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The Condition of England and the Standard of Living: Cotton Textiles in the Northwest, 1806–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

John C. Brown
John C. Brown
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics at Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610.
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Abstract

This article examines the workers' standard of living in the cotton textile industry of Northwest England from 1806 to 1850. Hedonic earnings regressions using 1835 data suggest that power-loom weavers required substantial compensation for the high rents and poor sanitation of urban locations. Adjusting earnings in the factory sector for the impact of urbanization cuts growth in living standards by 10 percent, or up to one-quarter of gains realized by 1850. Inclusion of those employed in the handloom sector implies that any improvements in the living standards of all workers in the industry appeared only during the 1840s.

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Articles
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The Journal of Economic History , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 591 - 614
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1990

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References

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23 The compensation will actually equal the workers' valuation of conditions if differences across communities are capitalized entirely in wage rates and all workers have similar tastes. Those preferring other aspects of “country living” would require an even larger payment than those who chose to live in the city. See Henderson, “Interregional Welfare Differences,” pp. 36–44.Google Scholar

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26 See Thompson, English Working Class, chap. 9. for a restatement of the traditional view;Google Scholar and Bythell, Duncan, The Handloom Weavers: A Study of the English Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 60–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 See Lyons, John, “Family Response to Economic Decline: Handloom Weavers in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire” in Research in Economic History, 12 (1989), pp. 45–91.Google Scholar

28 Baines, Cotton Manufacture, pp. 229–37, and Lyons, “Introduction of the Powerloom,” p. 167, describe the power-loom sector. The survey covers two-thirds of the parishes in Lancashire and West Yorkshire and is included in the “Returns Relative to Power Looms Used in Factories,” Parliamentary Papers, 1836, vol. 45. Pigot and Company, National and Commercial Directory for the North of England (London, 1834), provides the names of towns for mills in West Yorkshire.Google Scholar

29 See the “economiser” indices for provisions for the North, the Northwest, and the industrial North in Crafts, N. F. R., “Regional Price Variations in England in 1843: An Aspect of the Standard of Living Debate,” Explorations in Economic History, 19 (01. 1982), pp. 51–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The data on rents are from the Manchester Statistical Society, Report on the Condition of the Working Classes in an Extensive Manufacturing District (London, 1838)Google Scholar; and Milne, Joshua, “Survey of the Condition of the Poor in Thirty-Three Townships of the Manufacturing Districts,” Parliamentary Papers, 1833, vol. 6, pp. 664–67. The regression model of rents used to predict rents for the entire sample, with t-statistics in parentheses, is as follows: Data on population and area are from the Abstracts of the 1831 Census, Parliamentary Papers, 1833, vols. 36–38.Google Scholar

30 See Chadwick, Edwin, Report of the Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of Great Britain, in Flinn, M. W., ed. (1st edn., 1842; London, 1965), pp. 8, 148–49.Google Scholar Although infant mortality is also cited as an indicator of the quality of life, it depends upon other influences, such as breast-feeding practices, income, and female labor-force participation, that are only partially related to urban environmental conditions. A puzzle for historians of nineteenth-century demography, for example, is the failure of urban infant mortality to fall until after 1900, over 30 years after most English cities had installed modern water supply and sewer systems. See Robert Woods and John Woodward, “Mortality, Poverty and the Environment,” and Thompson, Barbara, “Infant Mortality in Bradford,” in Woods, Robert and Woodward, John, eds., Urban Disease and Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1984), pp. 1–36 and 120–47, respectively;Google Scholar and Wohl, Anthony, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 10–42. Mortality from typhoid fever is another indicator of local sanitary conditions, but was not reported separately from typhus during this period. The mortality data by registration district are from “Abstracts of the Causes of Death,” Reports of the Registrar-General for 1838–1842.Google Scholar

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32 RELIEF was, for example, 1.7 to 2 times higher in the handloom weaving centers of Padiham and Burnley than in Bury, which by the mid-1830s had few handloom weavers. See Bythell, Handloom Weavers, p. 57;Google Scholar the “Reports of Assistant Commissioners: Report of G. Henderson,” Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, appendix A (London, 1834), pp. 909–10A, 922–24;Google ScholarWalton, Social History of Lancashire, pp. 194–95; and Fleischman, Conditions of Life, pp. 329–35. RELIEF is the per capita amount “Expended for the Relief of the Poor” for 1835–1836 found in the Appendix, Second Annual Report of the Poor Law Commission, Parliamentary Papers, 1836, vol. 29.Google Scholar

33 The data for SHAREWATER for weaving and integrated mills are available by parish for most of the sample area from “Appendix to Mr. Homer's Report,” Reports of the Inspectors of Factories, Parliamentary Papers, 1842, vol. 22.Google Scholar The power-loom survey provided data on the number of looms. See Hutchins, B. L. and Harrison, A., History of Factory Legislation (London, 1911), pp. 70, 79–80, and Bayson, Ashworth Cotton, p. 164, for discussions of relays. The data on relays are for those factories identified as using them for children on July 1, 1836, by the Report of the Inspector of Factories, Parliamentary Papers, 1837, vol. 50, pp. 193–95.Google Scholar

34 See Gatrell, , “Size of Firms.” The Report of the Inspector of Factories for 1835 and 1838, Parliamentary Papers, 1836, vol. 45; 1839, vol. 42, provides parish-level data on the numbers employed and on horsepower. I am grateful to an anonymous referee and the editor for bringing this issue to my attention.Google Scholar

35 The survey includes earnings for three age groups: adults 18 years or older, teens 13 to 17 years, and children under 13 years. Of the 195 factories in the sample, 65 report a range of earnings for each age group that bracket what are apparently the average earnings reported for the remaining 130 factories. The age-earnings profile resulting from the wage regressions supports this interpretation. The predicted ratios of earnings of 9-, 12-, and 13-year-olds to 18-year-olds from the regressions for Manchester are all within 10 percent of the ratios found in Stanway's 1833 survey of children employed in factories in Stockport and Manchester in the “Report of the Factory Commission,” Parliamentary Papers, 1833, vol. 20, pp. Dl 87–88.Google Scholar Chow tests determined the appropriate breakdown of the data into subsamples. In each of the four resulting subsamples, coefficients were stable across potentially smaller subgroupings at better than a 5 percent level of significance. Since the observations on earnings were averaged over differing numbers of looms, one might expect heteroskedastic error terms that would lead to biases of an unknown direction in the t-statistics. The Goldfeld-Quandt test failed to reject the hypothesis of homoskedasticity at a 5 percent level of significance. See Kmenta, Jan, Elements of Econometrics (2nd edn., New York, 1986), pp. 292–94.Google Scholar

36 Note, however, that the average-skilled weavers received no compensation for high levels of Factory Act violations.Google Scholar

37 See Lloyd-Jones and Le Roux. “Size of Firms,” p. 78.Google Scholar

38 The differentials in earnings are based upon a comparison of the handloom weaving towns of Padiham and Burnley with the factory town of Bury.Google Scholar

39 Taylor, “Cotton Industry,” pp. 117–18.Google Scholar

40 Towns with a value of WATERDISEASE or RENT greater than one standard deviation above the mean were assigned to the dense urban parish; those with either value more than one standard deviation below the mean were assigned to the rural parish. The remaining towns were assigned to the urban parish. Dividing the towns into seven representative locations did improve the approximation of the wage gradients, but led to only slightly higher estimates of compensation.Google Scholar

41 Williamson, “Factor Markets,” pp. 648–54. The revised estimate of compensation is 30 percent for “the North,” which arises from a different specification of the hedonic regression and a modified definition of the compensation.Google Scholar

42 See Lyons, “Introduction of the Powerloom,” table A.II.3, and p. 185, for estimates of the output per weaver.Google Scholar

43 The nominal wage series is from Wood,History of Wages, tables 37, 38. The series relies upon wage data from Manchester prior to 1833 and assumes that the gap in wages between southeastern and northeastern Lancashire in 1833 prevailed for the period from 1806 to 1833. See Fleischman, Conditions of Life, chap. 4, for the data on prices for Manchester and Bolton for 1806 through 1834;Google Scholar and Neild, William, “Comparative Statement of the Income and Expenditures of Certain Families of the Working Classes in Manchester and Dukinfield, in the Years 1836 and 1841,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 4 (01. 1842), pp. 320–34, for the data for 1836 and 1841. Data on rents and the ”northern urban” budget weights are from Williamson, British Capitalism, appendix tables A.3 and A. 1 respectively. Data on coal prices in Manchester are from von Tunzelmann, Steam Power, pp. 96–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarGayer, Arthur D., Rostow, W. W., and Schwartz, Anna Jacobson, The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy. 1790–1850, microfilmed supplement (Oxford, 1953), table 123, provides the data on the price of tea inclusive of duties; the index of clothing prices is from Williamson and Lindert, “Reply to Crafts,” pp. 148–49. The regional cost-of-living index is linked to Williamson and Lindert's ”southern urban” price index to extend it from 1842 to 1850.Google Scholar

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45 Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, p. 137.Google Scholar

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48 Fleischman, in Conditions of Life, pp. 129–33, provides the price data. Weavers testifying to Parliament argued that the cost of inputs as a share of gross earnings was 8 to 25 percent higher in 1833 than in 1814. See the “Report of the Select Committee on the Present State of Manufactures, Commerce, and Shipping in the United Kingdom,” Parliamentary Papers, 1833, vol. 6, pp. 605, 665.Google Scholar

49 Bythell, Handloom Weavers, p. 117, accepts this estimate as a “plausible guess.” The assumption does contradict the 1833 testimony of handloom weaver Richard Needham that there had been no productivity growth in the weaving of cambric since 1800. See “Report of Select Committee,” Parliamentary Papers, 1833, vol. 6, p. 700.Google Scholar

50 See Wood, History of Wages, table 41.Google Scholar

51 See Lyons, “Family Response,” tables 3, 7, 8, for the data on the relative productivity and age-mix of weaving household members from a survey of 142 weavers in Tottington in 1818 and the census of 1851.Google Scholar

52 See Famie, English Cotton Industry, pp. 101–2.Google Scholar

53 Assuming a weekly output of four pieces per adult weaver of calico and one piece per weaver of cambric, and that power-loom production was exclusively calico, production of cambric and fancy goods would occupy at most one-third of the weaving population. See Lyons, “Power Loom,” p. 247; Bythell, Handloom Weavers, p. 115; and Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 407.Google Scholar

54 Annual growth in real agricultural wages in West Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland from 1795 to 1833 was from 0 to 0.6 percent; growth rates more than doubled after 1833. A time series from Cumberland suggests a pattern of improvement from 1795 to 1806–1810, little growth up to the mid-1830s, and then rapid growth of about 2 percent until 1850. See Bowley, Arthur L., “The Statistics of Wages in the United Kingdom during the last Hundred Years: Part l, Agricultural Wages,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 61 (12 1898), pp. 702–22.Google Scholar From 1818–1820 to the mid-1830s earnings of Manchester porters rose 6 percent, while earnings of bricklayers' laborers apparently stagnated. Most of the growth in earnings of town laborers between 1805 and 1850 occurred after 1831. See Fleischman, Conditions of Life, pp. 188–89, Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 438; and von Tunzelmann, “Trends in Real Wages,” p. 46.Google Scholar

55 Richards, Paul, “The State and Early Industrial Capitalism: The Case of the Handloom Weavers,” Past and Present, 83 (05 1979), pp. 91–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 295–305, do contend that state intervention, whether through continuation of supplements to income under the Old Poor Law or mandating minimum earnings, would have been appropriate.Google Scholar

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57 See the Hammonds, Modern Industry, p. 223;Google ScholarVigier, François, Change and Apathy: Liverpool and Manchester during the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1970)Google Scholar; Wohl, Endangered Lives, chap. 7: and Jeffrey G. Williamson. “Underinvestment in Britain's Cities during the Industrial Revolution?” mimeo, Cambridge, MA, 1987.Google Scholar

58 Fn. 20 provides the sources for the estimates for Ashton-under-Lyne and Preston.“The Return of the Average Rate of Expense of Combined Works of Drainage and Water Supply for Towns under the Public Health Act …,” House of Lords Papers, vol. 31, 1852, p. 305, suggests that these estimates are consistent with the actual costs reported for several unnamed towns.Google Scholar