at frequent and irregular intervals visits are paid to every workman’. The rooms should be clean; the beds and children lice-free; their joint incomes, and their general habits of life, were recorded in special accounting books.

Josiah Wedgwood described the state of the Potteries after he had, as it were, colonized the neighbourhood. In a small pamphlet, ‘An Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery’, he celebrated the new conditions with ‘the workmen earning nearly double their former wages – their houses mostly new and comfortable, and the lands, roads and every other circumstance bearing the most evident marks of the most pleasing and rapid improvements … Industry has been the parent of this happy change.’ William Radcliffe, the author of the Origin of the New System of Manufacture (1828), described in glowing terms the weavers under the patronage and control of Samuel Oldknow, cotton manufacturer, with ‘their dwellings and small gardens clean and neat – all the family well clad – the men with each a watch in his pocket …’.

We may of course turn to conflicting testimony. A surgeon, asked to recruit working men into the marines, noted that ‘the mechanics are shorter, more puny, and altogether inferior in their physical powers. Many of the men presented for examination are distorted in the spine and chest, which witness attributes to the confined position in which they work.’ The risks of disease and illness were infinite. The supposedly happy potters of Staffordshire, men and boys, often worked continually for twelve hours in temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The fork-grinders of Sheffield worked in an atmosphere of stone and metal particles, where lung disease was endemic; the plumbers, who used lead, were slowly poisoned; the hatters, who employed mercury, suffered from nervous debility; the cotton workers contracted byssinosis. Leather workers died of anthrax and lung disease struck down those who worked with wool. Grinder’s rot and bricklayer’s elbow, potter’s rot and miner’s phthisis were some of the occupational hazards. Tailors and seamstresses often lost their sight. Even as late as 1842 a Manchester labourer had a life expectancy of seventeen years, and a Leeds operative of nineteen.

Industry could not exist without misery. One traveller, William George Maton, observed in the copper manufactories that ‘some of the poor wretches who were ladling the liquid metal from the furnaces to the moulds looked more like walking corpses than living beings’.

Industrial victims of another kind were also evident. The hand-loom weavers of Lancashire and elsewhere lost their occupations, as new weaving technologies made their skills redundant; a report on the textile settlements by Angus Reach concluded that they ‘are a wretched and hopeless set’. They were joined in their suffering by southern agricultural labourers who had been used to increase their incomes with industrial labour in the wintry seasons, until the factories had left the south. They were also threatened by agricultural change that encouraged more enclosures and more scientific land use.

The infants were not far behind. The children at work in the mills were reported as suffering from extreme debility, fatigue and deformations of the body. One famous observer, Friedrich Engels, described various children as manifesting ‘pain in the back, hips and legs, swollen joints, varicose veins and large persistent ulcers in the thighs and calves’. If Engels might be considered a less than reliable witness his testimony is confirmed by a Manchester doctor who wrote that:

I stood in Oxford Road, Manchester, and observed the stream of operatives as they left the mills at twelve o’clock. The children were almost universally ill-looking, small, sickly, barefoot and ill-clad. Many appeared to be no older than seven. The men, generally from sixteen to twenty-four, and none aged, were almost as pallid and thin as the children … it was a mournful spectacle.

The children, then, may become a true test of the industrial system. The life of what became known as ‘the factory child’ was a symbol of the age. One operative, Charles Aberdeen, who had begun work as a boy, told a committee: ‘I have seen the race become diminutive and small: I have myself had seven children, not one of which survived six weeks; my wife is an emaciated person, like myself, a little woman, and she worked during her childhood, younger than myself, in a factory.’

The benefits of child labour, however, were deemed to be considerable. Children had, after all, worked from a very early age in the fields, in the shops and in domestic dwellings. They were no strangers to hard labour. It was considered to be good for them. It inculcated obedience and discipline. It added to the family purse. It was of value to the nation and of infinite advantage to the poor themselves. Defoe had commented, in his travels around the country, that in Norwich ‘hardly any thing above four years old but its hands are sufficient to itself’. The unspoken proverb here is that the devil makes work for idle hands. In Norwich, too, he commented that ‘the very children after four or five years of age, could every one earn their own bread’. As late as 1796 Pitt informed the Commons that ‘experience had already shown how much can be done by the industry of children’. So there was no outcry against the employment of very young children in the mills and factories; there was no outrage. They helped to keep wages down. They supported their families. What was wrong with that?

It was customary in the more populous parishes of London to send their children on poor relief to the proprietors of the cotton mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire; they were sent by the wagon-load as a welcome deduction from the poor rate. Many of the pauper children were collected from the workhouses of London and Westminster and transported north in large groups. One London parish negotiated a bargain with a Lancashire mill-owner that it could send one idiot child with twenty sound children. It is not at all clear who was paying whom. In the beginning the authorities paid a nominal sum to the mill-owners for taking their children off the rates, but there were also many reports of the factory-owners paying the parish for what was essentially slave labour.

The parents had no voice in the matter since they, too, customarily relied upon parish relief. And so the children were dispatched with as little care as if they were being shipped to the West Indies. When one slave-owner from that region heard that the children were worked at the cotton mills from five in the morning to seven at night, he observed that ‘we never in the West Indies thought it possible for any human being to be so cruel’. Children were also engaged in night work when the pressure of demand required it.

The conditions in which they worked were uniformly deplorable. They were unprotected from the grind of machinery, and there are many reports of fingers being cut off or limbs crushed in the wheels. One boy who worked in a cotton manufactory for twenty years remarked that ‘I got deformed there; my knees began to bend in when I was fifteen; you see how they are.’ He was part of what Engels called ‘a crowd of cripples’. The ceilings were low, the windows narrow and generally closed. In this unventilated state epidemic disease was rife, with ‘factory fever’ first coming out in 1784. The food was often rancid, with porridge and black bread as staples. Some of the children had to raid dust heaps or fight with the pigs to get into their troughs. Discipline was considered to be essential in such conditions. It was normal for a sleepy or slow child to be hit with a whip, cane, or clenched fist; if any tried to escape they were put in irons. For serious offences the child might be suspended in a ‘cage’ or basket from the ceiling. There is no doubt that some of the overseers were brutish, with a predilection for giving pain to infants. One factory in Manchester was known as ‘Hell’s Gate’.

Nevertheless the children were very useful. They were generally docile and uncomplaining. To whom, in any case, could they complain? They were quick and nimble, small enough to insert themselves into the machinery where required. Some machinery was constructed with child operatives in mind; the spinning jenny had a horizontal wheel best handled by children aged from nine to twelve. One observer, Samuel Schroeder, noted that ‘a small boy makes the blanks red-hot in a small furnace. Another boy puts them under the punch, one by one. The third picks them out of the punch and greases the upper mould between each punching with a greased brush. All this goes quite quickly.’

The children were also very cheap, some of them earning nothing more than their food and lodgings. The age of their labours began at four or five. Pin-makers, for example, began at five, and it was said that going into their workshop was like entering an infants’ school. Jedediah Strutt of Belper explained to a Commons committee that he would take children at the age of seven but preferred those between eleven and twelve. There can be no doubt that these factory children were the least favoured, and least protected, group in eighteenth-century society.

There were occasions when an adult male was given work only if he also sent his children to the mill. Thus there grew up ‘families’ of operatives. Secure work for husbands, wives and children could thereby be gained. The adults were better able to look after their children, at least in theory, and their joint earnings were larger than the average.

Natural exaggeration cannot be discounted in the more appalling accounts, and of course the horrors of the workhouse were not visited upon all the children. The dire conditions afflicted the majority, but some escaped them. The more enlightened employers, such as the Arkwrights and Oldknows, for example, tried to mitigate the hardships of the children’s condition; schools were established, and special ‘apprentice houses’ were built; the boys and girls (specially segregated) were sometimes allowed to play in the fields. But this only put a gloss upon their misery. Robert Owen explained in A New View of Society (1813) that David Dale of the New Lanark mills paid particular attention to the health, cleanliness and diet of the children in his employ; it was reported that ‘the rooms provided for them were spacious, always clean and well ventilated; the food was abundant’. Nevertheless they were employed from six in the morning to seven in the evening, winter and summer; it was observed that ‘many of them became dwarfs in body and mind, and some of them were deformed’. It was concluded that the kind intentions of David Dale were ‘in their ultimate effect almost nugatory’.

Women as well as children provided the human energy of the Industrial Revolution. They too were considered to be docile, nimble and cheap. They also had to be resourceful in a world where they could be employed among the machinery as well as earning their livings as gun-makers, blacksmiths, pin-makers, armourers, or chimney sweeps. William Hutton travelling through the north country in 1741 noticed, with an attempt at irony, that in some of the factories ‘I observed one, or more females, stripped of their upper garment, and not overcharged with their lower, wielding the hammer with all the grace of their sex. The beauties of their face were rather eclipsed by the smut of the anvil …’

There is a suggestion of sexual licence here that other observers had already taken up as one of the evils of industrialism. One factory reformer, Michael Sadler, observed: ‘I never did hear it denied that many of the mills, at least those in which night work is pursued, are … little better than brothels.’ A Children’s Employment Commission, established a few years later in 1842, reported that the factories were characterized ‘by the practice of gross immorality, which is prevalent to a great extent, in both sexes, at very early ages’. Some of the female workers complained that their male colleagues often resorted to drink and other stimulants to counter their fatigue, and in a general atmosphere of heat and monotony the results were inevitable. So the industrial age promoted promiscuity.

The women were particularly sought out, however, for delicate repetitive tasks such as painting on pottery or polishing in the japanning trades. It was thought that they would not ‘combine’ in the manner of their male colleagues, and would be more tractable in matters of hours and subsistence wages. In the mills and factories, young women in fact comprised the majority of the employees. Women made up the bulk of the textile trade and were most heavily employed in those industries which favoured technical innovation. This relatively new workforce could be exploited more easily, and could be used to bypass traditional rules and work regulations.

One recognizable group of people has been left out of this survey of early industrialism, and they are the industrialists themselves. In these first years they had to be at the same time adventurers, entrepreneurs, salesmen, managers and, if possible, inventors. Some of them had been drapers or shopkeepers, part of that ‘middling’ class which was even then struggling to find its voice. Others had been apprentices ready to exploit their training. Yet not all of them had to rise entirely by their own efforts; some of the most successful industrialists were of the second generation, with fathers or even grandfathers ahead of them in the trade, But they might also be the sons of farmers, yeomen, gentlemen and physicians. They might acquire their education in dissenting academies, in technical schools, in private schools that specialized in mathematics and geometry, or in the lectures arranged by the learned societies of their neighbourhood. There was also a plethora of technical literature from pamphlets and manuals to encyclopaedias.

Some had been mill-wrights who had constructed and designed machinery. One of the most famous of them, Sir William Fairbairn, recalled that ‘a good mill-wright was a man of large resources; he was generally well educated, and could draw out his own designs and work at the lathe; he had a knowledge of mill machinery, pumps and cranes, and could turn his hand to the bench or the forge with equal adroitness and facility’. Such a man could quite easily turn industrialist.

Others had been merchant-manufacturers who saw the value of expanding their trade. Others were by training scientists or engineers eager to put their expertise to practical account; there were few factory managers who were not interested in scientific and technical change. That was the key to their enterprise. Josiah Wedgwood established an ‘experimental company’ while Matthew Boulton set up a ‘research assay office’.

The history of successful industrialists is instructive. William Radcliffe wrote that

availing myself of the improvements that came out while I was in my teens, by the time I was married [in 1784 at the age of twenty-four] with my little savings and a practical knowledge of every process, from the cotton bag to the piece of cloth, such as carding by hand or by the engine, spinning by the hand-wheel or Jenny, winding, warping, sizing, looming the web, and weaving either by hand or fly-shuttle, I was ready to commence business for myself; and by the year 1789 I was well established and employed many hands both in spinning and weaving, as a master manufacturer.

So a beginner, with the help of a little capital, could progress by degrees to become a master manufacturer. This is the human face of industrial change.

Peter Stubs of Warrington, a master file-maker, was also an innkeeper and brewer when he began his business. There were times when he had difficulty in recruiting youth to his workshops; the mother of Edward Lancelot of Liverpool wrote that ‘I hope you will excuse mee for not sending my son. The reason is I ad no shoes.’ Yet he prospered, and in various stages of his business career he was selling cast-iron bookcases and glass cylinders as well as potatoes and coconuts. His company still survives and remained in private hands until the 1960s.

Jedediah Strutt of Belper invented a stitching machine known as the ‘Derby rib machine’ that manufactured ribbed stockings, with which he gathered fame and prosperity. Part of the epitaph he wrote for himself affords a good if idealized description of the eighteenth-century industrialist who ‘without having wit had a good share of plain common sense – without much genius enjoyed the more substantial blessing of a sound understanding – with but little personal pride despised a mean or base action …’.

Samuel Oldknow of Stockport was the first to manufacture muslin in England. He established an industrial centre, with a steam-powered manufactory, a bleaching plant, finishing factories and warehouses; he also had a zeal for organization, and decided to develop a community of workers on the site. A thousand weavers were employed in the immediate area of the manufactory, while another 1,000 worked in related factories in the same neighbourhood. Another aspect of industrial change can be seen in Oldknow’s enterprise; six of his employees eventually set up in industrial business on their own account.

There was almost a religious zeal in this propensity for progress. One merchant, Samuel Salte, told Oldknow, that ‘you must both have the perseverance of saints and the resolution of martyrs’. Charity, too, could also be found. One mechanic, Laurence Earnshaw, devised a machine that could spin and reel cotton in one operation; but then he destroyed it for fear that it would take bread from the mouths of the poor.

It is a nice question, however, to determine the actual religion of the industrialists or even of those touched by industry. They were in large part dissenters; very few Anglicans, except for some of the nobles and the great landowners, participated in business. It needed the industry, the self-reliance and the determination of the large body of dissenters to promote industrial change. Since they were forbidden to hold civil or military posts, and were excluded from the English universities, their ambitions were concentrated in other areas. The dissenting academies were in any case fertile ground for young inventors and engineers.

Many of the great iron-masters were Quakers, sturdy, self-reliant and highly conscious of kith and kin; they did not care to marry ‘out of the Society’ and as a result Quaker dynasties like that of the Darbys were established; the first Abraham Darby came from a family of Quaker locksmiths near Dudley in the west midlands. Thrift and austerity encouraged the accumulation of capital, while prudence and industry directed that capital back into the business. The Quaker network no doubt also led to price-fixing or what might more respectably be called trading agreements.

Methodism was perhaps a more significant force. In all its forms that faith was an intrinsic aspect of industrial change through its missionary activities among the northern working class; they sought through their hymns and sermons to encourage aspiration rather than despair among those who laboured in factories; the pursuit of success was seen as a Christian obligation, while the quest for innovation and self-improvement was the most honest of causes.

Drunkenness, time-wasting, laziness and all the other pre-industrial vices were to be exorcized; as alternatives to misery and its various opiates, the Methodists set up their own communal activities, which afforded a sense of belonging, and of participation, in an industrial world that still seemed alien to most of its workers. That is why hand-loom weavers, in particular, became indoctrinated with Methodism as a way of life rather than of devotion. In the summer of 1784 John Wesley ‘found a lovely congregation at Stockport much alive to God’. It was stated as a general rule that ‘where there is little trade, there is seldom much increase in religion’. It has been said, therefore, that Methodism was the religious arm of the Industrial Revolution. In the words of one of Charles Wesley’s hymns:

Help us to help each other, Lord,

Each other’s cross to bear,

Let each his friendly aid afford

And feel his brother’s care.

As a caveat it might be added that a significant number of weary workers, of both sexes, might profess no religion at all. God could not have made the mills.

The iron-masters tended to be assertive and aggressive. They were the first identifiable group of industrialists, some of them coming from agriculture and some from the metal trades. Many of them had names taken from the Old Testament – Shadrach Fox, Nehemiah Lloyd, Job Rawlinson, Joab Parsons, Zephaniah Parker – and they seemed to possess the same primal force. ‘The orders I have made’, Ambrose Crowley told his managers, ‘are built upon such a rock that while I have my understanding it shall be out of the power of Satan and all his disciples to destroy them.’ Iron was in their blood. They could be callous and even ruthless but they seemed to take a proprietary interest in what they called ‘our men’.

Their employees were obliged to work in conditions that were compared to those of Hades. The furnace, the flames, the smoke, the heat, the white-hot ingots, the whole intricate network of chains and pulleys, are worthy of the graver of Piranesi or Gustave Doré. The glare of the furnaces and the lights of the hearths lit up the nights of the Black Country just as surely as if they had been raked by searchlights. It is perhaps no wonder that Ambrose Crowley invoked the name of Satan.

The case of iron is instructive in another sense. One great innovation changed the nature of the product. By means of ‘puddling’, a process of melting and stirring invented by Henry Cort in 1783, coke was used to refine pig iron into wrought iron or bar iron. The furnaces became ever larger and the uses of the iron multiplied; it was mined, smelted, refined, rolled into plates and rods. The demand grew for iron chains, iron pipes, iron wheels, iron stoves, iron grates, iron rails, iron mortars, iron nails, iron pots, iron fences, iron pillars, iron buildings, iron ships and iron paving. It was the age of iron. It could be manufactured in apparently unlimited quantities and before long England became the largest iron producer in Europe, providing half of that continent’s supply. The iron bridge that spans the Severn in Shropshire was considered to be one of the wonders of the world and the dramatist Charles Dibdin predicted that ‘it will apparently be uninjured for ages’. Indeed it still stands.

From the development of the steel industry emerges a similar story of innovation and growth. A clock-maker from Doncaster, Benjamin Huntsman, was the pioneer; in testing the methods for producing finer clock-springs he hit upon a method by which he could maintain the steel at an intense heat in a crucible of clay while its impurities were burned away. It became known as ‘Huntsman’s crucible’ by means of which cast steel was produced in greater and greater quantities. He took out no patent but was determined to keep his secret until he was foiled by a rival manufacturer, Samuel Walker, who on a wintry night disguised himself as a homeless beggar and pleaded to be close to the warmth of the furnace where he could spy with more ease.

In textiles, the glory of England, growth was apparent on all fronts, from silk to wool, from cotton to linen. The clue to improvement was of course the plethora of machines for carding, for combing, for winding, for warping, for weaving, for lapping, for slubbing, and a score of other operations. One improvement led to another, one technical idea promoted another idea. The new inventions were at first only readily applicable to cotton but they soon spread to wool and to linen.

It was a process of what might be called incremental change which was not necessarily written down but worked out in practice by the operatives who passed on their skills by demonstration and word of mouth. Men and women, and even children, learned by doing. This is one of the great engines of the industrial change of the late eighteenth century. The knowledge of skilled workers was of indispensable benefit in the spread of inventiveness, with a pool of young mechanics and apprentices who were eager to learn. It was the practical side of the Industrial Revolution which was perhaps most important. Goethe observed that ‘we [Germans] regard discovery and invention as a splendid personally gained possession … but the clever Englishman transforms it by patent into real possession’. This may be less than fair on men such as Arkwright and Darby, but it does contain an important truth. The English artisan was well known for his discipline, concentration and urge for practical perfection.

Thus in the manufacture of cotton there were innumerable minor adjustments, and a stream of suggestions, for the better employment of the operatives. At the accession of George III in 1760 3 million pounds of raw cotton were imported; twenty-nine years later the figure had risen to 32.5 million. Cotton goods became cheaper and much more plentiful; as a result some of the problems of human well-being were reduced. Francis Place, the social reformer, noted that the new cottons worked ‘all but wonders in the health and cleanliness of women’. It took an Indian hand-spinner approximately 50,000 hours to prepare 100 pounds of cotton, whereas the process on Arkwright’s rollers and ‘the mule’ took 300 hours. The production of cotton moved from the East to the West. The plight of the hand-spinners in India and the hand-loom weavers in England was left out of account, leading ineluctably to their suffering in the nineteenth century.

Two other elements of manufacturing, at this time of change and innovation, deserve notice. A manager at Whitbread’s brewery wrote in the spring of 1786 that ‘last summer we set up a steam engine for the purposes of grinding our malt and we also raise our liquor [water] with it’; the improvements ‘are very great indeed’. The London breweries were soon wholly mechanized, among them the Black Eagle Brewery in Brick Lane, Courage’s Brewery by Butler’s Wharf, the Anchor Brewery at Southwark and Whitbread’s Brewery in Finsbury. The brewers themselves became rich and influential citizens. Some became members of parliament, while others became mayors, justices of the peace and aldermen. They were the aristocrats among London businessmen.

The brewers also invented a new refreshment that helped the wheels of industrial change turn with better grace. In 1722 a brewery in Shoreditch prepared the first mug of ‘porter’, a black and bitter beer, with more hops than malt, that pleased the palate of Londoners accustomed to strong and sharp flavours. It was cheaper than pale ale, and was the first beer to be suitable for mass production; by the 1760s, the sale of porter accounted for almost a half of the market in beer. London tastes were also gratified by another marvel of mechanics. Canned soup and canned meat were on sale by 1814.

Yet the textile industry was central. The mechanization of wool processing lagged behind that of cotton, but eventually it displaced the conditions of work at home where women and children managed the sorting, cleaning and spinning while the men concentrated upon the combing and weaving. The flying shuttle and, eventually, the spinning jenny and the combing machine took their place. New urban districts devoted to wool clustered around Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford and Halifax while the old wool towns of the southwest dwindled away. These changes were not of course without consequences of their own, among them the series of events that became known as the ‘Wiltshire Outrages’. Was it just or proper that a whole way of work, or way of life, should be eliminated? The new wool factories were seen as themselves great machines bent upon destroying custom and ancient practice, employing men and women who did not possess any of the traditional skills or, more importantly, traditional values. One Norwich wool-comber told his employers, in the middle of a working dispute: ‘We are social creatures and cannot live without each other; and why should you destroy community?’ There was no satisfactory answer.

It was therefore inevitable that ‘combinations’ of workers should be established to agitate for better terms and conditions in their respective trades. The destruction of custom, and the attempt to repeal apprenticeship, added to the general unrest. The Leicester Sisterhood of Female Handspinners was established by 18,500 women in 1788, but most of the workers who joined in the first ‘trade unions’ were skilled male workers in the metal trades anxious to fight employers who wished to cut their wages or change their working hours. They were also intent upon forming a ‘closed shop’ against the incursion of women, children and other forms of cheap labour. When the makers of muslin in Glasgow tried to cut down piece-rates, they were confronted by boycotts and organized resistance. As early as 1726 a parliamentary committee was informed that the serge weavers had their own club houses ‘where none but weavers are admitted, and that they have their ensigns and flags hung out at the door of their meetings’.

In 1758 a warrant was issued at the Lancaster Assizes for the arrest of nineteen senior weavers who were believed to act as stewards for a combination of several thousand weavers. They had agreed to collect money ‘for supporting such weavers as should by their committee be ordered to leave their masters and made other dangerous and illegal regulations: that they had insulted and abused several weavers who had refused to join in their schemes and continued to work, and had dropped an incendiary letter with threats to masters that had opposed their design’. This activity did not only anticipate the machine-breaking of 1802 and the Luddite riots of 1811, but it also can be seen as a harbinger of the professional and organized trade unionism of the nineteenth century. Even in the last decades of the eighteenth century there were attempts at discipline, organization and cohesion among the ranks of the workers.

Their example prevailed in other trades. The journeyman hatters formed what Francis Place called a ‘perpetual combination’. Weavers combined in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, while wool-combers were organized in Leicestershire and Yorkshire. Plumbers, carpenters, shoemakers and house-painters had joined them by the end of the century. The factory system was no doubt the true parent of protest and unrest; it seemed to be large and growing ever larger, creating a new world of penury and exploitation.

The workers were perhaps following the example of their employers since, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the steel manufacturers of Birmingham, the nail-smiths of Gloucester and pin-makers of Nottingham were among the many manufacturers who formed what might be called self-help organizations or, less kindly, price-and wage-fixing rings.

Outbreaks of riot and machine-breaking were common in the eighteenth century. As early as 1719 the striking keelmen of Newcastle upon Tyne were met by a regiment of soldiers and a man-of-war. In 1726 riots and loom-breaking broke out in the West Country, and in 1749 the silk, cotton and iron trades were disrupted by demonstrators. In 1768 Hargreaves’s spinning jennies were destroyed by irate workers and, a decade later, Arkwright’s machines met a similar fate. The first law to prevent the growth of trade unions, the Combination Act of 1721, banned journeymen tailors from entering into ‘combinations to advance their wages to unreasonable prices and lessen their usual hours of work’. The law and the employers got their way, and created the context for more severe Combination Acts at the end of the century. In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels made the observation that ‘the history of the proletariat in England begins with the invention of the steam engine and of machinery for working cotton’.

Engels may have misinterpreted the signs of social change in England, and was clearly mistaken in basing them upon continental models; the British form of industrial protest had none of the proto-socialist shrillness of the agitators in France and Germany. It was more formal, more measured and more pragmatic; it relied to a certain extent upon humour and sarcasm, and was maintained by a deep deference for national institutions.

Yet no doubt something was happening. There was something in the air of the industrial towns and villages that had not been sensed before. An observer, Richard Ayton, going among ‘the people of the lower orders in Lancashire’, noted in Voyage round Great Britain (1813) that they are ‘fully aware of the importance of their labour’. He noted also that they were ‘rude, coarse and insolent … Much vice and profligacy necessarily prevail among them; but while their morals are corrupted the powers of their minds are called forth; they become lawless and unprincipled, but quick, cunning and intelligent.’ Was this the new kind of labour that the factory system, and industrial change itself, had elicited?

26

On a darkling plain

The industrial geography of the later eighteenth century was dominated by ‘the drift’. It was in large part fuelled by the movement from the rural hinterlands to the industrial areas of the north and the midlands where the demand for labour was most intense. Who would work in the fields for a pittance when they could work in the factories for a living wage? The looms called them. There was no sudden or general migration, from the southwest and the southeast to the north; it was a process that was gradual and incremental. It is true, however, that the readily available labour drifted from neighbouring rural areas to the nearest industrial centre. It was essentially an aggregate of small movements over a restricted area. That is why, over the eighteenth century, furnaces and forges quickly came to a halt when the harvest had to be brought in.

Yet there was slow but significant change. Charles Dibdin in his Musical Tour of 1788, noted that ‘manufactories that begin about the centre of the kingdom push on to the north – having taken up their residence in Yorkshire – they expand to the east and west; but particularly the west, in a most astonishing way. Thus, from Leeds to Liverpool – through Bradford, Halifax, Rochdale, Manchester, Warrington and Preston – the population is wonderful’.

The metal industries had found their home in the midlands, rivalled by the growing cotton manufactures of Lancashire or Cheshire and the woollen manufacture in the West Riding of Yorkshire. That was the geography of trade in the broadest possible terms. Lancashire, the West Riding, Staffordshire and Warwickshire (together with Middlesex) were by 1800 the most populous counties in England. The consequence was that the rural areas of Essex, Suffolk, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire became ever more agricultural as all traces of industry vanished.

Special trades flourished in separate small areas. Prescot specialized in watch-parts, Chowbent and Leigh made nails, while Ashton-in-Makerfield manufactured locks and hinges. Staple materials could be found in different regions. Tin and copper were mined in Cornwall; lead was everywhere in the Mendips, but there were large supplies of the same metal in Cumberland and Derbyshire. Salt was the preserve of Cheshire, while slate found its natural home in Cumberland and North Wales. Portland was of course famous for its stone. In the eighteenth century England was a capacious storehouse of natural resources that could be easily exploited, and this in turn promoted industrial progress.

The result was that each region and each town was fundamentally different from its neighbours; some employed more female than male labour, while others were more dependent upon the ‘boom or bust’ cycle of certain industries. Prices rose and fell according to different variables. Craft industries were shaped by artisan production in manufactories or by the ‘putting out’ system of domestic labour. When a banker, Mr Oakes of Bury St Edmunds, made a journey to Lancashire on business in 1803, he believed that the county was ‘like a different country’. Nothing was familiar or recognizable; even the people seemed different. The simple peasant of Cromford, according to a diarist and traveller, John Byng, had turned into ‘an impudent mechanic’. Joseph Healy, a poet who later celebrated the resistance at Peterloo, observed the ‘half-burnt cadaverous looking animals’ to be found at the Stourbridge glass-works in 1777. This was a new nation.

Why had this social revolution happened in England rather than in France or Austria? It may be related to Defoe’s dictum that England had by the early eighteenth century become ‘the most flourishing and opulent country in the world’. In France, for example, raw materials were scarce and the possibilities of investment few; the traditions of the country also favoured small-scale enterprise in a manner which the larger farmers of England soon abandoned. In England, too, there was virtually no state or bureaucratic control to guide the process of change; instead, by a series of statutes, the administration actively assisted those who were willing to break up the customary traditions of industry and manufacture. The decay of ‘custom’, as it was known, really meant the end of the old order. Popular traditions were denounced as immoral and popular beliefs were derided as superstition; the familiar perks of the daily job, such as the odd piece of cloth or metal, were now considered to be theft.

The history of patents, as we have seen, exemplifies a prolonged period of inventiveness and ingenuity in the later part of the eighteenth century which may be related to the natural pragmatism and practicality of the English. Science and manufacture were closely aligned in the period, with institutions such as the Lunar Society bringing together manufacturers and experimentalists. From their collaboration came much of the machinery of change. The individual entrepreneur was also free to assert himself, with the spirit of competition and acquisitiveness all around him. Contemporaries noted in fact that the English, of all people, were possessed by the spirit of gain and were characterized by aggression and ruthlessness in its pursuit. All things worked together.

The industrial towns represented some of the most evident signs of the new order. Some of them, Wigan, Bolton and Preston among them, were known as mill towns. They were anomalies. They had no corporate structure for the most part, and were singularly free of churches and hospitals. They were just planted when industrial conditions were suitable and to a certain extent resembled the towns of the ‘gold rush’ of 1849 in California. The lead mills of Sheffield provoked one visitor to note that the houses were ‘dark and black, occasioned by the continual smoke of the forges’. It was written of Barnsley, known as ‘Black Barnsley’, that ‘the very town looks as black and smoky as they were all smiths that lived in it’. From Rochdale to Wigan, from Bury to Preston, the dark stain grew and grew. In 1753 Bolton was little more than a village with one street of thatched houses and gardens; twenty years later its population had risen to 5,000; within a further sixteen years it had risen to 12,000 and by the beginning of the nineteenth century to 17,000.

The dwellings of the manufacturing towns were largely back-to-backs with one room on each floor; it was common for the houses to be occupied by more than one family, and many residents dwelled in the cellar which consisted of two rooms under the ground with a small window in the ceiling. Since there was no administrative control of the building trades, the houses were generally narrow, dark and unhealthy. Even the once-affluent dwellings had degenerated into slums, and workshops were built over the gardens. This was a world of small courts, alleys and tenements, generally with one outside privy for four families. The new streets, so quickly knocked up, were without drains, pavements, or public lighting. Everything seemed temporary, makeshift, haphazard, testifying to the distress and uncertainty of this new world of work.

A medical report, compiled in 1793 by Doctor Ferriar for a police committee in Manchester, states that ‘in some parts of the town the cellars are so damp that they are unfit for habitation … Fever is the usual effect.’ Large masses of people were streaming towards specific areas of cheap and dangerous housing. In Lancashire many thousands of cottages were built, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to accommodate a labour force of some 170,000 people. This was a measure of the change from what had once been a predominantly agricultural region. Ferriar also reports that ‘a lodger fresh from the country often lies down in a bed filled with infection by its last tenant, or from which the corpse of a victim to fever has only been removed a few hours before’.

Harsh conditions, however, may serve to bring people together. Over time the residents of what were once little more than shanty towns developed a strong sense of community, in some sense equivalent to the ‘combinations’ of the industrial workers and others. People sought out their kin, and also others who had originally come from the same rural neighbourhoods. Neighbours themselves were the first line of defence against sickness and unemployment; there was no benevolent state to assist them.

In 1807 the poet Robert Southey visited Birmingham:

A heavy cloud of smoke hung over the city … the contagions spread far and wide. Everywhere around us … the tower of some manufactory was seen at a distance, vomiting up flames and smoke, and blasting every thing around with its metallic vapours. The vicinity was as thickly peopled as that of London … Such swarms of children I never beheld in any other place, nor such wretched ones.

The city expanded at an enormous rate, year by year, and an observer wrote that ‘the traveller who visits her [Birmingham] once in six months supposes himself well acquainted with her; but he may chance to find a street of houses in the autumn, where he saw his horse eat grass in the spring’.

Mr Pickwick in the course of his perambulations took in this ‘great working town’ with all ‘the sights and sounds of earnest occupation’, where ‘the streets were thronged with working people. The hum of labour resounded from every house, lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attick storeys; and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls.’ This was not the harsh music of London with which Dickens was familiar; this was more intense, and more concentrated. These were streets filled with ‘working people’, not with the motley London citizenry in all its variety. You would not find here the dandies or the actors or the ‘shabby-genteel’ or the madwomen who appear in Dickens’s novels; these had all been elbowed aside in the rush for work and trade.

Birmingham had become the toy shop of the world, when a ‘toy-maker’ was a manufacturer of buckles, trinkets, small arms, locks, buttons, tweezers, snuffboxes and a multitude of other small metal goods. Hundreds of workshops were locked in a cycle of manufacture whereby various small parts of each device were cast eventually to form a whole, a sprocket-wheel here and a strap there. The guns were passed from shop to shop in the course of their construction, and were handled by specialized operatives at every stage of the procedure. This was what was generally perceived to be the real Industrial Revolution. Matthew Boulton’s Soho works were 2 miles from the centre of the town, with his thousand workers providing the fuel that fed the flame of commerce. By 1775 Birmingham was the largest industrial centre outside the capital. The rolling mill and the rotary steam engine were the future.

The people of Birmingham had dirty faces and no names, according to one contemporary, but some of them at least were fired by an enthusiasm for making. William Hutton, the first proper historian of the city, wrote in 1741 that ‘I was surprised at the place but more so at the people. They possessed a vivacity I had never beheld. I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake. Their very step along the streets showed alacrity. Every man seemed to know and prosecute his own affairs.’ So the disparate reports conjure up images of energy, determination, eagerness, industry. It may have been the air of Birmingham, therefore, that created the conditions for the emergence of dissent and radicalism as the two significant elements of city life. Dissenters played a large part in the corporate life of the town and the Lunar Society, with its fair share of free-thinkers and dissenters, was established in Birmingham. They represented the richer citizens who funded a town hall, a corn exchange, a theatre and a new market hall as well as the ‘improvements’ of New Street. Of course it was unwise to ignore the sheer determination and contrariness of what was known as ‘the bunting, beggarly, brass-making, brazen-faced, brazen-hearted, blackguard, bustling, booby Birmingham mob’. Soon enough they would take their revenge upon some of the dissenting elite in the town.

Manchester also arose in the time of industrial change. Robert Southey again deplored the conditions of the people who were fed into the machine, whose ‘health physical and moral alike is destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms’. A foreign contemporary observed that there was no sun in Manchester; only a dense cloud of smoke that covered the bright orb. The only light came from Vulcan, the god of fire and of metalworking, and from his monstrous furnaces.

Its major trade was in cloth, and, in particular, cotton, but it contained twelve iron foundries as well as numerous tin-plate workers, braziers and lock-makers. It was, in other words, a prodigious industrial town. A rapid increase in new housing occurred in the 1770s, and within ten years more than a third of all new dwellings had been erected. Such was the demand that many of the houses were occupied even before they were finished.

The new streets were narrow and badly lit, if they were lit at all; the land was so valuable that courts and lanes and alleys were crowded together at the expense of light and air. In a city of almost 100,000 people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was not a single public garden. This is what was meant by the truism that England had changed from a rural to an urban civilization. Joseph Kay, a barrister, was at a slightly later date delivering a speech to the Manchester Statistical Society in the course of which he stated that ‘in no former era and under no former phase of national life has anything at all similar been witnessed’. This was true enough. The impact of Manchester upon political and economic life would be immense.

Other cities had other histories. Newcastle upon Tyne was of course dominated by its coal trade, and the deliveries of its ships kept the hearths of London burning with what was known as ‘sea coal’; the cheap fuel encouraged the growth of brewing, dyeing, glass-making and soap-making. It was the fourth largest town in England and as such dominated the economic and social life of the north-east. It was also a centre of printing, and in the eighteenth century published more books than any other city except London. It supported three newspapers, three circulating libraries and seven subscription libraries. The men of business took a keen interest in public affairs, and it has been estimated that there were more than fifty clubs of Whig or radical tendency. This is the other face of the industrial change, when the men of wealth and influence no longer necessarily took the side of established power and authority.

An American businessman, Louis Simond, approached Leeds at night, and saw a quintessential industrial nightscape where ‘from a height, north of the town, we saw a multitude of fires issuing, no doubt, from furnaces, and constellations of illuminated windows (manufactories) spread over the dark plain’. In more placid style John Dyer, in ‘The Fleece’ (1757), noted the growth of ‘busy Leeds’ where:

Some, with even line,

New streets are marking in the neighb’ring fields.

The most evocative literary description of an industrial town comes later in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, where his love of darkness and decay, of stunning contrasts and of reality touched by stage fire, found its true subject. ‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.’ The horrid vista is presumably based upon Preston, which Dickens had just visited, but it could be an emblem of any mill town of the period.

Amid this gloom and blackness and soot and grime, however theatrically elaborated by Dickens into a vision of hell, there was much industrial misery. The factory system often represented a sentence of death. In addition the industrial towns had many paupers, debarred from work by sickness and injury, who huddled together in the poorest districts. Even the labourers still in employ were often in some way deformed with swollen limbs or unsteady legs.

Yet this picture of unrelieved misery, so much emphasized by social historians of the twentieth century, is incomplete. Could a country be racked by manifold suffering on such a scale without visible revolt? Other developments must be cast in the opposite scale. By the early years of the nineteenth century industrial wages were keeping pace with the cost of living, and industrial change itself was providing the necessities of the labouring classes. Cottons and woollens, food and drink, were now more amply distributed, and it was believed that the diet of the workers had greatly improved. Wheat replaced rye, and meat became a staple dish. Cheaper and better-distributed coal provided heat for the hearth. The rise in family earnings and the greater regularity of pay in the industrial districts were also not insignificant benefits. In 1830 Macaulay observed that ‘the laboring classes of this island … are on the whole better off as to physical comforts than the inhabitants of any equally extensive district of the old world … The serving man, the artisan and the husbandman, have a more copious and palatable supply of food, better clothing and better furniture.’ But of course, as a result, examples of comparative suffering and real poverty were ‘more acutely felt and more loudly bewailed here than elsewhere’.

The industrial system itself led to manifest improvements. The employment of female workers gradually helped to establish the social and economic independence of women, while the scandal of child labour provoked such outrage that it promoted attempts at some form of primary education by charitable institutions; the ‘ragged schools’ began their long life in 1818, while the charity schools of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster had already created ‘the steam engine of the moral world’. The combinations of the workers led in turn to friendly societies, savings banks, mechanics’ institutes and of course trade unions. The ills of life were to be remedied rather than endured.

Long and complex arguments have been made ever since about the relative rise or fall of the ‘standard of living’. Since the measure or index of such an impalpable entity seems to vary with each debate, it becomes a nice question. It is not practicable, for example, to compare a modest rise in wage rates with the manifestly unhealthy and even mortal conditions of the new cities. Does the spread of cholera balance the lower cost of bread? Cheaper clothing cannot compensate for overcrowding. Yet one statistical measurement may be granted without much objection. The average height of the population deteriorated in the second half of the eighteenth century, and continued to decline through the first half of the next century. This was most obvious of course in the vast difference between the poor and the rest of the population; agricultural distress and industrial decline in certain areas led to a class of people living in what Charles Booth later called ‘chronic want’.

The worst cases of economic failure must be set against evidence of falling mortality. The absence of epidemic plague and the increased attention to sanitation and hygiene may help to explain the improvement, and one influential London physician, Doctor Lettsom, remarked that the people ‘have learnt that most diseases are mitigated by a free admission of air, by cleanliness, and by promoting instead of restraining the indulgence and care of the sick’. Not everyone cared for the new methods. In 1768 a hospital for inoculation was burnt down by a mob in Peterborough.

The number of infants who died shortly after birth in the British Lying-in Hospital, in Holborn, fell from 1 in 15 in the 1750s to 1 in 118 by the turn of the century. In the course of his travels in the 1770s John Wesley observed the crowds of young children that seemed to populate the towns and villages. In 1726 life expectancy was put at a meagre twentyfive years; by the 1820s it had risen to forty-one years. The length of life, however, remained very low in the newly industrialized cities.

It is perhaps impossible, therefore, to gauge the general effects of industrial change in the eighteenth century. It represents a complex of so many particular forces and events that it might best be treated as a natural phenomenon with all the random and inexplicable details that surround such an event. Yet some tentative conclusions may be advanced. The people, according to Thomas Hardy, now served smoke and fire rather than frost and sun. They became accustomed to the machine and to the clock; they worked for a wage rather than for subsistence, and they had no essential stake in the objects they produced. The nature of the family and household was wholly changed.

England was no longer predominantly an agricultural society, a state in which it had remained for approximately 10,000 years. It was no longer plausible to propound a natural hierarchy of power based upon land; the twin imperatives of custom and deference began to disappear. The powers of patronage began subtly to change as the ‘middling classes’ aspired to more political and economic power. The abolition of the laws of apprenticeship, and of the assize of bread where that commodity was granted a ‘fair’ price, marked the onset of an economy that was based upon competition and self-interest.

That was why the labouring masses, the working people, soon became a class apart. It was considered as impossible to mix the higher and lower classes as to mingle oil and water. One employer, quoted by Arnold Toynbee in his lectures on the Industrial Revolution, stated that ‘there can be no union between employer and employed, because it is in the interest of the employer to get as much work as he can, done for the smallest sum possible’.

The professional artisan, too, began to separate himself from manual labour and from too close an involvement with the working men; in the previous dispensation a metal manufacturer might spend the day with his employees, superintending and assisting them, but that collaboration was now coming to an end. Samuel Courtauld was considering a career in engraving at his family’s silk mill but his father told him that ‘you seem to forget that mere manual labour – though of the higher class – is very rarely indeed so valuable as a business – as those modes of trade or manufacture which allow us a profit from the labour of many persons’.

The practitioners of ‘mere manual labour’ were now moving towards the more backward parts of the town where they were segregated from their ‘betters’. The business of trade, which had always been conducted as close as possible to the street – the gloves that Shakespeare’s father made were on show at the front window – were now relegated to a back room while the front quarters were for sleeping and eating.

The same changes were taking place in the world of agriculture. Small farms disappeared, and large enclosed farms became the standard for excellence. The small farmer gave way to the great agriculturalist who was the rural equivalent of the master manufacturer; he was already accruing vast profits from the easy availability of food. The labourer had once been part of the farmer’s household, eating at the same table, but that contiguity had ended. One labourer complained, according to Arnold Toynbee, that ‘the farmers take no more notice of us than if we were dumb beasts; they let us eat our crust by the ditch side’. The farm labourers themselves were now housed in a species of barracks.

This division between the ranks of society might have perilous consequences. By dint of schooling, even of the most elementary kind, the younger workers were becoming more literate and therefore less ignorant of the wider ways of the world. They were less abject and less easily led or cowed. New men might have new ideas. From the period of the ‘combinations’, for example, we may date the early organization of workers in a common cause, a movement that led to the emergence of Chartism in the late 1830s. The ties between the ranks or classes of society had been broken, provoking ambition, restlessness, or confusion.

It has been suggested that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries crime rose at an unanticipated rate, particularly in the newly urbanized and manufacturing regions. It had become necessary to supervise the people in a stricter and more organized fashion. In 1792 the creation of the London Police Magistrates initiated a trend for stipendiary magistrates in other urban regions. For most of the eighteenth century prisons were simply large and verminous dungeons where a variety of criminals was promiscuously held, so that by 1789 the prison reformer, John Howard, was suggesting the innovative model of ‘regular steady discipline in a penitentiary house’; he was advocating the modern form of prison, in other words, which can also be seen as one of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution.

The laments came in many forms. Some decried the changes in the landscape, where the mills had risen in the valleys and the great rocks were cut for limestone. The earth, in the striking phrase of John Britton, ‘is covered and loaded with its own entrails’. William Blake saw into the heart of the new dispensation and correctly estimated its consequences.

All the arts of life they chang’d into the arts of death …

And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel,

To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours

Of day & night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file

And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious workmanship,

Kept ignorant of the use: that they might spend the days of wisdom

In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread.

The literary complains were taken up by popular songs and street ballads, as in one poem composed by Joseph Mather against master cutler Watkinson who counted thirteen knives as a dozen when he paid his men:

That monster oppression behold how he stalks

Keeps picking the bones of the poor as he walks …

In an anonymous and powerful ballad, ‘The Complaint of a Kidderminster Weaver’s Wife to her Infant’, the master manufacturers are called ‘murderers’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘oppressors’:

Hush thee, my babe! thy feeble cry

Tells me that thou ere long wilt die:

I’m glad thou hast not liv’d to curse

Our cruel masters. That were worse.

The movement of Romanticism might itself be interpreted in one of its aspects as an assault upon, or retreat from, the new industrial age. In the eighth book of ‘The Excursion’ William Wordsworth is astonished by the fact of a ‘huge town’ emerging ‘where not a habitation stood before’. One of his editors cites the case of Middlesbrough, which in 1830 was no more than a farmhouse by the bank of the Tees and which fifty years later was a town of more than 50,000 inhabitants: