The Making of the English Working Class

by E.P. Thompson

By 1811 we can witness the simultaneous emergence of a new popular Radicalism and of a newly-militant trade unionism.

The history of reform agitation between 1792 and 1796 was (in general terms) the story of the simultaneous default of the middle-class reformers and the rapid “leftwards” movement of the plebeian Radicals.

There was a piquancy in égalité, in the outrage to 18th-century forms, as when the Jacobin Lord Daer sat with artisans and weavers as plain “Citizen Daer”. But the belief that “a man’s a man, for a’ that” found expression in other ways which may still be recalled in criticism of the practices of our own day.

These Jacobin strengths, which contributed much to Chartism, declined in the movement of the late 19th century, when the new Socialism shifted emphasis from political to economic rights.

The strength of distinctions of class and status in 20th-century England is in part a consequence of the lack, in the 20th-century labour movement, of Jacobin virtues.

The cotton-mill is seen as the agent not only of industrial but also of social revolution, producing not only more goods but also the “Labour Movement” itself. The Industrial Revolution, which commenced as a description, is now invoked as an explanation.

it was also a war against Jacobinism.

At the time when half Europe was intoxicated and the other half terrified by the new magic of the word citizen, the English nation was in the hands of men who regarded the idea of citizenship as a challenge to their religion and their civilisation; who deliberately sought to make the inequalities of life the basis of the state, and to emphasise and perpetuate the position of the workpeople as a subject class. Hence it happened that the French Revolution has divided the people of France less than the Industrial Revolution has divided the people of England.…

Throughout this time there are three, and not two, great influences simultaneously at work. There is the tremendous increase in population (in Great Britain, from 10.5 millions in 1801 to 18.1 millions in 1841, with the greatest rate of increase between 1811–21). There is the Industrial Revolution, in its technological aspects. And there is the political counter-revolution, from 1792–1832.

The English ancien régime received a new lease of life, not only in national affairs, but also in the perpetuation of the antique corporations which misgoverned the swelling industrial towns. In return, the manufacturers received important concessions: and notably the abrogation or repeal of “paternalist” legislation covering apprenticeship, wage-regulation, or conditions in industry. The aristocracy were interested in repressing the Jacobin “conspiracies” of the people, the manufacturers were interested in defeating their “conspiracies” to increase wages: the Combination Acts served both purposes.

We can now see something of the truly catastrophic nature of the Industrial Revolution; as well as some of the reasons why the English working class took form in these years. The people were subjected simultaneously to an intensification of two intolerable forms of relationship: those of economic exploitation and of political oppression. Relations between employer and labourer were becoming both harsher and less personal; and while it is true that this increased the potential freedom of the worker, since the hired farm servant or the journeyman in domestic industry was (in Toynbee’s words) “halted half-way between the position of the serf and the position of the citizen”, this “freedom” meant that he felt his unfreedom more. But at each point where he sought to resist exploitation, he was met by the forces of employer or State, and commonly of both.

commences by describing the employers and the workers as “two distinct classes of persons

What his address does is to itemise one after another the grievances felt by working people as to changes in the character of capitalist exploitation: the rise of a master-class without traditional authority or obligations: the growing distance between master and man: the transparency of the exploitation at the source of their new wealth and power: the loss of status and above all of independence for the worker, his reduction to total dependence on the master’s instruments of production: the partiality of the law: the disruption of the traditional family economy: the discipline, monotony, hours and

conditions of work: loss of leisure and amenities: the reduction of the man to the status of an “instrument”.

The issues which provoked the most intensity

of feeling were very often ones in which such values as traditional customs, “justice”, “independence”, security, or family-economy were at stake, rather than straightforward “bread-and-butter” issues.

There were undoubted increases in real wages among organised workers during the burst of trade union activity between 1832–4: but the period of good trade between 1833 and 1837 was accompanied by the smashing of the trade unions by the concerted efforts of Government, magistrates, and employers; while 1837–42 are depression years. So that it is indeed at “some unspecified date between the drafting of the People’s Charter and the Great Exhibition” that the tide begins to turn; let us say, with the railway boom in 1843. Moreover, even in the mid-40s the plight of very large groups of workers remains desperate, while

the railway crash led to the depression years of 1847–8. This does not look very much like a “success story”; in half a century of the fullest development of industrialism, the standard-of-living still remained—for very large but indeterminate groups—at the point of subsistence.

Over the period 1790–1840 there was a slight improvement in average material standards. Over the same period there was intensified exploitation, greater insecurity, and increasing human misery. By 1840 most people were “better off” than their forerunners had been fifty years before, but they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight improvement as a catastrophic experience.

In fact, the southern labourer had been reduced to total dependence on the masters as a class. But slave labour is “uneconomic”, especially when it is exacted from men who nourish grievances at lost rights and the inchoate resistances of “free-born Englishmen

Illiteracy, exhaustion, the emigration from the village of the ambitious, the sharp-witted and the young, the shadow of the squire and parson, the savage punishment of enclosure or bread-rioters and of poachers—all combined to induce fatalism and to inhibit the articulation of grievances.

The revolt of 1830 was not wholly without effect.

The revolt both sapped the confidence of the gentry, and helped to arouse the Reform agitation of 1831–2.

Throughout the nineteenth century the urban worker made articulate the hatred for the “landed aristocrat” which perhaps his grandfather had nourished in secret: he liked to see the squire cast in villainous melodramas, and he preferred even a Board of Guardians to the charity of a Lady Bountiful: he felt that the landowner had no “right” to his wealth whereas, if only by foul means, the mill-owner had “earned” his.

The savage penal code, the privations, the Bridewells, of old England were forgotten; but the myth of the lost paternalist community became a force in its own right—perhaps as powerful a force as the utopian projections of Owen and the Socialists.

It is an historical irony that it was not the rural labourers but the urban workers who mounted the greatest coherent national agitation for the return of the land.

If, for the sake of argument, we take the hypothesis that 40% of the population (10.5 millions) was living below a given “poverty-line” in 1790, but only 30% of the population (18.1 millions) in 1841, nevertheless the absolute number of the poor will have increased from about four millions to well over five millions. More poverty will be “felt” and, moreover, there will in fact be more poor people.

The first half of the 19th century must be seen as a period of chronic under-employment, in which the skilled trades are like islands threatened on every side by technological innovation and by the inrush of unskilled or juvenile labour. Skilled wages themselves often conceal a number of enforced outpayments: rent of machinery, payment for the use of motive power, fines for faulty work or indiscipline, or compulsory deductions of other

kinds.

Invention simultaneously devalued old skills and elevated new ones.

But when we follow through the history of particular industries, and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people.

the very notion of regularity of employment—at one place of work over a number of years for regular hours and at a standard wage—is an anachronistic notion, imposed by 20th-century experience upon 19th-century realities.

while wages were moving slowly but favourably in relation to the cost-of-living, the proportion of workers chronically under-employed was moving unfavourably in relation

to those in full work.

Ideology may wish to exalt one and decry the other, but facts must lead us to say that each was a complementary component of a single process. This process first multiplied hand-workers (hand calico-printers, weavers, fustian-cutters, woolcombers) and then extinguished their livelihood with new machinery.

What we can say with confidence is that the artisan felt that his status and standard-of-living were under threat or were deteriorating between 1815 and 1840. Technical innovation and the superabundance of cheap labour weakened his position.

The impostors, who studied the market and were quick to vary the supplies of suffering to meet the jaded and inelastic demands of human compassion, fared better than the genuine sufferers, who were too proud or too inexperienced to market their misery to its best advantage.

The commonest error today is not that of Gaskell and of Engels but that of the optimist who muddles over the difficult and painful nature of the change in status from artisan to depressed outworker

But the prosperity induced by the soaring output of machine yarn disguised a more essential loss of status. It is in the “golden age” that the artisan, or journeyman weaver, becomes merged in the generic “hand-loom weaver

Yet at the same time as wages were screwed lower and lower, the number of weavers continued to increase over the first three decades of the 19th century; for weaving, next to general labouring, was the grand resource of the northern unemployed. Fustian weaving was heavy, monotonous, but easily learned. Agricultural workers, demobilised soldiers, Irish immigrants—all continued to swell the labour force.

The demonstration was dispersed by the magistrates with bloodshed, and the full vindictiveness of the authorities was revealed by the State prosecution and imprisonment of a prominent manufacturer, Colonel Joseph Hanson of the Volunteers, who had supported the minimum wage bill, for the crime of riding among the weavers and uttering “malicious and inflammatory words

With no hope of legal protection the weavers turned more directly towards the channels of political Radicalism.1 But for some years after 1800 an alliance between Methodism and “Church and King” rowdyism kept most of the weavers as political “loyalists”

It was after the Wars that the real Radical tide set in; and in 1818 a second critical confrontation between the weavers and their employers took place. It was the year of the great Manchester cotton-spinners strike, and of the first impressive attempt at general unionism (the “Philanthropic Hercules”).

It is an over-simplification to ascribe the cause of the debasement of the weavers’ conditions to the power-loom.3 The status of the weavers had been shattered by 1813, at a time when the total number of power-looms in the U.K. was estimated at 2,400, and when the competition of power with hand was largely psychological. The estimate of power-looms rises to 14,000 in 1820, but even then it was slow and clumsy

Once again the decline preceded serious competition with the power-loom. Power was not introduced into worsted-weaving on any scale until the late 1820s; into “fancy” woollens until the late 1830s (and then only partially); while the power-loom was not effectively adapted to carpet-weaving until 1851. Even where direct power competition existed, the speed of weaving only slowly rose to that by which the hand-loom’s output was trebled or quadrupled.

The demographic pattern of Heptonstall-Slack was extraordinary: in a population of 348, over one-half were under twenty (147 under fifteen), while only 30 were over fifty-five; this did not represent a growing community, but a low expectation of life. In the catastrophic years of the 1830s and 1840s, when the power-loom, the Irish influx, and the new Poor Law, finished off what wage-cutting had begun, there were—alongside the insurrectionary hopes of Chartist weavers—the more gruesome stories: the children’s burial clubs (where each Sunday-school pupil contributed 1d. per week towards his own or a fellow-pupil’s funeral); the dissemination and serious discussion of a pamphlet (by ‘Marcus’) advocating infanticide.

The breakdown of custom and of trade unionism was directly influenced by State intervention. This was “inevitable” only if we assume the governing ideology and the counter-revolutionary tone of these years. The weavers and their supporters opposed to this ideology a contrary analysis and contrary policies, which turned on the demand for a regulated minimum wage, enforced by trade boards of manufacturers and weavers. They offered a direct negative to the homilies of “supply-and-demand”.

The weavers saw clearly, Richard Oastler testified, that “capital and property are protected and their labour is left to chance”.

The transparency of their exploitation added to their anger and their suffering: nothing in the process which brought troops to Peterloo or enabled their masters to erect great mansions in the manufacturing districts seemed to them to be “natural” or “inevitable”.

Historians who assume that wage-regulation was “impossible” have not bothered to present a case which can be answered. John Fielden’s proposals for a minimum wage periodically reviewed in each district by trade boards was no more “impossible” than the