Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society
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Again, as long as the wage earners preferred to take a large part of the benefit in
early marriage and large families (whether caused by more births or lower infant
mortality), then demography was also against them maintaining their relative
share, for the supply of labour was the ultimate arbiter of wages, and a glut of
labour in the peak decades of population growth and urbanization is the likeliest
explanation of the stagnation or decline of real wages in the 1820’s and 1830’s.
Finally, the structure of the price changes and the pattern of production and
demand it reflected favoured the rich rather than the poor. Food prices rose
higher and fell more slowly than those of the new manufactured goods, so that
consumers, towards the bottom of the social scale, who spent most of their
income on food gained much less than those, towards the top, with a
considerable surplus for other goods. But this brings us to the larger and more
important questions of how not merely the great aggregates of the rent, profit and
wage-receiving classes but the different groups within them fared during the
Industrial Revolution, and how these different groups came in turn to partake of
its benefits. For not only were there great differences in welfare between different
sub-classes, especially in the working class, but there were important differences
in the timing with which, as it were, they were admitted to the circle of its
beneficiaries.
If, as we suggested in the last chapter, social emulation was the key to the
expansion of demand which evoked the increased production of the Industrial
Revolution, then we should not expect all the different levels of society to enter
into full enjoyment of its benefits at one and the same time, but to come to it at
varying times and speeds. It is these varying times and speeds which above all
account for the wide differences in comfort and well-being at any given point
within the Industrial Revolution. Instead of a comparatively static model of a new
industrial system showering blessings indiscriminately or in unchanging
proportions—more at the top, less at the bottom—on an otherwise stationary
social pyramid, we should adopt a dynamic model of a new industrial system
growing like a vortex within the old, and gradually pulling into its orbit of
production and demand circle after circle of producers and consumers. Higher
and more centrally placed circles, like the entrepreneurs and the factory workers
themselves, and, perhaps surprisingly, the landowners and larger farmers, were
drawn in from the start, to enjoy higher incomes and spend an increasing
proportion of them on the new consumer goods. Lower and peripheral circles,
like the farm labourers, were the last to be affected, though even here there were
gradations: the northern farm labourers felt the effect on their wages as early as
the late eighteenth century, while those of the southern counties had to wait until
the 1870’s or later to begin to feel real benefit. In between, there were not only
circles, like the urban labourers or the miners, who were drawn in at varying
times and speeds, but other, like the handloom weavers and the framework knitters,
1
Mantoux, op. cit., p. 238; F.Podmore, Robert Owen (1923), p. 642.
114 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM
who early on were drawn into comfort and even, by contemporary standards,
luxury, only to be thrust out again by the inexorable whirl of technological
change.
It would take too long to catalogue all the aspects, levels, twists and changes
of this dynamic process, but enough can be said about each of the major circles
to indicate its nature. First of all, there can be no doubt that the upper and middle
classes, whose incomes as we have seen more than kept up with economic
growth, were the first to enjoy the new consumer goods and other benefits of
industrialism. We find the aristocracy from the very beginning enjoying the
fashionable new muslins and printed cottons of the 1780’s, Wedgwood’s
‘ornamental ware’ which was in fact subsidized by the ‘useful’, Boulton and
Fothergill’s Birmingham ‘toys’, and all the best ironmongery, furniture and
gadgets of the new creation.
1
The new factory masters and merchants were only
one pace behind, with their fine Georgian houses and furnishings, pianos and
pictures, carriages and liveried servants. The lesser business men and
shopkeepers came into affluence a generation later, in the early nineteenth
century, according to G.R.Porter, 1851:
In nothing is the improvement here mentioned more apparent than in the
condition of the dwellings of the middle classes. As one instance, it is not
necessary to go back much beyond half a century to arrive at a time when
prosperous shopkeepers in the leading thoroughfares of London were
without that now necessary article of furniture, a carpet, in their ordinary
sitting-rooms…. In the same houses we now see, not carpets merely, but
many articles of furniture which were formerly in use only among the
nobility and gentry: the walls are now covered with paintings or
engravings, and the apartments contain evidence that some among the
inmates cultivate one or more of those elegant accomplishments which
tend so delightfully to refine the minds of individuals, and to sweeten the
intercourse of families.
1
The falling prices of manufactured goods also left the same circles with more, if
they wished, to spend on food. Although they could no doubt already buy as
much in quantity as they liked, one gets the impression from the growing
obsession with French chefs, gargantuan feasts, and exotic foods, and from the
spate of cookery books, that in the early nineteenth century the rich were
spending much more on the variety and elaboration of their food than formerly,
and that in this they were increasingly emulated by the middle class.
2
And
whatever happened to consumption of food per head, they would not go short.
1
N.McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood: an 18th-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and
Marketing Techniques’, Ec.H.R., 1960, XII. 408f; E.Robinson, ‘18th-Century Commerce
and Fashion: Matthew Boulton’s Marketing Techniques,’ Ec.H.R., 1963, XVI. 39f.
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM 115
They almost alone enjoyed the increase in coffee from one ounce per head in
1801 to one pound seven and a half ounces in 1841, though they also account for
the fall in the consumption of wine, from over half a gallon a year to under a
third.
3
While general sugar consumption per head undoubtedly fell from thirty
pounds ten ounces a head in 1801 to fifteen pounds five ounces in 1840, theirs
probably rose, and Porter reckoned that, whatever the price and importation, the
top fifth of families would take at least forty pounds per head, leaving the rest to
fluctuate between nine pounds in 1840 and twenty pounds in 1849.
1
By analogy
we can guess that they would take the first pick of all the other foods in the
market, in bad years and in good, and that the proportion available for the rest
would fluctuate far more markedly than the total figures suggest.
They it was, too, who enjoyed first and most abundantly the other benefits of
economic growth: the improved transport, especially the new roads, faster
coaches, and the early railways, and the facilities they afforded of living in more
salubrious suburbs and taking holidays in the new resorts; the better houses,
cleaner drains, piped water, improved medical treatment, and the bonus they
offered in longer life and the survival of children; and the spare income for
education, entertainment, clubs, societies, books, journals, newspapers, and so
on, which all increased in quantity if not always in quality. Finally, they enjoyed
a bonus which is now denied to the most advanced industrial societies: cheap and
increasingly abundant personal service. The number of servants increased faster
than population, from 600,000 in 1801 to 1,300,000 in 1851 (and to two million
in 1881)
2
—a clear indication that the rich could afford to buy more of the labour
of the poor, and so of the widening gap in income distribution.
Within the working class the first circle to share largely in the benefits of
industrialism was not that of the factory workers who, though they improved
themselves, did not at the beginning start high enough up the income scale to
have a large surplus over and above immediate necessities, but the top ten to
fifteen per cent of wage earners who came in the course of the nineteenth century
to be called the labour aristocracy. These were chiefly craftsmen—printers,
joiners, cabinet makers, cutlers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, the building crafts,
and the like, who we saw in Chapter II were not clearly distinguishable in the old
society from the lower echelons of the middle ranks. During the Industrial
Revolution many old trades overtaken by machinery, such as the woolcombers
and calico-printers, dropped out of their circle, and a number of new trades, such
as the iron puddlers, the fine spinners and the railway engine drivers, rose into it.
1
Porter, op. cit., (1851), p. 522.
2
Cf. J.Burnett, Plenty and Want: a Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the
Present Day (1966), chap. iv.
3
Porter, op. cit., (1851), pp. 549, 560.
1
Ibid., pp. 541, 543, 545.
2
Deane and Cole, op. cit., p. 143.
116 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM
Since they were paid throughout from fifty to one hundred per cent more than
labourers in the same or nearby trades, since with certain exceptions their skills
were in increasing demand, and since they were far less vulnerable to
unemployment than the rest of the working class, they were a particularly
favoured group who benefited from industrialism as early and nearly as much as
the adjacent middle class.
1
Their real wages at the very least kept up with the
average, as those of the builders in the above table show, and they were
particularly resistant to wage cuts, so that during slumps and price falls their real
wages did not decline so steeply as the rest, and their margin of spending power
beyond the average worker almost continually increased. These were the workers
who ate meat, vegetables, fruit and dairy produce, lived in the best and newest
cottages and filled them with furniture and knick-knacks, bought books and
newspapers, supported mechanics’ institutes and friendly societies, and paid the
heavy subscriptions to the craft trade unions.
Below and after them in the scale and speed of improvement came the factory
workers themselves, whose chief claim to notice in the textbooks is their fight
against long hours and bad working conditions. Since in the chronology of
industrial relations grievances about hours and conditions are normally
secondary to those about pay, this in itself is evidence that they did not consider
themselves badly paid, except in periods of slump and short-time working. It is
true that cotton operatives’ average wages were consistently amongst the lowest
for any industry, but this was because only about a quarter of them were adult
men (twenty-seven per cent in 1835) and the rest women, youths and children.
2
For men wages ranged from about 1.3 to three times the northern farm labourer’s
average (14s. 6d.–17s. for cardroom operatives to 33s. 3d. for fine spinners in
1833 compared with 11s. 1d. for northern farm labourers).
3
Real wages
according to G.D.H.Cole, who was no meliorist, much more than doubled
between the bad year 1800 and 1830 and, after falling back somewhat during the
1830’s, surged to a new height in 1850 approaching three times the level of 1800.
1
Whatever discount we make for the exaggeration of the price index, it is clear
that cotton operatives, and probably most factory workers, enjoyed a markedly
rising standard of living from the end of the Wars onwards. By the 1830’s ‘the
majority of the factory operatives were in receipt of wages which brought within
their reach a fairly abundant diet of plain food and, if careful and thrifty, tidy
clothes and decent household goods.’
2
Factory workers, however, were a minority of the working class at the end of
the Industrial Revolution, and even if we add to them the miners, transport
workers, iron shipbuilders and other rapidly expanding occupations who can be
1
Cf. E.J.Hobsbawm, ‘The Labour Aristocracy in 19th-century Britain’, Labouring Men
(1964), chap. xv.
2
Deane and Cole, op. cit., p. 294.
3
Wood, loc. cit.; Bowley, op. cit., Stat.J., 1898, LXI. 704–7.
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM 117
presumed to have improved their real wages pari passu with them, they would
still be outnumbered by those below them. Amongst these were those cruelly
tantalized victims of technological progress, the dislocated handicraft workers,
above all the handloom weavers and framework knitters. These had been
amongst the first and most indulged beneficiaries of industrialism. In the ‘golden
age of the handloom weavers’ from the 1770’s to the 1790’s, when labour was in
brisk demand to weave the new cheap cotton yarn, they could earn twenty-five
shillings and more a week, three times the northern farm labourer’s average, and
clearly lived better than all but the best-paid factory operatives. The trade
became overcrowded, however, long before the power loom became general in
the 1820’s, and their long decline into misery began as early as 1798.
3
Bolton
weavers’ weekly earnings fell from 25s. in 1800 to 14s. in 1811, 9s. in 1817, 8s.
6d. in the early 1820’s, and reached the desperate level of 5s. 6d. in 1829.
4
A
private enquiry into 8,362 North Lancashire weavers’ families in 1833 revealed
average wages of 3s. 8 d. a week per worker, or 1s. 9 d. per head which, after
deducting the cost of rent, fuel and light, left only 1s. 3 d. per head for food and
clothing.
5
Mercifully, it became a diminishing occupation, though not decreasing
fast enough, since it was learned so easily and the Irish in the towns and the
children of weavers in the remoter villages often had no other resort. Their
numbers fell from 240,000 in 1831 to 110,000 in 1841 and 23,000 in 1856.
1
In other textiles and in hosiery, in nail and chain making, boots and shoes,
tailoring and dressmaking and many other trades, domestic outworkers struggled
on much longer, to become in many cases the wretchedly poor and exploited
‘sweated trades’ of the 1890’s and 1900’s. Their long agony of poverty,
starvation and degradation was part of the social cost of industrialism which
must be offset against its benefits.
The displaced domestic workers were driven out from the inner circles of the
blessed to the outer circles of the depressed unskilled and casual labourers, the
street folk, beggars and criminal underworld of the worst urban slums. Here lay
depths of poverty and degradation unimagined by those above them, until
accident, sickness or the death of the breadwinner drove them down amongst
them.
2
Only the determined investigators, ready to face the filth, stench, disease
and the literal risk of death, like Kay, Engels, Chadwick, Southwood Smith, and
Mayhew, could have any real notion of life at this level, and even they were
incapable of measuring statistically the size and depth of poverty in the worst
1
G.D.H.Cole, Short History of the Working-Class Movement, 1797–1937 (1937), pp. 181–
2; based on Wood, loc. cit.
2
Collier, op. cit., p. 49.
3
N.J.Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: an Application of Theory to the
Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1770–1840 (1959), p. 205.
4
Porter, op. cit., (1851), p. 444.
5
Collier, op. cit., pp. 47–8.
118 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM
quarters of the great towns. Not until Booth in the 1880’s and Rowntree in 1899
do we have reliable estimates of the numbers in poverty, that is, with too little
income to maintain themselves in merely physical health. By that time, at the end
of a century and more of steeply rising national income, thirty-one and twenty-
eight per cent respectively of the population of London and York, forty and forty-
three per cent of the working class, were below the poverty line.
3
Clearly, this
huge segment of the working class had not yet benefited from industrialism,
except in the crude sense that greater numbers of them had been kept alive to
suffer the same life of misery and frustration. Their release from the frozen grip
of poverty had to wait for the twentieth century with its disproportionate rise of
unskilled wages and of the Welfare State.
1
The outermost circle of all was that of the farm labourers, especially those of
the counties remotest from the industrial towns. Though even their exiguous
average wages rose between 1795 and 1850, from 8s. 11d. to 9s. 6d., in real terms
by fifteen per cent, this was almost entirely due to the differential rise of northern
wages, and in the south and east money wages scarcely rose at all, and real
wages almost imperceptibly.
2
Meanwhile, boarding in the farmhouses by
unmarried labourers, a system which at least guaranteed them adequate food,
declined, encouraging early marriage and more mouths to feed; enclosures,
though creating more employment, also whittled away perquisites of fuel and
grazing rights and made accommodation more difficult to obtain; and the decline
of domestic employment for wives and children reduced incomes and made
families more dependent on overcrowded and underpaid agriculture. Small
wonder that ‘the agricultural labourer was, in fact, the worst fed of all workers in
the nineteenth century,’ living in the south chiefly on bread with only
occasionally a bit of cheese or bacon, potatoes, little or no milk, ‘tea’ made from
used tea-leaves or burnt crusts, and meat only a rare luxury.
3
He was also the
worst housed, ‘herded together in cottages which, by their imperfect
arrangements, violated every sanitary law, generated all kinds of disease, and
rendered modesty an unimaginable thing,’
4
and even denied such cottages in
‘closed parishes’ where landlords forebade them in the interests of keeping down
the poor rates. Why such conditions did not produce death rates as high as those
of the towns is explained by two factors, the fact that insanitary housing is less
dangerous in rural areas, and, a question needing further investigation, the
statistical effect of migration on crude death rates, when a large proportion of
1
Smelser, op. cit., p. 207.
2
Cf. E.Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great
Britain (1842, ed. M.W.Flinn, 1965), p. 397: ‘The statements of the condition of
considerable proportions of the labouring population…have been received with surprise
by persons of the wealthier classes living in the immediate vicinity, to whom the facts
were as strange as if related to foreigners or the natives of an unknown country.’
3
C.Booth, Life and Labour of the People: London (1891), II. 21; B.S.Rowntree, Poverty:
a Study of Town Life (1901, popular ed., n.d.), pp. 150–1.
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM 119
those born in an area go elsewhere to die. There is no evading the conclusion
that ‘this was a population existing permanently on the verge of starvation’,
1
and
it was not until after 1870, when the exodus from the countryside became rapid,
money wages rose, and real wages rose sharply with the great price fall, that the
southern farm labourers at last joined the outer fringe of those who benefited
from industrialism.
There are a great many other aspects of this important question which would
have to be investigated before any definitive conclusion could be arrived at
about the effect of industrialism on the living standards of the working class: the
incidence of unemployment, and whether the cyclical depressions of the early
nineteenth century were worse than the chronic under-employment of the
eighteenth century; the exact implications for the working class of the available
statistics of consumption; the extent and effects of the increase in the adulteration
of food as the towns grew and with them the distance between producer and
consumer; the incidence and regressive nature of taxation, which increased the
burdens on the poorer classes down to Peel’s fiscal reforms and income tax in the
early 1840’s; the chronology of house-building, delayed by the Wars and their
aftermath, and the failure of accommodation standards and amenities to keep up
with the growth of towns; and the conflicting evidence of demography, setting
short-term increases in urban death rates against their overall decline. Some of
these will be touched on in the last section of this chapter, on conditions in the
towns.
Meanwhile, the direction in which the answer will be found is via a
Benthamite calculus of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, setting
the numbers in the groups which gained against those in the groups which lost by
industrialism. This is more difficult than it sounds, since the very process of
industrialization was continually changing the proportions, and we do not even
have accurate occupational statistics until 1851. It may well be that until the
steep decline in handloom weaving and other dying domestic trades after 1840
and the absolute decrease of agricultural labour after 1851, the numbers of those
who suffered exceeded those who benefited. Certainly, the Booth and Rowntree
figures suggest that fifty or more years earlier a majority of the working class
might well have been in poverty by the standards of the late Victorian age.
Against this, however, it must immediately be said that without the industrial and
agricultural revolutions a much larger proportion still of the increased population
would not only have been in poverty but would have starved to death. Finally,
1
Cf. Routh, op. cit., pp. 106–8, 144–5; B.S.Rowntree and G.R.Lavers, Poverty and the
Welfare State: a Third Social Survey of York (1951).
2
A.L.Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century (1900), table at end.
3
Burnett, op. cit., p. x and chap. ii.
4
R.E.Prothero (Lord Ernle), Pioneers and Progress of English Farming (1888), p. 224.
1
Burnett, op. cit., p. 28.
120 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM
whatever the proportions at the beginning, there can be no doubt that the long-
term trend was, often ruthlessly, in the right direction, towards the diminution
and extinction of the losing and the survival and expansion of the gaining
groups.
1
In this harsh sense of the survival of the fittest the Industrial Revolution
ultimately spread its blessings to what became a majority of the population.
2.
INDUSTRIALISM AND THE FAMILY
An exactly parallel controversy raged amongst contemporaries, though less
amongst modern historians, about the effects of the factory system on the family.
‘When women work in factories,’ wrote Engels, ‘the most important result is the
dissolution of family ties.’ Babies and infants were neglected, farmed out to
baby-minders who fed them badly and unhygienically or not at all, and quietened
them with Godfrey’s cordial and other opiates, to their premature destruction.
Older children at wages repudiated parental discipline and moral control,
demanding to board at minimal charges or leaving home altogether, and the girls
were deprived of the domestic education required to make a clean and
comfortable home. Working wives had no time to clean and cook for and look
after their families, and their husbands were driven out to seek comfort in the
public house and gin shop. ‘Sometimes, when the husband is unemployed, while
his family are at work, the normal structure of the family is reversed’, and the
man deprived of masculinity and self-respect.
2
Gaskell, from whom Engels derived most of his notions on the development
of the family, declared:
a household thus constituted, in which all the decencies and moral
observances of domestic life are constantly violated, reduces its inmates to
a condition little elevated above that of the savage. Recklessness,
improvidence, and unnecessary poverty, starvation, drunkenness, parental
cruelty and carelessness, filial disobedience, neglect of conjugal rights,
absence of maternal love, destruction of brotherly and sisterly affection,
are too often its constituents, and the results of such a combination are
moral degradation, ruin of domestic enjoyments, and social misery.
1
Lord Ashley concluded similarly:
1
E.g. the number of cotton factory operatives overtook that of the handloom
weavers in the 1830’s: operatives, 1832, 208,000, 1844–46, 340,000; handloom
weavers, 1832, 227,000, 1840, 123,000—Smelser, op cit., pp. 194, 207.
2
Engels, op. cit., pp. 160–5, 236.
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM 121
Domestic life and domestic discipline must soon be at an end; society will
consist of individuals no longer grouped into families; so early is the
separation of husband and wife, of parents and children.
2
To these charges Richard Oastler, J.P.Kay (Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth), the
Rev. G.S.Bull, Léon Faucher and many others added sexual immorality, both
before and after marriage. A witness before the Factory Commission in 1833
declared that ‘it would be no strain on his conscience to say that three-quarters of
the girls between fourteen and twenty years of age were unchaste,’ and another
that ‘some of the married women were as bad as the girls,’
3
Gaskell, as usual,
went further:
The chastity of marriage is but little known among them: husband and wife
sin equally, and a habitual indifference to sexual rights is generated which
adds one other item to the destruction of domestic habits.
4
On the other side the factory owners and operatives and their defenders just as
vehemently denied the accusations, or claimed that factory workers were unfairly
singled out for faults which were universal in the working class, if not indeed in
English society as a whole. John Bright denied that factory work broke up the
family or degraded the home, since most women left the factory on marriage or
when their children arrived. Henry Ashworth, the model cotton employer of
Egerton and Turton, declared that he employed no married women, nor did his
married workmen wish their wives to work. Dr. Loudon wrote of Nottingham, ‘It
is rare to find a mother who has at home a couple of children alive, working in a
mill. The duties of domestic life compel her to stay at home.’ Dr. Mitchell told
the Factory Commission in 1834 that the available evidence showed that Very
few women work in the factories after marriage.’ Leonard Horner the Factory
Inspector reported in 1844 that of the minority of women who remained at work
over twenty-one, only 27.5 per cent were married.
1
Even Engels could not
produce more than 10,721 married women out of 61,098 female operatives in
412 Manchester factories, only eighteen per cent of the total, or an average of
twenty-six working wives per factory, while the number who supported
unemployed husbands was 821, or only two per factory, and there was no
evidence that even these few men were permanently unemployed.
2
1
P.Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery: the Moral and Physical Condition of the
Manufacturing Population (1836), p. 89.
2
E.Hodder, Life and Work of 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1923), p. 234.
3
P.P., 1833, XX, Commission on Employment of Children in Factories. D1, pp. 648,
667.
4
P.Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), p. 147.
122 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM
The operatives themselves vigorously denied that factory girls made bad
wives. One witness before the 1833 Commission replied:
I have heard it said so, but I know to the contrary, because I married three
wives out of the factory, and I take that as proof. I am certain that as good
wives may be had from the factories as from any other occupation.
Another claimed that his wife and nineteen-year old daughter, an operative since
the age of nine, made all the clothes for the family excepting his coat. A woman
witness declared, ‘You think we can do nought but work in factories, neither
brew, nor bake, nor sew.’ Later observers pointed out that factory work was no
worse than most occupations, including agricultural labour and domestic
industry, in ‘unfitting girls to look after a house or for domestic life’.
G.W.Hastings told the Social Science Association in 1857 that the ‘widespread
feeling that the industrial employment of women is prejudicial to the domestic
happiness of the working classes’ was mistaken:
The justice of this idea, however, is disproved out and out, by comparing
the districts where the industrial employment of women prevails with those
districts where it is scarcely known. Take for example, colliery districts,
mining districts, towns of metal manufacture, seaport towns without
fisheries, and there you find that the squalor, the thriftlessness, the
ignorance, and the dissipation are far more universal than in towns and
districts devoted to the manufacture of cotton, linen, lace, and suchlike
products. In the latter instances, woman has abundant work; in the former
she has none. Slatternly habits, therefore, in the lower orders are not a
consequence of the industrial employment of women, but constitute an evil
to be dealt with on its own grounds.
There were, indeed, plenty of critics to declare that upper and middle-class wives
were educated in every accomplishment except how to cook and manage a
household, and consequently drove their husbands out to the comfort and
gastronomic delights of their clubs.
1
As for the supposed immorality of factory workers, Cooke Taylor pointed out:
Now, [licentious] conversation in a mill is all but physically impossible;
the operatives are separated from each other by frames of working
1
John Bright and Sir James Graham in House of Commons, 15 March and 3 May
1844; Commission on…Factories, loc, cit., XX. E5, C3, 5, and Supplementary
Report, Part I, XIX. 38; I.Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial
Revolution, 1780–1850 (1930), pp. 197–8.
2
Engels, op. cit., p. 165n.
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM 123