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By Root 585 0

where they were worked till they broke and then coughed their way to early deaths. Is it really necessary to point out that poverty, inequality, child labour, disease and pollution existed before there were factories? In the case of poverty, the rural pauper of 1700 was markedly worse off than the urban pauper of 1850 and there were many more of him. In Gregory King’s survey of the British population in 1688, 1.2 million labourers lived on just £4 a year and 1.3 million ‘cottagers’ – peasants – on just £2 a year. That is to say, half the entire nation lived in abject poverty; without charity they would starve. During the industrial revolution, there was plenty of poverty but not nearly as much as this nor nearly as severe. Even farm labourers’ income rose during the industrial revolution. As for inequality, in terms of both physical stature and number of surviving children, the gap narrowed between the richest and the poorest during industrialisation. That could not have happened if economic inequality increased. As for child labour, a patent for a hand-driven linen-spinning machine from 1678, long before powered mills, happily boasts that ‘a child three or four years of age may do as much as a child of seven or eight years old.’ As for disease, deaths from infectious disease fell steadily throughout the period. As for pollution, smog undoubtedly increased in industrial cities, but the sewage-filled streets of Samuel Pepys’s London were more noisome than anything in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester of the 1850s.

The plain fact is that the mechanisation of production in the industrial revolution raised incomes across all classes. The average Englishman’s income, having apparently stagnated for three centuries, began to rise around 1800 and by 1850 was 50 per cent above its 1750 level, despite a trebling of population. The rise was steepest for unskilled workers: the wage premium for skilled building workers fell steadily. Income inequality fell, and gender inequality, too. The share of national income captured by labour rose, while the share captured by land fell: the rent of an acre of English farmland buys as many goods now as it did in the 1760s, while the real wage of an hour of work buys immensely more. Real wages rose faster than real output throughout the nineteenth century, meaning that the benefit of cheaper goods was being garnered chiefly by the workers as consumers, not by bosses or landlords. That is to say, the people who produced manufactured goods could also increasingly afford to consume them.

While it is undoubtedly true that by modern standards the workers who manned the factories and mills of 1800 in England laboured for inhuman hours from an early age in conditions of terrible danger, noise and dirt, returning to crowded and insanitary homes through polluted streets, and had dreadful job security, diet, health care and education, it is none the less just as undeniably true that they lived better lives than their farm-labourer grandfathers and wool-spinning grandmothers had done. That was why they flocked to the factories from the farms – and would do so again in New England in the 1870s, in the American South in the 1900s, in Japan in the 1920s, in Taiwan in the 1960s, in Hong Kong in the 1970s and in China today. That was why the jobs in the mills were denied to the Irish in New England and the blacks in North Carolina.

Here are three anecdotes to illustrate the notion that factory jobs are often preferable to farm ones. A farm worker named William Turnbull, born in 1870, told my grandmother that he started work at thirteen, for sixpence a day, working six days a week, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., usually outdoors whatever the weather, with just Good Friday, Christmas Day and half of New Year’s day as his only holidays. On market days he started herding sheep or cattle to town, carrying a lantern, at 1 or 2 a.m. A cotton picker from North Carolina in the 1920s explained to a different historian why the mill was so much better than the farm: ‘Once we went to work in the mill after we moved here from the farm,