PROGRESS A N D P O V E R T Y I N B R I T A I N ,

780-1850: A REAPPRAISAL

A. J. T A Y L O R
University College, London
[Before the Industrial Revolution] the workers enjoyed a comfortable and
peaceful existence. . . . Their standard of life was much better than that of
the factory worker today. F . Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in
England ( I 845).
If we look back to the condition of the mass of the people as it existed in this
country, even so recently as the beginning of the present century, and then
look around us at the indications of greater comfort and respectability that
meet us on every side, it is hardly possible to doubt that here, in England
at least, the elements of social improvement have been successfully at work,
and that they have been and are producing an increased amount of comfort
to the great bulk of the people. G. R. Porter, The Progress of the Ration,
2nd edn. ( 1 8 4 7 ) . ~
i
D I D THE CONDITION of the working classes improve or deteriorate
during the period of rapid industrial change between I 780 and I 850?
The controversy is as old as the Industrial Revolution itself. For men
like Andrew Ure and Thomas Carlyle, as for Porter and Engels, the
issue was one of contemporary politics. While Ure, a nineteenthcentury Dr. Pangloss, so admired the new industrial order that he could
compare factory children to lively elves a t play,g Carlyle saw the world
of the millhand as but a dingy prison-house, of rebellious unthrift,
rebellion, rancour, indignation against themselves and against all men.4
Even among the classical economists there was a sharp division of
opinion. O n the one hand were those like Porter, whose optimism had
its roots in the doctrines of The Wealth of Nations; on the other those
whose pessimism reflected the less sanguine approach of Malthus and
Ricardo.
With the marked improvement in national prosperity which Britain
experienced in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the debate
lost something of its early vigour and urgency. The statistical investiga-

Trans. W. 0. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Oxford, 1958), p.

P. 532.
a A. Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), p. 301.
4 T. Carlyle, Chartinn (1839), p. 35.

10.

A . J. TAYLOR

tions of Leone Levi and Sir Robert Giffen5 tended to confirm what the
observation of contemporaries already suggested: that, in common with
the nation at large, the working classes were enjoying a perceptibly
higher standard of living in 1875 than twenty-five years earlier. The
will to resist the tide of industrial growth was declining as its benefits
became more apparent, and with the logic of time the controversy was
passing from the hands of the publicists and reformers into those of the
economic historians.
The transition was, however, by no means an immediate one.
Thorold Rogers, an early historian of the Industrial Revolution, in
1884 welcomed the return of the political economist to his proper and
ancient function, that of interpreting the causes which hinder the just
and adequate distribution of wealth.6 To Rogers the years of rapid
industrial change were a dismal period for the working classes, and
the quarter century after 1790 the worst time in the whole history of
English labour. Arnold Toynbees verdict echoed that of Rogers. We
now approach, he said, 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.B In both these interpretations the
voice of the social reformer mingles with that of the historian: and the
view thus firmly expressed commanded general acceptance for more
than a generation. I t is to be found as much in the writings of Ashley
and Cunningham as in those of the Webbs and the Hammonds.
I t was not until after the first world war that a new and less dismal
note was struck.9 Then within the short space of little more than a year
the pessimists interpretation was four times put to serious question. I n
her London L$e of the Eighteenth Century, lo Mrs. Dorothy George argued,
largely on the basis of mortality statistics, that the standard of life of the
London labourer had improved considerably in the course of the
eighteenth century. This thesis was reinforced and extended a year later
in the work of Miss M. C. Buerll and G . Talbot Griffith.12 Each found
cvidence of a declining death-rate in the country as a whole between
1750 and 1850, and from this drew the general conclusion that living
standards were rising. At the same time an even more powerful optimistl3 entered the lists. From the evidence of nineteenth-century wage
6 L. Levi, Wages and Earnings of the Working Classes (1885); R. Giffen, Essays in Finance,
Second Series (1886), pp. 365-474.
Thorold Rogers, preface to abridged version of Work and Wases (1885).
7 Zbid., pp. 140, 128.
A. Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (1884), p. 84.
For a Dossible anticipation of Claphams conclusion (see below),
.. see Dictionary- of- Political
Economy, Grid edn. (1go8),iii. 802 (A: L. Bowleys article).
Pubd. 1925.
l1 M. C. Buer, Health, Wealth and Population in the Earb Days of the Industrial Revolution (1926).
l e G . T. Griffith, Population Problems of the Age of Malthus (1926).
Is The terms pessimist and optimist, though not wholly apposite, have now obtained
general currency. They are certainly preferable to the alternatives classical and modern
recently used. The so-called modern theory of improving living standards has as long an
ancestry as its classical antithesis.

18

PROGRESS A N D P O V E R T Y I N BRITAIN

statistics and commodity prices, Sir John Clapham concluded that the
purchasing power of the English labourer in town and country had
risen substantially between I 785 and 1850.~~
This new turn in the controversy not only redressed the balance of
forces, but, by reintroducing the statistical weapon, revived methods
of argument largely disused since the days of Rogers and Giffen. Where
the Hammonds, like Engels before them, turned to the evidence of the
blue books and the pamphleteers, Mrs. George and Griffith appealed to
the bills of mortality, and Clapham to the wage books. Faced with so
great a display of statistical force, J. L. Hammond conceded-though
not uncritically-this part of the field.16 He was content to rest his case
on the written and verbal testimony of contemporaries to the physical
and spiritual suffering which, he contended, had been the inevitable
concomitant of the new order. Men might have more food for their
bcllies and cheaper clothing for their backs but the price exacted for
these benefits was out of all proportion to the gains. The spirit of wonder
could not live at peace in treadmill cities where the daylight never
broke upon the beauty and the wisdom of the world.le
As a via media between two hitherto irreconcilable viewpoints, Hammonds compromise was readily accepted by writers of general histories,
and it has retained an unshaken place in their affections; but it could
be no final settlement of the debate. Thirty years now separate us from
the work of Clapham and Hammond. I n those years discussion has continued sporadically but vigorously. Most recently T. s. Ashton and
E. J. Hobsbawm, in particular, have opened up new fields of evidence
and lines of enquiry. I t is appropriate to ask how far their findings
have changed the broad pattern of argument and interpretation,

...

ii
Of the twin sides of the debate that which relates to the qualitative
aspects of the labourers life has, not surprisingly, made least progress.17
The bleakness and degradation of much urban life in the early nineteenth century needs no underlining. The mean streets and insanitary
houses still surviving in many industrial towns, and the mute desolation
of large areas of South Wales and the West Midlands are as eloquent
testimony to the drabness of nineteenth-century life as are the pages of
the parliamentary reports. This was an England built in a hurry and
with little thought for the health and wellbeing of its rapidly growing
multitudes. But, asJ. D. Chambers has observed:18Whatever the merits
of the pre-industrial world may have been, they were enjoyed by a
l4 J.

H. Clapham, Economic History of Modem Britain, i. (1926), pp. 128,466, 560-2.

J. L.Hammond, The Industrial Revolution and Discontent, Econ. Hist. Rev., ii (rgso),
2 I 5-28.
J. L. and B. Hammond, T h Age of the Chartists (1930),p 365.
l6

l7 For a recent re-statement of the issues, on the whole favourable to the pessimistic
viewpoint, see W. Woodruff, Capitalism and the Historians: A Contribution to the Discussion on the Industrial Revolution in England, Jour. Econ. Hist., xvi (1956),1-17.
J. D. Chambers, l71c Vulc of Trent r670-rBm (Econ. Hist. Rev. Supplements, 3, n.d.),
P. 63.

19

A. J. TAYLOR

deplorably small proportion of those born into it. If the industrial

towns carried the seeds of physical and spiritual death for some, they
also brought new life and opportunity to others. Not only did the towns
ultimately give enhanced possibilities of physical health and enjoyment
to the many; they also provided those widening cultural opportunities
which, side by side with more debasing attractions, have come to distinguish the urban societies of the modern world. The older generation
perhaps suffered most in the upheavals and disorders of early industrial
development: for the younger and more adaptable the transition may
not all have been disenchantment. But at this point argument comes
close to dogmatism, for the historians assessment of gain and loss must
inevitably be coloured by his personal value judgements and
predilections.
This overriding difficulty is not entirely absent from the parallel
controversy about material living standards; but here at least the historian can appeal to the statistics. Although this particular oracle is in
no sense infallible-too often it is mute or, when vocal, ambiguous-it
offers some firm foundations for argument. I t is essential, therefore, at
this point, that we examine, however briefly, the main types of statistical
evidence available to the historian.
The most direct route to the assessment of changing living standards
lies through the measurement of the movement of real wages. Real.
wages relate money earnings to retail prices, and their movement, therefore, reflccts the changing purchasing power of the consumer. Claphams
calculation of the movement of real wages suggests that the purchasing
power of the industrial worker rose by some 16 per cent between I 790
and 1840, and by 70 per cent over the slightly longer period from I 790
to 1850.10 I n the same periods the real earnings of farm-workers increased by 2 2 per cent and 60 per cent.20These assessments were based
on the wage statistics assembled at the beginning of the present century
by A. L. Bowley and G. H. Wood, and on a cost-of-living index computed
by N. J. Silberling. Since Claphams guarded findings were published,
however, Silberlings index has been tested and found wanting,21 and
its rejection has inevitably invalidated the conclusions which Clapham
based upon it.
Where Silberling failed, others have ventured with little greater
success.22 But even were a satisfactory cost-of-living indcx established,
and in the nature of things this would seem unlikely, it would still leave
unsolved the equally complex problem of devising a satisfactory general
index of working-class earnings. Here, as in the case of prices, the fundamental obstacle is the insufficiency and unreliability of the surviking
20 Ibid., p. 128.
on Clapham, p. 561.
See emeciallv T. S. Ashton. The Standard of Life of the Workers in England., 1740._
1830, 30uL Econ.Hist., Supplement ix (1949), 29-30.
E.g. E. W. Gilboy, The Cost of Living and Real Wages in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland,
Reu. Ecan. Statistics, xviii (1936), 134-43; R. S. Tucker, Real Wages of Artisans in London,
17zg-1935,Jour. Amcr. Statistical Sac. (1936),73-84.

lo Based
81

20

PROGRESS A N D P O V E R T Y I N B R I T A I N

evidence; but additional difficulties arise from the changing structure of

the labour force-there were virtually no factory operatives in cotton
in 1780, for example, and few surviving domestic workers in the industry seventy years later-and the problem of assessing the incidence
of rural and urban employment. Our knowledge of the extent and
nature of mid-nineteenth-century unemployment remains limited, notwithstanding the light thrown upon the subject by recent investigation^.^^
For the eighteenth century even this modicum of evidence is lacking,
and a basis for comparison between the two periods in consequence
hardly exists.
I t seems, therefore, that despite its attractiveness, the approach to the
standard of living question through the measurement of real wages must
be abandoned. The movement of real wages can be detcrmined within
acceptable limits of error only in the case of certain restricted occupational groups: for the working class as a whole the margin of error is such
as to preclude any dependable calculation.
A more promising approach is provided by attempts to establish
changes in the pattern of working-class consumption. This method has a
long and respectable ancestry-it was employed, for example, by both
Giffen and Levi-but its application to the period before 1840has only
recently been attempted. It is perhaps primarily on the basis of their
investigations in this field that Professor Ashton reaches the conclusion
that towards the end of the eighteenth century in some important
respects the standard of living was rising,24 and that Dr. Hobsbawm
arrives at the precisely opposite conclusion for the early nineteenth
century. 2 6 We may usefully investigate the basis of these generalizations.
Let us first consider food. I n the middle of the nineteenth century, as
half a century earlier, bread and potatoes were the staple items in the
diet of every working-class family. It is impossible, on the evidence available to us, to calculate the changing levels of consumption of these
commodities with any degree of accuracy; but it seems possible, as Dr.
Hobsbawm suggests, that bread consumption was declining in the early
decades of the nineteenth century. The implications of this development,
however, are far from clear. In 1847 G. R. Porter noted26 that a large
and increasing number [of the population] are in a great measure fed
upon potatoes; but at the same time he observed that unless in years
of scarcity, no part of the inhabitants of England except in the extreme
North, and there only partially, have now recourse to barley or rye
bread. I t has been usual among dieticians and economic historians to
interpret a shift from rye to wheaten bread as evidence of improvement,
Is
See e.g. E. J. Hobsbawm, The British Standard of Living, 1790-1850, Econ. Hist. Rev.,
2nd ser. x (1g57), 46-68, especially pp. 52-7; R. C. 0. Matthews, A Study in Tru& Cycle
History, 1833-42 (Cambridge, rg54), passim.
*4 Ashton, Changes in the Standard of Comfort in Eighteenth-Century England, Proc.
Brit. A d . , xci (ig55), 187.
Hobsbawm, British Standard of Living, pp. 60-1. (It is not improbable that, sometime
soon after the onset of the Industrial Revolution
they [living standards] ceased to
improve and declined.)
G. R. Porter, Progress of the JVution, 2nd edn. (1847)~
p. 543.

...

A . J. TAYLOR

21

and a shift from bread to potatoes as evidence of deterioration in general

living standards. Here the two processes are seen working themselves
out side by side. How, if at all, is this seeming contradiction to be
resolved?
The potato was still a relative newcomer to the diet of the average
Englishman at the end ofthe eighteenth century. Its advance represented
a minor dietetic revolution whose progress was determined not solely,
and indeed perhaps not even primarily, by economic factors. Outside
Ireland, the potato had made its greatest conquests in the English northwest. Cheapness and ease of growth commended its use to native as well
as immigrant Lancastrians; but perhaps of equal importance was the
variety which it gave to the working mans table. In Ireland the rising
consumption of the potato was the mark ofdeteriorating living standards:
in northern England the same phenomenon admits of a different explanation. Even if our statistical knowledge were increased, therefore,
it is doubtful whether the case for an overall rise or decline in the
standard of living could find any convincing basis in the changing consumption pattern of bread and potatoes. At best it suggests differences
of experience between the agricultural and industrial communities. 27
Not so with meat. Here a decline in per capita consumption may well
be taken as prima facie evidence of an overall deterioration in living
standards. At this point the historian is more fortunate in his statistical
sources. Both Professor Ashton and Dr. Hobsbawm have made important use of the Returns of the Collector of Beasts Tolls at Smithfield
Market, the one to demonstrate a rise in meat consumption during the
~~
eighteenth century, the other to suggest its decline after 1 8 0 0 . The
Smithfield returns present a continuous, though not necessarily always
comprehensive, survey of the numbers of sheep and cattle brought to
London for slaughter in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
and in relation to population their trend is upward in the second half of
the eighteenth, and downward in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. But, suggestive as they are of wider general tendencies,
the Smithfield statistics must be approached with some caution. They
do not take into account all classes of meat-the ubiquitous pig, for
example, is omitted-nor do they allow for the weight, as distinct from
the number, of beasts taken for consumption. The investigations of G. E.
Fussell20 thirty years ago disproved the once commonly held view that
the weight of animals at market more than doubled during the course
of the eighteenth century. His findings were that the Smithfield cow or
sheep of 1800 was little heavier, though rather meatier, than its 1700
forbear: but it would be dangerous, without similar close investigations,
to carry over this conclusion into the nineteenth century. Even more
7 For a fuller discussion of this subject, with a somewhat different emphasis, see R. N.
Salaman, History and Social InpUence of the Potato (1g4g), chaps. xxv-xxvi.
Ashton, Changesin the Standard of Comfort, pp. 175-7; Hobsbawm, British Standard
of Living, pp. 58-9, 63-8.
G . E. Fussell, The Size of English Cattle in the Eighteenth Century, Agricultural
History,iii (1g2g), 160-81.

22

PROGRESS A N D POVERTY I N BRITAIN

questionable is the extent to which Londons experience may be said

to reflect that of the country as a whole. In its extremes of wealth and
poverty London was no doubt a microcosm of the nation at large, but
its economic progress ran a somewhat different course from that of
either the industrial North or of the agricultural South. The evidence
on meat, therefore, while it suggests a nineteenth-century decline and
to that extent holds no comfort for the optimist, is of itself insufficient to
establish any firm thesis of general deterioration.
When attention is turned from bread and meat to more quickly
perishable foodstuffs like milk and green vegetables, historian and
statistician part company. Contemporaries were virtually silent about the
levels of consumption of these nutritively significant items of diet. I t
seems likely, however, that in the case ofperishable commodities the years
of rapid urbanization were years of declining consumption. Although
cattle were grazing within a mile of Manchester Town Hall as late as
I 850, and large-scale market gardening was developing on the fringe of
the industrial areas, the carriage of fresh dairy produce and vegetables
before the coming of the railway must have presented problems which
could hardly fail to be reflected in shortages and high prices.
The conclusions to be drawn, therefore, from the evidence on food
consumption are by no means clearly defined: but their general tenor is
to suggest rising living standards towards the end of the eighteenth
century and less certain progress or even decline thereafter.30 Food,
however, though it remained the most important item of working-class
expenditure and took up the greater part of every working-class budget,
did not exhaust the workers wants. We know less than we would wish
about the movement of house rents, but perhaps sufficient to suggest
that, in relation to the labourers wage, rent rose rather than declined
between 1800 and 1850.~1Fuel, on the other hand, was increasing in
availability and tending to fall in price with the greater exploitation of
inland coalfields and improvements in transportation.
It was outside the field of necessities, in the narrow sense, that increasing consumption was most evident. Between 1785 and 1840 the
production of cotton goods for the home market increased ten times
more rapidly than did population. An equally well-attested, if somewhat
more limited, increase is to be seen in the output of soap and candles;
and it is possible to infer similar increases in the production of a wide
range of household articles from pots and pans to furniture and furnishi n g ~I .t would
~ ~ be unwise to interpret this general expansion in output
as synonymous with an equivalent increase in working-class consumpso For further discussion of the nutritional problem, and particularly of the question of
adulteration, see J. C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, The Englishmans Food, 2nd edn.
(1958), also J. Burnett, The History of Food Adulteration in Great Britain in the Nineteenth
Century (London Ph.D. thesis, 1958, summarized in Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, Xvxii (1959),

104-9).

*I For a discussion of the housing question, see Ashton, Some Statistics of the Industrial
Revolution in Britain, Trans. Munchstet Statistical SOC.(1g47-8), 1-21.
aa See, inter alia, the authorities cited by W. Hoffinann, British Industry, 1700-1950 (Engl.
trans. I 955).

A . J. T A Y L O R

23

tion. The upper and middle classes, no doubt, took a disproportionate

share of the products as they did of the profits of industrialization: but
it is clear that improving standards of comfort were slowly percolating
down to the mass of the population. By the 1840s working-class houses
in Sheffield were said to be furnished in a very comfortable manner,
usually of mahogany.33
the floors . . . carpeted, and the tables
Similar conditions were to be found in the mining districts of Northumberland and Durham. If these improvements were purchased in part at
the expense of so-called necessities, and specifically of food, this was a
matter of the consumers choice. A society slowly growing more prosperous may well prefer to sacrifice near-necessities in the pursuit of new
luxuries.34
There remains for consideration one further possible approach to the
measurement of changing living standards. As long ago as 1 8 1 6John
Rickman, the census-taker, expressed the opinion that human comfort
is to be estimated by human health and that by the length of human
life.3GLongevity is in general a useful yardstick of changing living
standards, and for this reason among others the debate on living
standards has tended to keep company with that on the causes and
nature of population growth.
Between 1780 and 1850 the population of England and Wales rose
from some 78 to 18millions, a rate of growth wholly unprecedented in this
country. Contemporaries were made increasingly aware of this development and sought its explanation in terms either of a rising birth-rate or
of a declining death-rate. The followers of Malthus, perhaps even more
than Malthus himself, put particular stress on a high birth-rate, and by
implication discounted the significance of increased longevity. The
contrary viewpoint, laying emphasis on a falling death-rate, was neither
so firmly nor perhaps so coherently held, but indications of it are to be
found in Rickman, among others. In the present century the issue has
been no less vigorously debated. Griffith, in 1926, came down heavily
on the side of a declining death-rate as the primary factor in population
growth, hut his thesis, though widely accepted, has never received the
general endorsement of demographers. T. H. Marshall, for example,
though giving full weight to the decline in the death-rate from 1780
onwards, insists that as much attention be given to the forces which
kept the birth-rate up as to those which pulled the death-rate down;a6
and J. T. Krause goes even further in concluding that the national
[statistical] materials suggest strongly that a rising birth-rate was

...

Porter, p. 533.
CJ The statement of Thomas Ho!mes of Aldbrough (Holderness) in 1837 or 1838
covering the experience of his lifetime. There has been a very great increase in the consumption of meat, wheaten bread, poultry, tea and sugar
The poorest are not so well fed.
But they are better clothed and provided with furniture, better taken care of in sickness and
misfortune. So they are gainers. This, I think, is a plain statement of the whole case. Quoted
in full by Ashton, Standard of Life of the Worken in England, p. 37.
0. Williams, L$e and ktters of Rickman (1912),p. 182.
T. H. Marshall, The Population Problem during the Industrial Revolution, Economic
History, i (~gzg),452. This article remains the classical statement of the population problem.
38

s4

.. .

24

PROGRESS A N D POVERTY I N BRITAIN

the major cause of the growth of the English population in this

period.S
When there is such disagreement about causes of first instance, it is
not surprising that equal divergence of opinion is to be found about the
underlying causes of population growth and their implication for the
movement of living standards. Neither an increasing population nor a
rising birth-rate is in itself evidence of improving living standards: indeed the experience of some Asiatic societies suggests that the reverse
may often be the case. A declining death-rate, on the other hand, unless
-an important provisog8-it is merely the statistical reflection of a
rising birth-rate, implies an increased expectation of life and may therefore be regarded as prima facie evidence of an improving standard of life.
I t is generally agreed that the crude death-rate fell sharply-perhaps
by a quarter-between I 780 and the end of the French Wars, and rose
significantly, though slightly, over the next two decades;3esince when its
course has been consistently downward. I n so far as it is possible to
regard the overall reduction of the death-rate as synonymous with increased longevity, this increase in expectation of life has been traced to
a variety of causes: to a growth in medical knowledge and facilities, to
the recession of specific virulent diseases, to improvements in personal
hygiene and public health, to better and more plentiful supplies of food,
and to a marked reduction in maternal and infant mortality. Griffith,
for example, while touching on all these factors, perhaps lays most stress
on improvements in medical knowledge and practice, and on environmental factors-the latter to explain not only the decline in the deathrate before 1815 but also the temporary reversal of the trend in the
post-war period. Marshall emphasizes the rapid decline in infant mortality before 1810and its perceptible, ifless marked, rise thereafter. More
recently two medical investigators, T. McKeown and R. G . Brown,40
have, for the eighteenth century at least, questioned the importance
of improvements in medicine and treatment, and by implication given
added weight to the significance of advances in nutritional standards.
These statistics and explanations are broadly consistent with those
changes in living standards-upwards in the late eighteenth century
and arrested to the point of decline thereafter-which have already been
suggested by the evidence of food consumption. Yet, notwithstanding
this coincidence, the ambiguity of the death-rate still makes it highly
suspect as an instrument for the measurement of changing living
J. T. .Krause, Changes in English Fertility and Mortality 1781-1850, &on. Hist. Rev.,
2nd ser. x1 (1958), 70. For another view, also broadly favourable to the birth-rate thesis,
see H.J. Habakkuk, English Population in the Eighteenth Century, Econ. Hist. Rev.,
2nd ser. vi (1g53), I 17-33.
3B For a brief elaboration of this important qualification, see Ashton, Standard of Life
of the Workers in England, p. 22.
Cf. the estimates of J. Brownlee, quoted by Marshall, ubi supra, p. 443. (The deathrates are as follows, 1781-90: 28.6 (per thousand), 1811-20: 21.1, 1831-40: 23.4). For a
criticism of these figures see Krause, ubi supru,.pp. 52+2.
T. McKeown and R. G. Brown, Medical Evidence relating to English Population
Changes, Population Studies, ix (1955)~I 19-41.

25
standards. This is the more the case when it is borne in mind that the
growth in population of these years was not solely a British nor evcn a
European phenomenon.41 The fundamental cause of population increase would accordingly appear to lie outside the narrow confines of
the new British industrial economy. This does not mean that industrialization played no part in determining the pattern of Britains population
growth; but it suggests that industrialization was at least as much a
consequence as a cause of the increase in population. Where cause and
effect are seemingly so inseparably intertwined, head is apt to chase tail
in disconcerting fashion. The demographer would be the first to admit
that he has problems of his own to solve in this period before he can
effectively come to the aid of the economic historian.
A. J. TAYLOR

iii
Where so much remains legitimately controversial, the historian can
at best draw only tentative conclusions. The evidence, however, would
appear to permit two immediate generalizations. There is reason to
believe that after an early upsurge in living standards in the first stages
of rapid industrialization, the pace of advance slackened, and decline
may even have set in, by the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is
also evident, notwithstanding Porters assertion to the contrary,42 that
the progress of the working class lagged increasingly behind that of the
nation at large. Had working-class incomes kept pace with the growth
of the national income, the average worker could have expected to find
himselfsome 50 per cent better off in real terms in 1840than thirty years
earlier.43Even the most sanguine of optimists would hardly claim that
such was in fact the case.
To explain how this situation arose is in a measure to validate the
facts themselves. Thorold Rogers, writing in the 1880s, attributed the
poverty of the working classes in the earlier part of the century to a
variety of causes: to the unrestricted employment, before the first
effective factory act in 1833, of juvenile labour; to restrictions on, and
the weakness of, trade unions; and to the attitude of employers and of
the law.44 But, significantly, he added that, although the sufferings of
the working classes
might have been aggravated by the practices of
employers, and were certainly intensified by the harsh partiality of the
law. . they were due in the main to deeper causes.46Chief among
these, Rogers cited the protracted wars against France, the economic
dcrangements which accompanied them, and the behaviour of successive
governments, which were slow to remedy social evils, yet intervened

. ..

M. R. Reinhard, Hirtoire dc la Population Mondiale ds 1700 d 1948 (Paris, 1949), passim.

Porter, pp. 531-2.
Based on the national income estimates assembled by P. Deane, Contemporary Estimates of National Income in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Econ. Hist. Rev.,
2nd ser. viii (1956), 339-54.
Rogers, pp. 130 ff.
dB Ibid., pp. 140-1.
l

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PROGRESS A N D POVERTY I N B R I T A I N

unwisely to maintain the price of bread and to impede the development

of trade unionism.
Modern historians have tended to endorse Rogers findings, though
with varying degrees of emphasis. They have also added two other
factors, made evident by more recent economic experience: the effect of
the claims of long-term investment on current c o n ~ u m p t i o nand
, ~ ~ the
movement of the terms of trade. A brief examination of the interaction
of these varied factors is relevant to our discussion of living standards.
In the early stages of rapid industrial growth, a society is obliged to
make heavy investments not only in buildings, machinery, stocks and
equipment, but also in communications and public utilities. Such investment must inevitably be made at the expense of current consumption,
unless, as in the case of the United States, foreign investors are willing
to prime the pump of economic development. Thus Soviet Russia
declared a virtual moratorium on increased living standards while laying the foundations of her industrial greatness in the 1920s. Britain after
I 780 was erecting textile-mills and iron-works, constructing a great network of canals and laying the nucleus of a greater railway system, and
building reservoirs, gas-works and hospitals to meet the present and
future needs of a rapidly growing urban population, Like Russia a
century later, though less consciously, she was sacrificing present comfort to the pursuit of future wealth and prosperity. By 1850 this early
investment was yielding abundant fruit, and future expansion, in terms
of railways, steamships, steel-mills, and electrical plant, was no longer
to be incompatible with rising living standards.
The needs of capital accumulation, therefore, supply a partial explanation of the relative depression of working-class living standards
in this period of rising national wealth. I t would be unwise to press this
argument too hard, however. In Japan, for example, whose industrial
growth after 1918closely paralleled that of Britain in the early nineteenth century, it proved possible to reconcile industrial growth with a
perceptible advance in living standards.47 We must, therefore, look
further afield if we are to explain not only the slow but still more the
inconstant rise of living standards in nineteenth-century England. It is
here, in particular, that significance is to be attached to the effects of
the French Wars and to the frequently adverse movement of the terms
of trade.
The wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France imposed a
severe strain upon the resources of the nation, and offset, in part at
least, the gains of industrial and commercial expansion. Large-scale
borrowing by the state during the war, and the imposition of severely
regressive taxation at its end, not only induced serious wartime inflation but tended further to redistribute the national income in favour
46 For a recent restatement of this thesis, see S. Pollard, Investment, Consumption and the
Industrial Revolution, &on. Hisf. Rev., 2nd ser. xi (1958), 215-26.
4 G . C. Allen, Short Economic History of Modern Japan (1946),p. I 06.

A . J. TAYLOR

27

of the men of property. War thereby, both directly and indirectly, acted
on balance to the economic detriment of the nation at large and to that
of thc working class in particular.
The movement of the terms of trade also proved disadvantageous to
the working-class consumer. During the first half of the nineteenth
century the terms on which Britain dealt in foreign markets steadily
worsened, more particularly between I 800 and I 8I 5, and between I 830
and 1840.~~
In order to pay for a given volume of imported goods,
Britain had to export almost twice as much in 1840as she had done in
1800.Specifically, the price of cotton exports fell much more rapidly
after 1815than did that of imported foodstuffs. In part-though only
in part-cotton manufacturers and their employees were able to find
compensation in a reduction of the pricc of their imported raw material:
for the rest they had no alternative but to accept lower profit margins
and reduced piece-rates. A significant share of the bcnefits of Britains
new industrial efficiency, therefore, went neither to her workers nor to
her industrialists, but to the foreign consumer.
Behind these pervasive but temporary factors lay the insistent force
of population pressure. In so far as population increase may be ascribed
a determinant r61e in the economic growth of this period, it is easy to
understand how the upward thrust of population, though it facilitated
and encouraged industrial advance, also retarded the improvement in
living standards which industrialization brought in its train. Since the
value of labour, as of any other commodity, gains with scarcity, an overabundant supply of labour is plainly inimical to the advance of workingclass living standards.
How plentiful then was the supply of labour in early ninetcenthcentury England? Thc question admits of no categorical answer. The
rapid increase in population, the influx of Irish immigrants, particularly
into industrial Lancashire and western Scotland, the readiness with
which women and young children could be employed in mills and workshops, are all pointers to an abundant labour supply. But the supply of
workers must be measured against the demands of employers. That the
number of those seeking employment in a year of intense depression like
1842 was far in excess of demand is tragically evident; but we need to
deepen our knowledge of employment conditions in boom years like 1835
before we can pass final judgement on the general state of the labour
market. The relative immobility of labour, in terms both of geographical
and of occupational movement, tended to create not one but a number
of virtually independent marketsfor labour, in some of which workmen
were in short, and in others in abundant supply. If a generalization is
to be ventured it must be that, except at the level of the skilled worker
or in years of exceptional demand, employers had little difficulty in
48 A. H. Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (Cambridge, Mass., 1958),pp. 94-98.
For a somcwhat different approach to the terms of trade, see Ashton, Standard of Life of
the Workers in England, pp. 25-8.

28

PROGRESS AND POVERTY IN BRITAIN

finding hands; and to this extent the worker, lacking effective trade
union organization, was generally placed in a weak position in his
dealings with his employer.
To dwell thus upon these three major forces is not to deny the significance of more traditional explanations of working-class discontent; but
it may serve to place these in a new perspective. That the scales were
heavily weighted against the working classes is indisputable. There is
no shortage of evidence, in the blue books and elsewhere, of capitalist
excesses, some of them committed in the name of so-called sound
economics, some of them less worthily motivated. I n face of these, the
worker could find little help from a state which made him the weaker
partner in every contract and frustrated his efforts at collective selfhelp. But these evils, although they were the most apparent and the
most easily remediable, were neither the only, nor probably the most
important, causes of the failure of the working classes to derive early
benefits from the rapid growth of industrial enterprise and productivity.
iv
We may now sketch in rather fuller detail the general movement of
working-class living standards between 1780 and 1850.The limited
evidence suggests that down to about I 795 working-class families were
gaining at least a share in the benefits of quickening economic activity. 49
Prices for manufactured goods in foreign markets were buoyant and
industry was reaping the full reward of its increased productivity,
Workers in the newly stimulated industries enjoyed rapidly rising living
standards; this was above all the golden age of the Lancashire handloom
a new and less happy trend is apparent.
weaver. From the mid-1790~
War, inflation, and worsening terms of trade spelt distress for all but
limited sections of the working class. Wages limped slowly behind the
cost of living, the standard of living of the workers was lowered. 50
Recovery after 1815was slow and interrupted. There were good years
like 1825,when employment was high and earnings moved upwards,
and even better ones like 1836,when a strong demand for labour went
hand in hand with falling food prices. At such times working-class living
standards, particularly in the industrial North, reached heights much
above those of the best years of the eighteenth century. But there were
also years, like I 8I 7 and I 842,when work was scarce and food dear, and
the position of the labourer, not least in the towns, was little if a t all
better than that of his predecessor in the leanest years of the earlier age.
It is evident that by 1840the material progress of half a century had not
yet sufficed to insulate the working class against the worst effects of
economic depression. The ebb and flow of working-class fortunes, as of
those of the economy in general, had in some respects tended to become
4D See Hobsbawm, British Standard of Living, p. 46. For a different view of these years,
see Salaman, pp. 487 ff.
60 Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 ( I @ ) ,
p. 150.

A . J. TAYLOR

29

more marked with the growth of industrialism and of the nations export trade. To this extcnt the labourer suffered more sharply under the
pressure of industrial distress, though he gained equally substantially
when business activity moved upward. In the exact calculation of gain
and loss which a comparison with an earlier age involves, it is necessary
to take account not only of both prosperous and depressed years but also
perhaps of the new insecurity which the changing character of the
business cycle brought with it. But the calculation, however nicely
weighted, depends on the accuracy of the information at the historians
disposal, and the vagaries of the evidence must leave the ultimate
question still an open one.
To say this may appear tantamount to suggesting that a generation
of historians has laboured to bring forth a mouse. But the appearance is
deceptive. Although the central issue may remain unresolved-and is
perhaps likely to remain so-the area of controversy has been substantially and significantly reduced. Optimist and pessimist now agree
in seeing the years before 1795 and from the early 1840s as periods of
advance-the latter to be sustained until almost the end of the nineteenth century; each views the quarter century of war as a time of
deterioration; and each also draws distinctions between the experiences
of different types of worker.61 It is common ground that the skilled enjoyed relative prosperity; and among these are to be numbered not only
the craftsmen called into existence by the new order, but also the older
artisan, now pressed into fuller and wider service. I n this group are to be
found machine-makers, iron-moulders, builders, printers and not least
hewers of coal and ore. There is similar agreement that decline in living
standards was the lot of the domestic worker in those industries where
the machine had taken early command, in cotton weaving and hosiery
knitting, for example. But in 1840 the majority of English workers, including the vast and varied army of farm-labourers and the smaller
company of textile operatives, fell outside these two groups, and their
experience in terms of gain or loss can be neither so easily nor so indisputably defined.
All this would suggest that the area of disagreement has contracted.
Certainly it has become more clearly defined: and this is also true in a
further sense. It is perhaps no more than an accident that Professor
Ashton speaks of the Standard of Life of the Workers in England and
Dr. Hobsbawm of the British Standard of Life. Neither makes great play
with the implicit distinction;62but from the point ofview of the general
controversy its importance can scarcely be exaggerated, a fact which
Porter recognized a century ago, when he restricted his claim ofimproving
E. Cf. Ashton, An Economic History of England: 7he Eighteenth Century (1g55), pp. 234-5;
also Standard of Life of the Workers in England, pp. 33-8, Hobsbawm, Thc Labour
Aristocracyin Nineteenth-CenturyBritain in Democracy and the Labour Movement (ed.J. Saville),
pp. 101-39 (especially pp. 205-8).
6 a But n.6. the distinction between English and Irish experience made by Ashton, Industrial
Revolution, p. 161.

30

PROGRESS A N D POVERTY IN BRITAIN

living standards, in the first instance, to England.63 I n 1841 the

inhabitants of England outnumbered those of Ireland by only two to
one. Today, taking the same areas, the disproportion is almost ten to
one. Ireland, politically integrated in the United Kingdom since I 801,
loomed large in the British scene. Although in 1841 the tragedy of the
Great Famine still lay in the future, the living standards of Irelands
eight millions were already close to the margin of subsistence. The
Forties may not have been hungry in England; they were certainly so
in Ireland. I t would be too much to suggest that the pessimistic case
rests on the inclusion, and the optimistic on the exclusion, of Ireland
in the calculation of the nations welfare; but the distinction between
English and British is here clearly of more than marginal significance.
The argument for declining living standards is patently strongest when
the experience of Ireland is added to that of Great Britain, and correspondingly weakest when attention is confined to England and, more
specifically, to its new industrial North and Midlands. If nothing else
emerges from recent debate, therefore, it is evident that future controversialists will need to define their arguments in precise terms of date,
area and the section of the population with which they are concerned.
Even more significant than this evidence of a narrowing area of
dispute is the change in the nature of the debate which has accompanied
it. Where argument was once primarily in terms of the new industrial
classes, it has now shifted to the wider field of the British working class
as a whole, among whom as late as 1840 the new industrial wageearners were still only a minority. At the same time the extreme position
adopted by some advocates of the pessimistic case-that the decline in
working-class living standards in this period was only part of a permanent process of deteri0ration6~-now appears to be virtually
abandoned. This move to fresh positions is in a sense a pessimists
retreat, but it has wider implications. In the past the debate over living
standards has tended to become inseparable from a more general controversy about the merits and demerits of laissez-faire capitalism, in
which optimists and pessimists might be broadly characterized as
respectively the friends and foes of economic liberalism. This division
would now seem too facile. To contend that living standards rose is not
to extol the merits of liberal capitalism; nor does the view that they
declined necessarily imply its denigration. The slowness of advance, or
actual deterioration, in working-class living standards is now seen to be
explicable, at least in part, in terms other than those of the excesses of
capitalist individualism; and the retardation of living standards in the
early stages of industrialization has revealed itself as the experience of
socialist as well as of capitalist societies. At the same time it has been
clearly demonstrated that rapid economic growth and social advance
6a

See above, p. 16.

For a recent statement of this point of view, see J. Kuczynski, A Short History of Labour
Conditions in Great Britain, 1750 to the Present Day, 2nd edn. ( r g ~ )especially
,
pp. 79-80, I 19.
64

A . J. TAYLOR

are as compatible with socialist as with capitalist institutions. From one

standpoint, therefore, the significance of the debate may be said to have
narrowed; but from anothcr it has undoubtedly widened. Industrialization is now a world-wide phenomenon; and the controversy about the
standard of life in nineteenth-century Britain will remain not only a
favourite jousting-ground for economic historians but a n issue relevant
to the problems of the modern world.65
E.~

CJ A. J. Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (1956).

[This article was in the printers hands before the appearance of R. M. Hartwells Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in England: a Methodological Inquiry, journal of
Economic History,xix, 1959, pp. 229-49. Mr. Hartwells essay represents a parallel and in
some respects complementary approach to that attempted here.]