Mini-lecture 13: "Poverty and the 'Hungry Forties' "
Scope: Poverty was common throughout British history and could be just as acute in the countryside as in towns. Urbanization and industrialization made poverty more visible and its effects, more shocking. The new spirit of utilitarianism on one side, coupled with an evangelical reform impulse on the other, combined to make poverty seem more scandalous to the Victorians than it had to their predecessors. Underemployment and sickness often pushed working people into poverty; public health conditions were so bad that epidemics of cholera, typhus, and typhoid were common. Novelists, journalists, and radicals all studied and condemned poverty; the New Poor Law created the workhouse system in an attempt to alleviate the condition economically. The law’s inadequacies, however, made philanthropy a necessary supplement.
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Outline
I. Rural poverty was still common in Victorian England.
A. The enclosure movement had created a class of landless laborers, many of whom were paid wages at or below starvation level.
B. Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, subtitled The Two Nations (1845), describes scenes of horrible rural poverty behind an apparently idyllic landscape.
II. Urban poverty was caused by numerous factors.
A. Fluctuations in the business cycle and seasonal patterns of work led to periodic declines in the demand for labor.
1. City dwellers were completely dependent on money for food but lacked money when out of work.
2. There was no welfare state or unemployment benefit to compensate the unemployed.
3. Mining needed more men in winter.
B. Businessmen’s belief in laissez-faire policies was niixed with their belief that they could remain competitive only by paying the lowest possible wages.
C. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Combination Acts made the creation of trade unions illegal for fear that they would lead to revolutionary activity.
D. Sickness was often the push that sent a family over the edge from working poverty to starvation or crime. Unsanitary living conditions and overcrowding made epidemics common, and the cities were swept by periodic outbreaks of cholera, typhus, aiid typhoid.
E. The working poor found various ways to cope.
1. If they were “known” they could get credit at local shops, buying “on tick.”
2. Pawnbrokers were universal in working-class districts, because families regularly had to raise a little money from their scanty possessions.
3. The poorest people also moved often and were most likely to become criminals.
III. The persistence of poverty was studied and condemned by numerous groups.
A. Novelists used poverty as a backdrop for their stories; Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton (1848) described how members of the Davenport family were laid off, then became sick with typhoid fever.
B. Journalists, such as Henry Mayhew. were fascinated with the variety of ways poor Londoners found for making some sort of income and staying alive.
1. Mayhew published London Labor and the London Poor in 1849.
2. He was fascinated by the orphaned children of London, including the “mudlarks,” who waded out into the river estuary at low tide to scavenge for anything of value that had dropped off boats into the muddy river bed.
C. Radical observers, notably Friedrich Engels and later Karl Marx, described these conditions as part of their indictment of capitalism.
1. Engels, a German, was sent by his father to manage his textile factories in Manchester and was appalled by urban slums there.
2. His book The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) became a classic indictment of early British capitalism.
IV. The political response to poverty was never adequate in the Victorian era.
A. The New Poor Law, introduced in 1834, created workhouses.
1. The aim was to be economical and to deter potential inmates.
2. Dickens made them a byword for misery and privation.
3. The sick, mentally ill, and the aged were often forced to go there.
4. Historians have shown that some workhouses were well run and humane.
B. The prevailing mood of laissez-faire among the business classes discouraged state intervention, especially if financed through taxation.
C. Civic reformers inside the British political system proposed public health and sanitation legislation.
1. One of the most influential of these reformers was Edwin Chadwick, who belonged to the first generation of professional civil servants.
2. He was a great collector of statistics and advocated the systematic application of efficient principles to the regulation of poverty.
3. He encouraged cleanliness but was bitterly hated for it.
D. A general rise in real wages after the 1850s made downright starvation less common, but aggravated poverty remained widespread.
V. Philanthropy sometimes alleviated the worst suffering but was often accompanied by preaching and moralizing that the poor resented.
A. Middle-class Victorians widely believed that they were prosperous because they were more virtuous than the poor and that the poor were subject to that condition because they were less virtuous.
B. In Bleak House, Dickens demonstrates his acute eye for charity recipients’ resentment.
C. Seebohm Rowntree recognized poverty periods in the working-class life cycle.
1. Poverty was likely during early childhood.
2. It abated when a child could earn, increasing family funds.
3. It recurred when a worker had to support his own children.
4. It lessened when the worker’s children joined the workforce.
5. It recurred again in old age when he was unable to work.
D. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, estimated in the 1880s that as many as three million people, “the submerged tenth,” lived in permanent poverty. (See Booth’s book on poverty, In Darkest England.)
VI. As a percentage, the number of very poor was declining, but as a total, it remained very high. In general, the standard of living, at least for people who could get regular work, did rise in the Victorian era.
Essential Reading:
W. D. Rubinstein, Britain ‘s Century: A Political and Social History, 1815— 1905.
J.H. Treble, Urban Poverty in Britain: 1830—1914.
Supplementary Reading:
Henry Mayhew, London Poverty and the London Poor.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.
Questions to Consider:
1. What factors made the urban working class especially vulnerable to poverty?
2. How effective were Victorian efforts to remedy poverty?
Important Quotes from Lecture 13:
Benjamin Disraeli, the man who eventually became the Conservative Prime Minster, wrote in his novel Sybil (1845) that there were "two nations" in England. The rich and the poor. Here is his description of the poor:
“With the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in the winter, the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of childbirth gives forth another victim to our thoughtless civilization. These swarming walls have neither windows nor doors sufficient to keep out the weather or admit the sun or supply the means of ventilation, the humid and putrid roof of thatch, exhaling malaria like all other decaying vegetable matter. Beside the door might be observed the dung heap on which every kind of filth was accumulated with the purpose of being disposed of for manure. So that, when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hopes of refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dung hills.”
The London area, just south of the Thames, called Jacob’s Island, Henry Mayhew called: “the Capital of Cholera.” Here’s his description of the area from Mayhew's book London Labor of the London Poor (1849):
“When I ventured to visit the last named district, would not have wondered about the pestilence in that malarious quarter, bound as it was on the north and east by filth and fever and on the south and west by want, squalor, rags, and pestilence. Spared by the Great Fire of London [1666], the houses and comforts of the people in this loathsome place have scarcely known any improvement since that time.
In the days of Henry II, the foul, stagnant ditch that to this day makes an island of this pestilential spot, was a running stream. But at this date, the running brook was changed to a tidal sewer.”
Houses were built actually over the river on pilings, because building space was at such a premium.
Mayhew continues, “At some parts of the stream, whole rooms that have been built out over houses on opposite sides of the river nearly touch one another. There, with the very stench of death rising through the floorboards, human beings slept night after night until the last sleep of all came upon them years before its time.”
He watches people emptying their toilet buckets into this river. At the same time, he sees a group of the local neighborhood boys swimming in the river not very far away. Then, to make matters even worse, he sees another kid lowering the drinking water bucket down into the river. He says,
“And yet, as we stood gazing in horror at this fluvial sewer, we saw a child from one of the galleries opposite lower a tin can with a rope to fill a large bucket that stood beside her.”
He realizes that she’s getting drinking water.
“In each of the rude and rotten balconies, indeed, hung over the stream, the self-same bucket was to be seen in which the inhabitants were wont to put their lucky liquid to stand so that they might, after it had been left to settle for a day or two, skim the fluid from the solid particles of filth and pollution which constituted the sediment.”
“Pop! Goes the Weasel.”
“Pop! Goes the Weasel" is a song about going to the pawnbroker. “Popping,” means pawning, and the “Weasel” is the iron. You can do without the iron for a day or two, so pop goes the weasel. Go to the pawnbrokers to give the iron and raise a bit of money.
Mrs. Gaskell, who wrote classic novels of industrial life, describes in Mary Barton (1848) how the Davenport family is laid off because of a drop in trade. Then Mr. Davenport develops typhoid fever:
“He lay on straw so damp and moldy no dog would have chosen it with preference for the flagstones. Over it was a piece of sacking coming next to his worn skeleton of a body. Above him was every article of clothing that could be spared by mother or children in this bitter weather. In addition to his own, these may have given as much warmth as one blanket, could they have been kept on him, but as he restlessly tossed to and fro, they fell off and left him shivering in spite of the burning heat of his fevered skin. Every now and then, he started up in his naked madness, looking like a prophet of woe in a fearful plague picture, but soon fell again in exhaustion. Wilson appeared [this is one of his friends], carrying in both hands a jug of steaming tea intended for the poor wife, but when the delirious husband saw drink, he snatched at it with an animal instinct, with a selfishness he had never shown in health."
Henry Mayhew's description of the scavenger boys:
"I collected about a dozen of these unfortunate children. There was not one of them over 12 years of age, and many of them were but six. It would be almost impossible to describe the wretched group, so motley was their appearance, so extraordinary their dress, and so stolid and inexpressive their countenances. Some carried baskets filled with the produce of their morning's work and some tin kettle with handles. Others, more needy still, had caps from their own heads and had filled them with what they had happened to find. The muddy slush was dripping from their clothes and utensils and forming a puddle in which they stood."
Friedrich Engels was a factory manager in Manchester, fascinated and appalled by what he found. His book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, also published in 1845, a decade that is very rich in these things, became one of the classic indictments of early British capitalism.
“The worst courts are those leading down to the River Irk, which contain unquestionably the most dreadful dwellings I have ever seen. In one of these courts, just at the entrance where the covered passage ends, there is a privy without a door. This privy is so dirty that the inhabitants of the court could only enter or leave it if they were prepared to wade through puddles of stale urine and excrement. It was the scene of a cholera outbreak in 1832. Nearby is the river. It is a narrow, cold, black, stinking river full of filth and rubbish which it deposits on the low-lying right bank. In dry weather, this bank presents the spectacle of a series of the most revolting blackish-green puddles of slime from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and create a stench which is unbearable, even to those standing on the bridge 40 or 50 feet above the level of the water.”
Mayhew again on the "dustmen":
"The dustmen, in their appearance, very much resmeble the wagoners of the coal merchants. They generally wear knee britches with ankle boots or gaiters, short, dirty smocks frocks or coarse, gray jackets, and fantail hats. In one particular, however, they are at first sight distinguishable from the coal merchant's men, for the latter are invariably black from coal, while the dustmen, on the contrary, are gray with ashes."
In Dickens's Bleak House, Mrs. Pardiggle is a philanthropist. She’s a terrible busybody, and she’s visited this family before and given them some improving, Evangelical tracts. They encounter a disgustingly dirty house, and there’s no furniture, and a man is lying on the floor, smoking. As soon as they come in, this is what the man says:
“I wants an end of these liberties took with my place. I wants an end of being drawn like a badger. Now you’re going to pull, pry, and question according to custom. I know what you’re a-going to be up to. Well, you haven’t got no occasion to be up to it. I will save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washing? Yes, she’s a-washing. Look at the water. Smell it. That’s what we drinks. How do you like it? And what do you think about gin, instead? Ain’t my place, dirty? Yes, it’s dirty. It’s naturally dirty, and it’s naturally unwholesome. And we’ve got five dirty and unwholesome children as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them and for us besides. Had I read that little book what you left? No, I ain’t read that book what you left. There ain’t nobody here that knows how to read it. And if there was, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. How have I been conducting myself? I’ve been drunk for three days. I would have been drunk for four if I’d had the money. And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I give it to her, and she’s a liar if she says I didn’t.”
