Andrew's Wiki
People British Economy

Overall Growth, 1830-1914

• By 1914, UK produces 7x more goods/services than in 1830
  • Population has doubled
  • Per person, consumption has tripled and a half
    • Includes what is bought or sold, not invisible stuff (home garden, women’s work, etc)
    • Everyone gets richer, everyone’s income increases
    • Although the range of earnings did not change, so still similar distribution of poorer and wealthier
  • Yet, average earnings in 1991 5.5x more than in 1914
    • Why? more extreme division of poor and rich
• Healthier (taller)
  • 1830s-60s: shorter, less healthy
  • 1860s-70s and later: taller, healthier
• Longer life-span
  • Infant mortality high, only slightly better as century wears on
  • Biggest change in survival rate of kids 1-14
  • Also, 15-44 don’t die as often, either
• Resistance to disease increases
  • Development of treatments and vaccines not really helping mortality rates yet
  • Control of food, water, and sewage only help a little
  • Mostly because you fight disease better: less likely to die if you get sick
    • Why? Better “nutritional status” due to rising standard of living.
      • Love and care given to children, as well as food intake, warmth, and housing
• Better homes (better kitchens, bathrooms)
• Better infrastructure: roads, transportation, public buildings; government sponsored utilities: light, power, water, and sewage service
• More leisure time
• Why?
  • Mostly, increase in investment and more efficient workers
  • Population Growth: more people, you have bigger employment pool, more to sell to
    • Malthus: population increasing at faster rate than the means of subsistence, therefore checks to population will occur: positive (famine, disease) and preventative (later, fewer marriages; abstinence)
      • Fears mostly stop by mid-century: population growth leads to economic growth, not starvation or revoultion
    • 1826-1830: spur of population b/c women marrying younger, more extramarital births
    • After 1830, birth rate decreasing again (controlling fertility, later marriages), and people spend money on things, not kids
    • Increasing life expectancy
    • You have a greater number of smaller households, which lead to a total increasing population, which is overall younger than before 1830
  • More productivity
  • Immigration/emigration
    • Immigration to England from rest of Europe nearly counterbalances emigration of English to US, Canada, and Australia (but net loss of about 2 million from 1861-1911, with emigration from England increasing during this period and the peak at 1880s)
    • Moving not so violent: usually, they moved to places they knew something about, were well-informed about opportunities there, not blindly going
    • More workers
    • Workers worked harder, more efficiently: better education and more food
      • 1870s: compulsory primary education
    • Machines help out
  • Standardization (screw-thread)
  • Inventions (electricity, gas lighting, trains, steam power, telegraph, telephone)
  • Empire, ie, enlargement of trade overseas and increase in investment
    • NOTE: It seems to me that the modernists often react to these very forces of economic growth: standardization, bureaucracy
• Changes in production
  • Decline of agricultural production
    • In 1830s, agriculture still employs majority of population
    • Agricultural Revolution: 1830s investment
      • With rising population and thus demand, farmers demand better:
      • Enclosure
      • New crops
      • Soil science
    • Corn Laws
      • Tariffs on imported food
      • Repealed in 1846, Sir Robert Peel: movement towards free trade
      • Farmers face more competition, see falling prices, respond w/improvements and cutting labor
    • Parliament cares mostly about free trade, not about domestic farmers
  • Growth of big business
  • Women enter workforce (except in agriculture at rural areas, in which jobs for women decrease)
  • Domestic service
  • “Shopocracy”
• Growth Pattern
• “Trade cycle:” every nine years, economy moves from depression to recovery and back again
  • Depends on fate of overseas trade: success of British exports
  • By end of each cycle, production has increased
  • A stressful time
• New types of jobs
  • Census takers in 1851 classified jobs under 51 headings
    • In 1911, 470 different jobs!

Problems

• Busts
  • 1830s: manufacturing
  • 1840s: “hungry forties”
  • 1846-8: Irish Potato Famine (1-1.5 million die)
  • 1860s: finance and cotton
    • 1860s: “cotton famine” during US Civil War in Lancashire (no supply of cotton)
    • Serious doubts about British economy begin
    • Paris Exposition 1867 and Columbian Exposition 1893 make them worry about Fr and Am, but they’re also worried about Ge
  • 1880s: agriculture
  • 1890s: manufacturing
• Great Depression
  • 1873-1896
  • Low prices
  • By 1896, bankruptcies have more than doubled from when bust began
  • Recovers by 1914
• Causes of Busts
  • British exports fail
  • Short supply of gold
• Underemployment and unemployment
  • Porters, seasonal labor, dock-labor
  • Agricultural labor sometimes hired by day or even by hour (or at hiring fairs for 1 yr)
  • “Sweated labor:” unskilled, cheap labor readily available, so readily available that they are given low waves
  • Most enlistments in military occurred from unemployment
  • Used to manufacture mass goods
• Inequality
  • Types
    • By class
      • More than half the population does not have enough shelter, warmth, food
      • About 30% truly in want (some can’t afford to bury their dead for weeks)
      • Crime: generally decreases over time, esp with property crime, but drunkenness and violence increase during downswings of economy (despite constant fears of middle class, which are funny b/c most property crimes were committed by the poor against the poor anyway)
      • Marx migrates to UK in 1849
      • Slums are in plain sight
      • Literally, upper classes “looked down” on lower classes b/c height diff: stunted, malnourished (thus, people think they’re a diff race) – not enough protein, vulnerable to disease
      • Women and children undernourished to keep breadwinner healthy and active
      • Boer War shows people unhealthy recruits, public outcry
      • 1834: New Poor Law: less outdoor aid, creation of workhouses, punitive charity, new ideology of individual effort: support only given to those in workhouses (charities follow suit: only helps injured, aged, children)
    • By region
      • London loses shipping, but has tons of manufacturing and gains suburbs
      • Small manufacturing towns crop up
      • Seaside resorts pop up
    • By age
      • Inequalities among children often the greatest
      • 1830s, 40s: banned work in mines, chimneys; hours limited
      • Before marriage, greatest disposable income and independence
      • No real age for retirement standardized: work until you can’t stand it
    • By gender
      • Work habits: before, in farming and craft and shopkeeping, women work with husbands; later, in factories, increasing separation
      • Increasing lack of ability for women in rural areas to supplement men’s work and thus help earn family income
      • Of course some women liked no having to work outside home, esp in working class b/c that way you have more leisure (139), aren’t a “drudge” b/c don’t have to do 3 jobs, but only 2 (kids and housekeeping)
      • 1840s, Chartists supported women’s votes
      • 1869, property-owning women allowed to vote in local elections
      • 1870s-80s Married Women’s Property Acts (so their property doesn’t just become their husband’s)
      • 1891: finally, a law that says men can’t beat their wives
      • Edwardian Suffragettes lead to women getting vote, 1928 suffrage complete
• Foreign competition
  • Of foreign goods on export market
  • Of use of foreign goods for domestic production
  • Progress of Germany and US in particular grows faster than Britain’s progress
• Overall, though many historians (as well as popular contemporary accounts) lay claims of not progressing as much as it should, actual facts do not show any particular fault. Simply, Brit economy, esp in latter half of this period, did not rise as quickly as US, Ger, or other industrializing countries.

Risk and Change

• Victorians liked change b/c they wielded force over nature, but not its social effects
• Life was risky, as Samuel Smiles’ business books encouraged risk-taking
  • Death: 1850, 1 in every 12.5 working-age men and women died (compared to 1 in 44 in 1980); 1 in ever 13.3 infants children died (1 in 281 now)
  • Illness, disablement
  • Growing old, earn less
  • Having children, earn less
  • Trade cycles
  • Seasonal fluctuation in work availability
• How to survive problems, to balance finely above ruin
  • Women’s credit networks (see Davidoff below)
  • Shopkeepers often help to balance out the diff through credit system
  • Taking in lodgers
  • Going to cheaper lodgings
  • Pawning
• New Poor Law and new attitudes about charity get strict
• Contaminated food, milk, and water, esp milk
  • Milk diluted with (often contaminated) water, preserved for transport by dangerous substances
  • No wonder the honey stuff in Buddenbrooks and emphasis on milk in portrayals of farm life!
  • End of 19th century, desire for “pure food” increases
• Contaminated paint, esp the favorite green color which had arsenic in it
  • Esp wallpaper: “killer wallpaper”
• Pollution from use of coal in homes
  • Poor ventilation
  • Rickets in children, vulnerability to other illnesses, b/c not exposed to sunlight
  • Respiratory diseases
• Occupational dangers
  • Hard work, excessive hours
  • Miners, bargemen, inn-keepers (alcohol, smoke, tuberculosis), chimney-sweeps, potters (lead poisoning) among most dangerous
  • Both deaths from immediate accident and from accumulating diseases
• Gambling increases, not just the rich anymore
• Help for lower class: burial clubs and other small societies
  • Mostly skilled laborers helping their fellows in the same biz
  • “Friendly societies” help the injured and ill
• Middle-class risk
  • Security: in the Funds (government securities, low-risk) or lodging
  • Insecurity: business families
    • before 1855: limited liability only for railways/some chartered companies: everyone else completely risking it
    • Bankruptcy: “draconian,” lost everything
    • Possibility of debtor’s prison even up to 1869
  • Bank failures common
  • Sea transport not fail-proof
  • Not enough knowledge about supply, demand, prices, etc, to make good decisions with
• Growth of insurance
  • By 1860s, well-known and common, particularly fire insurance
  • Growth of life insurance (mostly for funerals)
  • New types: automobile insurance, railway accident insurance, theft, professional liability
• In a risky society, social misdemeanors could affect your employment or financial well-being, not just social life (atmosphere of credit)
  • Sexual behavior, drinking only in private homes or clubs, dress, etiquette, living within means
  • “Deference, respectability, independence”
• Failure is seen as your fault, and consequences do ensue.

Cities

• Where?
  • Old market centers and regional centers develop, and new textile/metal towns, surburb towns outside London, and new resort towns: Brighton, Cheltenham, Hastings, Torquay, Eastbourne
• Urbanization
  • 1831: 34% population lives in towns/cities over 10,000 folks
  • 1911: 70% do (and 64% in towns over 50,000)
• Myth-busting
• Urban population increase not mostly due to migration
  • There was movement the opposite way, too
  • Most of this change due to natural increase within cities (more reproduction there than in country)
• New urban population not actually displaced farm workers forced to move to city for factory jobs: not a violent or sudden change for most of them
• Buildings and Infrastructure Activity
  • Increasing homes, jails, hospitals, offices, shops, factories, workshops
  • Small tradespeople and retiring middle class folks use savings to buy property as a nest egg for retirement: lots of property is owned in this way
  • Building ventures done by individual craftsman employing their own labor to be sold to entrepreneurs in the housing market: not large-scale corporate ventures
  • London not really centralized in terms of infrastructure management until 1888
  • Outside these large towns, some “municipal socialism” (67)
  • 10% of domestic income devoted to developing urban areas by 1900
• Why?
  • Better economic prospects
• More dangerous than country, where death rates were lower
  • But they do improve
  • By 1911, cities nearly as healthy
• Gross
  • Overstuffed cemeteries
  • Thames “a sewer” that smelled awful and looked opaque
• Human Capital
  • Incl. investments in “education, training, health, and migration”
  • Education: no consolidation in 1830, but people learn through Sunday schools and village schools pretty well; by 1914, formal compulsory system present
    • Fights among religious denominations for control over education was what largely kept centralization down
    • Primary education to age 12-3 (industrial classes had this by 1914)
    • Secondary education for middle classes, incl. new universities
    • Upper class had “public schools” and university system

Household Composition

• Servants and Lodgers in 1851
  • Servants: 16% of households
  • Lodgers: 12% of households
• Most people were renters
• Number of total houses increasing substantially: building and furnishing homes common (59)
  • 15-20% of “capital expenditure” spend on private homes
  • 6% of total consumer spending devoted to household goods
• Houses are bigger, have more amenities
  • Exceptions existed, however (Manchester 1911: less than half of homes have toilets 60)
• Growth of suburbs, very prized
  • “Garden suburbs” of Letchworth, Welwyn very popular
• Gardens prized
  • Flower beds
  • Garden gnome! (from Germany 1880s)
• Growth of building industry
  • Building trades a huge industry: masons, plumbers (highest), bricklayers, carpenters, joiners (next highest(
  • In 1911, fifth highest industry of employment (metal manufacture, commerce, agriculture, mining/quarrying, then building)
• Basic Victorian Home
  • Brick with stone ornaments
    • Bricks “handmade from clays, dug by hand” (130) from only a few spots in UK
    • 1856: brick-making machines invented, which can use lots of stone/clay types
  • Two rooms up
  • Two rooms down
  • Extension for kitchen, scullery, washroom/bathroom
  • Attic for servants and/or kids and/or storage
  • One bay window at least
  • Iron railing for garden wall
  • Tiles to the front door
  • Stained glass or molded panel door
  • Wooden inside
  • Wallpaper, mirrors, lead pipes, marble/faux marble fireplace
    • Wallpaper: under 4 million yards produced per year in 1860s, up to almost 360 million yards in 1874 (9000% increase)
• Sidenote: Crystal Palace
  • First prefabricated structure!

Work

• Early 19th c: division between home and work doesn’t really exist
  • Families worked together
• Historically, separation occurs first for middle class, then for artisans, then for laborers/working class
  • More and more work divorced from home
• Women: as the change occurs, they stop working too:
  • 1851: only 25% married women not working
  • 1911: only 10% do work
  • For working-class women, roles redefined as home, children, etc
    • I never really realized that these jobs really only became obviously women’s ones during this period: I thought it had always been thought of like that… No wonder there was such a big deal about the spheres: they’d not existed before.
    • In a sense, families move from 2-income household to 1-income
• By 1914, separation clear and entrenched
  • Exception: women, some artisan-craftsmen
• Work more and more getting formal
  • Less about being with neighbors, relatives
  • More about arriving to a place at a certain time, near strangers
  • Work more disciplined
  • Work hours formalized, the work-week established
  • Artificial lighting eliminates seasonality of work schedule
• Work time
  • Traditional farm and manual work had been about 10 hours a day
  • Textile workers overworked
  • 1847 Ten Hours’ Act: ten-hour work day max
  • 1870s: nine-hour days most likely
    • 1870s saw the reduction of work week by 15% (form about 65 hours/week to 56 hours/week)
    • Efficiency rose, however, so production isn’t affected negatively
  • Manual workers worked longer than non-manual (exception: shop workers)
• Holidays
  • Saturday half-holiday
  • Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and some regional holidays
  • Bank Holidays Acts, 1871, 1875 protect those holidays
  • Paid holidays: 1890s for some skilled jobs
• Commutes
  • Over time, get longer
  • Better transportation allowed it
• Types of work
  • Agricultural jobs decline, even faster than in other 1st world countries
    • 9% by 1911
  • Service jobs rise
  • Manufacturing jobs hold steady, accounting for about half of all British jobs, from 1841-1911
    • Highest percentage of manufacturing workers in world
  • Mining jobs double!
    • 1841: over 200,000 miners
    • 1911: over 1.2 million miners
    • Why? Growth in manufacture and building construction
• Women
  • Service sector: slowly, professional, communications, and transportations jobs begin to encroach upon and surpass the domestic service sector
• Interchangeable parts
  • 18th century, and practically up to 1850, goods made individually even when mass produced
    • Approximations worked fine
    • Often required hand finishing
  • Last half of 19th century in Britain and US, “replicated to fine tolerances:” pieces made to fit perfectly
    • Joseph Whitworth, engineer, first true interchangeable parts: screws and bolts
    • Blueprints: could go round the world, enhanced British engineering prestige
  • Effects: “hand skills devalued,” but still needed for big machines or luxury items; and machine culture could go anywhere, be universalized

Communications and Transportation

• Railway
  • Carries passengers from 1830 onward
  • Carried perishable goods
    • Agricultural specialization
  • Help to relieve in-city traffic (though at first were messes!)
  • Class division
    • First, second, and third class
    • Special rates for workers and clerks (separate times, of course)
    • Contributes to segregation of classes into distinct neighborhoods
• Trams, buses, etc
  • Those and railways help separate home and work
  • Horses couldn’t take Victorians where they needed to go
    • Would’ve required too many horses!
    • Horses have to be changed too often
• Postal service
  • Letters increase tremendously
• Telegraphs
  • First company set up for private messages, 1846

World Economic Power

• Britain is the biggest investor in the world
  • Owned triple the assets of Fr, Ger, and US together
• Of world trade, it makes and exports 25% (1913)
• Imports 23% of its goods; exports 15% of theirs; 1855
• Largest empire ever
  • Its goods create sense of home for Britons in empire
• Increasing variety of consumer goods available
• Prices of imports decline
• Despite loud fears about imported goods, Britain only gained by its trading
  • Circular: profits used to invest more abroad
• Unions
  • 1799-1800 Combination Acts
    • Parliament outlaws unions b/c of Fr Rev
    • But not effective
    • Repealed 1824-5
  • Some given special legislation to exist
    • 1880s: 500,000 trade union members
    • By WWI, half of manual laborers in unions
  • Still, lots of resistance
    • Strikes/pickets illegal
    • Strikers often dismissed
  • What did they do?
    • Most early ones were of skilled workers (engineers, printers, cotton workers, miners, shipwrights
      • Sought benefits: help for finding jobs, sick leave
      • Resembled the “friendly societies”
    • 1850s: organized unions designed for all workers of particular industry to help regulate supply of labor, make it scarce, thus protect their interests
    • 1868: Trades Union Congress (national rep)
    • 1900: Creation of Labour Party, the voice of trade unions
    • 1907: Liberal gov gives legal sanction/protection to unions
  • What did they achieve?
    • Women and children helped by philanthropists like Chadwick
    • But unions did do other things: health and safety measures, for example
    • Probably didn’t get raised wages, but did protect them from being cut
    • Changed nature of employee-employer relations: formalized
    • Signaled growing political power of working class

Agriculture and Food

• Popular conception of the timeless agricultural world, unchanging and timeless against the hectic pattern of urban and industrial change—untrue!
  • Also “pastoral idyll” is myth: women, children, and men all worked long, back-breaking days
• After Napoleonic Wars, Corn Laws basically prevent the importation of foodstuffs at the request/pleas/threats of landowners and farmers
  • Protectionism in favor of producers, not the food buyers
  • Creates artificially high wheat prices
  • Lots of agitation around them in 30s and 40s for free trade
  • 1842: Sir Robert Peel replaces tariffs with income tax
  • 1846: Repeal of Corn Laws
    • Price of loaf of bread consistently decreases from repeal of Corn Laws down to outbreak of WWI: almost in half from 1830 to 1913
    • Overall prices of foodstuffs fall about 10% (fruit, veggies, grains)
  • PROBLEM: Now, in 1840s, agricultural producers must face foreign competition: also butchers, flower growers, carters, people involved in making agricultural machinery, people involved in agricultural transport, etc
• Major Changes
  • Increased demand
  • Changing tastes
  • Inhabitants leaving for overseas or for cities
  • Changes in regional production patterns: different things growing
    • More pastoral farming in central and western England and Scotland
    • Eastern England focuses on grains, mostly wheat but also oats, barley
    • Dairy in southern and north-west England and Scotland
    • More orchards and vegetables-as-cash-crops
  • Enhanced productivity due to advanced procedures and machines
    • Machines: milking machines, threshers, reaping machines
    • Fewer workers: by 1914, agricultural laborers an insignificant part of population
    • 1830-60: Agricultural Revolution
      • Enclosure
      • More investment in buildings, employees, and changes/scientific farming—called “High Farming”
      • New crops
      • Old crops made better
      • Increasing output
      • Increasing prices
• But increasing prices stop: 1860-1914, they fall dramatically
  • Response of landowners (95% of land tenanted out): try to exercise political muscle, but fail
  • Response of tenant farmers: ask landowners for help, invest money themselves in their farm, try new crops
• Better Food
  • Better in quality, quantity, variety
    • Less reliant on bread and potatoes alone
    • More meat and dairy
    • Sugar consumption skyrockets
  • Protection against adulteration of foods (ie, chalk not allowed in bread)
  • Ships bring tropical goods like bananas and oranges
  • Low staple food prices means more dairy and meat
    • Also means that lower classes aren’t starving so much (before, as many as 1/3 of working classes had difficulty putting food on table)
  • Choice comes in: preferring Welsh and Scottish meat, but European cheeses
  • Food processing increases, as well as its large-scale retail, esp thanks to railways
    • For example, beer production centralized: a few firms now (and, beer consumption doubles!)
      • Pub culture grows: says it’s the number one leisure pursuit “of much of the population” (99)
    • For example, growth of whisky into Scotland’s national drink
• More chip-shops and cafes
• Fish and chip shops
  • Fish n chips popular by 1880s, and in 1914, 25% of fishing goes to it
  • 1888: 10,000 fish n chip shops
  • 1910: 25,000 chip shops in Britain
  • Seen as lower class, shunned by middle class
• Chocolate moves from upper class to everyone’s food
• Tea sees greatest growth
  • Why? better water, temperance, falling duties on imports
  • Tea shops like Lyons and ABC for middle and working classes, and for lovers! (100)
• Eating: people generally ate more than they do now, liked havin some meat on em

Manufacturing

• Small, Short-Lived Firms not Giganto Factories?
  • In 1851, half of workers in a firm employing under 30 people
    • 1907, less than 8% of workers in firm that employs more than 4.000 workers
      • Employers: railways, Post Office, “textiles, engineering, armaments, iron and steel, and shipbuilding” (112), brewers, tobacco companies, chemical production
      • Even some of those were big just b/c of mergers that didn’t affect work conditions (ie, still small workshops scattered across England counting as “one” employer)
  • In 1880, more workshops than factories in Britain
    • Most Victorian workers never worked for a mill- or factory-owner capitalist who slave-drived them and alienated their labor
    • Most firms had relatively low start-up costs, even for some machines, didn’t have “lumpy” investments to make: few “barriers to entry” (113) to most industries
    • In 1880s, most firms last about ten years, no longer: constant flux
  • By 1914, most industries are mass-produced in factories
    • Maybe Marx is more prescient than we think, not backwards.
    • Gives me more reason to talk about artisan production: actually reflects the lamentable truth about not being manufacturing enough, until the turn of the century.
  • Complex hierarchies involve various folks of importance, including workers and union leaders cooperating with foremen and managers: not rigidly top-down discipline
  • Not until after WWI did it become all about large-scale monopolies with “sophisticated labor management” (114)
  • Truth: it’s about small-scale, constantly changing firms that have relationships with employee and employer
  • Upshots: Individual skill still matters, the individual worker isn’t an interchangeable cog
  • My possible objection: small workshops can still be alienating
• 1800-50: outwork goes to the workplace
  • Outwork: sub-contracts in which employers give raw materials to individual workers who will make the goods at their own houses/workshops
  • Factories: you go to work
• Strike!
  • Some because of general unrest and decline in living standards, but others because of specific conditions of specific industries
• Innovation
  • Two types
    • Product innovation: new stuff (bicycles)
      • Victorians obsessed with new inventions, often saw them in conjunction with inventor (“Beecham’s pills”) (115)
    • Process innovation: new ways to make regular stuff
      • Less flashy, but more important for development
      • Emphasis on actual work experience: even boss’s boy had to learn from the ground up, sweeping the floors and having apprenticeship like all other workers
• Steam
  • Before 1830—classical period of Ind Rev—not really used
  • 1830s-40s, began to be used, mostly by textile companies
  • By 1870s, six times the 1840s amount was used
  • Yuck: the leather belts were stitched together and could break and whip around the factory; they could shut out the light; they were loud!
• Electricity
  • By turn of century, replacing gas light
  • 1907, well spread (10% of industrial power is electric)
    • Not only in industry, but lighting, heating, cooking
  • Improved factory conditions: electricity runs “inside” machines, replacing belts
• Lagging Behind?
  • Many scholars (and contemp commentators) made foreign competition seem all doom and gloom
    • Cf Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, which says “cult of the amateur” and a preference of vocational education (learning on job) to technical and scientific higher education (which Germany was too at) led to Britain lagging behind
  • Floud’s Argument
    • British education was suited to their needs: they already had tradition of technical education, so didn’t need to institute it formally; vocational training mostly effective, esp. in fields like engineering; lower classes already pretty literate and night classes readily available already
    • Before 1914, Britain was not lagging behind US and Germany and France (partly b/c so far ahead in 1830, sure)
    • Everyone benefited from foreign competition
  • Arguing that overall good of economy is what’s best for each individual
    • That buying foreign goods is efficient
    • Overall, no lagging of the economy by turn of century, as some have argued
• Foreign Competition
  • Around mid-century, British goods were the goods you bought
  • But beginning in 1840s, more foreign goods available
    • Every twenty years, amount of imports doubled
      • 1830: 4.2 million pounds Brit sterling
      • 1870: 36.9
      • 1913: 155.6
    • Increase of free trade
    • Due to demand for cheaper stuff and better variety of goods
  • Investigating competition gave the British new ideas
• Raw Materials
  • “Coal, iron, cotton, tin, lead, hemp” (125), stone, timber, water
  • Extracting raw materials is a rougher, cruder job than machine-work
  • Empire = partially there to get raw materials
  • Many English mines and quarries exhausted by turn of century, have switched to importing raw material
• Coal
  • Remained simple, few machines, still dangerous and primitive, depending on shovels (133), even by 1913
  • For powering industry, homes, and ships, as well as for exporting and for use in other products (medicines, dyes, photographic materials)
  • Canals just for coal shipment sprang up, and railways used to transport it later
  • Coal production from 1830-1913 had risen 9.5 times (not just b/c of population growth of 5x)
  • Coal mined nearly everywhere in Britain, each of it slightly different
  • Damage to mining areas
    • Coal-waste burned right there
    • Coal washed in streams
    • Leaked sulphuric acid into water sources
    • Ruins trees, crops, and even wool and cattle
  • Damage to urban areas (usage)
    • Soot: 20% less sunlight, leads to rickets
      • A real reason to get your health back in the country
    • Layers of soot and dust everywhere: blackens everything
    • People spend average of 1% of their incoming cleaning off soot
    • Not fixed till Clean Art Acts of 1950s

Service

• Adam Smith didn’t care about service, for example saying servants “add to the value of nothing,” but economists know you don’t have to make widgets to earn your living
  • Floud says the growth of service sector has been relegated to the margins, too much attn on manufacture
  • Not only by historians, but during those times too, when domestic work, cab-drivers, shop-keepers, and even doctors and lawyers were ridiculed or seen as types of prostitutes or fawners
• Industrialization creates demand for more service, “non-material goods”
  • Britain led the way to this kind of society: more employed in service than manufacture
  • 1.7 million in 1841
  • 6.2 million in 1911
• What types and how did they change over time?
  • Growth areas: Public administration, military, professional occupations (finance, transport, distribution, communications; incl. clerks, teachers)
  • Stable: There had always been lawyers, doctors, and clergy
  • Decline: Domestic service
  • Other types: porters, messengers, policemen, guards, footballers
  • Why?
    • Reason one: Where else will you spend your money? “low elasticity of demand for food” (137): when you get better at making food, food is cheaper to make as well as to buy, and you have people needing jobs AND more disposable income ready to go somewhere else
    • Reason two: economic specialization
    • Reason three: leisure services (more leisure, need people to cater to it)
    • Reason four: quite productive
      • 1830, service sector 2.5 to 3 times more productive (of cash) than manufacture
      • 1914: service sector about 1.5 times more productive
      • Well-paid, and until 1911 or so, much better paid than industrial workers (why the decline? increased productivity of industry; their skills become much more common; some replaced by machines)
• Firms
  • Services that require large capital investment dominated by large firms, partic. communication and transport
  • 1907: over 2/3 of the largest firms in England were service ones, not manufacturing ones
  • Lots of growth in banking and insurance, both pretty solid and secure
• Preparation for Clerk-Type jobs
  • Well-educated, well-respected
  • Considered by lower classes to be the tip-top of ambition b/c of its security
  • Tons of competition
  • Skills they needed much more involved than manufacturing positions, even the management manuf. stuff
  • Usually system of apprenticeship to train on job
  • Good job security and steady but small wage raises, although it takes a long time to get into an important position (work your way up)
  • Societies spring up to regulate entry into these jobs and regulations concerning competence, amount of training, length of apprenticeship, etc, towards end of century; sometimes exams too
  • Sometimes exclusive, depending on recommendation or appearance
• Some of these careers respected, some not
  • Respectability: the professional classes (doctors, lawyers, surveyors, etc) gain respect by mid-Victorian period
  • Not respected: hospitality, painters, shopkeepers, servants
• Expenditure in 1900
  • Upper and middle classes: 1/3 of income devoted to service industry
  • Lower classes: 10% of income
  • Upper and middle: most on domestic service (23%), but lots on travel and transport (17%), betting/entertainment (9%), medical services (8%)
  • Lower classes: most on transport (40%), medical (16%), and entertainment/betting (10%)
  • Rest of it? Hairdressing, religion, education, charity (146)
• Travel/Transport
  • Middle and upper classes, transport mostly about vacation and leisure, while with lower, it’s about getting to work
    • A significant type of conspicuous consumption, esp with tons of types o carriages
    • Exception: commuting for middle classes increasing as century wears on (by end of century, London suburb commuting is busiest railway system in world) (146)
  • Type
    • Early 19th c: horse-drawn coaches
    • 19th century: trains
    • Edwardian: trams, buses; growth of bicycles, automobiles
      • Average car in 1900 cost 10x the yearly wage of agricultural worker
      • Cars seen as loud and obnoxious
  • Vacation
    • Lower class: annual visit to seaside
    • Middle class: resorts
    • Upper class: shooting/hunting in the country or Scotland
  • Foreign Travel
    • At first, the upper class’ Grand Tour
    • But then, Cook’s and other agencies form, and guidebooks written
• Medicine
  • Increase in numbers of dentists
  • Tons of not well paid female nurses and midwives
  • Patent medicines everywhere (Beecham, Boot, Holloway)
  • Last quarter of century, “Fever Hospitals” sequester patients with infectious diseases, reduce numbers of deaths in hospitals (which had before led people to stay away from them!)
  • Increase in expenditure on medicine and medical services did not really help them, though
    • Intestinal diseases did lessen after public hygiene measures were taken, and some STDs were made more easily sufferable, but that’s about it
• Entertainment
  • He says not to think that domestic entertainment wasn’t connected with the outside economy, and I agree (150)
    • Why? “dependent on service sector” like sheet music (piracy rampant 1880s-90s!), attendance at music halls or theatres, sales of instruments, lessons, sales of newspapers and books (Daily Mail 1 million readers in 1900) (152)
  • Funny side note: some medical journals claimed that young ladies’ over-practicing led to neuroses, while others claimed that bad piano-playing by their ladies led men to drink or to crime!!
• Sport
  • Growth of playing clubs for football, cricket, rugby
  • Growth of public parks/fields
  • Gets people away from crime
  • Makes urban areas pretty, more grassy
  • Spectatorship at sports increases astronomically in last quarter of teh century
  • Sports become a “major export” of Britain
• Betting
  • Always a part of lower-class life
  • But telegraphs and growth of sporting newspapers make it more professional
• Seaside Resorts
  • Tons of expenditure making them
  • Model: Brighton
  • Example: Bournemouth
    • Created in 1838; by 1911, 78,000 residents (shop-keepers, hospitality, etc)
  • First to middle classes, then also for working classes
  • Some retirement towns (or just for unemployed/leisured folks) as well as holiday resorts
• Retail
  • Shop-keeping seen as suspicious, middle-man inflation or control of goods, of adulteration (beer, bread, milk, tea)
    • Lots of anxiety about adulteration
    • Milk: cream skimmed off, added chalk or flour or starch to re-thicken it, carrot juice for flavor, and sometimes dangerous preservatives
    • Cf importance of “local milk” when people travel to country or when they’re sick, and of the honey in Buddenbrooks
  • Consolidation of shopping
    • Still bought bread and milk from local vendors, but other purchases have been standardized, prepackaged, by 1914
    • Local fairs and markets declining in significance (exception: livestock)
    • Wholesale ventures are replacing them
    • Drapers turn in to department stores: fixed, standard prices; low margins but high volume of sales; use of advertising and lit shop windows; no credit
  • By 1914, you have department stores, cooperatives, chain stores, not ust village shops
  • Department Stores
    • Trained shop-keepers, good book-keeping, dependable stock control
    • Thomas Lipton: lower-class goods
    • Selfridges: middle class
    • Delivery: Whiteley’s (estb 1887) has fleets
    • Catalogues: Army and Navy Stores’ catalogue for all around empire
    • Telephone orders: Harrods
  • Co-ops
    • 1844: first one, to help the poor
    • Bulk purchasing passes savings on to customer
  • Quality control introduced
  • Branding introduced

Finance

• the City: bankers, financiers, traders in the original walled in square mile of Roman foundation
• They are accused by historians of not investing right: because all their money went to foreign investments, they didn’t invest in Britain itself, leaving it to lag after WWI
  • However, Floud points out that there was no room for domestic investment, that their foreign work reduced prices so that British people could spend more on services (thus promoting service industry)
• Investment
  • Before 1850, would invest in specific business or buy a piece of land or a building, or would invest in bonds issued by foreign governments
  • After 1850, however, decided to invest more safely, doing “portfolio” style investment where they would invest in private companies and not put all their eggs in one basket
  • Other foreign countries however kept up the old style of investment
• Empire
  • By beginning of WWI, Britain controlled 25% of globe
    • And yet financially they didn’t really gain overall: one historian says if they hadn’t engaged in empire, only would have lost 5 years of financial growth (could have just traded with them, not spent time and money and effort on governing and keeping in control and war and exploring etc)
  • Who benefited from Empire?
    • A few lucky investors
    • Mostly, the immigrants who found good jobs abroad, esp those who go to Canada, Australia, NZ, and South Africa
• Free Trade Debate
  • Fiercest political debate during this time period was over free trade
  • Before 1840s, protectionism and mercantilism
    • Instead of fostering economic growth, wants to maximize British wealth only (ie, minimize imports)
  • 1840s: repeal of Corn Laws and many tariffs lead to more of a “free trade” environment
    • Meanwhile, US, Germany, and France did have protectionist policies (Dutch and Danes were free trade), but didn’t matter b/c British control of so much of the trade meant that everyone benefited from British free trade
    • Coming off of arguments by John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo
      • 1770s: Adam Smith attacks tariffs
      • 1817: Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy
  • Result of repeal of tariffs and Corn Laws: didn’t immediately kill farmers and make prices go down b/c of increased demand, but after 1860s did result in lower food prices (imports from Germany, but mostly US and Russia) and made farmers go diversify, esp to concentrate on goods that can’t be imported easily, like fresh meat and dairy, vegetables, and fruit (more dairy, pasture, market gardens and orchards)

British Gov Meddling

• Begun in 1830s with Factory Acts that start unhelpful but get increasingly specific and controlling, esp to protect women and children
• Specific interventions and Acts do help once the public gets outrages about something (a Royal Commission would be sent to go out and investigate the problem), but real changes often come as a result of public opinion swaying change directly to industrialist who doesn’t want to lose money
  • More about exposure, reports, and lurid newspaper accounts than about laws working correctly
• Punitive charity laws, like 1834 New Poor Law, make outdoor relief (money or goods given directly to poor) stop and begin to make poverty look unrespectable
  • Over time, they get even more strict against widows and children, and also against elderly
  • Tide turns just before WWI, with introduction of pensions, unemployment benefits

New Spaces

• Poets’ Complaints
  • Anna Seward, 1785:
    • “thick, sulphureous smoke, which spread, like palls / That screen the dead…pollute thy gales / And stain thy glassy waters.”
  • Wordsworth
    • 1787: could refer to quarrymen suspended in their jobs: “Glad from their airy baskets hand and sing”
    • 1814: he’s changed his tune: permanent smoke and spreading cities “hide the face of the earth for leagues”
• Quarries, Mines leave Spoil-Heaps
  • Cornwall today still littered with by-products of mining for kaolin clay for pottery production: piles of quartz and mica
  • By-products left on landscape could wipe out vegetation, and even some gases and smokes would do the same
  • Landscapes converted to “debris of gavel and stones”
  • Nice houses would be pulled down in these areas, respectable folks running away

Definitions

• Consumption versus Investment
  • Consumption: purchasing goods with lifespan of less than a year
  • Investment: purchasing goods with lifespan of over a year (“durable goods”)
• “Psychic income: satisfactions which cannot be expressed in monetary terms” (94)
• “Lumpy” investment: you need all of it, or none of it at all, because only all of it will get the job done (ie, having “most” of the railway won’t satisfy! (112)
• Process innovation versus product innovation (new ways to make things or new things to make)
• Types of change
  • Embodied change: easily seen and measured
    • ie, interchangeable parts, new sources of power (steam)
  • Disembodied change: not easily measured; usually about refinement and perfection, small changes

Quotes

• John Stuart Mill, “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)
  • We are in “an age of transition…obvious a few years ago only to the more discerning: at present it forces itself upon the most unobservant.”
  • Change: “the first of the leading peculiarities of the present age”
• Leonore Davidoff in Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol 2
  • Women are engaged in “credit networks” “for services rendered” to people around them, incl. lodgers, taking in washing, loans, nursing, taking care of the dead, mid-wifery etc
• Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (1988)
  • More things to buy = more things to pawn
  • Takes up Lewis Mumford’s “carboniferous capitalism” (ie coal dependence)
• Robert Tressell’s Edwardian novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
• Bourke, “House-wifery in working-class England” (1994)
• Read Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop
• Adam Smith
  • “Consumption is the sold end of and purpose of all production.” (1)
  • Servant “adds to the value of nothing” while manufacturer “adds generally to the value of the materials which he works upon” (135)
• Elizabeth Roberts, An Oral History of working women
• Sidney Webb, a founder of London School of Economics, supporter of unions
• Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody (clerk)
• Beeton’s Penny Guide to Domestic Service 1888 (seriously, a penny? hilariously ironic, that)
• 1909, Condition of England, Charles Masterman (how awful cars are!)

• Conclusion
  • Don’t look at this era with rosy-glasses because it tolerated cruelty and exploitation.
  • But it was the place where the equality and comfort of today came from, so respect it as the source of where we are today.