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plight of the poor during the Victorian era

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  Posted by Elkstone (U3836042) on Wednesday, 22nd December 2010

  Were they worse of than serfs/peasants under feudalism? The age was characterised of harsh living and working conditions, workhouses, children working in factories, mines, chimneys, etc.
  
  The lords during the feudalism had to feed and cater those tied to his land. But under the unkind market system of the victorians, was it worse?
  
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 22nd December 2010

  Elkstone
  
  There are problems in trying to compare the plight of the serfs in Medieval England with Victorian Britain. The first is a picture usually dominated by the area of the so-called "three-field system", plus in fact the chartered boroughs and market-towns that emerged by 1500 and with it all concept of the English "Commonweal". People seem to have really started talking about this when they realised what had been lost with the monasteries, and during the Elizabethan Religious Settlement the Poor Law Act was set up laying the duty of looking after the poor on each parish.
  
  This created a situation in which Dr Johnson could say that you judged a civilization by the way that it treated its poor, and nowhere were they better treated than in England.. By which he was thinking especially of Southern England and that Medieval heritage.
  
  But this England was being lost in Great Britain: and neither Scotland nor Ireland had a compatible system of poor relief. In the late 1690's 20% of the population of Scotland were reckoned to be "soarners"- sturdy beggars given a licence to roam and to beg for alms. Fletcher of Saltoun argued that these were forming dangerous gangs that picked on soft targets, and recommended that they should all be enslaved.. The situation in Ireland with the religious divide between Catholic and Protestant was different, but licenced begging- and street-vending and entertainment- seem to have been common.
  
  The poor populations from both these regions got sucked into the developing industrial areas, which developed partly because they did not have the controls and infrastructure that defended the economy and society with the English Commonweal. The "Commonweal" created problems for change and innovation, like protecting old industries and crafts..
  
  Cotton only got started in Lancashire because the existing textile trades and workers in the London area were protected by law and custom. Lancashire was "free" with its developing cities not having any real local government structure until after the Municipal Corporations Act c1835.. This really was the "Wild West" where there were no wage or price restrictions, and the Parish Apprenticeship powers of the old Poor Law were used as a source of cheap labour.. It allowed, for example, the emerging port of Liverpool to man its slave ships with pauper children and thus undercut the port of Bristol that shared the Atlantic trade with London.
  
  The industrial North of England and the Glasgow region became the powerhouses of the new industrial system, and, as William Cobbett observed at the time,
  (a) the political economics of the period was heavily dominated by Scots Philosophers (NB Adam Smith and his argument of scrapping government intervention- local and national- and leaving developments to the play of the free market:
  and (B) management became the special preserve of the Scots , who had become the favoured choice as slave-drivers in the Caribbean and brought a similar approach to estate and business management in the new Britain, and to the working of the poor law even within the English Commonweal. Hence the "Last Labourers' Revolt" of 1830.
  
  But "Irish lessons" were important too.. By 1830, and right up till he was called out to defend London against the Chartist mobs in 1848, a great reassuring "presence in the British Establishment was the Duke of Wellington, the "Iron Duke", whose childhood (apart from boarding school) had been spent in Ireland.. There like most of the Loyalist Establishment he learned (as was later said of the US General Macarthur) "how to deal with a mob"- savagely if necessary.
  
  So the fifty years from 1783 to 1833 saw , again as William Cobbett said, people giving up the expression "the common people" and referring to the masses as "the lower orders".
  
  The current Conservative leadership seems to draw very much upon what the "radical" Benjamin Disraeli realised c1833, and wrote about in his novels. Britain, he said, was a land of two nations- the rich and the poor, and "one nation Conservatism" became a major thread of Toryism- leading logically to the "Big Society".. But it is not really obvious that this is a concept that has any roots outside of the area of the old English Commonweal, and thus the scathing and cynical attitude of the Labour Party, whose heartlands historically lie outside the Commonweal.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by NormanRHood (U14656514) on Wednesday, 22nd December 2010

  i think the Plantagenets were more humane

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Thursday, 30th December 2010

  I tend to think that in relative terms (i.e. always in relation to each era's technological advances and living conditions) things do not change that much and that people remain too much collated to empty titles such as "serf" and "worker" implying that the latter is a free citizen and as such as-if any more free than the former. I also tend to think that for much of human history, humanity was divided into the few of the upper class and the many of the lower class with the existence of a visible middle class only at specific eras and only within specific countries (e.g. all of Middle East, most of east Asia, all of non-tribal Africal had traditionaly minimal middle class).
  
  Now the case of serfs vs. workers is not an easy one since we compare fairly distant eras. In serfdom conditions, we can see that there was not just the feudal lords and the serfs but there was also a sizeable class of people federated around the lords that included a wide range of professions such as episcopes, technicians, artists and literate people (back then still quite a rarity) and of course the priesthood who could all be seen as a primary middle class. Life for them was fairly ok - always relative to the then conditions (cos today even a worker has better life conditions than a medieval aristocrat). However, I think, the case of 19th century workers was a bit worse even in direct comparison, but then this started changing with the rise of a middle class that appeared to fill in the new positions (e.g. mid-rank managerial positions, technical and technological specialisations etc.) created after the first wave of industrialisation - something which Marx and Engels who only spoke of bankers, industrialists and workers had not seen coming.

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  Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Thursday, 30th December 2010

  Elkstone,
  
  This week's episode of 'Melvyn Bragg: In Our Time' (Radio 4) deals with the Luddites and therefore brings in the very matters that you are interested in. It will be repeated this evening.
  
  One of the points made was that Engels' comments on the state of Britain in the 1840s only became widely known towards the end of the century when his writings in German were translated into English.

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  Posted by Mike Alexander (U1706714) on Thursday, 30th December 2010

  Yes, I listened to most of that programme in the car this morning, and will catch up with the rest on the podcast later. I found that interesting about Engels' work - I wonder how widely read it was in Germany? Because I gather by the late 19th century (when Germany was industrialising and overtaking Britain in key areas) the Germans made provisions for social healthcare and housing that resulted in a healthier population than Britain was able to muster by the start of WWI. But perhaps that was simply that the authoritarian political system made it easier to implement in Germany, whereas Britain was still in thrall to liberal ideology.
  
  By the way, this is the second of a pair of programmes about the industrial revolution which I have found most interesting (having not really explored it in much detail since schooldays). I found particularly interesting the argument (somewhat heated) in the first programme over whether it was a peculiarly British inventiveness, or simply geopolitical factors (abundance of coal, presence of an efficient privately-established canal network, use of imperial power to control markets etc.) which gave Britain the lead in innovation and growth from the late 18th century onwards. I suspect the truth is somewhere inbetween. Another factor (which didn't get much mention, unless I missed that bit) was the wealth from the slave and sugar trades, which bankrolled much of the investment in the early stages.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 30th December 2010

  Mike Alexander
  
  Though the influx of wealth was important- what was probably more important was the stock of private wealth associated with a gradual revolution in private ownership onwards from the English Revolution and Civil War, which essentially really began the serious dismantling of the "Feudal System" and its ties and obligations.
  
  Gradually the right to dispose "real estate" at will became effective freehold ownership so that a new financial system could emerge in which capital could be raised for new ventures like the opportunities offered by the Atlantic Trade. Property provided the collateral for loans, and owners of property provided the world's most importance method of spreading risks- the Lloyd's Insurance market.
  
  Watching the scenes of flood devastation in Queensland- and having in mind the Polynesians/Australia thread- I am reminded of the importance of having a financial system that could underwrite attempts to "boldy go where no man had gone before".
  
  The Zong Affait reminds us that the slave trade also proved a successful venture because of this speading of the risks.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 30th December 2010

  Mike Alexander
  
  The success of the German Socialist Party in the Reichstag elections of the early 1890's was a great encouragement for the Bradford Conference and the project for MP's committed to represent "Labour". And, in fact, in the Weimar Republic there were prominent German Marxists who argued that Marx's Communist Revolution could be achieved through the parliamentary route, and that Germany did not need to follow the Russian Lenninist path.
  
  These factors, of course, helped to create Nazism, because Communism within democracy was a real threat to the "status quo" and because German economic progress had been forced and fast-tracked out of defeat, weakness and desperation- as a "Triumph of the Will"- the political will. of course, the Middle Class, already very weak before 1914, was almost fatally weakened by the hyperinflation and economic collapse in 1923. After which State action ( by the USA) provided the impetus for a second German economic miracle before 1929.
  
  
  But fast-tracking meant that the State took the the place of the British entrepreneur, and also of the British system of risk-insurance.. This meant that, while the mid-Victorians believed in "Meritocracy"- even the succesful self-help elements of the "Labour Movement" - and therefore the continuation of the English tradition of the proud "freeborn Englishman", the "Germans" suddenly grasped the reality of the proud First Empire back in the Middle Ages, and the possibility that a united Germany, under a new emperor, would be strong once more.
  
  During the Second World War Aldous Huxley, away in California, produced a study of French policy during the Thirty Years' War- "The Grey Eminence"- that very obviously pointed the reader towards the fact that the real, and legendary, treatment of the German region by France and her allies during that bloody war, that estimated reckoned had killed up to 30% of the German populations, had left a brutalised and traumatised country..
  
  And ,when Goethe returned North to Weimar in 1793, from Italy, he was shocked to find the grim, dark and "gothic" homeland that he had forgotten. And soon in was to be overwhelmed by France once more. Even great Prussia was humbled, before deciding that a revolution was necessary.
  
  Initially England was taken as the political model for its revolution, and then historical studies (notably by von Ranke) showed that Teutonic and Roman genius could also help to create a new and more effective political system.
  
  But soon Britain was exporting its industrial revolution too. And it was the second or third phase, which made it possible for Germany to leap straight to the age of steam and the train, and steel, while Britain only slowly phased out the technologies and habits of an earlier age. It meant that by the 1850's the Westminster Parliament could be warned that Prussian workers were putting in 16 hour working days in the factories. Meanwhile domestic workers in Britain, trying in vain to compete with their old "domestic" ways of production, were sometimes working such long hours: but the signs are that the German worker was being the "model citizen" and working for the greater good as he had been taught in the "Realschoolen" which turned out Marx's "lumpenproletariat" way before Britain had even an elementary national system of education ..
  
  But "model citizens" in this scheme of things were perhaps more like the Medieval serfs tugging their forelocks to the royal Families ( Germany had over 50?) and to the military elite. As the Nazis realised and enshrined, it really was almost a Medieval social system suddenly equipped with cutting edge science and technology, and, like women under Nazism, people were well-looked after as long as they accepted what the autocratic political system dictated, including military conscription, something that Britain only stomached in time of war..
  
  Bismarck, the genius and archtitect of the new Germany held that the common people were only interested in full stomachs- not necessarily quite as insulting as might be imagined, for the full stomachs that worried them did not have to be limited to their own.
  
  
  Cass

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  Posted by NormanRHood (U14656514) on Tuesday, 4th January 2011

  Queensland floods
  
  sounds like some Noahs ark senereo
  
  maybe they need more high rises and helicopters
  
  monorails

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  Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  The floods are certainly not quite that bad NormanRHood, and certainly not the worst that Rockhampton etc have seen. Most Australians are well used to dealing with flood and drought, especially those that choose to live and build on flood plains.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  ID
  
  Thanks for your insight and experience..
  
  I noted yesterday a slight change in the TV coverage over here. The journalists seemed to have found a few more "old hands" who had seen it all before: and they showed a place in town where there are markers showing that the heights achieved by other floods well within the living memory of the "locals" had not yet been equalled.
  
  As with the cold December that we have just gone through in GB we seem to make a big deal these days out of fitting the way that we are trying to live to the external reality-- though I have to say that, out sledging on our local hill, I found cross-sections of the community just making the best of the situation..
  
  Once again news coverage seems to find it hard to avoid turning current affairs into some kind of Victorian Melodrama ( Do they have melodramas in Victoria?)
  
  Cass

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  Posted by thelastminority (U14702061) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  
  
  Elkstone,
  
  Your post has something like what i was told and generally what i understood as the case, give or take, growing up in the 1970/80s. The very first history book i picked up sometime after leaving school (19th century British History) was by G.M.Trevelyan, which has similar stuff. But, what he also has is something like our newer public discourse of more recent years - i.e. the recent Paxman documentary, and his description of the progress, change and reform, that took place over the course of the Victorian years (rather than pre-1837).
  
  Q. Was this immense era of change ULtimately for the better, or incrementally increasing for the better?
  
  Some sort of reading of economic and social history, tends to have, as far as i can work out, a different idea of things, even as against Paxman etc.
  
  Mathias, Court, Best, Jones & Pool, Flynn, Burton, Arthur Taylor, A.L. Morton, Reay etc, all tend to have evidence of a gradually improving situation 'for all groups in society'. Hours worked, pay, age of children working, mortality, marrying age, educational opportunities, quality of housing etc
  
  The population of England increased gradually after the Black Death towards 5.5mn by 1700, and to just shy of 10mn by 1800. By 1900, it was heading close to 40mn !!!!!
  
  Nothing has ever happened to mankind of such enormity in so short a period of time. Nothing is more important for an understanding of the life of mankind over the last 200. 2000 years(?) probably 20,000 years ! The modern mechanical (19th) and then technological World (of the 20th Century) emerged and developed in time. Practically all the changes that took place, more or less, give or take, more or less, occured during this period of time.
  
  
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  Asa Briggs "The Age of Improvement- 1783-1867".
  
  Cass

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  Posted by thelastminority (U14702061) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  
  
  Asa Briggs ???!!
  
  
  

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  Posted by thelastminority (U14702061) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  
  
  NormanRHood: i think the Plantagenets were more humaneΒ 
  
  perhaps, but. Richard I and crew, rebelled against their dad Henry II. why ?
  
  Thomas Becket was apparently (according to one source i read recently) the first old English guy to attain prominence and challenge the King authority (and Norman rule generally) - which seems to explain (?) why TV guy Schama allowed three quarters of an hour on the subject, during his series on all of English History !
  
  Did the Angevin dynasty bring in Roman Law, and trial by jury, because they decided it was a good idea, or because these kinds of ideas arrived via the Med during this period of time?
  
  
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  lastminority
  
  Do you have a problem with Asa Briggs?
  
  Why I mentionned him was that there is good reason to see the period 1783-1867 overall as one when there was a general belief that improvement was not only possible but essential- especially in order to cope with the population increase that you have mentioned.
  
  Briggs was one of the most informed and thorough social historians of the Fifties and Sixties.. I usually find his books on the Nineteenth Century very informative- e.g. "Chartist Studies", "Victorian People" and "Victorian Cities"... A bit "Sussex" perhaps -"Oxfbridge by the sea".
  
  Nice to see Court, one of our old A Level Text-books getting a mention.
  
  Getting back to improvement and the OP, the belief in improvement underpinned the belief that the old poor relief trapped both people and regions in poverty and made individual and collective progress possible..
  
  On a wider scale one could say that this is mirrored in the current situation when there are regions of Britain that have become heavily dependent upon State spending to provide people with incomes and the locality with "life blood" -either worked for or not- Incomes that is that do not directly contribute to the wealth that is needed to pay for them. And the opposition reaction to today's announcement about help that would be given to those with a viable new wealth-creating idea is a predictable one- to criticise the banks for not throwing money at businesses which probably would not pass the Dragon's Den test...
  
  The record of State intervention in spotting good "investments" has never been very good, and reached new heights of Walter-Mittyism in recent years.
  
  Lowe said of Payment by Results- as "The Age of Improvement" was coming to an end- "I can not guarantee that the scheme will either be cheap or effective. But if it is not cheap it will be effective. And if it is not effective it will be cheap.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  the lastminority
  
  Trial by jury was an old English tradition.. At a time when people cherished their honour and reputation someone of "oath-worthyness" who found him/herself accused of a crime, had merely to produce 12 people who knew him/her, who were also oath-worthy and who would swear his/her innocence- and that was the end of the matter. Hence "jurors"= those who would swear.
  
  Hence also the popular disdain that there must have been in 1066 when Harold Godwinson openly admitted to being "the lowest of the low", for he acknowledged that he had taken an oath to William of Normandy, but that it "did not count" because he did not know that he was swearing on the bones of a great saint. For the common man an oath was an oath, and an Englishman's word was his bond. But then Harold was at least half Viking.
  
  As for Henry II, as a foreigner more accustomed to French customs and manners, but also aware of the disorder in England in the previous reign, did not think that the old way was good enough, and he changed the Jury system. Now the Crown chose 12 "oath-worthy" men who did not know the accused and swore to listen to the evidence and decide whether one of their peers was guilty or innocent.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by thelastminority (U14702061) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  
  
  Do you have a problem with Asa Briggs? Β 
  
  ?? all i said was Asa Briggs !!??? y'what, question mark......
  
  what do you mean, do i have a problem with him??
  
  
  

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