In a comparatively poor society with low productivity and limited resources, children had always had to earn their keep, since it was impossible to support large numbers of non-workers. Traditionally most children had probably been at work by the age of seven or nine, frequently helping at their parents’ occupations but not uncommonly working for other masters. There was nothing remarkable about child labour in the mills, apart from the novelty of the factories themselves and the publicity they attracted. More remarkable was the minor role of men in the cotton mills, only a little more than a quarter of the factory workers, perhaps 50,000 or so in 1830, being adult males. Being men in a man’s world, they had collared the plum jobs, as mulespinners; but by the same token, in a world which defined workers as essentially male, their minority position tended to emphasize the peculiarity and untypicality of factory workers among the working population as a whole. The early recruitment and continued dominance of the mill girls has frequently been remarked and explained, in terms of the resistance of established, male, workers to employment in unfamiliar and possibly degrading conditions, and of the greater docility, submissiveness, and adaptability of the women. Since in the eyes of generations of commentators from Engels onwards virtue, in the promise of democratic and socialist achievements, has been seen to reside in the factory proletariat, it is more surprising that little emphasis has ever been placed on the influence of women as the major element in the first factory proletariat in the world. It could be that they contributed a decisively non-violent and non-revolutionary tone to the nascent proletariat at the one moment, in the late 1830s and 1840s, when for a variety of reasons social tensions were so acute that a determined move from the mills might have tipped the scales towards disintegration of the social order.
Powered machinery and factory organization of course existed in other industries besides cotton by 1830, notably in parts of the woollen and worsted industries of the West Riding, in flax spinning, in some branches of engineering, and in the large works engaged in the manufacture of iron. But, all told, there were probably still fewer than 100,000 male factory workers in 1830, outnumbered by the women although they were concentrated in fewer industries and were scarcely to be found outside Lancashire, Lanark, and the West Riding. There were more cobblers and shoemakers, craftsmen working on their own or in small workshops, than there were male factory workers; and there were between three and four times as many working in the completely unmechanized building trades. Tailors outnumbered coalminers, and there were three blacksmiths for every man employed in making iron. The message is plain. Industry had been growing rapidly since the late eighteenth century, and employment in manufacturing, mining, and building, inside and outside the factory, had grown from about 30 per cent of the total working population in 1811 to over 40 per cent by 1831, or from 1.7 million men and women to 3 million. Yet most of this expansion took the form of multiplying the number of people working with traditional tools in traditional occupations: much less than 10 per cent of industrial workers had any experience of factories, or about 3 per cent of the occupied population.
Agriculture had long been in relative decline, certainly since the early seventeenth century if not before, since it is the essence of commercial and industrial growth that the non-agricultural proportion of the population should increase, fed and supplied either by the increasing efficiency of those who worked on the land, or by growing advantages and opportunities for importing agricultural produce. Both had been happening in Britain, although since in the early 1830s, given normal to good harvests, the country was virtually feeding itself, the emphasis had been on improvements in agricultural productivity, bolstered by growing imports of grain and livestock from Ireland. Agriculture had probably ceased to provide the livelihood of a majority of the population before the middle of the eighteenth century, and the agricultural sector had declined from over a third of the working population at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a quarter by 1831. Nevertheless, the actual numbers engaged in farming were still increasing, growing from about 13/4 million then to the historical peak of over 2 million in 1851; it was only from the plateau of the 1850s that the long and practically uninterrupted decline in the number of farmworkers began. These numbers included nearly 300,000 farmers, about half of whom employed some hired labour while the other half used only the labour of themselves and members of their families. That left something like a million agricultural labourers, landless and propertyless, owning neither their homes nor their tools, and entirely reliant on wage labour. This was far and away the largest single occupation of male workers, about twice the size of the next largest group, those working in textiles of all sorts, and not far short of three times larger than the body of workers in the building trades. Many women also worked in agriculture, some full-time like the dairymaids, the members of the new and growing labour gangs in East Anglia, or the Northumbrian bondagers who were regular field workers as brawny as any men; many more were drawn in at the seasonal work peaks of turnip hoeing and singling, or harvest. Ambiguities of self-perception and of definition make the number of women who described themselves as agricultural workers (in the 1841 census) somewhat suspect; they appear to have been the fourth largest group of women workers, after those employed in domestic service, textiles, and the clothing trades, but they may have been more numerous than the 80,000 enumerated in 1841 or 230,000 in 1851.
Insofar as it makes any sense at all to look for the average British workingman, he was to be found in 1830 working in the broadly defined industrial sector, but not in a factory; the most representative workingman, however, was the agricultural labourer. The typical working woman, there is no doubt, was a domestic servant. The nature of work is a major influence on a person’s sense of identity, but its place is scarcely less important, and most people lived and worked in the countryside, whether directly involved in farming or not. It was not until 1851 that a majority of the British population was classified as being urban, on the unexacting definition of living in a place with 2000 or more inhabitants. Population size is a convenient, but rough and ready, measure of urbanity; while the judgement of contemporaries in the Registrar-General’s office should be respected, that this size represented the dividing line between country and town, it is clear that many of the smallest notional ‘towns’ would have been overgrown villages, their inhabitants as close to the land in their way of life as their cottages were to the surrounding open country. It should be acknowledged that small country towns like Aberystwyth (Cardiganshire), Burford (Oxfordshire), Midhurst (Sussex), Sedbergh (West Riding), or Spilsby (Lincolnshire), all of which had populations in the 1500–2000 range in the 1830s, were unmistakably town-like in the sense that they were something more than collections of agricultural workers and agricultural trades. They performed marketing, administrative, and professional functions for their rural hinterlands; and in their small way they looked like towns in layout and contiguity of buildings. Nevertheless, diminutive towns like these, and the great majority of the places which clearly had the look and feel of towns, were essentially traditional country towns. In 1831 about 90 per cent of the places which physically and often administratively were towns had populations of under 20,000, and in most of them the inhabitants were accustomed to country sights, sounds, and smells in the streets, and had strong links of kinship or friendship in the surrounding countryside. This considerable slice of the ‘urban’ population remained, therefore, well integrated into a traditional economic and social order, and by and large had not recently experienced upheavals in jobs or living conditions, or changes in the texture and scale of their environment, of a kind likely to produce disruptive social effects or to alienate them from established authorities in church, corporation, and neighbouring country house.
To be sure, the 20,000 threshold, like any other, is no more than an approximate and imperfect guide to a town’s character, and there were places like Bury, Wigan, Bradford, or Huddersfield which had only just crossed it or were poised to do so, that were unmistakably parts of the new industrial order. All the same, it was in the really