Poverty and the Urban Working Class
Overview
Poverty and the Urban Working Class
Industrialization changed living and working standards dramatically, reducing many to poverty. People in the working classes had new opportunities for employment and faced new challenges. A new culture of consumption grew out of the mass production of a growing number of inexpensive consumer goods. Members of the working classes enjoyed only limited access to these goods, along with only crowded, substandard, even unhealthy, housing in the growing industrial cities of England, Europe, and the United States. Such conditions effectively consigned many in the industrial working classes to an effective state of poverty. These conditions and the responses of people in these working classes to these conditions changed the economic, political, and social landscapes of the industrializing world.
Learning Objective
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Compare the lives of factory owners and workers in England during Industrialization.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
The Condition of the Working Class in England: Friedrich Engels' influential 1844 study of the impact of the Industrial Revolution, which inspired numerous reforms in industrial Britain
Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 is arguably the most important record of how workers lived during the early era of industrialization in British cities. Engels, who remains one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century, came from a family of wealthy industrialists. He described backstreet sections of Manchester and other mill towns where people lived in crude shanties and shacks, some not completely enclosed, some with dirt floors. These towns had narrow walkways between irregularly shaped lots and dwellings. There were no sanitary facilities. Population density was extremely high. Eight to ten unrelated mill workers often shared a room with no furniture and slept on a pile of straw or sawdust. Toilet facilities were shared if they existed. Disease spread through contaminated water sources. New urbanites—especially small children—died due to diseases spreading because of the cramped living conditions. Tuberculosis, lung diseases from the mines, cholera from polluted water, and typhoid were all common.
Engels’s interpretation proved to be extremely influential with British historians of the Industrial Revolution. He focused on both the workers’ wages and their living conditions. He argued that the industrial workers had lower incomes than their pre-industrial peers and lived in more unhealthy environments. This proved to be a wide-ranging critique of industrialization and one that was echoed by many of the Marxist historians who studied the industrial revolution in the 20th century.
Conditions improved over the course of the 19th century due to new public health acts that regulated things like sewage, hygiene, and home construction. In the introduction of his 1892 edition, Engels notes that most of the conditions he wrote about in 1844 had been greatly improved.
Chronic hunger and malnutrition were the norm for the majority of the population of the world, including Britain and France, until the late 19th century. Until about 1750, in part due to malnutrition, life expectancy in France was about 35 years, and it was only slightly higher in Britain. In Britain and the Netherlands, food supply had been increasing and prices falling before the Industrial Revolution due to better agricultural practices (Agricultural Revolution).
However, the population grew as well. Before the Industrial Revolution, advances in agriculture or technology led to an increase in population, which again strained food and other resources, limiting increases in per capita income. This condition is called the Malthusian trap and according to some economists, it was overcome by the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution resulted in better and faster transportation that allowed for the faster movement of goods from different regions of countries. Transportation improvements, such as canals and improved roads, lowered food costs because they helped increase supply. The post-1830 rapid development of railway further reduced transaction costs, which in turn lowered the costs of goods, including food. The distribution and sale of perishable goods such as meat, milk, fish, and vegetables were transformed by the emergence of the railways, giving rise not only to cheaper produce in the shops but also to far greater variety in people’s diets, which improved nutritional intake.
The question of how living conditions changed in the newly industrialized urban environment has been very controversial. A series of 1950s essays by Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins set the academic consensus that the bulk of the population at the bottom of the social ladder suffered severe reductions in their living standards. Conversely, economist Robert E. Lucas, Jr., argues that the real impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standards of living of the poorest segments of society gradually, if slowly, improved. Others, however, have noted that while growth of the economy’s overall productive powers was unprecedented during the Industrial Revolution, living standards for the majority of the population did not grow meaningfully until the late 19th and 20th centuries and that in many ways workers’ living standards declined under early capitalism. For instance, studies have shown that real wages in Britain increased only 15% between the 1780s and 1850s and that life expectancy in Britain did not begin to dramatically increase until the 1870s.
Not everyone lived in poor conditions and struggled with the challenges of rapid industrialization. The Industrial Revolution also created a middle class of industrialists and professionals who lived in much better conditions than they had before. In fact, one of the earlier definitions of the middle class equated it to the original meaning of capitalist: someone with so much capital that they could rival nobles. To be a capital-owning millionaire was an important criterion of the middle class during the Industrial Revolution although the period also witnessed a growth of a class of professionals (e.g., lawyers, doctors, small business owners) who did not share the fate of the early industrial working class and enjoyed a comfortable standard of living in growing cities.
Attributions
This photo is Jacob Riis' 1889 "Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement--'Five Cents a Spot'".
Images courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Title Image - Jacob Riis, "Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement--'Five Cents a Spot'". Attribution: Jacob Riis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Provided by: Wikipedia. Location: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacob_Riis,_Lodgers_in_a_Crowded_Bayard_Street_Tenement.jpg. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
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"Social Change"
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