Robert Glen - Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution

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Routledge Library Editions: The Industrial Revolution

Volume 2

Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution

Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution

Robert Glen

First published in 1984 by Croom Helm Ltd.

This edition first published in 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1984 Robert Glen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-63291-2 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-315-16309-3 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-70635-4 (Volume 2) (hbk)

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

URBAN WORKERS

IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

ROBERT GLEN

CROOM HELM
London, Canberra

1984 Robert Glen

Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row, Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT

Croom Helm Australia, PO Box 391, Manuka, ACT 2603, Australia

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Glen, Robert
Urban workers in the early industrial revolution. - (Croom Helm studies in society and industry)
1. Industry - Social aspects - Stockport (Greater Manchester: District)
2. Stockport (Greater Manchester: District) - Industries - History
I. Title
303.4'83'0942734 HD60.5.G7
ISBN 0-7099-1103-3

All rights reserved. For information, write:
St, Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Printed in Great Britain
First published in the United States of America in 1983

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Glen, Robert.
Urban workers in the Industrial Revolution.
1. Labor and laboring classes - England - Stockport
(Greater Manchester) I. Title.
HD8400.S72G53 1983 305.5'62'0942734 83-43002
ISBN 0-312-83472-1 (St. Martin's Press)

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents

Guide

For Elsie Glen arid Agnes Grieme,
My Grandmothers

The Industrial Revolution in England seems to have a perennial fascination for historians, and rightly so. As the first instance of successful industrialisation, it can still provide many social and economic lessons and also furnish essential evidence for continuing debates over ideology and theory. This study focuses primarily on the early Industrial Revolution (c. 1780-1820), a period which has received less attention than the later Industrial Revolution probably because of the smaller number of sources available for the earlier period. Parliamentary inquiries were not so numerous before the 1820s as after, and the same could be said for workers' periodicals, independent social investigations, and so forth.

The Stockport district poses special problems. It did not have its own newspaper until 1822. Its legal and administrative records are scattered, in part because it lies on the boundary between two counties. Thus, many relevant items are to be found either in Lancashire or Cheshire repositories, while the Assize documents relating to Stockport are in the Public Record Office in London. Compounding the problem was the fact that down to the 1970s, the major local manuscript collections were split inconveniently between the Stockport Public Library and the Stockport Municipal Museum. This helped to assure that Stockport would be the subject of few detailed studies. A large Victorian compilation by Henry Heginbotham (2 vols., 1882-92) was followed nearly a half-century later by George Unwin's justly famous work on Samuel Oldknow and his role in the industrialisation of the Stockport district (1924). Only a few things of consequence appeared during the ensuing 50 years.

Yet a revival is currently underway. The first Cheshire volumes of the Victoria County History (1979- ) contain much material on Stockport and north-east Cheshire. The same can be said of the new periodical, Cheshire History (1979- ), and the publications of the Stockport Historical Society, Poynton Local History Society, Marple Antiquarian Society and other history groups in the area. In one sense, the present work comprises merely the latest addition to this renaissance of local and regional history.

I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for helping me in this .

R.G.
New Haven

In England, modern society is indisputably most highly and classically developed in economic structure. Nevertheless, even here the stratification of classes does not appear in its pure form. Middle and intermediate strata even here obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere (although incomparably less in rural districts than in the cities) .. Physicians and officials, e.g., would... constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords - the latter, e.g., into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries. [Here the manuscript breaks off.] - Marx, Capital , vol. III (1894), last chapter

The old Cheshire saying that 'when the world was made, the rubbish was sent to Stockport' had particular relevance to the period of the Industrial Revolution. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Stockport and its district contained scores of factories, cramped brick houses no longer red but sooty black, innumerable beer shops and pawn shops and, as a final mark of advanced industrialisation, a heavily polluted river system. Having passed through the town on many occasions, Friedrich Engels could write with some authority in 1845 that Stockport was 'notoriously one of the darkest and smokiest holes in the whole industrial area, and particularly when seen from the [railway] viaduct, presents a truly revolting picture'.

Stockport thus comprised precisely the sort of industrial setting in which a mature 'working class' might be expected to emerge. Indeed, Engels referred specifically to Stockport as one of a group of medium-sized industrial towns in which occupational stratification was highly visible. When discussing such towns, Engels divided their populations into only three groups: a mass of factory workers, a small number of shopkeepers and a mere handful of factory owners. He further claimed that workers in such towns form an even larger proportion of the total population than in Manchester'. According to Engels, rapid urbanisation of the kind Stockport experienced contributed to the class formation which inevitably accompanied industrialisation.

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