Industrial Society: Workers, Cities and the Struggle for Reform

Life in the shock cities

Industrial towns grew faster than anyone could plan for. Families moved from farms to cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow for factory jobs. By 1851, census figures showed that more people in England and Wales lived in towns than in the countryside, one of the first times this had happened in a large country.

Housing was crowded and cheaply built, often back-to-back rows with no running water. Sewage ran into rivers that also supplied drinking water. Smoke from coal fires darkened the sky. Diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis and cholera spread quickly. Life expectancy in some industrial districts was far lower than in the countryside.

The writer Charles Dickens described an imaginary industrial city, Coketown, in Hard Times (1854). The German businessman Friedrich Engels, who worked in Manchester, published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

Work in the factory and the mine

Factory work was ruled by the clock and the machine. Shifts of twelve hours or more, six days a week, were common in early textile mills. Fines punished lateness or talking. Machines had few safety guards, and injuries were common.

Children had always worked on farms and in family workshops, but factories and mines employed them in new ways and in large numbers: small children could crawl under machines or through narrow mine tunnels, and they were paid less. Women were also a large share of textile workers, usually paid less than men.

Work was not only in factories. Many people still worked at home, in small workshops or as servants. Domestic service was one of the largest jobs for women throughout the century.

A new class society

• The industrial middle class (factory owners, merchants, bankers, engineers, lawyers, clerks) grew rich and confident. It valued hard work, thrift, respectability and free trade. Many middle-class families held the ideal of separate spheres: men in public life and paid work, women at home.
• The working class shared the experience of wage labour, crowded housing and insecurity. Shared hardship helped create a sense of class identity, expressed through unions, mutual aid societies and political movements.
• The old landed elite kept much power, especially in government, but had to share it with the new middle class.

The gap between the ideal of separate spheres and the reality of working-class women, who had to earn wages, is a good example of how class shaped gender.

Responses: protest, organizing and reform

Direct action. Between 1811 and 1816, groups of skilled textile workers called Luddites broke machines that threatened their jobs. The government sent troops and made machine-breaking punishable by death.

Unions. British law long treated unions as illegal conspiracies. In 1834, six farm workers from Tolpuddle were sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing an oath to a union; public protests won their release. Unions were fully legalized in 1871. In Canada, the Nine-Hour Movement and the Toronto printers' strike of 1872 led Parliament to pass the Trade Unions Act that year.

Chartism. The People's Charter (1838) demanded six reforms: votes for all men over 21, a secret ballot, no property requirement for members of Parliament, payment of MPs, equal electoral districts, and annual elections. Parliament rejected huge Chartist petitions in 1839, 1842 and 1848. Yet most of the six points later became law.

Factory and mine laws. Parliament investigated conditions. The Factory Act of 1833 banned work by children under nine in textile mills, limited hours for older children and, importantly, created paid inspectors to enforce it. The Mines Act of 1842 banned women and girls, and boys under ten, from working underground. In 1847 a Ten Hours Act limited the work of women and young people in textile mills.

Public health. Edwin Chadwick's 1842 report linked disease to filth and poverty. The Public Health Act of 1848 allowed towns to create boards of health. During the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, the doctor John Snow mapped deaths and showed they clustered around one water pump on Broad Street. He persuaded officials to remove the pump's handle. His work helped prove cholera spread through contaminated water, and it is often called a founding moment of epidemiology.