More History

You are in > History

History

by Marcus Mulholland / August 11th 2006

What the Victorians did for us

The free-market industrialisation of Britain caused widespread misery, over-work, disease and the early deaths of millions of people. The rebellions, economic breakdowns and state action which followed gave rise to gradual improvements in quality of life in the late Victorian period.

By 1800 AD, Britain had projected itself from predominance in medieval wool production and command of a powerful navy to possession of the world’s first global empire and control of international trade in cotton and other commodities.

Pillage from the rest of the world, including the use of slave labour in the colonies, funded the application of technical and organisational discoveries to harness the nation’s own abundant resources, including coal, iron, and labour. 

For the main part of the 19th Century, Britain held a barely challenged world monopoly in manufactured products; the output of the country’s industries and the extent of its empire grew hugely.

Yet, comparing it with the pre-industrial era, economic historian Arnold Toynbee (in a lecture he gave in 1884) described his then-recent times as:

 “A darker period - a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible, because, side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of pauperism; and production on a vast scale, the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and to the degradation of a large body of producers.”

While using state power to acquire and exploit its international dominance (for instance, the massive military campaigns and the laws preventing the colonies from freely trading with foreign nations, even each other, except for the mother country), British economic policy at home was to allow free rein for market forces.   Toynbee observed:

 “The essence of the Industrial Revolution is the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth.”

These regulations, while restricting the growth of industry, had also protected the common people from some of the effects of early capitalism.  They included compulsory seven year apprenticeships for many occupations, the setting of wage rates by magistrates, state control of prices and regulation of quality for bread and other goods.  

People in the medieval countryside also had use of the common lands – extensive areas where they could plant crops and graze animals. Through the process known as enclosures, these areas were privatised and given to the landlords.

Liberty to starve

Deprived of the common lands, and with the higher agricultural yields resulting from increases in the average size of farms, the use of new tools and the planting of clover and legumes for field rotation causing not prosperity but rural unemployment; with the handicraft production by which many households supplemented their income made uneconomic by competition from the growing factories, many people had little choice but to  migrate to the cities and work for the capitalists.

Luddites destroying machinery

Those who complained about the effects which the free market was having were rebuked in terms which would warm the heart of a modern day neo-liberal.  A petition of cotton weavers, desperate because of the loss of their livelihoods, was rejected by Parliament in 1811 with the following explanation:

"No interference of the legislature with the freedom of trade, or with the perfect liberty of every individual to dispose of his time and his labour in the way and on the terms he may judge most conducive to his own interests, can take place without violating general principles of the first importance to prosperity and happiness of the community."

But the rise of laissez faire was not a process by which the individual overcame the state and other collective forces.  The British ruling class used coercive state power to acquire and exploit its international dominance (for instance, the massive military campaigns and the laws preventing the colonies from freely trading with foreign nations, even with each other, except for the mother country). 

Riots and rebellions

Ruthless state action also had to be employed to enforce ‘perfect liberty’ on the British populace, who welcomed the changes with riots and revolts including the Luddite movement of 1811 to 1813, the Pentrich Rebellion of 1817, the Captain Swing Riots of 1830 to 1831, the Chartist Rising in Newport of 1839 and the Rebecca Riots of 1839 to 1844.  The repression of the 1831-32 rebellions alone involved the imprisonment of 600 people, with 500 sentenced to transportation and 19 executed.

Troops firing on Chartist rebels in Newport, 1839. 24 civilians were killed.

While market forces were pushing millions of workers from the position of individual farmers and artisans into highly organised mass production, the ownership of industry – though still in the hands of a tiny clique - also became collectivised and organised.  From 1825, joint stock companies were permitted; the functions of ownership (by the shareholders) and management of enterprises became increasingly separated.  With the introduction of limited liability in1856, owners no longer had to balance their hugely increasing wealth with the risk that they would have to pay the debts of failing companies. 

Anti-union laws

Organisation by the workers was repressed by the state and the employers.  Although the total ban on trade unions by the 1799 Combination Act lasted only a quarter of a century, other legal provisions including the Master and Servant Act of 1823, the continued ban on picketing and the liability of unions to be sued by employers for ‘restraint of trade’ severely limited the successes of the workers in their many attempts to act together to maintain their portion of Britain’s expanding wealth. 

 In recent decades there has been an academic controversy about whether there was any increase in the money wages of workers (after accounting for inflation) in this period.  Nicholas Crafts of the London School of Economics concedes that:

 “Research continues to show that real wage growth during the industrial revolution was very modest at best.” 

But any such modest rises in an individual’s pay could not possibly make up for the worsening collective conditions which people had to bear.

Inside the front door of an urban worker in early and mid-Victorian times was an expensively rented, overcrowded, hovel with no clean water or sanitation.  Outside, on the way to work he could breathe the smog from factory chimneys, mixed with the stench of the open cesspools.  On the way home, the gin palaces offered him the opportunity to celebrate a decision to get drunk rather than spending his meagre wages on food and clothing. 

 A shrinking proletariat

'Him', of course, is used for convenience.  With trade unions kept weak, rates of pay were so low that in industrial districts all family members - men, women, children as young as six and seven - had to toil for fourteen hours per day and longer, sometimes without respite even on Sundays, down mines and in mills and workshops, risking horrific accidents and appalling industrial diseases. 

Girl working in brickyard, 1872. Child labour (for children under 10) was not abolished until 1878.

That was in the good times.  Frequent slumps and changes in technology often deprived whole areas of employment, allowing people the freedom to choose between the workhouse and starvation.

Unfettered capitalism had effects which were biological as well as social.  According to Professor Martin Daunton:

 "Large towns were... desperately unhealthy, with levels of death at a level not seen since the Black Death. New epidemics were stalking the cities: cholera and typhoid were carried by polluted water; typhus was spread by lice; and 'summer diarrhoea' was caused by swarms of flies feeding on horse manure and human waste. The problem was easy to identify and difficult to solve: too little was invested in the urban environment, in sewers, street paving and cleansing, and in pure water and decent housing…

"A baby born in a large town with a population of more than 100,000 in the 1820s might expect to live to 35; in the 1830s, life expectancy was down to miserable 29. A comparison between a desperately unhealthy large town and a small market town shows the costs of migrating in search of work and prosperity. In 1851, a boy born in inner Liverpool had a life expectancy of only 26 years, compared with a boy born in the small market town of Okehampton who could expect to live to 57."

It was not only life that got shorter; due to malnutrition, disease and overwork the physical size of the average individual actually began to shrink.  As modern research based on contemporary records reveals:

 “Cohorts of children born in each successive decade during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries exhibited a trend of increasing average height attainment, a pattern consistent with a trend of improving nutritional status. But those children born during each decade from the 1820s to the 1850s (inclusive) revealed an actual fall in height attainments relative to their predecessors.”

 ‘Inflammable multitudes’

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, studying the British scene from London and Manchester, called the tendency of economic growth under capitalism to result in increased hardship rather than prosperity for the masses 'the emiseration of the proletariat', and predicted that it would lead to revolution.   This view was not restricted to supporters of communism.  The Poet Laureate Robert Southey wrote to his friend Ashley Cooper, who is better known as Lord Shaftesbury:

"I agree with you that the state of the poor cannot be discussed too much, for till it is improved physically and morally and religiously we shall be in more danger from them than the West Indian planters are from their slaves"

Some activists within Britain’s ruling class pressed for shorter working hours for women and children, legalisation of trade unions, better housing and sanitation, urban planning, and compulsory state schooling, in order to reduce the threat of the overthrow of the capitalist system itself.  Lord Shaftesbury explained the increasing danger to his fellow legislators:

 “The two demons in morals and politics, Socialism and Chartism [the movement which demanded the right to vote for working class men] are stalking through the land; yet they are but symptoms of a universal disease, spread throughout vast masses of the people, who, so far from concurring in the status quo, suppose that anything must be better than their present condition… we know also that our system begets the vast and inflammable mass which lies waiting, day by day, for the spark to explode it into mischief.

“…these vast multitudes, ignorant and excitable in themselves, and rendered still more so by oppression or neglect, are surrendered, almost without a struggle, to the experimental philosophy of infidels and democrats.”

The great stink

The dismal outcomes of the ‘invisible hand’ against any standard of good works were becoming evident economically as well as socially.  Crucial sectors, whose output was necessary not only for the profit of individual companies but for the functioning of the whole system, were unable to perform effectively without state intervention.

'Death' on the Thames

This was emphatically demonstrated by the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, during which Parliament had to close for business because of the overwhelming stench of raw sewage emanating from the Thames. 

Soon afterwards, a scheme to build a publicly-funded and controlled drainage and sewerage system for the capital was approved.  The system, designed by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, put an end to the series of cholera epidemics which had ravaged the city, and transformed the quality of life of all Londoners.

State intervention

Even the most extreme free-market ideologists concede the concept of ‘market failure’, reluctantly admitting that the smooth running of capitalism necessitates some limited exceptions to the rule of the laissez faire. 

But from an early stage in the growth of industrial capitalism in Britain, it became clear that market failures were the rule rather than the exception.  The sectors demanding government intervention included:–

The road network: the companies (called turnpike trusts) which built, maintained and charged tolls on the trunk roads were unable to keep them in adequate condition.  In 1839 a parliamentary commission reported that they owed their impatient creditors at least £9 million, and were unable to compete with steamships and the growing railways.  Faced with the prospect of having no passable inter-city roads, the government handed responsibility for them to the local authorities.  The last turnpike trust went out of business in 1895.

Railways: following a speculative investment bubble in the 1830s and 1840s which involved enormous waste and duplication on the profitable routes, the railway firms became unable to provide an adequate rate of return to their owners and creditors on the very high fixed investment costs.  Legislation culminating in the 1874 Railway and Canal Act effectively replaced competition with state regulation and close supervision of the railway system.

Telecommunications: The telegraph service, which the private sector was not able to develop into an extensive and profitable communication network, was nationalised and put under the control of the post office in 1870.

Utilities: Water, sewerage and the gas supply were municipalized by the major local authorities in the 1860s and 1870s because the private contractors were unable to provide the necessary levels of investment and commitment to deliver safe and adequate services.

Housing:  After the link between inadequate housing and outbreaks of disease was demonstrated by Edwin Chadwick and other reformers, the state had to begin setting minimum standards in the construction of dwellings; from 1851, local authorities were empowered to build houses for working class tenants.

Education: The patchwork of religious and charity schools of the mid 19th Century, though increasingly subsidised by the state, was clearly failing to produce a workforce capable of being trained to master the advancing industrial technology of the time.  The 1870 Elementary Education Act, introduced by Bradford wool merchant W.E. Forster, created state schools and made primary schooling compulsory.

In a long series of conflicts which ebbed and flowed within the British ruling class from the early Victorian period onwards, against a backdrop of working class activity including riots, strikes, petitions and dissemination of revolutionary as well as reformist ideas; and with evidence of the practical unsustainability of laissez faire increasingly becoming undeniable, a regulatory framework and the beginnings of a public sector began to emerge, against the resistance of powerful groups of capitalists. 

Improvements won in struggle

Where it could, starting with the 1836 Municipal Corporations Act, the central state evaded responsibility for providing public services and passed this distasteful duty to the local authorities. 

A series of factory acts very gradually limited the working hours of children, and then women and men, though implementation of these restrictions was, especially at the beginning, sabotaged by factory owners and was frustrated by the small size of the factory inspectorate. 

Trade unions, seen as a lesser evil than revolutionary agitation, were progressively legalised and by the time of the Trades Union Congress of 1874 were representing one million workers, mainly in the skilled occupations.

It was only from the late Victorian period, after these institutional changes were coming into effect, that improvements in mortality, health and lifespan, significant rises in real incomes and the acquisition of some leisure time (as distinct from involuntary unemployment) began to be felt by the masses of people.

Though the privileges of empire and Britain’s head start in manufacturing allowed the capitalist owners to retain their huge wealth while conceding, through the framework of the state, a somewhat better standard of living to the working class, this latter was wrested from them in a long collective struggle. 

Paradoxically, by this partial overthrow of the principle of laissez faire, Britain also became a much more comfortable and satisfying place for the middle and upper classes to live and do business.  

Noble sphere

Joseph Chamberlain, a wealthy industrialist who as mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s took the water and gas supply into public ownership and used the authoritarian powers of local government to redevelop the city, boasted:

 "Formerly, it was badly lighted, imperfectly guarded, and only partially drained; there were few public buildings and few important streets ... But now, great public edifices not unworthy of the importance of a Midland metropolis have risen on every side. Rookeries and squalid courts have given way to fine streets and open places. The roads are well paved, well kept, well lighted, and well cleansed ... Baths and wash-houses are provided at a nominal cost to the users. Free libraries and museums of art are open to all the inhabitants…"

 Thus the socially privileged were no longer to be merely the lords of dreadful squalor or overseers of colonial subjects – they could also become proud masters of public development. As Chamberlain remarked:

"There is no nobler sphere for those who have not the opportunity of engaging in imperial politics than to take part in municipal work."

Many at the time gave these changes the less than noble name of ‘gas and water socialism’.

Chamberlain's "Midland metropolis" today

Though not consistently or assertively applied, the principle was established that social action would be allowed to improve social welfare, a principle which free-market economists held to be contemptible.  In 1943, Friedrich von Hayek bemoaned the retreats of his and previous generations from laissez faire:

 "We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism...”

Present-day living standards

Since the rise of von Hayek’s disciple Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, we have become accustomed to the all-pervasive claim, promoted also by New Labour politicians, that the capitalist market performs good works and promotes the public good.  A recent editorial in the Economist magazine insisted “the standard of living people in the West enjoy today is due to little else but the selfish pursuit of profit”.  These assertions have no basis in historical or current facts.

Rather, the strong forces of the competitive market generally act against the ‘common good’, frequently even against the long term common interests of the ruling elite; therefore, non profit-seeking collective forces – political struggles, trade unions, welfare systems, state controls, subsidies and public ownership – have been required to impede, regulate, supplement and supplant the market, thus preventing or ameliorating social, environmental and political catastrophes.

Modern ‘Western’ standards of living are due to much else besides the selfish pursuit of profit.  They are built on a social and material infrastructure involving direct state action and extensive regulation. 

Our freedom - or otherwise - from epidemics of disease or from the prospect of abject poverty through unemployment, inadequate housing, low wages or retirement is not guaranteed merely by the wealth of a nation as measured by GDP.  It has been determined by collective struggles - and continues to depend on such struggles.