A growth in productivity and new industrial employment prevented disaster: if living standards hardly improved, they did not collapse. English wages, already very high by world standards, remained so. In most of continental Europe, where living standards did indeed deteriorate as the population boomed, real wages dropped to half or a third of those in England. The visiting French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville thought that “the English poor appear almost rich compared to the French poor”.
But what about living conditions? Were they not appalling? Given the explosive growth of the towns and cities, some were. But Engels’s famous denunciation of the filth of Manchester, which he described as the “degradation” of a new industrial proletariat, was in fact something quite different: the overcrowded slums of pre-industrial Manchester failing to cope with an influx of Irish refugees.
What Engels was really describing was what poverty would be without an industrial revolution, with Irish refugees living in conditions more like rural poverty. Of course, his aim was political, as was that of the Hammonds, who blamed the ruling class for the sufferings of the poor: “the disinherited peasants that are the shadow of its wealth … the exiled labourers that are the shadow of its pleasures … the villages sinking in poverty and crime and shame that are the shadow of its power and pride.” Thompson’s sympathies were similar.
So to a degree were those of Dickens. But again, if we take a comparative view, it is hard not to conclude that Dickens’s contemporaries were less heartless and incompetent than he shows them. Infant mortality in 1839 was 151 per 1,000 in England (comparable with that of Afghanistan in 2010); but in France it was 160, in Belgium 185, and in southern Germany 285.
So is there another vision of Dickensian poverty? Yes, if we look more carefully. The industrializing economy coped with huge population rises, and from around 1850 there were substantial increases in real wages and mass consumption. The exploding towns were unhealthy (though so were ancient cities), but less so than elsewhere. The British state, contrary to conventional assumptions, was unusually interventionist in sanitary and workplace regulation.
Most important of all, poorer people were helping themselves, in families, workshops, neighbourhoods, churches and pubs, where friendly societies and trade unions were born, and where a new society and culture was being created. The real place on which Disraeli based his hell-hole Wodgate was Willenhall, a Black Country lock-making town. But Disraeli, drawing on an official report, left out the Sunday Schools and chapels, and the finding that despite industrial pollution “the inside of the poorest houses is [often] perfectly clean”.
Poor people also had rights to financial help under the Poor Law, and were quick to stand up for them by applying to Overseers of the Poor and, if dissatisfied, appealing to the magistrates. Tocqueville was scandalised to see old men, unemployed labourers and pregnant girls doing so unblushingly before the Justices of the Peace.
Poor people themselves did not necessarily share the pessimism either of contemporary upper-class commentators or of later historians. The rural poor, especially young people underemployed in over-populated villages, found in towns and factories an escape from dependency, chronic poverty and exclusion from adult life and marriage. However risky and accident-prone, a move to town meant more regular work, money in their pockets, freedom, the chance of family life, and exciting new social and cultural opportunities. Judging from their own writings, many working people felt not only that they were living in a rapidly changing world, but that it was changing for the better.
Typical was a Wiltshire carpenter, John Bennett, looking back later in life on his rural childhood in the 1790s: “what troublesome times we had during my bringing up,” whereas today “the working classes in my opinion, was never so well off”.
There was, however, a bitter irony. The traditional and relatively humane Poor Law, which has been described as the biggest system of wealth redistribution in the world, was slashed by reformers in 1834. This caused huge suffering and discontent, memorably evoked by Dickens, but the authors of this disaster were not black-hearted Tory reactionaries, but high-minded Liberal modernisers — brought to power by the Great Reform Act of 1832.
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