Everything described so far was done to a population that could not vote, could not lawfully combine, and had no representative in the Parliament that made the rules.
The previous lessons have established the costs: a wage that barely moved for two generations, a workplace organised around the owner's clock, and a city that killed a fifth of its children. This lesson is about what the people carrying those costs did, and about the long, grudging, and in the end substantial legislative answer. It is easy to write this as a story of good intentions triumphing. The more useful reading is that reform arrived when it became cheaper than the alternative, and the alternative was supplied by the people in the streets.
The legal position
Begin with what was and was not allowed, because the constraints explain the tactics.
The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made it a summary offence for workmen to combine to raise wages or shorten hours, triable by two magistrates who were frequently themselves employers. They were repealed in 1824 largely through the manoeuvring of Francis Place, and a wave of strikes immediately followed, so Parliament passed an amending act in 1825 that permitted combination for wages and hours alone while leaving almost any effective action prosecutable as intimidation or as conspiracy at common law.
Representation was narrower still. Before 1832 the franchise in England and Wales rested on a patchwork of ancient qualifications; Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds returned no members at all, while Old Sarum, an uninhabited mound in Wiltshire, returned two. The Reform Act of 1832 redistributed seats to the industrial towns and standardised the borough franchise at a £10 householder, raising the electorate in England and Wales from roughly 400,000 to roughly 650,000, which is about one adult man in five. The Act enfranchised the middle class and confirmed the exclusion of everyone below it, and that specific disappointment is where the largest working-class movement of the century begins.
Luddism
The Luddites are the most misremembered episode in the subject. They were not opposed to machinery in general, and they were not a mob.
The attacks ran from March 1811 to about 1816, in three distinct districts with three distinct grievances. Nottinghamshire framework knitters attacked wide stocking frames used to make cut-ups, cheap stockings cut from a knitted sheet rather than fashioned to shape, which undercut the trade and, they argued, defrauded the customer. Yorkshire croppers, who finished woollen cloth by hand with 40 pound shears and were among the best-paid workmen in England, attacked gig mills and shearing frames that did their work. Lancashire attacks were aimed at power looms and were mixed up with the collapse of handloom weaving described in an earlier lesson.
What united them is that each group was appealing to a body of regulation that had recently been swept away. Apprenticeship rules, quality standards and the old statutory machinery for fixing wages had been repealed or left unenforced, and petitions to Parliament to restore them had failed. Machine breaking was what happened after the legal route closed. It was disciplined, it was aimed at specific frames belonging to specific masters who had broken custom, and frames belonging to masters who paid the customary rate in the same workshop were often left untouched.
The state's response was severe out of all proportion. Frame breaking was made a capital offence in 1812, against which Byron made his maiden speech in the Lords, and something like 12,000 troops were deployed in the disturbed districts, a force comparable to the army Wellington then had in the Peninsula. The York special commission of January 1813 hanged seventeen men.
Example. A master can install a machine costing £200 that saves £60 a year in wages. Money can otherwise be lent at 5 per cent. If there is a one in four chance each year that the machine is destroyed, is it still worth installing?
Without any risk the machine returns per cent a year, which is obviously worth having. With a 25 per cent annual chance of losing the whole £200, the expected loss is a year, so the expected net gain falls to , a return of 5 per cent, exactly what lending the money would earn without the trouble. At that point the master is indifferent, and any higher risk makes him decline. This is the real logic of machine breaking, and it explains why it was targeted rather than general: the threat does not have to destroy every machine, only to make the expected return on installing one no better than the alternative. Historians have called this collective bargaining by riot, and in a country with no lawful unions, no factory inspectors and no vote, it was the only bargaining instrument available.
Now you. The government floods the district with troops and hangs seventeen men, cutting the annual risk of destruction to 2 per cent. What happens to the calculation, and what does that say about what the state was actually doing?
Answer
The expected loss falls to , so the net gain is £56 and the return is 28 per cent, barely below the undisturbed 30. The threat has been neutralised and the machines go in. What the state was doing, in economic terms, was underwriting the return on labour-saving capital, which cuts through the idea that mechanisation was a private process politics merely observed. The direction of British technology was set by relative prices, as an earlier lesson argued, but an owner's ability to realise those prices rested on a state willing to garrison the West Riding. The qualification is that the Luddite threat could not have held for long even without troops, since the machines were profitable enough that some master somewhere would always take the risk. It bought time and raised the price, which is what industrial action usually does.
Peterloo
The other route was mass peaceful assembly, and the state's answer to that is the event that gave British radicalism its founding memory.
On 16 August 1819 a crowd generally estimated at 60,000, drawn from the mill towns around Manchester, walked in disciplined contingents to St Peter's Field to hear Henry Hunt speak for parliamentary reform. The magistrates ordered Hunt's arrest, and the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, local men on horseback, rode into the crowd with sabres drawn. Eighteen people were killed and something like 650 to 700 were injured.
The name Peterloo, coined by a radical journalist against Waterloo four years earlier, stuck because it named the thing exactly: cavalry used against British civilians. The government thanked the magistrates and passed the Six Acts within four months, restricting public meetings, seizing seditious publications and taxing the cheap press out of existence. It also produced, indirectly, the Manchester Guardian, founded in 1821 by a merchant who had watched the field.
The Factory Acts
Regulation of the workplace took forty years and moved in a pattern worth extracting, because the same pattern recurs whenever a state first regulates an industry.
The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 limited parish apprentices in cotton mills to twelve hours and required some schooling, and did nothing, because enforcement was left to local magistrates and there was no inspector. The Act of 1819 barred children under nine from cotton mills and limited those aged nine to sixteen to twelve hours, and did almost nothing, for the same reason.
The Factory Act of 1833 is the hinge, and the reason is administrative rather than moral. It excluded children under nine, limited those aged nine to thirteen to nine hours a day and 48 a week, limited those aged fourteen to eighteen to twelve hours and 69 a week, required two hours of schooling a day, and, decisively, created four salaried factory inspectors with the power to enter any mill, question anyone, and prosecute. Four men for the whole country is a derisory number and it was still transformative, because for the first time the law had someone whose job was to notice.
What followed built on that machinery. The Mines Act of 1842, prompted by a royal commission whose illustrations of women and children hauling coal underground were circulated to horrified members of Parliament, banned women and boys under ten from working below ground. The Factory Act of 1844 limited women to twelve hours, cut children to six and a half, and required dangerous machinery to be fenced. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 limited women and young persons to ten hours, which owners evaded with relay systems until the Act of 1850 fixed the hours between which anyone could work, producing a normal day of ten and a half hours.
Example. Nassau Senior argued in 1837 that a ten hours bill would destroy manufacturing profit entirely, because in an eleven and a half hour day the profit is made in the last hour. Test the argument on a mill with revenue of £10,000, materials and wages of £8,500, and a fixed capital charge of £1,000.
Profit is . Cutting the day from 11.5 hours to 10 is a reduction of per cent, so revenue falls to £8,696 and materials and wages, which vary with output, fall to £7,391. The fixed charge stays at £1,000, since the building and machinery cost the same whether they run or not. Profit is therefore , a fall of 39 per cent. That is a serious loss and it is not the annihilation Senior predicted. His error was to assign the fixed capital charge to particular hours of the day, as though the first ten hours paid the wages and the eleventh paid for the machinery, when a fixed cost is by definition spread across all the hours worked. The prediction also assumed output would fall in exact proportion to hours, which it did not: after 1847 output per hour rose as workers worked less exhausted and owners raised machine speeds, and by the 1850s the industry was producing more than ever on a shorter day.
Now you. Why was it politically easier to regulate the hours of children than the hours of adult men, and how did the reformers turn that to their advantage?
Answer
Because a child was held not to be a free agent capable of making a contract, so limiting a child's hours could be presented as protecting someone incapable of protecting himself rather than as interfering with a bargain struck between adults. Regulating an adult man's hours ran straight into freedom of contract, the governing economic doctrine of the age, and every attempt to do it directly failed. The reformers' move, associated with Richard Oastler, John Fielden and Lord Ashley, exploited the fact that a mill is a connected system: a spinner cannot work without the children who piece his threads and clean under the machines, so a limit on children's hours limits everyone's hours in practice. That is why the Ten Hours movement pushed hardest on children and women, and why owners fought those clauses as fiercely as if they applied to men, which in effect they did. The relay systems of 1847 to 1850 tried to break that link by rotating children through the day, and the 1850 Act closed it by fixing the clock hours between which anyone could work.
Chartism
The largest movement of all came directly out of the exclusion of 1832 and the New Poor Law of 1834, which abolished outdoor relief in principle and sent the destitute to a workhouse deliberately made worse than the worst available job.
The People's Charter of 1838 set out six demands: universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, no property qualification for members of Parliament, payment of members, equal electoral districts, and annual parliaments. Every one of them is a mechanism rather than a policy, and taken together they amount to the claim that the working population could not fix any of its other problems until it could vote.
The movement's instrument was the mass petition, and the scale is easy to underrate.
Example. The 1842 Chartist petition carried about 3.3 million signatures. Great Britain's population in the 1841 census was about 18.5 million, of whom roughly 26 per cent were men aged over twenty. What share of adult men signed, and how does that compare with the electorate?
Adult men numbered about million, so 3.3 million signatures is about 69 per cent of them, and roughly five times the 650,000 men entitled to vote in England and Wales after 1832. Parliament declined even to hear it, by 287 votes to 49. Treat the share with care: petitions were signed by women and by boys, and were not verified in 1842, so the true figure for adult men is lower. The 1848 petition, which claimed 5.7 million, was checked by the House and found to hold about 1.9 million genuine names, one third of the claim. Even discounted heavily this is a level of organised participation without precedent in British history, achieved by a population with no vote, no money and a twelve hour working day.
Now you. Five of the six points eventually became law. Why is Chartism usually described as a failure?
Answer
Because none of them passed while the movement existed, and the movement collapsed after the damp anticlimax of 10 April 1848, when the Kennington Common demonstration met a London full of special constables and the petition went to Parliament in three cabs. The property qualification went in 1858, the second Reform Act came in 1867 and the third in 1884, the secret ballot in 1872, roughly equal districts in 1885, and payment of members not until 1911, all passed by governments responding to other pressures and none crediting the Charter. Only annual parliaments never arrived, and nobody now thinks that was a loss. Whether this counts as failure depends on what a movement is for. Judged on winning its demands within its own lifetime it failed completely; judged on establishing that those demands were the reasonable ones, so that the next generation could adopt them as moderate positions, it succeeded slowly. The honest answer is that it lost and was right.
The Corn Laws, and who had won
The last of these fights is the one that settles which interest now ran the country.
The Corn Laws of 1815 blocked imported wheat until the domestic price reached a high threshold, protecting landlords' rents at the cost of the price of bread. The Anti-Corn Law League, founded in Manchester in 1838 and led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, ran what is recognisably the first modern political campaign: paid lecturers, a national newspaper, mass mailing made possible by the penny post of 1840, and the systematic buying of 40 shilling freeholds to create voters in county constituencies.
Robert Peel repealed the laws in June 1846, using the Irish famine as the occasion and splitting his own party permanently in the process. Two readings of the outcome are worth holding together. It was a victory for cheap food, and the working population benefited from it. It was also a victory of the manufacturing interest over the landed interest, since a manufacturer who wants low wages wants cheap bread, and the League was funded by employers, several of whom were resisting the Ten Hours Bill at the same moment. Cobden and Bright both opposed factory regulation.
That is the shape of the whole period's politics in one line. The industrial classes won their argument against the landowners in 1846, the working population won its argument about hours in 1847, and the two victories were won by opposed coalitions in consecutive years. By the middle of the century Britain had an industrial economy, an inspected workplace, a beginning of a sanitary state, and a political system that had absorbed enough pressure to survive the year Europe spent in revolution.
What it also had, by then, was imitators, customers, and colonies whose own manufacturing it had destroyed. The final lesson takes the argument outward, to what the technology did when it left.