Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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Whitehaven, the Curwens at Workington and Harrington, or the Dukes of

Norfolk in Sheffield and Glossop, performed an indispensable utilitarian service.

In Glossop, one of the few entirely new towns of the Industrial Revolution, the

12th Duke of Norfolk and his sons leased out the mills and fostered the turnpike

which put the site on the map, laid out the streets, built many of the houses, the

town hall, the gasworks, the waterworks, several schools and churches, Anglican

and Roman Catholic, helped found the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire

Railway, and finally, when the latter proved dilatory, built the Glossop branch

line and sold it back to the Company.

All this is not to say that the landowners made the Industrial Revolution: that

was not their function. Their function was, in seeking their own profit by all the

means which their special position in English society had made available to them,

to create the climate and conditions in which a spontaneous industrial revolution

could take place, and to give it effective legislative encouragement when and

where it required it. While Continental aristocracies were still preoccupied with

preserving their political privileges, military honour, social exclusiveness and

feudal rights, sometimes as in France and Poland to the point of self-destruction,

English and Scottish landowners were using their unique position as a base for

the economic advance of themselves and of the whole nation.

Capital, the second factor of production, is so much of the essence of

industrialism that, paradoxically, it is easy to over-estimate its importance in the

process. Investment is not a magic wand which can create economic growth

unaided. It is at least as much an index, a measure, an effect of growth as a

cause. Men are more important than money, capitalists than capital; and as more

than one under-developed country has discovered, it is more likely that

resourceful entrepreneurs will make shift to raise missing capital than that capital

will call forth absent entrepreneurs. Eighteenth-century Britain had the advantage

of low interest rates and a fairly advanced banking system, capital was cheap and

credit forthcoming, and this in itself was an important cause of the Industrial

Revolution. But it was not an autonomous cause. Low interest rates were the

effect of complex economic forces which at bottom related to the rapprochement

between the saving and the enterprising groups in the population. They did not

cause people to invest in risky innovations—high rates would have done that

more effectively—but were the measure of their readiness to invest in production,

instead of hoarding their surplus wealth as peasants do, or disbursing it in

conspicuous consumption like most aristocracies. Neither the State nor the

banking system, as such, could create this readiness. The low legal rate of interest,

5 per cent from 1714, which followed rather than preceded the fall in the

‘natural’ rate, did not make people invest: on the contrary, it practically

W.Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning (1954), pp. 39, 42;

J.D.Marshall, The Industrial Revolution in Furness (Barrow, 1958), chaps. ix, xiv;

E.Hughes, op. cit., II, chaps, ii, v; Perkin, op. cit., 16–18.

64 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

prevented them from doing so whenever government stock rose to 5 per cent or

more, and they could get a better return from gilt-edged.

Though it helped the flow of credit, the banking system was the beneficiary

rather than the cause of low interest rates, which had become low while banking

organization was still rudimentary compared with that of several European

countries. Indeed, in the English provinces, as opposed to Scotland, it was hardly

a system at all: in 1750 there was only a handful of banks outside London. It was

the Industrial Revolution which created an organized national system of banking,

not the reverse.

Moreover, the banks as they came into existence did not in

general supply fixed capital for industrial enterprise. The country banks were not

investment houses but primarily commercial institutions, concerned with the flow

of payments and short-term credit required by trade. They thus performed an

essential role in the expansion of industry, both in lubricating the wheels of

commerce and in releasing entrepreneurs’ own funds from circulating for

investment in fixed capital; but they did not usually invest in mills, factories and

mines, unless the banker, like Arkwright’s helper Wright of Nottingham, was

personally connected with the enterprise, and then normally he invested only in

his personal capacity. The great bulk of the capital for new industrial enterprise did

not come from institutional sources,

and institutional interest rates were

important only in the negative sense that they were not high enough to draw

capital away from the informal channels of industrial investment. The low

interest rates were a reflection of the readiness and ability to invest via these

informal channels, and this in turn was a largely social phenomenon.

English society was specially fitted to provide both the capital and the

capitalists for the new industrialism. Here lies the answer to the two crucial

questions of industrial investment: where did the initial capital for the new

enterprises come from, and what motivated the entrepreneurs to ‘scorn delights

and live laborious days’ long enough to build them up?

To the first the answer lies partly in the wide diffusion of modest wealth which

put the means of enterprise within the reach of much larger numbers than

elsewhere, partly in the system of kinship and connection which could reinforce

the individual’s capital from the resources of a wide range of friends and relations.

Amongst the numerous and prosperous middle ranks of English society there

was no lack of potential entrepreneurs with sufficient capital and self-confidence

to back themselves, but not so much as to disdain hard work and application. The

burden was lightened by the fact that in the early stages of new or rapidly

expanding industries large masses of pre-accumulated capital were not called

Cf. Ashton, Industrial Revolution, chap. iv, and 18th Century, p. 29.

L.S.Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution (1956), p. 4 and passim;

Ashton, Industrial Revolution, pp. 102–3, 108–9.

Cf. H.Heaton, ‘Financing the Industrial Revolution’, Bulletin of Business Historical

Society, 1937, XI.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 65

for. Comparatively small initial capitals were rapidly built on by ploughing back

a high proportion of the firstcomers’ relatively enormous profits. The Walker

brothers’ great ironworks at Rotherham was built up from a tiny foundry worth

only  600 in 1746, five years after they began. The huge Dowlais concern was

founded in 1759 on a Capital of  4,000 shared between eight partners. In cotton

the humble beginnings of the Arkwrights, Peels, Strutts, and so on, are well

known; Samuel Oldknow had assets in 1783 of  2,636, minus debts of  1,548,

leaving a net capital of  1,088, plus  148 in buildings and fixtures, on which

within a decade he built up a turnover of over  80,000 a year and founded one of

the largest contemporary factories. Before the rise of the great porter brewers the

equipment for a rented brewhouse could be bought for as little as  200, though a

larger circulating capital was required for materials and the like: Henry

Isherwood of Eton, an inn servant who married well, built up from a single

public house a business worth  8,000 or  9,000 a year. The average paper mill in

1800 was worth only  4,000, some much less, and could be rented. A considerable

newspaper like the Manchester Guardian could be founded as late as 1821 on a

capital of  1,000.

At the end of the process of transformation in each industry, when great cotton

mills, ironworks and porter breweries were worth hundreds of thousands of

pounds, new entrants to large-scale enterprise required much larger capitals,

which only come from banking or mercantile wealth. In heavy industries,

especially in areas short of capital, landed or mercantile capitalists might be

drawn in from the beginning, as Lords Mansel and Uxbridge, the Bacons and

Crawshays of London, or the Harfords of Bristol were into the Welsh coal-

mining, iron and copper industries.

There was some transfer of mercantile

capital into the factory system from domestic industry, as in the case of

Arkwright’s partner Need, Radcliffe’s partner Ross, Benjamin Gott’s partners,

Wormald and Fountaine, or even Thomas Fox of Wellington in the ‘backward’

West of England cloth industry.

But the great majority of the new entrepreneurs

in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution set out from small, though rarely

negligible, beginnings: neither too humble to strike out independently, nor too

prosperous to work hard and long in new and risky ventures. The Peels,

Fieldens, Strutts, Wedgwoods, Darbys, Dobsons, Stubbs, Radcliffes and many

more came from yeoman or small farming stock, often uniting domestic industry

with husbandry. In the metal industries Aaron Walker, William Hawks, John

Parker, George Newton, Benjamin Huntsman, Isaac Wilkinson, Samuel Garbett

Ashton, Iron and Steel, p. 46; John, op. cit., p. 43; P.Mathias, The Brewing Industry in

England, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 253–5; D.C.Coleman, The British Paper

Industry, 1495–1860 (Oxford, 1958), p. 233; A.E.Musson, ‘Newspaper Printing in the

Industrial Revolution’, Ec.H.R., 1958, X. 413.

Dodd, op. cit., p. 155; John, op, cit., pp. 26, 30, 35; J.P.Addis, The Crawshay Dynasty: a

Study in Industrial Development, 1765–1867 (Cardiff, 1957), chap. i.

66 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

and others were small, prosperous, independent craftsmen. Arkwright, David

Dale, Robert Owen and Oldknow began as apprentices to shop-keepers.

The

greatest source of new industrialists was the lower levels of the middle ranks, the

very levels in short whose prosperity and independence most surpassed those of

other countries.

When, as often happened, their own small capital fell short of what was

needed, they had to recruit funds wherever they could. Here they fell back,

naturally and inevitably, on the old society’s system of kinship and connection.

Banks were unlikely to help them, unless like the brewers, Truman, Hanbury and

Buxton or Barclay and Perkins, they were personally connected with the

bankers. Samuel Oldknow set up in the muslin trade with the help of his uncle, a

Nottingham draper. Richard Crawshay’s ironworks began from the ironmonger’s

shop bequeathed to a favoured apprentice. Matthew Boulton added to the

inheritance of his father, a prosperous silverstamper, by marrying a fortune of

 28,000, and borrowing on the security. Matthew Ellison, the Duke of Norfolk’s

agent in Glossop, leased a cotton mill from the Duke for his sons; it was

developed into a very large concern by his daughter’s stepson, Francis Sumner, a

young man with a small capital and great ability. Jedediah Strutt’s ‘Derby rib’

machine was backed by his brother-in-law, a carpenter, and he sought further

capital from the clergyman with whom his wife had been in service. The last

example illustrates both the tenuous links which might be made to serve, and the

indirect connection with institutional finance: the Rev. Dr. Benson, though

willing enough to lend at 4 per cent, could not raise the money without selling

his government stock at a loss. Even straightforward partnerships often contained

elements of personal, beneficial ‘connection’: Benjamin Gott went into

partnership with the Leeds cloth merchants to whom he had been apprenticed, he

supplying less than 10 per cent of the capital.

The Quaker cousinships in

brewing, banking and ironfounding— the Bevans, Barclays, Gurneys, Lloyds

and Perkins, and the Darbys, Reynolds, Parkers, Hawkins and Harveys—were

perhaps no more than a special case of the general use of kinship. Non-Quaker

brewers, for example, pressed their connections into service: when ‘Mr. Thrale

overbrewed himself last winter’ (1772) he ‘made an artificial scarcity of money

in the family which has extremely lowered his Spirits’; while Samuel Whitbread

junior in 1797 and 1807 saved his brewery by extensive borrowing in the

aristocratic circles into which he had married.

In the absence of institutional

R.S.Fitton and A.P.Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830

(Manchester, 1958), chap. iv; W.Radcliffe, Origin of the New System of Manufacture

(Stockport, 1828), pp. 14–15; H.Heaton, ‘Benjamin Gott and the Industrial Revolution in

Yorkshire’, Ec.H.R., 1931–2, III. 45f.; H.Fox, Quaker Homespun: Life of Thomas Fox of

Wellington,…1747–1821 (1958), p. 15.

Cf. P.Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century (1928), pp. 376– 382;

M.Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1947), pp. 278–81; Ashton, Iron and

Steel, pp. 209–10.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 67

methods of financing industrial enterprise through the banking system or the joint-

stock company, kinship and connection performed an indispensable service.

To the second question, why entrepreneurs invested their capital and

themselves in new and risky industrial enterprises, the answer might seem

obvious: to enrich themselves. Yet the limitless pursuit of wealth for its own sake

is a rare phenomenon, and historians with a taste for psychology have

understandably looked for additional motivations and drives to explain the

extraordinary energy and ambition of eighteenth-century industrialists. Weber

and Tawney found the answer in a peculiarly capitalist spirit compounded of

unlimited acquisitiveness and the urge to succeed in the face of God and man,

deriving ultimately from the Protestant Reformation.

More recent variants of

this approach seek it in a dramatic change in the psychological outlook of Old

and New Dissenters in the eighteenth century itself. Hagen argues that the

‘withdrawal of status respect’ from such ‘subordinate minorities’ as the Old

Dissenters produced ‘retreatism’ in the earlier generations, presumably before

the mid-eighteenth century, but then, by reaction from this, a driving ambition

and ‘innovational creativity’ in their sons, presumably in the Industrial

Revolution itself.

McClelland relates the change in outlook to the increased

‘need for Achievement’ produced by the advent of Methodism and its emphasis

in child-rearing on conscious training in self-reliance and mastery: the

Methodists’ ‘uncompromising stress on excellence…seems almost certain to

have acted to promote the development of achievement motivation in Methodist

children…. And the picture was similar in other Nonconformist bodies in

England in the eighteenth century.’

Such explanations are interesting and important in emphasizing the

inadequacy of purely economic motivations, but unfortunately they put the cart

before the horse. Against the first it can be argued that the ‘capitalist spirit’ has

been found wherever capitalism has thrived, in the ancient, medieval and modern

worlds, both before and after the Reformation. Against the second it can be

argued that middle-rank Dissenters enjoyed the same respect, no less and no

more, than others of their status, and that no withdrawal of respect, no retreatism,

and therefore no innovational reaction can be traced in the historical evidence.

Against the third it can be argued that Methodism came too late to affect in

childhood more than a handful of the new industrialists—only two of the sample

of 92 mentioned above were known to be Methodists

—and if the argument from

child-rearing is transferred to Old Dissent, the same problem arises as with the

Mathias, Brewing Industry, pp. 293–4; Unwin et al., op. cit., p. 2; Addis, op. cit., p. 6;

S.Smiles, Lives of the Engineers (1861–65), IV. 166–7; Perkin, op. cit., p. 11; Fitton and

Wadsworth, op. cit., pp. 24–39; Ashton, 18th Century, p. 29; Heaton, op. cit., Ec.H.R.,

1931, III. 48.

Pressnell, op. cit., pp. 114, 283; Ashton, Iron and Steel, pp. 214–17; Mathias, pp. 269,

286, 287–99.

68 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

second, of explaining the timing of the innovational surge. Above all, against all

three it can be argued that they explain the general case by means of the

particular instead, of vice versa. Driving ambition and innovational creativity

seem to have been common to the English middle ranks, whatever their brand of

religion, and, as was argued with their religion, seems more likely to have

derived from their position in an open aristocracy offering special opportunities

and rewards to ambition and creativity than from a religion which affected only a

part of the middle ranks, and was itself arguably derived from that position.

For the old society offered sufficient motivations for ambition and innovation

to all equipped to respond to them, whatever their religion. To the perennial

desire for wealth the old society added other motivations which gave point and

purpose to the pursuit of riches. Compared with neighbouring and more

traditional societies it offered both a greater challenge and a greater reward to

successful enterprise. On the one hand the greater insecurity of a society in

which status followed property rather than property status increased the penalty

for lack of effort. On the other, the social prestige and power over one’s

neighbours which were annexed to property, however acquired, added prizes of a

psychologically more satisfying kind to those of mere acquisition. As Malthus

put it in his optimistic defence of the ‘strikingly beneficial’ effect of social

inequality, ‘If no man could hope to rise or fear to fall in society; if industry did

not bring its own reward, and indolence its punishment; we could not hope to see

that animated activity in bettering our own condition which now forms the

master-spring of public prosperity.’

And Adam Smith, who knew the world of

the early industrialists still better, asked: ‘To what purpose is all the toil and

bustle of the world? …It is our vanity which urges us on…. It is not wealth that

men desire, but the consideration and good opinion that wait upon riches.’

In the

old society ‘the consideration and good opinion that wait upon riches’ were a

synonym for social status. The pursuit of wealth was the pursuit of social status,

not merely for oneself but for one’s family. In the last resort the ultimate

motivation of the industrialists, as for most rising men before them, was a

dynastic one: to found a family, to endow them splendidly enough to last for

ever, and to enjoy a vicarious eternal life in the seed of one’s loins.

All these motivations can be found in so typical an industrialist as Jedediah

Strutt. ‘Getting of Money’ he wrote to his wife in 1765,

Weber, loc. cit.; R.H.Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Hagen, op. cit., esp. pp. 290–303.

D.C.McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton, N.J., 1961), esp. pp. 145–9.

Hagen, op. cit., 306, 307.

T.R.Malthus, Essay on Population (Everyman, 1951), II. 254.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), quoted by Gray, op. cit., p. 17.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 69

…is the main business of the life of Man & thou knowest not how

solicitous I am while life, & youth, & opportunity lasts to acquire

something that you & I, should we live so long, may not have the two great

calamities of Human Life, poverty and Old Age, come upon us together.

Should we succeed in this…what think you, in that decline of our days,

will afford us a pleasure equal to that of being able to leave a fair

patrimony to our children, & to reflect, that they are placed in

circumstances that renders them superior to many of these difficulties we

were forced to struggle with…(?)

To his eldest son he wrote a decade later: ‘I need not tell you that you are not to

be a Nobleman nor prime minister, but you may possibly be a Tradesman of some

emminence….’ Finally, near the close of his life—he died in 1797—he wrote in

his intended epitaph, ‘Here lies JS—who, without Fortune, Family or friends

rais’d to himself a fortune, family & Name in the World….’ Besides a

flourishing business he left a mansion and an estate in Derbyshire, and his

grandson, fittingly, became a peer.

‘Vanity’ took many forms, and not every industrialist, at least at the height of

his career, wished to change places with a lord or squire. ‘I have but one pride,’

wrote William Crawshay senior, ‘to be head of the iron trade and land won’t do

that.’ But his father at the end of his career, in a time of fierce competition and

price-cutting, thought ‘nothing but land can be considered as safe’; his son built

Cyfarthfa Castle; and later he himself almost disrupted the firm in his efforts to

withdraw his capital and retire.

Raising one’s status did not necessarily and

immediately mean retiring from business to lead the life of a leisured gentleman.

In the first generation and often in the second the position of ‘eminent

tradesman’ was a novelty to be enjoyed, and if the business spared mind and

leisure enough English society was sufficiently flexible to admit rich

entrepreneurs to many of the pleasures and honours of the ruling élite before

retirement to the land. Thus active bankers and brewers, merchants and domestic

industrialists had long formed a substantial minority in Parliament and on the

justices’ bench, and the more successful factory industrialists automatically

joined them there.

Landed property, however, in the shape of a large country house and a

sufficient estate to support the traditional country sports and pleasures of the

gentry was a necessary qualification for full acceptance into genteel society and,

once attained, provided a constant counter-attraction to the allurements of

business. Moreover, as the Peels found to their satisfaction and Samuel

Whitbread junior to his cost,

the highest honours were reserved for those not

only with wealth and ability but with the complete leisure to exploit them. In the

Fitton and Wadsworth, op. cit., pp. 108–10, 145, 163; D.N.B., LV. 63f.

John, op. cit., p. 39; Addis, op. cit., pp. 19, 46–9, 54.

70 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

early stages of industrialism at least, before the spectacular rise in the scale of

fixed capital investment had made itself fully felt in ‘Society’ and politics, land

was still the most secure and permanent form in which to hold the property

which alone conferred high status. Of this the industrialists themselves were

keenly aware, instance the arguments of the Birmingham Commercial Society in

opposing an excise on manufactures in 1785:

That manufactures and commerce should only be considered as a means of

acquiring that real property which is the proper object of taxation. That

property, while exposed to the extreme uncertainty which it is necessarily

subject to, while engaged in manufacture and commerce, cannot be justly

deemed substantial until it is withdrawn from those dangers.

In 1830, Coleridge, rejoicing in the ‘permanence’ which landed property

conferred upon society, observed: ‘To found a family, and to convert his wealth

into land, are twin thoughts, births of the same moment, in the mind of the

opulent merchant, when he thinks of reposing from his labours;’

while Cobden,

bemoaning the lack of interest of the industrialists in land reform, could still

exclaim in 1851: ‘See how every successful trader buys an estate, and tries to

perpetuate his name in connexion with “that ilk” by creating an eldest son.’

Whether to crown their success as ‘eminent tradesmen’ or to launch

themselves or their families into the landed gentry, then, the entrepreneurs of the

Industrial Revolution hastened to acquire land and build or buy a great house. In

factory textiles Arkwright built Willersley Castle and became in 1787 the most

flamboyant High Sheriff of Derbyshire, the Strutts built Milford House and

bought estates in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, while the Peels bought the

Drayton Manor and Tamworth estates on which they raised their political careers.

In the metal industries, the Foleys became barons, the Wortleys Earls of

Wharncliffe, the Hardys of Low Moor Earls of Cranbrook, the Guests Lords

Wimborne, Isaac Wilkinson leased a country house at Plas Grono near Wrexham,

his son John was buried at his seat at Castle Head, Ulverston, Matthew Boulton’s

son bought Great Tew from the Dashwoods, themselves descendants of a

Restoration London brewer, Thomas Williams ‘the copper king’ bought Plas

Llanidan, Anglesey, from Lord Boston, and Michael Hughes, also of the Parys

Copper Mining Company, rebuilt Sherdly Hall, near St. Helens. Wedgwood the

great potter built Etruria Hall near his works and Barlaston Hall in the country. In

Whitbread committed suicide in 1815—Roger Fulford, Samuel Whitbread, 1764–1815

(1967), p. 306.

G.H.Wright, Chronicles of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce ([Birmingham],

1913), p. 15.

S.T.Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State (1839), p. 25.

J.Morley, Life of Richard Cobden (1903), p. 561.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 71

brewing, a trade which had produced many new men before them, the ‘power-

loom brewers’ of the late eighteenth century built up large country estates: the

Barclays in Norfolk, the Hanburys in Hertfordshire and Essex, the Whitbreads

over  420,000’s worth of land in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. In the paper

industry the greatest paper-maker of the eighteenth century, James Whatman

junior became High Sheriff of Kent at the age of twenty-six, and retired at fifty-

three to his estate at Vinters, near Maidstone.

The list might be indefinitely extended, with lesser men attaining lower social

heights, for the rise of new men was a process long familiar and fascinating to

contemporaries. As a Manchester ‘Cobbler’ put it in 1756,

See, as the Owners of old Family Estates in your Neighbourhood are

selling off their patrimonies, how your Townsmen are constantly

purchasing; and thereby laying the Foundation of a new Race of Gentry!

Not adorn’d, it’s true with Coats of Arms and a long Parchment Pedigree

of useless Members of Society, but deck’d with Virtue and Frugality; and

who, knowing both how, and when to be content, retire, decently to enjoy

their well-got Wealth, leaving the Coast open, for new Adventurers, to

follow their worthy Example.

The new industrialists were treading a beaten road, well-trodden by generations

of new men before them. In 1820 Malthus accurately summed up the motivations

of contemporary capitalists as follows:

It is not the most pleasant employment to spend eight hours a day in a

counting-house. Nor will it be submitted to after the common necessaries

and conveniences of life are attained, unless adequate motives are

presented to the man of business. Among these motives is undoubtedly the

desire of advancing his rank, and contending with the landlords in the

enjoyment of leisure, as well as of foreign and domestic luxuries. But the

desire to realize a fortune as a permanent provision for a family is perhaps

the most general motive for the continued exertions of those whose

incomes depend upon their own personal skill and efforts.

Industrialism, with its enormous expansion of fixed and visible capital, of the

significance of industry in the life of the nation, and thus of the power and

prestige of industrialists, was to increase the permanent attractions of business

over against land, and change the motivations of business men. In the early

See D.N.B. and standard biographies; Fitton and Wadsworth, op. cit., p. 163;

Ashton, Iron and Steel, p. 218; T.C.Barker and J.R.Harris, A Merseyside Town in

the Industrial Revolution: St. Helens, 1750–1900 (Liverpool, 1954), pp. 89, 152–4;

Mathias, Brewing Industry, pp. 286–7; Coleman, op. cit., p. 154.

72 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

stages, however, social emulation, ultimately of the leisured amateurs who ran

the old society and enjoyed its highest honours and rewards, was the powerful

motivation which English society offered its entrepreneurs in greater measure

than elsewhere.

Social emulation also played a significant part in the mobilization of the third

factor of production, labour. A regular, disciplined, reliable labour force was—

and is—the most hazardous requirement of an industrial revolution, and it was

not achieved without trouble, pain and difficulty. A factory proletariat, wholly

dependent on industrial wages and innured to regular hours of work at the rhythm

of the machines, is a highly sophisticated social group, utterly remote from the

life of the peasant, with its irregular hours and slow rhythms dependent on

season and weather, its alternations between excessive activity and under-

employment, and its chronic lack of spendable income. English society, however,

had, as we have seen, long got rid of most of its peasants, and though wage-

earners of a modern type were to be found only in isolated groups in some of the

mines, ironworks, glass-houses and the like, a large proportion, perhaps a

majority, of workers had reached what may be considered a half-way stage

between peasant and proletarian. Many of them still had one foot on the soil, a

few roods of pasture, a cottage garden or a cow on the common to eke out their

money-earnings but, in addition to finding the rent for these, most of their needs,

of food, clothing, fuel, utensils and so on, were bought in the market and paid for

in cash. The habits of earning and spending thus long ingrained were a

favourable basis on which the blandishments of the new system could work.

The early factory workers—apart from the parish apprentices, who probably

never numbered more than 20,000—were not driven into the mills, but drawn

there by the promise of higher wages than they could earn outside.

Except for

highly-paid male spinners, skilled craftsmen were not required in the early textile

mills, and average factory wages have to be compared with those of the unskilled

outside, especially women and children. In the early stages of the Industrial

Revolution, when weavers and other domestic workers were still earning

comparatively large wages, there can be little doubt that adult factory workers

were recruited by attraction rather than compulsion. The factory owners,

especially in the more remote factories, had to take pains both to stimulate the

workers’ desire for money and to arrange for the supply of new commodities on

which to spend it. Arkwright, for example, was impelled to build a market place

at Cromford and offer prizes for the tradesmen who best supplied it.

It was here

that social emulation, the desire ‘to keep up with the Joneses’, which operated at

these no less than at higher levels of English society, came into operation. For

J.Stot, A Sequel to the Friendly Advice to the Poor (Manchester, 1756), p. 19;

A.P.Wadsworth and J.de L.Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire

(Manchester, 1931), p. 242.

T.R.Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (1820), p. 470.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 73