William Tyler
Industry and Slum Housing
William Tyler - Industry and Slum Housing
- We continue our story today of aspects of Victorian age. And today I want to turn our attention to a darker side of Victorian life, the life of the poor in the industrial Britain of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution had taken off in Britain in the later years of the 18th century. And by the 19th century, the Victorian age, the twofold development of the factory system and of slum housing accommodation for its workers had covered vast tracts of the country, particularly in the north and in the Midlands. Cities such as Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton epitomised that phrase from William Blake’s famous poem, “Jerusalem.” “Those dark satanic nils.” A world of darkness indeed, quite literally with smoke and the effluence from factories. I remember going as a child, as late as the 1960s, on a school expedition to Leeds in Yorkshire. And I was put up in, we were all put up in people’s homes. And I was put up actually near the cricket ground in Leeds. And that was sort of on a hill with the city being in a sort of bowl. Now, I arrived at night and saw nothing of Leeds. In the morning I went to get the bus to take me in to meet the other people from school who were in the centre of Leeds. And I was amazed. I couldn’t see Leeds at all. It was just covered in orange smog. And as the bus went down, you went into this orange smog and descended, descended into hell, really. And that must have been right across Victorian Britain in the 19th century. Yet a case of being out of sight didn’t mean out of mind. For as we’ve seen in Victorian Britain, there was a belief in progress. Progress in the material goods and gifts that the industrial system provided, particularly for the increasing numbers of middle class. But also a rising moral concern about the middle class’s duty towards the living conditions of the poor.
As ever, with Victorian society, there is division. And as ever with Victorian society, there is the width of hypocrisy. Because Victorian philanthropy, which set out to ameliorate the conditions of the urban poor, you can say in our more cynical age of the 21st century, was a question perhaps of a well contented workforce becoming a malleable workforce. A contented workforce is a malleable workforce is an accusation you can make against Victorian philanthropists. Now, as I argued on another occasion in this series, you’ve got to be careful about using the criteria of this century to analyse the thought processes and the beliefs of the 19th century. For a start, the 19th century people were far more religious than they are in the 21st century. And perhaps one could even argue had a far more homed moral conscience, both as individuals and a society, than we do in the 21st century. In whichever country you are listening to me from, there seems to be a difference now than there was in the 19th century. And those of us lucky enough to be born immediately after the Second World War, thus having our childhood in the 1950s, had that last gasp of morality that the Victorians believed in so much. Okay, I know there was hypocrisy. I’m not suggesting there wasn’t. Nor am I suggesting that everybody in Victorian Britain in the middle classes thought the same thing. But what I am saying is that in the 19th century, there were a significant number of people with little money or a lot of money who were concerned to, as the Victorians would say, to do good, to help their fellow men and women by acts of philanthropy. Why? Why was there more philanthropy in the 19th century than there had been in the Georgian age of the 18th century?
And again, this applies to every advanced country in the world in the 19th century. And the answer is quite clearly there had been an enormous shift, a shift which had changed rural, largely still rural, agricultural societies into urban industrial societies. We take industry and we certainly take cities and large towns as a given in our day. But these were something new in the 19th century. And it became clear fairly soon in the 19th century to the larger public and to politicians that the state would need to intervene with legislation in order to control the worst excesses of Victorian capitalism. That public money would need to be spent on infrastructure such as urban sewage systems. We could no longer rely on philanthropy in a way that we had relied upon it in a rural society of the 18th century. And again, wherever you happen today to live, that applies. In Simon Heffer’s “High Minds,” which I’ve used before, I want to quote this. This is his title. On the way we live now, the creation of the Victorian City. Heffer writes, “Some of the challenges presented by the growth of British towns and cities in the mid 19th century were beyond the scope of philanthropists, however generous, and of charities, however well organised they were to tackle the problem. Matters such as sanitation, public health, and the development of infrastructure required a strategic treatment either by local authorities, which did not really exist in Britain until 1888, or more usually direction and intervention from central government. A glance at the population statistics illustrates this problem. In 1801 the population of London was 959,000.
By 1881, 80 years on, it was 4.7 and three quarters million. The city having burst its seams into the neighbouring counties of Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex. Manchester had just over 75,000 inhabitants in 1801. By 1851, it had risen to 303,000. And by 1881 to over half a million. Leeds went from 100,000 in 1801 to 430,000 in 1881. Liverpool from 90,000 to 650,000 and Birmingham from 95,000 to 530,000. These cities needed hospitals, sewage system, road and rail links, vast amount of housing. And in the end, graveyards. Cremation wasn’t legal until 1884 in England. The size of that increase in population, the fact that it was centred on cities, and that it took place over such a short period of time, relatively speaking, presented massive problems. And as Heffer said, problems that philanthropy could not answer, and thus means the involvement of central government. And you can take the involvement of central government in every day affairs as really being one of the consequences of the 19th century Industrial Revolution, sometimes referred to as the second Industrial Revolution. I don’t find that terminology particularly helpful because it’s on a continuum. But in the 19th century, certainly, central government, later, local government has to get involved. ‘Cause the problems are too great for any other system, the previous systems, to work, and therefore the nature of government changes. And that change we see today of the, some would say interference of government, whether central or local. Others would say the importance of the intervention of governments. But whatever you think, this is when it began and the cause is this Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The development of towns. And the development of towns comes about because of the development of factories.
Factories needed workers. Workers needed to be near the factories. Thus they required housing. And thus you see the development of the modern urban environment, cities and towns wherever you live. If you want to learn about what people at the time thought, rather than putting our analysis from the 21st century on the past, one easy source of information from the 19th century is the work of novelists. So for example, Benjamin Disraeli, in his novel, but later Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in his novel "Civil,” which he subtitled “Two Nations.” In other words, the rich and the poor. Or Mrs. Gaskell in her novel “North and South,” comparing the north of England, industrialised, with a still largely agricultural south, and Dickens in the most hard hitting of all of his novels, “Hard Times.” If you’ve given up reading Victorian novels because of your experience with Dickens at school, for example, please don’t ignore it now. “Hard Times” is an easy and relatively short novel to be able to read and gain from, and it has messages for today as well as it had when Dickens wrote it. Mrs. Gaskell also has an easy turn of phrase, which makes her writings important today as much as in the past. And as for Disraeli, well, Disraeli is Disraeli and he’s certainly worth reading. You don’t have to agree with their analysis. That’s not the point. The point is that that is their analysis at the time. Their analysis at the time. You cannot discard it. You cannot say they were wrong. They were writing in the context of their time. We, with hindsight, may be critical, or actually, we may prefer to see that they have messages for us today. Now, it’s not for me to labour the point, the point for me is to say, read the books for yourselves. Now, “Hard Times” is certainly a book that I would well recommend you to read.
And if you had bad experience with Dickens at school as I did, forget it. And don’t, whatever you do, take down an old copy of Dickens that you may have inherited from your family. Buy a new bright paperback coffee with a nice picture on the front, like this edition of “Hard Times.” Why? Because it looks so much more modern than a dreary old 19th century edition of Dickens. And if you think that’s a small point, well, I don’t believe it is. I think it gets you away from the old mindset. Anyhow, lecture over. You can read it or not read it as as you choose. Now, Disraeli called his novel “Civil: Two Nations.” And by two nations, he meant the rich and the poor. And the divisions between the rich and the poor were arguably not much greater than in the 18th century. But the sense of community that the 18th century had in rural, whether rural America, rural Britain, rural Canada, rural Australia, rural wherever, that had gone. You see in the factory system there’s a master and servants. Or there’s a master and that dreadful Victorian word, hands. If you worked in a factory, they don’t care about this. All they care about is that. Hands. And we use that word. And sometimes you can still hear it today, and it’s not a word that we should use. Because it dehumanises. And it did dehumanise. Huge percentage of, 80%, well, not quite 80%, 80% of the working class included the rural working class in Victorian Britain. But shall we say something like 60% or so of the urban working class are dehumanised by calling them hands. They’re not hands, they’re people. And if you read the novelists, that point is made time and time again. These are real people with just as much feeling as their so-called betters. Rich and poor. Disraeli’s answer was to return to a fantasy pre-industrial Britain in which we all lived happily gambolling amongst the sheep in rural England. Well, it was never like that. But there was a sense of greater community. And when I was preparing this, I was thinking that today we still hadn’t resolved the issue of rich and poor.
We still haven’t resolved the issue of elites and non-elites. In fact, in most advanced countries, the divisions have become greater. It was appalling for me to read that a leading footballer, soccer player to Americans, in Britain was earning something like quarter of a million a week and didn’t know what the word encyclopaedia meant. And that is a bit depressing. However, however, this division between rich and poor, elite and non elite, however you want to phrase it, has grown wider. It’s grown wider for people of my generation because born at the end of the war, my childhood in the 1950s, we grew up with that sense of community that had been formed during the trials of World War II. And we didn’t really lose that during the 1950s. We still hung onto that. It was still very safe for, as I was, as a child of seven, to cross the entire length of the city of Bristol and change buses to and from my school without danger, even in the winter, in the dark after four o'clock, it was still safe for me to do it. You wouldn’t begin to allow a child of seven to do that today. But we felt safe. We felt protected. There were policemen on the streets that we could go up to. We felt safe with the police then in a way that people don’t today. We felt safe when buses had bus conductors on them who knew us because we got the bus every day and spoke to us and looked out for us. And today in Britain, the present government has a policy of levelling up, levelling up. And this is back to Mrs. Gaskell’s “North and South.” Levelling up the North to the level of the South is their argument. For goodness sake, Mrs. Gaskell was writing nearly 200 years ago, and we don’t have an answer. And we don’t have an answer yet, to the consequences of the factory system, of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, which created this gulf in our society. Of course, there were others that had different answers to that of Disraeli, Disraeli arguing for a unity of purpose and looking back to a golden age, which didn’t exist. And thus his answer has never fully worked anywhere in the world. But there were also other people, different people, Marxists who had another answer.
People like Engels and Marx himself, who were in Britain, saw the horrors of the consequences of the factory system to the urban working class, which they called the proletariat. And they believed in a society that was equal in which the workers had control. Well, we know that in reality, the communist system did not provide the answer any more than Disraeli’s fantasy Romanticism provided the answer. And so today we are still looking at this question of levelling up in Britain. All other countries will have similar political issues. Whatever words they use. This division in our society, which can be so disruptive, can undermine society. How do we deal with those who are long-term unemployed? How do we deal with those in our society in which education is so important who dropped out of education? How do we deal with that in modern democracies? Communism clearly isn’t the answer. And we’re still struggling to come to terms, I would argue as a historian, with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. The Victorians, you see, were the very first people to face the realities of what Joshua Freeman, an American professor of history in his book, “Behemoth,” it’s on my book list, “Behemoth.” And Freeman has such a fascinating introductory chapter. And in this, he writes amongst other things, this. He writes, “From 18th century England on observers recognise the revolutionary nature of the factory. Factories visibly ushered in a new world. Their novel machinery, workforces of unprecedented size, and outflow of uniform products all commanded attention. So did the physical, social, and cultural arrangements invented to accommodate them producing vast quantities of consumer and producer goods, giant industrial enterprises brought a radical break from the past in material life and intellectual horizons.
The large factory became an incandescent symbol of human ambition and achievement, but also of suffering. Time and again it served as a measuring rod for attitudes towards work, consumption, and power, a physical embodiment of both dreams and nightmares.” Now, the fact that he’s an American, and although he does write about Britain and other places in the book, it’s largely based upon American experience, you can see that this Industrial Revolution and the analysis of it relates to wherever you are. And I’m using this to underline the points I made about Britain. A physical embodiment of dreams and nightmares. That was the problem. Factories were no answer. This was not a golden bullet. It may have produced cheaper materials, it may have produced a greater material culture for the middle classes and for those aspiring to join the middle classes. But it had this dark underside of the people who worked in those factories and lived in the slums that surrounded those factories. One of the interesting things about Britain, but it also applies in other Western countries, is that Marxism took no hold in Britain. The theory of Marxism is straightforward and very convincing. The realities of Marxism in practise, we know. Total failure. But Marxism never took hold in Britain because the emerging working class, who eventually get the vote, at least the men, in the 19th century, turn away from Marxism to towards what in Britain is the Labour Party. And the Labour Party itself disowned Marxism because the trade union movement, and thus the Labour Party movement had its origins in non-conformist Christianity. And non-conformist Christianity clearly has little trust with godless Marxism. So our socialism in Britain was rooted in Christianity. An obligation to work together to support ourselves, a straightforward nonconformist view of Christianity, represented by Baptist Church, Methodist. And moreover, in the industrial urban environment of the 19th century, the Church of England was barely visible. It was the nonconformist churches who were there. The Church of England was the middle classes at prayer.
It was these other chapels that reached into this working class and thus prevented Marxism ever getting any sort of hold at all in Britain. Unlike, of course, in France and unlike, of course, in Germany, but no hold in Britain. And the same applies to other parts of what once was the wider British sphere of influence, in Canada, United States and Australia etal. Here we have remained with a socialist, non Marxist alternative on the left to a natural right, which is the preserve of the landed classes, but also the manufacturing classes. So just to recap. The 19th century was the first truly industrial and urban society that the world had ever seen. This society had been brought about by the creation of the factory and the factory system. This in itself had a huge effect on middle class living standards and aspirational middle class living standards. In his book, “Behemoth,” Professor Freeman writes in this way, “We live today in a factory made world, or at least most of us do. Almost everything in the room I’m writing in came from a factory: the furniture, the lamp, the computer, the books, the pencils and pens, the water glass. So did my clothes, shoes, wristwatch, and cell phone. Much of the room itself was factory made. The sheet rock walls, the windows and window frames, the air conditioner, the parquet floor. Factories produce the food we eat, the medicines we take, the cars we drive, the caskets we are buried in. Most of us would find it extremely difficult to survive even for a brief time without factory made goods.”
But for those who worked in the factories of the 19th century it was a far different world to that of the material loving Victorian middle class. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel “North and South” Margaret Hale moved with her family because her father had lost his job in the south. Margaret Hale moved from Hampshire to the north and is dismayed as her family’s new home in the fictional northern mill town of Milton. And we read in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, “North and South,” the following. “'Oh, Margaret, are we to live here?’ asked Mrs. Hale of her daughter in blank dismay. Margaret’s heart echoed the dreaminess of the tone in which this question was put. She could scarcely command herself enough to say, ‘The flats in London are sometimes far worse.’ ‘Ah,’ but her mother said, then you knew that London itself and friends lay behind it. Here, well, we are desolate. Oh, what a place this is.‘” And in his novel “Hard Times,” writing of his fictional town called Coketown, Charles Dickens wrote this. “Coketown was a town of red brick, or a brick that would’ve been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it. But as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black, like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal and a river that ran purple with ill smelling dye and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a racking and a trembling all day long and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like a head of an elephant in a state of military madness. It contained several large streets all vary like one another and many small streets still more like one another inhabited by people equally like one another who all went in and out at the same time with the same sound upon the same pavements, which was the clogs in the north, to do the same work and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.” Dickens is a superb writer.
And he captures that despair in that description of the northern fictional town of Coketown in his novel “Hard Times.” In “North and South,” Margaret, the heroine of the story, really says something has to be done. In that novel she says this. “She was thrown with one or two of those who in all measures affecting masses of people must be acute sufferers for the good of many. The question always is, has everything been done to make the sufferings of these exceptions as small as possible, or in the triumph of the crowded procession, have the this been trampled on instead of being gently lifted aside of the roadway of the conqueror, whom they have no power to accompany on his march?” In other words, who is going to help the unfortunate poor, who Marxist terms proletariat, of these 19th century industrial cities? Not that I have much time for the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII and the former Prince of Wales. But many people may have seen the film of him visiting South Wales and saying, when he saw the condition in which people lived, “Something must be done.” And you could say that that phrase, “Something must be done,” has haunted the political elite from the early 19th century, for example, the introduction of the Factory Act in 1833, right through to the present British government’s view about levelling up. Something must be done. Now you may think you’re more than halfway through the talk. But I’ve written on my notes. So having given my talk a long introduction, let me look at some specific aspects of the subject of industry and slums. I could have begun with lots of stories about different things.
And I decided not to do that, but to try and put some simple analysis in front of you and to emphasise the importance that these Industrial Revolution of the 19th century caused, the factory system in particular, caused in society. It’s a great rip down society, and we’re living with the consequences today. That’s the message. So if you’ve just joined us and you’ve just woken up, that’s all you need to remember. So let’s have a look then at factories. The first proper factory was built in Darby in the Midlands on an island in the middle of the river Derwent in 1721 as a textile mill by a man called Thomas Lombe. L-O-M-B-E, L-O-M-B-E. Long without an A, with an O, and with an E on the end. Lombe. And Freeman, right? Professor Freeman writes this. He says, “The factory system, begun in Darby, spread slowly. In 1765, there were just seven mills. The one near Manchester by the end of the 18th century had 2000 workers.” That’s unheard of. “A gigantic enterprise by contemporary standards. More common were smaller mills using power driven machinery.” It’s the power of the steam engine which made factories possible and made factories essential. No longer was it a cottage industry, somebody at home on a loom, for instance. Now they’re driven by steam. And you’ve got loom after loom after loom. And so you go into the factory and the old cottage system, very rural, is turned into this factory system. And that factory system, as I’ve said earlier, could not be, in its worst excesses, could not be controlled by philanthropy. And we saw last week how in 1833, we have one of the first and earliest pieces of major legislation in the Factory Act.
And it was followed later by further Factory Acts and further legislation. One of the key issues for the Victorians, which really was, well, we would say a scandal. To them, it was something that had always happened, but many began to see as a scandal, was the employment of children, of young children in these factories. Some of you may have read in the distant past, “The Water Babies” by Charles Kingsley, and of children, boys, being sent up chimneys. Well, the factory system was arguably worse even than that. And legislation began even earlier than the Factory Acts. The first legislation against children working in factories came in 1802. That’s three years before Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar. We’re right into Regency England in 1802. And nothing in history is ever contained. The concept of the Victorian Age is an artificial one placed there by historians. So is the concept of a century. Things don’t change between 1799 and 1800 no more than they change between 1999 and 2000. Change is always a gradual change. Even something as huge a change as the factory system took time. In fact, it took until the 19th century to really make that sort of impact. And you remember that I quoted you the figures from the size of cities in 1801 to those in 1881. It’s a gradual process. Although in the course of human history, and not in their lifetime, not judging history’s length by one’s own human life, but in terms of the great sweep of history, this is a fairly quick revolution caused by the factory system. Legislation to protect children was most important. And legislation continued to be passed from that 1802 act right through to the end of the century with an act in 1891. I’m not going to bore you with the details of the acts.
If you are interested, you can read them up. But it simply relates to age and hours of work. The age of the children, the hours they worked, and the provision of education. But don’t forget there was almost no system to ensure that employers followed the rules of the act. I don’t want to do that. Instead, I wanted to read you the first stanza of a poem called “The Cry of the Children,” written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And Elizabeth wrote, listen carefully, because the last line is important. She wrote, “Do you hear the children weeping? Oh, my brothers, ere the sorrow comes with yours. They’re leaning their young heads against their mothers and that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows. The young birds are chirping in the nest. The young fawns are playing with the shadows. The young flowers are blowing towards the west. But the young, young children, oh my brothers, they’re weeping bitterly. They’re weeping in the playtime of the others in the country of the free.” They’re weeping in the playtime of the others in the country of the free. And today in modern day Britain with large numbers of food banks, the argument is how can this be, in a country that is one of the richest in the world? And to the Victorians, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how can the country of the free allow children to work in factories and mines and elsewhere? I find that poem, but particularly that first stanza, really an extraordinary one. Now let me return to philanthropy. Not only individuals, but particular employers. I’m going to look at the Cadbury family, the chocolate family of Birmingham. But there are many others.
There are, for example, where I used to live before the First World War, a model town set up by Criddles at Silver End in Essex. Criddles made windows, iron window frames. That’s how they made their money. And they set up at Silver End a model village with a chapel, with a meeting room, with a co-op shop, et cetera. And the family lived in the village, in a grand house compared to their workers but nevertheless. And the workers, if the husband became a foreman, they moved to a better street in the village. Then there were Lever brothers who made soap. And they established the incredibly beautiful Port Sunlight in Cheshire. It’s a most remarkable place. If you’ve never been and you have access to Port Sunlight, please go and please visit Lady Lever’s Art Gallery. When it was built, they forbade there to be a pub. This is paternalism. They didn’t believe in the demon drink. So there was no pub originally in Port Sunlight. Then there was Robert Owen, very famous in Scotland for his mills at New Lanark, who was particularly concerned about the employment of children and raised issues about it and went to London and met Peel, a committee that Peel was chairing, to look at the question of child labour. But the Cadbury family, who began in the 1840s making chocolate in the middle of Birmingham, thought that they would want a different sort of factory. They needed a bigger factory, to be honest, in the 1870s. But they wanted this bigger factory to be pleasanter. And so they bought land what was then outside the city boundary in a place called Bournbrook. And they called their factory Bournville. And they called it Bournville because it sounded, they thought, more French, and French chocolate was the in thing. And in Britain today, you can still buy Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate. I don’t think there’s much French about it, but nevertheless, that’s how it got its name. And they did all sorts of very positive things in this factory that they built, or on this site. They provided evening classes, adult education.
They provided swimming pools. They gave works outings. And they provided sports fields with sports teams. All quite revolutionary. And then in 1895, when their workforce was over 2000 in strength, they began building Bournville Village housing. And they tried to make the housing as good as they possibly could. And in that village, they built shops. They built schools, they built chapels and churches, they built playgrounds for the children. They built allotments for the men to grow vegetables in. They built a village hall. One result was that in a survey in 1915, it showed that the death rate and infant mortality rate for Bournville was significantly lower than for Birmingham as a whole. They had improved the health of workers. Now I’m going to talk about health and education at a later meeting, and we’ll come back to that question. Now I turn to housing. I’m using a book, it’s a local history book about London by Sarah Wise called “The Blackest Streets.” And she looked at an area of London which had slum housing and she traces it through the 19th century. And I wanted to read this story with which she begins her book. “At four o'clock in the afternoon of a damp, chilly Saturday in November 1887, two men kept an appointment with each other at Shortage railway station in London. Both were European Revolutionists. One, a communist, wished to reveal to the other, an anarchist, the very worst base of poverty he had discovered in the east end of London during his stay. The communist led the anarchist into the nearby Hackney road, then turned south, plunging into the maze light streets of the area known as the Old Nickel.
But the bustle of the main road suddenly ceased. And as the two walked southwards, the streets grew narrower and darker. Canyons of two and three story housing, stretching as far into the distance as the mist and drizzle allowed them to see. The anarchist soon became disoriented by the repeated left turnings, right turnings that his friend was making and felt strangely unsettled by the symmetry of the streets, the monotony of the blackened buildings, and the repetitive vistas revealed on this convoluted journey. This appeared to him to be a world leached of colour. Wherever he looked, all he could discern were various shades of grey. After five minutes of walking, the communist took the anarchist down an narrow passage, so narrow they had to turn sideways and move crab wise along it, that ran between two houses and into a tiny square surrounded on all sides by tenement buildings. He motioned to a small mound of earth rising between pools of filthy liquor and as bidden the anarchist took his stand upon the mound, the better to survey the scene. There was no one in sight. And although they could make out the distance subdued roar and rumble of the four busy streets that boxed the Old Nickel in, there was no sound nearby. There was not a blade of grass to be seen, but heaps of what looked like rubbish, broken furniture in the light. In one corner lay the carcass of a dog and here and there a rag of grey linen on a clothesline hung motionless in the cold air. The stone steps leading to the tenement doorways were worn down by generations of feet. Every window pane was cracked, some smashed. Thin columns of smoke rose from a few of the chimneys and dispersed into the mist. The anarchist thought that it looked as though death had just passed in giant strides through these streets and touched all breathing things with his redeeming hand. Redeeming, the anarchist saw death as a blessing in such a place as this.” The slum housing of industrial 19th century Britain.
The slum housing came in various forms. In the North Midlands it was usually back to back houses, back to back, whereby the houses were in a terrace in which two houses shared a rear wall. Back to back houses. One house with a rear wall there and another house facing that way hit its rear wall there. Back to backs, we call them. And the conditions in them were appalling. No sanitation. No running water. Overcrowded. Little furniture. Little comfort, basically. And in London, they’re the tenement blocks that Charles Dickens describes as rookeries. Rookeries? Well, like a cliff face in which the bird, the rooks, settle. He said, they look like rookeries rather than houses. And in “Oliver Twist,” Dickens describes these in this way. This is Dickens’s “Oliver Twist.” In 1838, Dickens described the horrible slum called Jacobs Island in South London. It was, he wrote a place of crazy wooden galleries with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath, windows broken and patched. Rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted ever for the dirt and squalor which they shelter and besmeared walls and a cane foundation. And I’ve done walks for people in London in the past, and you can go down to Jacob’s Island. And although it isn’t the same today, if it’s a rainy, dark November day when you take people for a walk there, you do get the feeling that Dickens got of the horror of this housing. And of course, that’s an important point. Slum housing, despite efforts by Victorians to improve it, was not really improved until after the Second World War in Britain. And we have some clearance programmes. But then it was a horrendous thing. In the introduction to my copy of “Hard Times,” the academic Thold writes this. “'Hard Times’ by Charles Dickens, like all the Victorian industrial novels, deplores the divide in British society famously invoked in Disraeli’s ‘Civil’ or ‘The Two Nations.’ A recent editor, David Cray, convincingly sums up Dickens’ dilemma, namely, quote, ‘That he repeatedly leans towards the mass of the people, then draws back because to commit himself would’ve been to wake up from the dream of harmony between classes.’” Harmony between classes is what Disraeli argues for in “Civil” and what these academics are saying Disraeli, sorry, Dickens wished to portray in his novel.
But the reality wasn’t harmony in our society. It was disharmony. Disharmony that sometimes led to industrial unrest on such a scale that governments feared revolution. But it didn’t come. You may well feel having listened to this talk that a goal of harmony between classes, if we use that word, it’s always going to prove out of reach. Now, politicians like Disraeli and others who believed in his book and his argument were simply romanticising a past that never existed and a future that would always be beyond reach. And those of you who have a Marxist tendency may wish to observe that although Marxism promised a harmony in society, it could not deal with the reality of elites that the communist society created. So you could, whatever your beliefs, from right to left politically, be pessimistic. We’re not going to resolve the issues thrown up by the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. But I think that’s too pessimistic. We could do with a strong dose of Victorian optimism. Optimism that believed any problem had a solution, all we had to do was to find it. Now, interestingly, and this is where I’m going to end, Professor Freeman in his book, I dunno where I put it now, I’ve got so carried away this evening. Professor Freeman in his book, “Behemoth,” writes this. It’s right at the end of his book. It’s the last sentence in the last paragraph of the book. “Behemoth: The History of Factories.” And Professor Freeman writes this, and he wrote this book, I’ll just check the date of when it was first published. It was first published in 2018. So it’s as up to date as you could possibly wish. And Freeman says, “Perhaps at this moment,” today, “perhaps at this moment, the most important lesson of the factory system is the one that is easiest to forget: that it is possible to reinvent the world. It has being done before and it can be done again.”
What a good dose of Victorian optimism, or if you prefer American optimism. It’s not the normal British way. We normally just moan that we could never solve these problems. Let me read Freeman one last time. “Perhaps at this moment, the important lesson of the factory system is the one that is easiest to forget: that it is possible to reinvent the world. It has been done before and it can be done again.” So those of you who think I’m always pessimistic, there’s the answer for you. That is optimism, Victorian style, written by an American in the 21st century. So thanks very much for listening tonight. I enjoyed preparing tonight’s talk. I hope some of you, at least, enjoyed listening to it. And I’ve got lots of questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Ed. “Bernard Shaw wrote to the undeserving poor in ‘Pygmalion.’” In the words of Eliza’s dustman father, she did not want to become respectable. IE, oh, sorry. Is that an ironic, satiric opinion?“ Yes, some people, yeah, in a way it is, but also in a way, it is that people were happy to stay as they were. Which reminds me of a grace said before meals in a Christian 19th century institution for children. The children were required to say this grace. Let me read it. "I thank the Lord for what I’ve had. If I had more, I should be glad. But now the times they are so bad, I must be glad for what I’ve had.” In other words, know your place. The very Victorian answer.
“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate,” Victorian Anglicans sang in church on Sundays. Where am I? Marcia, sorry. My eyesight seems to be going this evening.
Q: Marcia says, “Do you see parallels with today’s challenges, technology revolution and Industrial Revolution in the name of progress with the resultant downsides?”
A: Absolutely, Marcia, do I see that. But I think that’s what Freeman was referring to when he took that optimistic view. We have to be optimistic.
Q: Ed, Ed again writes, “One reads on social media disdain for the great unwashed, referring to all potential immigrants, be they Syrian, sub-Saharan African or Ukrainian, one assumes. How widespread was the Victorian support for the poor of other lands?”
A: That’s a difficult question, Ed. The major immigrants to Britain in the 19th century were Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, largely from either Germany or the Russian Empire, which, of course, included Poland and the Baltic states. And they, as many of you know, because you come from those families, many of those looked after their own. Soup kitchens in the east end of London, for example. Schools. But sought to enter British society. And the Sephardi Jews who’ve been here a long time, many, a number of them, like the Rothchilds, were in positions of power and influence. So it isn’t quite the same in 19th century Britain as in 21st century about immigrants. However, if we look wider to the empire, then that’s a much more tricky question to answer. Because there were lots of organisations in Britain that collected money for indigenous peoples across the empire. They never thought of them coming in large numbers here. That’s really a question I can’t answer. There’s been no research, as far as I know, on the Victorian support for poor in other places.
Q: Angela, “Would you equate the factory owners as slave owners or were many factory owners beneficiaries of the slave trade?”
A: Dear me, I think we have to be careful. These people were not slaves. We might say that, we might use the word colloquially and say they were slave workers, but if we’re using the word properly, they were not slaves.
Q: “Did many factory owners were the beneficiaries of a slave trade?”
A: No, most were not. Most were not. Unless you’re saying, for example, that the cotton, this is the example I gave last week about Peel, Peel’s father, the importing of cotton from America with the use of slaves in the South of the States, linked in. I don’t want to get involved in this issue of slavery. I think it’s, if we’re not careful, everything gets boiled down to the issue of slavery. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant. But if you are listening and you think, “What nonsense that is because they benefited from cheap cotton,” yes, they did. You have to make your own judgements about that.
Yes, Nikki, you’re absolutely right. “A good read is Tressell’s ‘Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist.’” I am lucky enough to have bought a couple of years ago a adult comic version of the book. If you can get hold of that, it’s very good. Just Google “A Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist” and see if you can find, if you don’t want to read the whole book and it’s pretty heavy going, you can now get a very nice adult comic version.
David, oh my word, hands or hands on board. Yes, all hands on deck, hands. We should not use the word hands. In my opinion. You can disagree. I wouldn’t use the word hand except by mistake today. When I was principal of the city lit, we changed the name of the Centre for Deaf People because we thought that that was wrong and we turned it into the Centre for Deafness because that seemed to be a way of recognising the full humanity of those who were deaf. These are small things, and wherever you are, you may want to do similarly. Who is this?
Deborah. “Another author I think they graphically explained Victorian England is Anne Perry. She’s an English author who writes mysteries that are very engaging and easy to read. She has two main series and she also did a series on the First World War.” Ignorance on my part. I don’t know Anne Perry. My point about the authors I mentioned were they were contemporaries to Victorian England. That doesn’t mean to say that people writing subsequently don’t have good insights, but I was trying to emphasise the contemporary, I can’t get that word out, the contemporary nature of Dickens and of Elizabeth Gaskell and of Disraeli, but I hadn’t, I shall write that author’s name down.
Oh, Lauren says, “According to Wikipedia, Anne Perry was a convicted murderer.” Well, there you go.
Vivian writes, “Charlotte Bronte’s novel ‘Shirley’ is a good description of in issues and social unrest.” Absolutely right.
“You read out number for the 19th century,” says Nicholas. Hang on, hang on, hang on. By 1901 the figure of the population in Britain was 1.7 billion. “You read out number for 19th century, when did it expand?” 1.7 billion. It expanded exponentially throughout the 19th century. It’s a step system throughout 19th century, Nicholas.
Sandy. “When I was growing up, I thought the town hall in Sheffield was made of coal it was so black. My stone home was black. Much cleaner now.” Yes, those of us who were in Britain in the ‘50s remember all these things being black. Incidentally, the town hall in Sheffield, along with many grand buildings, like the town hall in Manchester, for example, were built in a flourish at the end of the 19th century, in a flourish of Victorian opportunism and local prestige. They felt proud of it. And that’s something that we’ve also lost, pride in local community.
Mona says, “Those of us suffering of the future that includes Trump and DeSantis don’t have a clue how to survive. England sounds simpler to deal with.” Only from a distance, Mona, I assure you.
“Technology makes worse and the AI more frightening.” Well, we, let me try and be positive. All societies throughout history have had bumps along the road of things that many people in those societies felt were wrong. If you have confidence in Western societies, whether Britain, America, or anywhere else, you have to have confidence that we will bounce back from any temporary difficulties. In Britain, without getting involved in anybody arguing, with Brexit, for example, in the states with Trump, we will bounce back from these things. I’m confident that our democracies will. What I’m not confident about is, whether we’re talking about the States, America, Australia, or Canada, whether our governmental structures are any longer sufficient. And I’m also concerned about how we approach education, curriculum and learning. But that’s my particular hobby horse.
Lorna says, no, sorry, Lorna, I don’t do illustrations because I don’t want to interrupt the flow of what I’m doing. I never do illustrations. If you want illustrations, I didn’t have any illustrations in front of me., I had books where I was reading from. If you want some illustrations, you’re welcome to look things up. I mean, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be dismissive. But I don’t do it. I do analogue teaching. And in other subjects like art, you need pictures. I don’t need pictures. You all know what a factory is. You all know what a slum is. You don’t need a picture of that. But if you do, then you can spend a happy hour or two on the internet looking up pictures.
Q: Irene, Irene, hi. “Isn’t it possible that it is the capitalist system of class the causes the two nations of haves and have nots rather than the Industrial Revolution’s factories? After all, most of our industry in Britain has gone, but we still have a gap between the haves and have nots.”
A: Well, you have to say what comes first. The Industrial Revolution factories or the class system? The class system has not remained static. The class system in Britain and elsewhere has changed. The point you make about today is well made. Industry isn’t the problem today. We still have a gap between the haves and have nots. Part of that, if you look at the government’s view about levelling up, is the legacy from the decline of industry in the North so that the North is now in decline as compared to the South. It’s a much more difficult question, I think, to answer. You’d have to look at class, maybe from the 18th century to the 21st century. And you are arguing that with class you are always going to have rich and poor, but the Marxists try to do away with class and they still ended up in an elite and a non elite.
Q: Shelly, “How would you figure in the effects of the Industrial Revolution’s basic lack of war after Napoleon?”
A: I’m not sure how to answer that question, Shelly, which means it’s a good question. “How would you figure in the effects of the Industrial Revolution’s basic lack of war?” I dunno that it had much relevance. What we can say is it’s the British empire that was a major factor in the Industrial Revolution. I’m sorry, Shelly. That is a inadequate answer. But the question is too good. I can’t answer it off the top of my head. I don’t think it did have much of an effect.
Cheryl, “The dehumanisation of workers hasn’t gone away, but the terminology changes. Part-time workers are cheaper so recently employees are not people but FTE’s, full-time equivalents.” Absolutely with you, Cheryl. Absolutely.
Oh, so sorry. Is it Simon? I think it’s Simon who made the point. You are absolutely right. Agree.
Q: Who is the author of “North and South”?
A: Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell. And Rita has written it in for you. Elizabeth Gaskell. Her husband was a Unitarian minister in Manchester and a really interesting man in his own right.
Galaxy says, “Someone once told me that rich people are just poor people with money.” No experience of being rich. I can’t answer that.
Thank you. That’s very nice of you, Rita. Thank you, Sally.
Oh well. Well, Josie has a point. “While countries still struggle with the overwhelming national international implication of industrialization urbanisation and the impact on demography and resources, water, exhumation mark the now growing tsunami of climate change doesn’t wait for people to say we’re ready.” No, climate change is really horrendously, keeps slipping back in the political world of international politics. I do not know. Are we going to have to see some horrendous tragedy in the so-called developed world for politicians to really take the issue seriously? My wife and I went swimming this afternoon just before I came on to talk, and we do daily, and the amount of rubbish in the sea, and we collect rubbish on the beach every day, and it’s just horrendous what one collects. The quantity and the variety is mind blowing.
John. “I remember reading "Hard Times” many years ago. One character remains in my mind, the terrifying headmaster of the private school. He described Mr. Gradgrind as brutal, ruthless, and totally humorous,“ and that is one of my big gripes about education today, it’s much more Mr. Gradgrind. "Facts, facts, facts,” said Dickens. We had a terrible article in the Times at the end of last week in Britain saying it’s a good job that humanities in universities are dying. I mean, for goodness sake what are people talking about? This is back to the utilitarianism that is mocked by Dickens in the figure of Mr. Gradgrind. If any of you in any of you still working in education and you haven’t read “Hard Times,” please, please read it. It tells you everything that’s wrong with education today.
Oh yes, Naomi says, “I visited Port Sunlight with a group of you years ago, we all agreed that it resembles Hampstead Garden suburbs.” Well, the person involved with Port Sunlight was Luscher, that’s why the buildings are so good. “It was thanks Leon Blum, first Jewish Prime Minister of France, who managed to stop the French Communist Party in taking control of other French social parties and organisations in 1922 at the Tours Congress.” Absolutely right. But unfortunately the Communist Party in France is not a dead duck.
Jay. “As an American, I was impressed with Saltaire. Saltaire was the work of Sir Titus Salt and it’s a fascinating place in Yorkshire where capitalism with a heart produce houses, a social umbrella, and educational workers.” Yes, lots of examples. I gave some. Like Silver and like New Lanark, like Bournville, like Port Sunlight, there’s numerous examples. I have to tell you a story about Saltaire. I took a party to visit Saltaire and we were taken around. It was still operational then. And I took my party from Manchester and we were taken around Saltaire by a retired worker. And halfway through one of my students, oh, I dread adult education visits. One of my students promptly said, in a voice that could have cut glass, she worked for the BBC. And she said, “Oh, I’m afraid you’re awfully wrong. It was never like that in this factory.” And he answered, he said, “I’m sorry, madam, but I’ve worked in this factory man and boy and I have to tell you that’s what it was like.” She said, “Do you know who you are talking to? I am a Miss Salt,” she said. And she was indeed a Miss Salt. After which he pretty well prostrated himself on the ground in front of her, so impressed was he by the family. Titus Salt was her grandfather. She was an incredible lady, an absolutely wonderful student that I had. Sorry, that’s just a personal story about Saltaire.
Merna, “Horrifyingly, some Republican states are proposing to overturn child labour laws to allow children to work in slaughterhouses.” Oh my God, is that true? I didn’t know that. “Apparently some companies have been employing immigrant children.” That is a dreadful thing to read.
And Marion has added something about Titus Salt. Not Titus Oats, Joe, Titus Salt. Titus Oats is a quite different part of history, but he was somebody important at one time.
Q: “How authentic is the TV programme 'Call The Midwife’?”
A: I’m sorry, Barry. I don’t want “Call the Midwife.” I’m ever so sorry. I don’t know, is the answer.
Oh grand, lots of people are singing about Saltaire.
I’m sorry, Lorna. No, I don’t do pictures. If I do pictures, it’ll take, I have to cut out so much and it really isn’t important to have pictures.
“Arnold Circus in the East end of London,” says Margaret, “was the first slum clearance as far as I am aware near the end of the 19th century, but the poor for whom it was built didn’t end up there.” No, one of the problems is that because they were poor, if a local government or a developer or central government wanted an air area of slums, they simply closed the place down and to hell with the people that lived there.
“In the US,” says Shelly, “there were factory towns where the workers had to live and their wages were given to the factory store, which they had to use.” Now, that is also true in Britain as well. It’s called truck money. They could only spend the money in the factory’s own shop where prices were higher, but that begins to disappear and really has disappeared by the end of the 19th century here in Britain.
Q: Oh, what an interesting question. “Do you think that professional charities’ paid staff had a negative impact on pure charitable views of Victorian England?” says David.
A: I’m not sure. It’s again another question which is excellent, but I can’t answer it. I think there are problems with charities with paid staff. We found that in Britain with Oxfam, for example. There is a lot of problems about, I think, gosh, that’s a really interesting question. Beyond my expertise to answer, but I think you’re right.
Marion. Oh, well, thanks.
Carol. “It’s on about Salitaire.” Whoever mentioned Saltaire first, you hit a nerve. You’re very, please, please go. Thanks, everyone who enjoyed it. As I said, I enjoyed. Yes, you are absolutely right, Deana. The word behemoth comes from what I would call the Old Testament, comes from the Torah, the biblical Hebrew word meaning beasts. Absolutely. And that’s why Freeman chose it as the title for his book. Absolutely.
Simon says, “Much Victorian missionary activity was aimed at alleviating the ply to the poor of empire.” Well, I think, Simon, in truth, they wanted to convert people to Christianity, and that is particularly so in Africa. And if medicine or education was a way, or even agricultural production was a way of converting people, they would take it. Yeah.
Q: Oh, Josie says, “A pro positive hands. Then what about manufacture?”
A: Yeah, but that’s, sorry to be pedantic. That’s hands with a small H and not hands with a big H. But you’re right, of course you’re right, and I’m being picky.
Q: Paula, “Could you address the matter of mortality?”
A: Yes, I will. I’ll do mortality when we come to health. Do you mind, I’ll just make a note of that, so that I don’t forget when I’m preparing the talk. Mortality. Yeah, I can talk about that. And you are right. It’s child mortality. And it’s child mortality that throws all the statistics, of course.
Abram, “How large was the Sephardic population GB and how many a Ashkenazi Jews in,” I haven’t, I’m sorry. Abram, I do not have the figures. And you could try asking Trudy, but I’m not at all sure that there are many, I’m not sure there are such figures. Let me make a note of that. I’ll see if I can find some, I don’t know. The real distinction is that the Sephardi were well integrated into Britain, the Ashkenazi were poor. And as you probably know, the Sephardi community, through its leading rabbis, tried to stop the immigration of Ashkenazi because they thought that they would bring, they would sort of lessen the opportunities of Sephardic community within Britain.
And Abraham says, “Factory workers were not slaves.” Yeah, absolutely. “That was the entire reason for the revolutions at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Get free working hands, no grains required. Then the only course was the free, same about,” not sure I followed that, sorry.
Margaret, “There’s a huge Sephardic cemetery in the east end of London. Many thanks, oh, well, you are welcome.
Oh, Rhonda answers. Good. "Barry, I absolutely love ‘Call the Midwife.’ I was told by my friend who was born in England that is is very accurate. My daughter, who is friends with a midwife, also loves the story and finds it very accurate too, as do her colleagues who find it very accurate.” Well, jolly good.
Esther. “My friend, who was a midwife on a bicycle.” That sounds like the beginning of a joke, “says it’s very accurate.”
That’s nice. Thank you whoever, Jennifer, thank you.
“Immigrant children working factories in NC and many other places in the US.” Really? Says Elaine. That really is shocking news to somebody listening in Britain.
Q: Vivian, “Do you think it would be a good idea to advise people to visit the London Metropolitan Archives, whose assets deal with the poverty of London, the work areas, also about the damage of the last war?”
A: Absolutely right. But if you visit archives, it’s not a museum, you have to know what you are looking for. And yes, you certainly can do that. There was something else, somewhere else you could, it’s gone, I was going to say somewhere else you could go.
Somebody says, oh, Margaret’s dad. “‘Call the Midwife 'is based on 'The Memories of a Midwife,’ I’ve read the book.”
Anna says, oh, sorry. “China is the factory in our children. Wifi experts can change society while the robots do our factory work. Manual labour means hand labour.” Yes, of course it does. Manual is from the Latin. I mean, there’s all sorts of problems with AI. One of the things that worries me is we, sorry, just let me check, this is something that’s been going through my head recently. One of the problems with AI, it takes away human contact. Taking away human contact is not good. Many people in modern urban societies live in little boxes, and we have less community contact than we did, even in the slums they had huge community contact. Now no one’s saying we should go back to that, but the lack of community contact seems to me to be a very worrying one with AI. The second thing that worries me about AI is what are we going to do with all that time? Oh, you and I are fine. We know what we’re going to do. But the great mass out there, what are they going to do? Cause trouble? Possibly. Become over politicised? Absolutely. AI is not a solution. We’re going to have to manage it very carefully.
Oh, I didn’t want to end on a depressing note. I feel optimistic today, and that’s where I want to leave you. Now we’ve beaten problems in the past, said Professor Freeman, we’re beat problems in the future. So forward to the future with optimism, says I. Thanks for listening, you’ve been great. Thank you all.