Industrial Revolution

Henry Mayhew, From “Labor and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts, Letter I,” Morning Chronicle (1849, 1862)

THE CONTRASTS OF LONDON.

[…] But London is essentially a city of antithesis - a city where life itself is painted in pure black and white, and where the very extremes of society are seen in greater force than anywhere else. This constitutes, as it were, the topographical essence of the Great Metropolis - the salient point of its character as a Capital - the distinctive mark which isolates it from all other towns and cities in the world; for though the middle class and the medium forms of civilized life prevail in the Metropolis to an unparalleled extent, this does not constitute its civic idiosyncrasy; but it is simply the immensity of the commerce which springs from this same unparalleled prevalence of merchant people in London, and the consequent vastness of its wealth, as well as the unprecedented multitude of individuals attracted by such wealth to the spot, that forms the most prominent feature in every one's ideal picture of the town.

Of the Riches and Poverty of London.

Again, at night it is, that the strange anomalies of London life are best seen. As the hum of life ceases, and the shops darken, and the gaudy gin palaces thrust out their ragged and squalid crowds to pace the streets, London puts on its most solemn look of all. On the benches of the parks, in the niches of the bridges, and in the litter of the markets, are huddled together the homeless and the destitute. The only living things that haunt the streets are the poor wretched Magdalens, who stand shivering in their finery, waiting to catch the drunkard as he goes shouting homewards. There, on a door-step, crouches some shoeless child, whose day's begging has not brought it enough to purchase even the penny night's lodging that his young companions in beggary have gone to. Where the stones are taken up and piled high in the road, while the mains are being mended, and the gas streams from a tall pipe, in a flag of flame, a ragged crowd are grouped round the glowing coke fire - some smoking, and others dozing beside it.

Then, as the streets grow blue with the coming light, and the church spires and roof-tops stand out against the clear sky with a sharpness of outline that is seen only in London before its million chimneys cover the town with their smoke - then come sauntering forth the unwashed poor; some with greasy wallets on their backs to hunt over each dust-heap, and eke out life by seeking refuse bones, or stray rags and pieces of old iron; others, whilst on their way to their work, are gathered at the corner of some street round the early breakfast-stall, and blowing saucers of steaming coffee, drawn from tall tin cans that have the red-hot charcoal shining crimson through the holes in the fire-pan beneath them; whilst already the little slattern girl, with her basket slung before her, screams, "Water- creases!" through the sleeping streets.

Charlotte Brontë, “Letter 541,” in Clement King Shorter, ed. The Brontës; life and letters. 1857-1926, vol 2 (New York: C. Scribner's sons, 1908), 215-16.

A visit to the Crystal Palace, 1851

Letter 514

Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.

The Theory of the Leisure Class 36

ing to its standard, fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.

This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only the manner of life, but also the training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male, — the man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise good manners in the way pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on which these usages rest. Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is, by this method, made to serve as a means to the end. He consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette.

In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more genial kind, are of course also present. The custom of festive gatherings probably originated in motives of conviviality and religion; these motives are also present in the later development, but they do not continue to be the sole motives. The latter-day leisure-class festivities and entertainments may continue in some slight degree to serve the religious need and in a higher degree the needs of recreation and conviviality, but they also serve an invidious purpose; and they serve it none the less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious ground in these more avowable motives. But the economic effect of these social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the vicarious consumption of goods or in the exhibition of difficult and costly achievements in etiquette.

NOTES ON ENGLAND

BY

H. TAINE B.C.L. OXON.. KTC.

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER, BY

W. F. RAE

Author f "Westward by Rafl."

WITH A PORTRAIT OF THS AUTHOK.

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1885

IV.

VISIT TO EPSOM AND TO CREMORNB GARDENS.

RACES at Epsom : it is the Derby day, a day of

jollification ; Parliament does not sit ; for three

days all the talk has been about horses and their

trainers.

We start from Waterloo Station. The sky is cloud- less, free from mist ; my English neighbours remark that they had never seen such a day in London. All

around may be witnessed green husbandry, meadows

encompassed with hedges, and the hedge-row is often

interspersed with trees. The splendour of this green, the mass and the vigour of lustrous, golden, bursting

flowers, are extraordinary. Velvets constellated with

diamonds, watered silks, the most magnificent em-

broideries do not match this deep hue ; the colour is

excessive, beyond the reach of painting : but never

have the blooming and blossoming of plants, the

luxury and the joy of the adorned earth, dazzled me with such bright pomp.

Epsom course is a large green plain, slightly undu-

lating ; on one side are reared three public stands and

several other smaller ones. In front, tents, hundreds

of shops, temporary stables under canvas, and an in-

credible confusion of carriages, of horses, of horsemen,

38 NOTES ON ENGLAND.

of private omnibuses ; there are perhaps 200,000 human heads here. Nothing beautiful nor even elegant ; the

carriages are ordinary vehicles, and toilettes are rare ; one does not come here to exhibit them, but to witness

a spectacle ; the spectacle is only interesting on account

of its size. From the top of the Stand the enormous

ant-heap swarms and its din ascends. But beyond, on the right, a row of large trees, behind them the faint

bluish undulations of the verdant country, make a

magnificent frame to a mediocre picture. Some clouds as white as swans float in the sky, and their shadow

sweeps over the grass ; a light mist, charged wit}?

sunshine, flits in the distance, and the illuminated air, like a glory, envelops the plain, the heights, the vast

area, and all the disorder of the human carnival. It is a carnival, in fact ; they have come to amuse

themselves in a noisy fashion. Everywhere are gipsies, comic singers and dancers disguised as negroes, shoot-

ing galleries where bows and arrows or guns are used, charlatans who by dint of eloquence palm off watch-

chains, games of skittles and sticks, musicians of all

sorts, and the most astonishing row of cabs, barouches,

droskies, four-in-hands, with pies, cold meats, melons,

fruits, wines, especially champagne. They unpack ;

they proceed to drink and eat ; that restores the

creature and excites him ; coarse joy and open laugh-

ter are the result of a full stomach. In presence of

this ready-made feast the aspect of the poor is pitiable to behold

; they endeavour to sell to you penny dolls, remembrances of the Derby ; to induce you to play at

Aunt Sally, to black your boots. Nearly all of them resemble wretched, hungry, beaten, mangy dogs, waiting for a bone, without hope of finding much on it. They arrived on foot during the night, and count

THE DERBY. 39

upon dining off the crumbs from the great feast.

Many are lying on the ground among the feet of the

passers-by, and sleep open-mouthed, face upwards. Their countenances have an expression of stupidity and

of painful hardness. The majority of them have bare feet, all are terribly dirty, and most absurd-

looking ; the reason is that they wear gentlemen's old clothes, worn-out fashionable dresses, small Don-

nets, formerly worn by young ladies. The sight of

these cast-off things, which have covered several bodies,

becoming more shabby in passing from one to the

other, always makes me uncomfortable. To wear these old clothes is degrading ; in doing so the human

being shows or avows that he is the offscouring of

society. Among us a peasant, a workman, a labourer, is a different man, not an inferior person ; his blouse

belongs to him, as my coat belongs to me it has suited no one but him. This employment of ragged clothes is more than a peculiarity ; the poor resign themselves here to be the footstool of others.

One of these women, with an old shawl which

appeared to have been dragged in the gutter, with

battered head-gear, which had been a bonnet, made

limp by the rain, with a poor, dirty, pale baby in her

arms, came and prowled round our omnibus, picked up a castaway bottle, and drained the dregs. Her second

girl, who could walk, also picked up and munched a rind of melon. We gave them a shilling and cakes. The humble smile of thankfulness they returned, it is

impossible to describe. They had the look of saying, like Sterne's poor donkey,

" Do not beat me, I beseech

you, yet you may beat me if you wish." Their coun- tenances were burned, tanned by the sun ; the mother

1

had a scar on her right cheek, as if she had been

40 NOTES ON ENGLAND.

struck by a boot; both of them, the child in par ticular, were grown wild and stunted. The great social mill crushes and grinds here, beneath its steel

gearing, the lowest human stratum.

However, a bell rings and the race is about to begin. The three or four hundred policemen clear the course ; the stands are filled and the meadow in front of them is but a large black patch. We ascend to our places ; nothing seems grandiose. At this distance the crowd is an ant-heap ; the horsemen and the carriages which

move forward and cross each other resemble beetles,

May-bugs, large sombre drones on a green cloth.

The jockeys in red, in blue, in yellow, in mauve, form a

small group apart, like a swarm of butterflies which

has alighted. Probably I am wanting in enthusiasm, but I seem to be looking at a game of insects. Thirty- four run

; after three false starts they are off ; fifteen

or twenty keep together, the others are in small groups, and one sees them moving the length of the ring. To the eye the speed is not very great ; it is that of a

railway train seen at the distance of half a league ; in

that case the carriages have the appearance of toy- coaches which a child draws tied to a string ; cer-

tainly, the impression is not stronger here, and it is a

mistake to speak either of a hurricane or of a whirl-

wind. During several minutes, the brown patch, strewn with red and bright spots, moves steadily over

the distant green. It turns ; one perceives the first

group approach. " Hats off I

" and all heads are un-

covered, and every one rises ; a repressed hurrah

pervades the stands. The frigid faces are on fire ;

brief, nervous gestures suddenly stir the phlegmatic

bodies; below, in the betting-ring the agitation is

extraordinary like a general St. Vitus's dance ; pic-

Manifesto of the Communist Party

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians*

The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

* By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition] † That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)] ‡ Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

15 Manifesto of the Communist Party

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune*: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious

* This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition] “Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

26 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists

society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge. “Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.” “There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism. We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the

27 Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists

populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.