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Social conditions in the industrial towns of England were examined by Peter Gaskell in his work The Manufacturing Population of England, Its Moral, Social, and Physical Conditions, and the Changes Which Have Arisen From The Use Of Steam Machinery; with an Examination of Infant Labour, Baldwin and Cradock, London, 1833. We present some of his observations:
pp. 125-127.
“Independently of these open and recognised means, which are within the reach of the labourer and his family, there are others of most extensive operation for semoralizing him, through the agency of drunkenness and its attendant vices. The lowest class of the population, in the manufacturing towns, is, to a very considerable extent, made up of Irish, who inhabit the cellars and those portions of the towns which, to the casual observer, would appear totally uninhabitable. In these places, however, is congregated a very numerous body of people, who have introduced with them the same spirit of recklessness and improvidence, with the same systematic evasion of or violent resistance to law and order, which have so long disgraced their native country, and gone far towards ruining its resources. Here, and by these individuals, illicit distillation is carried on to a great extent. It has been calculated, upon not very perfect data, that there are not less than 100 stills in constant operation in Manchester alone,* [Footnote - * During the year 1832, thirty persons were committed to the New Bailey, Manchester, for having either been detected in distilling or hawking illicit spirits. Nearly the whole of these were Irish - one half had been known to have carried on the trade before, and one-third had been previously convicted and suffered imprisonment.] producing genuine potheen of the highest strength. From many seizures which have been made, it appears that the average size of the tubs may be about thirty gallons, and if each distillery should produce no greater quantity than this, the whole amount would be very considerable; and this is drunk, be it remembered, almost exclusively by the lowest classes. Reckoning thirty gallons as the weekly produce, it would give annually 156,000 gallons, which pays no duty, and the manufacture of which is carried on under circumstances in the highest degree unfavourable to the population. This estimate is, however, most probably underrated - the difficulty of detection is extreme - occupying, as the distilleries do, sites apparently the most improbable, and unfitted for the purpose. These generally are dark cellars, having no outlet except a trap-door, opening into some obscure court, half filled with filth, or excavations dug in the sand-stone rock, beneath tenements occupied by persons either knowing nothing of their subterranean neighbours, or being in league with them. The requisite apparatus is so simple and so little expensive, that detection is no hindrance, and a seizure valueless. The fine inflicted, L30, is of no moment to the successful speculator; and if it should so happen that he is unable to pay it, the short imprisonment which is the alternative, only hardens him in crime, and turns him out upon society a more determined and experienced scoundrel.
“The introduction of a low Irish population into Manchester and the surrounding towns and districts, has unquestionably aided very materially the destruction of domestic virtues and orderly habits in the operatives. The disregard to home comforts, which renders the Irish cabin a blot upon the history of its country, is exhibited still more strikingly when seen in the midst of a large town; and it has, unfortunately, found ready imitators in a class of the community, prepared for its adoption, in some degree, by poverty, ignorance, want of morality, and a growing indisposition for home, generated by a system of labour, which, by separating families, and by exhausting their physical energies, by incessant application, rendered them ready to fly, for temporary relief, to the gin-shop, the beer-house or the whiskey dealer.”
pp. 136-143.
“It very frequently happens that one tenement is held by several families, one room, or at most two, being generally looked upon as affording sufficient convenience for all the household purposes of four or five individuals. The demoralizing effects of this utter absence of social and domestic privacy must be seen before they can be thoroughly understood, or their extent appreciated. By laying bare all the wants and actions of the sexes, it strips them of outward regard for decency - modesty is annihilated - the father and the mother, the brother and the sister, the male and the female, do not scruple to commit acts in the presence of each other, which even the savage hides from the eyes of his fellows.
“The brutalizing agency of this mode of life is very strongly displayed in the language employed by the manufacturing population, young and old alike. Coarse and obscene expressions are their household words; indecent allusions are heard pronounced from the lips of brother to sister, and from sister to brother. The infant lisps words which, by common consent, are banished general society. Epithets are bandied from mother to child, and from child to mother, and between child and child, containing the grossest terms of indecency. Husband and wife address each other in a form of speech which would be disgraceful to a brothel - and these things may be imputed in a very considerable degree to the promiscuous way in which families herd together; a way that prevents all privacy, and which, by bringing into open day things which delicacy commands should be shrouded from observation, destroys all notions of sexual decency and domestic chastity.* [Footnote - * ‘In addition to overt acts of vice, there is a coarseness and grossness of feeling, and an habitual indecency of conversation, which we would fain hope and believe are not the prevailing characteristics of our country. The effect of this upon the minds of the young will be readily conceived; and it is likely that any instruction or education, or Sunday schools, or sermons, can counteract the baneful influence, the insinuating virus, the putrefaction, the contagion of this moral depravity which reigns around them. Nil dictu visuque faedum hoc lumina tangat Intra quae puer est. - JUVENAL.’ - Enquiry, & c. p. 25,]
“It may be questioned, whether in any other quarter of the world, or in any other condition of society, such an absence of the observances of modesty and personal cleanliness can be found. Nothing can be more brutalizing - nothing can render individuals more debased in their feelings and habits - nothing can tend more powerfully to produce that personal coarseness of habits, and filthy indelicacy, which are so disgusting and repulsive in woman.
“Many of these ranges of houses are built back to back, fronting one way into a narrow court, across which the inmates of the opposite houses may shake hands without stepping out of their own doors; and the other way, into a back street, unpaved and unsewered. Most of these houses have cellars beneath them, occupied - if it is possible to find a lower class - by a still lower class than those living above them. From some recent inquiries on the subject, it would appear, that upwards of 20,000 individuals live in cellars in Manchester alone. These are generally Irish families - hand loom weavers, bricklayers’ labourers, &c. &c., whose children are beggars or match-sellers in conjunction with their mothers. The crowds of beings that emerge from these dwellings every morning, are truly astonishing, and present very little variety as to the respectability of appearance : all are ragged, all are filthy, all are squalid. They separate to pursue their various callings, either shutting up their dens till night, or leaving a child as sole occupant. A great portion of these wander about the town and its suburbs, begging or stealing, as the case may be; others hawk little matters, such as pins, matches, oranges, &c., bringing back with them any fragment of meat or bread they have been able to procure. These cells are the very picture of loathsomeness - placed upon the soil, though partly flagged, without drains, subjected to being occasionally overflowed, seldom cleaned - every return of their inmates bringing with it a farther accession of filth - they speedily become disgusting receptacles of every species of vermin which can infest the human body.
“The domestic habits of these improvident creatures are vile in the extreme - carrying their want of household decency, if possible, one step further than those which have just been described. The Irish cottier has brought with him his disgusting domestic companion the pig; for whenever he can scrape together a sufficient sum for the purchase of one of these animals, it becomes an inmate of his cellar.* [Footnote - * ‘In all respects the habitations of the Irish are most destitute. A whole family is often accommodated on a single bed, and sometimes a heap of filthy straw, and a covering of old sacking hides them in one undistinguished heap, debased alike by penury, want of economy, and dissolute habits. Frequently the inspectors found two or more families crowded into one small house, containing only two apartments, one in which they slept, and another in which they ate; and often more than one family lived in a damp cellar, containing only one room, in whose pestilential atmosphere from twelve to sixteen persons were crowded. To these fertile sources of disease were sometimes added the keeping of pigs and other animals in the house, with other nuisances of the most revolting character.’ - Dr. Kay’s pamphlet, p. 32.]
“It is here too that he displays his recklessness in another of his characteristic propensities - whiskey-drinking, an opportunity for the indulgence of which is furnished by the illicit distillers in his vicinity for a mere trifle. The disgraceful riots which are calling perpetually for the interference of the police, are mainly attributable to this cause, and a return from the lock-ups would abundantly show how terrible are the outrages inflicted upon each other during these drunken brawls. Often, indeed, the whole population of court, street, or entire district, forms a faction, in opposition to that of some other in the neighbourhood; and the cries of ‘O’Flanagan’ and ‘M’Carthy,’ are as rife as in the heart of Connaught. When their passions are roused by intoxication, most severe and often bloody conflicts ensue between them, to the disturbance and degradation of the more peaceable in habitants. Thus it appears that the inferior order of Irishmen have brought with them all their vices into the manufacturing districts, and aid powerfully by their example - independently of lowering the value of the labour of the English operative - the demoralization which marks his general character.
“Another fertile source of the licentiousness in domestic manners, exists in the number of lodging-houses, which are very abundant in all the manufacturing districts. In towns they are thickly scattered through those divisions occupied by the poor. By a survey made in Manchester in 1832, there were found very near 300 of these houses. When it is remembered that these are but the temporary asylums of want and depravity, their number, great as it is, affords no criterion for ascertaining how many persons become their inmates during the year. In another point of view, they are extremely injurious : the breaking up of families, the consequence of mill labour, drives many of those who should be sheltered under a very different roof, to take up their abode in these haunts of crime; where, if not already debased by other causes, they are speedily reduced to the very lowest ebb of moral depravity. Their influence in this respect, resembles very closely that brought about by a residence in prison; for the parties which are the habitual occupants of the one, are in turn found living in the other.
“The extraordinary sight presented by these lodging-houses during the night, are deplorable in the extreme, and must fill the heart of any man, open to the feelings of humanity, with pain and unutterable disgust. Five, six, seven beds - according to the capacity of the rooms - are arranged on the floor - there being in the generality of cases, no bedsteads, or any substitutes for them; these are covered with clothing of the most scanty and filthy description. They are occupied indiscriminately by persons of both sexes, strangers perhaps to each other, except a few of the regular occupants. Young men and young women men, wives, and their children - all lying in a noisome atmosphere, swarming with vermin, and often intoxicated. But a veil must be drawn over the atrocities which are committed : suffice to say, that villany, debauchery and licentiousness, are here portrayed in their darkest character. They serve as so many foci for crime - so many hot-beds for bringing into existence vices which might have lain dormant, if not roused into vitality by their unnatural stimulus.
“The small sum devoted to household purposes by the operative, may be determined with some accuracy, and it affords considerable information as to his habits. A family consisting of five persons may serve as an example, that being about the average number. This family will pay for rent, which includes taxes, 3s. a week for a cottage containing two rooms; and the different items of their expenditure will be somewhere as follows : tea, quarter of a pound, 1s. 2d. ; coffee, half a pound, 10d. ; bread, 3s. ; coal and candles, 1s. ; animal food [Meat], 2s. ; butter, soap, salt and cheese, 2s. 6d. ; potatoes, 1s. ; sugar, 1s. 6d. ; milk, 3d. ; - total, 16s. 3d. The allowance of the above articles is liberal, and certainly more than what the generality of families use. Against this must be placed the amount of their earnings, which when taken at the average rate of wages paid to manufacturing labourers, will be 10s. 6d. per head - total of wages, 2l. 12s. 6d. ; thus leaving a surplus of 1l. 16s. 3d. for dress and other purposes.
“Though the general appearance of the operative is squalid, and the majority of the middle aged badly dressed, the young women and girls expend considerable sums upon their persons. They exhibit in the style of dress a very striking contrast with the inhabitants of the rural districts, a distinction always observable between town and country girls. A taste for shewy [sic] clothing has been no doubt given by the extreme cheapness of printed calicoes and muslins, and indeed by the lowness of price in all manufactured articles of middling quality; and the factory girl, with her pale face and languid expression offers, when decked out in her Sunday and holiday apparel, a strange anomaly with the dirty unfurnished, and miserable home from which she issues.
“The females employed in silk mills go a step still further as to dress than the cotton spinner or weaver. Many of these are really well and handsomely clad, and present an appearance of outward respectability, equal if not superior to that of hundreds in the middle walks of life.
pp. 146-150.
“Necessity, or rather improvidence, has driven her to have recourse to labour; and that labour being continued throughout the whole day, has torn asunder those links of affection which, under almost all circumstances, has bound a mother to her offspring; and in doing this it has deprived woman of that moral characteristic, the most influential in rendering her a loveable and loving being.
“Compelled to rise early - no opportunity given for visiting home, during the day, but at the scanty and hurried meal-times - her mind and body alike enthralled by her occupation - her social affections destroyed - her frame little calculated to furnish her child with support, she becomes inaccessible to its appeals to her tenderness - leaves it to the care of a hireling, or young person, a mere infant - suffers it to be filthy and half-starved; and, as its faculties develop, takes no interest in keeping it from the contagion of vice and grossness.
“A system which thus depraves and perverts, or which demands those times and occasions a mother should devote to her infant - which, from various concurring causes, so far influences her domestic habits as to interfere with the development of her social affections, and which, from its continued action upon her, at length destroys or buries them beneath a load of grossness and sensuality - must be wrong.
“If a mother’s love is thus injured - a love bringing as it does from the very groundwork of her moral nature, no wonder can be excited that the relations of husband and wife are perverted, and, in place of presenting a picture of what love and domestic felicity should be,, developing a scene of indecency - wanting everything which would render home a place for pure and chaste pleasures. The chastity of marriage is but little known or exercised; husband and wife sin equally, and an habitual indifference to sexual rights is generated, which adds one other item to assist in the destruction of domestic habits.
“The delicacy of comportment, which is the palladium of married love, has no existence : separated during the whole of the day, exposed to vicious example, surrounded by a stimulant yet enervating atmosphere, the intercourse of man and wife loses its protecting influence upon the animal appetites, and ceases to become a bar to licentiousness and sexual profligacy. After their day’s labour, they meet at night, not as those who love and have been separated; not to indulge in the endearments proper to their condition, but to drink and quarrel; to behave indecently, or to taunt each other in terms of beastiality. The fountains of domestic purity being thus poisoned, the sanctity of marriage rites thus profaned - social virtue is driven from her last strong hold, and leaves them prey to obscenity, coarseness, selfishness, and everything that is pernicious and abominable.
“No amenity of manners, no gentleness of behaviour, mark the home of a factory labourer in a crowded population; no regard for conjugal obligations, no bashful reserve, no cultivation of those finer sensibilities, which can and do shed a bright gleam of pure radiance over married life, when compsoed of its proper elements.
“If the domestic manners of the parents are thus depraved, their example cannot tend to remove the influence of the evil lessons taught their children at the mill - the gin or beer-shop - in the streets, or lodging-houses. Brother and sister lose that connexion [sic] which ought naturally and properly to exist between them : Disregard for each other’s welfare, a separation of interests and feelings, a forgetfulness of what is due, one to another - destroy those bonds which should link together the hearts of individuals springing from the same source, endeared as they ought to be by the memory of their younger years - years which, unfortunately for them, have been passed in total disregard for home duties, uncared for likewise by their natural guardians, and separated at an early age, to be exposed to a continuance of the same vices which deprived their homes of all beneficial influence upon their moral and social development, and inured to conduct vicious in itself and tending to destroy all the nobler and better feelings of their nature.
“Neither is the conduct of parent to child and of child to parent, a whit more engaging; but is as remote as possible from the just observance of filial and parental duties. Insubordination on the part of the child, cruelty and oppression on that of the parent; quarreling, fighting - a total alienation of affection; and, finally, a separation from home, at an age when parental control and proper domestic discipline are essential to the future wellbeing of the child.
“The instances of proper feelings between parents and children are very uncommon : those offices which should be mutually rendered are neglected; an utter disregard for the well or evil-doing of either party is exhibited. If they still live together, held by mutual interests, the morals of his children form no part of the anxiety of the parent, so long as they bring their usual weekly allowance to the fund for their support. It is no unusual thing to hear a mother detail a course of wickedness and licentiousness on the part of her son, bewailing his neglected time and his lost money, without once adverting to the moral criminality of his career, or the evil of its example upon the rest of the family; or a father telling the tale of his daughter’s dishonour, and cursing her for the neglect of her work, without even hinting at her depravity, or expressing sorrow for her moral declension. The brother will relate his sister’s wanderings from the path of chastity without a blush; and the sister detail her brother’s promiscuous intercourse amongst her own companions, without any apparent feeling of its impropriety.
“A household thus constituted, in which all the decencies and moral observances of domestic life are constantly violated, reduces its inmates to a condition in nowise elevated above that of the savage. Recklessness, improvidence, unnecessary poverty, starvation, drunkenness, prostitution, filth, parental cruelty and carelessness, filial disobedience, neglect of conjugal rights, absence of maternal love, destruction of brotherly and sisterly affection, bad men, bad women, bad citizens, are its constituents, and the results of such a combination are moral degradation, ruin of domestic enjoyments, and social misery.”
Robert Southey, using the pseudonym Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, wrote on poverty in England in his book Letters From England, George Dearborn, New York, 1836, letter no. XXVI.
pp. 50-52.
“WITH us charity is a religious duty, with the English it is an affair of law. We support the poor by alms; in England a tax is levied to keep them from starving; and, enormous as the amount of this tax is, it is scarcely sufficient for the purpose. This evil began immediately after the dissolution of the monasteries. They who were accustomed to receive food at the convent door, where they could ask it without shame because it was given as an act of piety, had then none to look up to for bread. A system of parish taxation was soon therefore established, and new laws from time to time enacted to redress new grievances, the evil still outgrowing the remedy, till the poor laws have become the disgrace of the statutes, and it is supposed that at this day a tenth part of the whole population of England receive regular parish pay.
“The disposal of this money is vested in certain officers called overseers. The office is so troublesome that the gentry rarely or never undertake it, and it usually devolves upon people rather below the middle rank, who are rigidly parsimonious in the distribution of their trust. If they were uniformly thus frugal of the parish purse it would be laudable, or at least excusable; but where their own enjoyments are concerned, they are inexcusably lavish of the money collected for better purposes. On every pretext for parish business, however slight, a dinner is ordered for the officers. While they indulge themselves they deal hardly by the poor, and give reluctantly what they cannot withhold. The beadsman at the convent door receives a blessing with his pittance, but the poor man here is made to feel his poverty as a reproach; his scanty relief is bestowed ungraciously and ungraciously received; there is neither charity in him that gives nor gratitude in him that takes. Nor is this the worst evil : as each parish is bound to provide for its own poor, an endless source of oppression and litigation arises from the necessity of keeping out all persons likely to become chargeable. We talk of the liberty of the English, and they talk of their own liberty’ but there is no liberty in England for the poor. They are no longer sold with the soil it is true; but they cannot quit the soil if there be any probability or suspicion that age or infirmity may disable them. If in such a case they endeavour to remove to some situation where they hope more easily to maintain themselves, where work is more plentiful or provisions cheaper, the overseers are alarmed, the intruder is apprehended as if he were a criminal and sent back to his own parish. Wherever a pauper dies that parish must be at the cost of his funeral; the instances therefore have not been wanting of wretches in the last stage of disease having been hurried away in an open cart, upon straw, and dying upon the road. Nay, even women in the very pains of labour have been driven out, because the birthplace of the child would be its parish. Such acts do not pass without reprehension; but no adequate punishment can be inflicted, and the root of the evil lies in the laws.
“The principle upon which the poor laws seem to have framed is this; The price of labour is conceived to be adequate to the support of the labourer. If the season be unusually hard, or his family larger than he can maintain, the parish then assists him; rather affording a specific relief than raising the price of labour, because, if wages were increased, it would injure the main part of the labouring poor instead of benefitting them : a fact, however mortifying to the national character, sufficiently proved by experience. They would spend more money at the alehouse, working less and drinking more, till the habits of idleness and drunkenness, strengthening each other, would reduce them to a state of helpless and burthensome poverty. Parish pay, therefore, is a means devised for increasing the wages of those persons only to whom the increase is really advantageous, and at times only when it is really necessary.
“Plausible as this may first appear it is fallacious, as all reasonings will be found which assume for their basis the depravity of human nature. The industrious by this plan are made to suffer for the spendthrift. They are prevented from laying by the surplus of their earnings for the support of their declining years, lest others not so provident should squander it. But the consequence is, that the parish is at last obliged to support both; for, if the labourer in the prime of his youth and strength cannot earn more than his subsistence, he must necessarily in his old age earn less.
“When the poor are incapable of contributing any longer to their own support they are removed to what is called the workhouse. I cannot express to you the feeling of hopelessness and dread with which all the decent poor look on to this wretched termination of a life of labour. To this place all vagrants are sent for punishment; unmarried women with child go here to be delivered; and poor orphans and base born children are brought up here till they are of age to be apprenticed off : the other inmates are those unhappy people who are utterly helpless, parish idiots and madmen, the blind and the palsied, and the old who are fairly worn out. It is not in the nature of things that the superintendents of such institutions should be gentle-hearted, when the superintendence is undertaken merely for the sake of the salary; and in this country religion is out of the question. There are always enough competitors for the management among those people who can get no better situation; but, whatever kindness of disposition they may bring with them to the task, it is soon perverted by the perpetual sight of depravity and suffering. The management of children who grow up without one natural affection - where there is none to love them and consequently none whom they can love - would alone be sufficient to sour a happier disposition than is suually brought to the government of a workhouse.
“To this society of wretchedness the labouring poor of England look on as their last resting place on this side of the grave and, rather than enter abodes so miserable, they endure the severest privations as long as it is possible to exist. A feeing of honest pride makes them shrink from a ace where guilt and poverty are confounded; and it is heart-breaking for those who have reared a family of their own to be subjected in their old age to the harsh and unfeeling authority of persons younger than themselves, neither better born nor better bred. They dread also the disrespectful and careless funeral which public charity, or rather law, bestows and many a wretch denies himself the few sordid comforts within his reach that he may hoard up enough to purchase a more decent burial, a better shroud, or a firmer coffin, than the parish will afford.
“The wealth of this nation is their own boast and the envy of all the rest of Europe yet in no other country is there so much poverty - nor is poverty any where else attended with such actual suffering. Poor as our own country is, the poor Spaniard has resources and comforts which are denied to the Englishman above all, he enjoys a climate which rarely or never subjects him to physical suffering. Perhaps the pain - the positive bodily pain which the poor here endure from the cold may be esteemed the worst evil of their poverty. Coal is every where dear except in the neighbourhood of the collieries and especially so in London, where the number of the poor is of course greatest. You see women raking the ashes in the streets, for the sake of the half-burnt cinders. What a picture does one of their houses present in the depth of winter ! the old cowering over a few embers - the children shivering in rags, pale and livid - all the activity and joyousness natural to their time of life chilled within them. The numbers who perish from diseases produced by exposure to cold and rain, by unwholesome food, and by the want of enough even of that, would startle as well as shock you. Of the children of the poor hardly one third are reared.
“During the late war the internal peace of the country was twice endangered by scarcities. Many riots broke out, though fewer than were apprehended, and though the people on the whole behaved with exemplary patience. Now were the rich deficient in charity. There is no country in the world where money is so willingly given for public purposes of acknowledged utility. Subscriptions were raised in all parts, and associations formed, to supply the distressed with food either gratuitously or at a cheaper rate than the market price. But though the danger was felt and confessed, and though the military force of London was called out to quell an incipient insurrection, no measures have been taken to prevent a return of the evil. With all its boasted wealth and prosperity England is at the mercy of the seasons. One unfavourable harvest occasions dearth; and what the consequences of famine would be, in a country where the poor are already so numerous and so wretched, is a question which the boldest statesman dares not ask himself. When volunteer forces were raised over the kingdom the poor were excluded; it was not thought safe to trust them with arms. But the peasantry are and ought to be, the strength of every country; and wo [sic] to that country where the peasantry and the poor are the same.
“Many causes have contributed to the rapid increase of this evil. The ruinous wars of the present reign, and the oppressive system of taxation pursued by the late premier, are among the principal. But the manufacturing system is the main cause it is the inevitable tendency of that system to multiply the number of the poor, and to make them vicious, diseased, and miserable.
“To answer the question concerning the comparative advantages of the savage and social states, as Rosseau has done, is to commit high treason against human nature, and blasphemy against Omniscient Goodness; but they who say that society ought to stop where it is, and that it has no further amelioration to expect, do not less blaspheme the one and betray the other. The improvements in society never reach the poor: they have been stationary, while the higher classes were progressive. The gentry of the land are better lodged, better accommodated, and better educated than their ancestors; the poor man lives in as poor a dwelling as his forefathers when they were slaves of the soil, works as hard, is worse fed and not better taught. His situation, therefore, is relatively worse. There is, indeed, no insuperable bar to his rising into a higher order - his children may be tradesmen, merchants, or even nobles - but this political advantage is no amendment of his actual state. The best conceivable state for man is that wherein he has the full enjoyment of all his powers, bodily and intellectual. That is the lot of the higher classes in Europe; the poor enjoy neither - the savage only the former. If, therefore, religion was out of the question, it had been happier for the poor man to have been born among savages than in a civilized country, whence he is in fact the victim of civilization.”
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