Suchergebnisse

It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years the history of working-class housing in the nineteenth century has been transformed. Many older historians, of course, took it for granted that the quality of houses built to meet the needs of the fast-growing urban population was uniformly bad, a testimony to the avarice of builders and landlords alike. Beliefs of this kind owed much to Engels, and to the Hammonds writing earlier this century about the life of the town labourter. One of the first suggestions that these views were really an over-simplified description of housing conditions came from Professor Ashworth in the 1950's, who pointed out that it was quite wrong to suppose that all nineteenth-century towns developed on the same lines, a kind of Coketown endlessly repeated. While not denying that there was a great deal of poor-quality building, more recently historians have made it clear that newer town housing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not necessarily worse than housing built earlier on, or worse than rural housing built at the same time; that new building varied in construction and amenities in the same town, and from town to town; that the skilled working classes were likely to live in better-quality housing than the unskilled; and that the segregation of working-class housing from middle-class housing, and of the better-off working classes from the labouring classes, again varied from town to town.

In his study of the effect of technological change on families working in the Lancashire cotton industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, Smelser has argued that the family as a work unit was disrupted by the introduction of larger mules, which required more child assistants in the spinning mill than one family alone could provide. The result was the disruption of the family work unit, hitherto preserved in the earlier cotton mills, and the decline of the old apprentice-ship system based on kinship.1 It should be instructive, therefore, to attempt a comparative investigation of conditions in the family work unit in Black Country nailing in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the trade faced increasing competition from factory-made nails and died a lingering death similar in some ways to that of handloom weaving.2 For the purposes of this article, the family work team of the nailers of Stourbridge and district will be examined in the light of the quantitative evidence of the 1851 census returns, and then the decline and disintegration of the work unit will be discussed, with particular reference to changes in familial roles. Here of course it will be impossible to separate work roles from social roles within the family, since so much time was spent by all members within the nailshop, and the distinctive life-style of nailers was strongly conditioned by their mode of work. Lastly, some suggestions will be made as to the causes of decline, and the general significance of the changes which took place in the family.

Everybody imagines he knows about working conditions in Victorian England, particularly the excessively long hours resulting from the use of machinery to which the workers became increasingly enslaved. In the famous words of James Philip Kay, "Whilst the engine runs the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness." It is equally well-known that the worst aspect of employment was the exploitation of women and small children in textile factories and mines. Factory conditions were causing disquiet as early as the 1780's, and the revelations of the witnesses before a succession of committees and commissions in the early part of the nineteenth century are too familiar to need repeating here. The same may be said of conditions in the mines. Who has not been moved by that description of girls at work in the mines of the West Riding – "Chained, belted, harnessed, like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half naked […] they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural"? Yet it is also common knowledge that factory and mine workers were only a minority among the working classes at the mid-century, numbering about 1¾ millions compared with the 5½ millions employed in non-mechanised industry. Agriculture and domestic service, in fact, employed twice the number of those working in manufacture and mining at this time.