My Apprenticeship (1926:238-271)
Introduction
I wrote this recently about the industrial revolution in Manchester and its Lancashire hinterland in ‘Studying the history of the world language’:
“In The Communist Manifesto (1845), Marx and Engels claimed that the industrial working class (‘proletariat’) would overthrow capitalism. G.W.F. Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right (1821), found that capitalism, when left to its own devices, generated mindless work and dire poverty. He saw no way around its ability to generate wealth, however, and thought its contradictions could be contained by the modern state. A “universal class” of university-trained bureaucrats would manage the process in the interest of the citizen body.
“Marx and Engels saw only one candidate for such a class, the new factory workers. Industrial capitalism would render the state obsolete; the factory system, by developing sweatshops or adding machines to human labour, was concentrating workers in new urban centres. They could offset the power of the owners’ money there by organizing more effectively than peasants locked up in the countryside. The workers, in addition to the potential of combination, they thought, had no property save their labour power. Small proprietors—the “petty bourgeoisie”, along with the “dangerous classes” who lacked stable jobs— formed separate classes. The proletariat would represent society.
“A ‘cotton famine’ beset Lancashire in 1861-64 when the Union navy’s blockade of southern ports in the American civil war dried up material supplies, causing massive unemployment. The owners petitioned parliament to send battleships to relieve the blockade; the workers held demonstrations supporting the North in the war and the freedom of labour. People died, but fewer than if workers only had their own labour to sell. What sustained them?
“Lancashire’s industrial workforce were substantially migrants from homelands that had largely avoided feudalism—Ireland, west Scotland, and north Wales—supplementing the former artisans of the water-driven textile industry in the Pennine hills. Lancashire has a wild hilly landscape to set against its “dark satanic mills” in the valleys (William Blake). I once took a French Marxist on top of the moors overlooking Oldham’s smog and Manchester’s beyond. He loved being above it all in that bracing wind; “I never knew—they never told us”, he said. The buoyancy that Marx and Engels noted in Lancashire could have had several causes. Working in a factory was the least likely.
“Beatrice Webb was a cooperative socialist who, with her husband Sidney, helped found a center-left think tank. She reports her shock when she left London to visit northern relatives near Manchester founding a new working-class civilization there. These were made, she wrote, by the workers themselves: the chapel, union and co-op. Each addressed both collective and individual interests: the chapel congregation was offset by protestant individualism; solidarity at work was based on private ownership of tools; and combination in a social market assumed private property in commodities.
“Studies of the workplace must also take in the institutions people devise for themselves outside it. The “informal economy” has long been a strategy of Lancashire’s inhabitants, before the industrial revolution and still today. In the Rossendale Valley, this included one-man part-time strip-mining and quarrying, transport and catering for pilgrims, hunting, keeping animals, market gardening, and thieving; coal mining was officially but not effectively abolished by nationalization after 1945. These activities helped working families to survive downswings in the business cycle. Marx and Engels, along with the political economists, missed it all. They clung to a contrast between working-class collectivism and petty bourgeois individualism that was never there.”
I had only read about Beatrice Potter Webb’s My Apprenticeship (2 vols, 1926). I have now devoured her brilliant account of her first experience of becoming a social investigator under a pseudonym through several visits in the 1880s to Bacup in East Lancashire where her mother came from. I choose to reproduce this engaging and profoundly personal reflection here. It presents a picture of Rossendale, where I lived while teaching in Manchester University and later when my former partner came from another small town there, and experienced survivals of her experience that her different take on what she found there have forced me to recon6sider. But first I must give a brief account of Rossendale’s distinctive place in Lancashire’s history and geography before, during, and after the industrial revolution.
Lancashire was underpopulated before the industrial revolution, except in its coastal and hilly borders. The Irish Sea coast was part of a Viking kingdom based in the Isle of Man that took in parts of Ireland. This was divided into two regions, Fylde (agriculture) and Furness (iron works). The wet Atlantic weather dropped its rain on the Pennine Hills near Manchester, giving rise to a water-driven artisan industry using cotton from the American colonies’ slave plantations. This was because cotton flies around in production as textiles, and the humidity reduced that effect. The Rossendale Valley and other hill towns in east Lancashire then became a main source for factories supplying Manchester with its global monopoly of cotton textiles. This drew massive immigration from the Celtic periphery to the larger factory towns. The other main source of labour was coerced inhabitants of the workhouses. This was because peasants and artisans had their own domestic employment and could not be relied upon to turn up as mill-hands for the factories’ machines, if distracted by their existing sidelines.
In 1870, a House of Lords enquiry into the use of legal physical punishment in England and Wales revealed that it had been abolished in two-thirds of the counties and was much diminished in the rest. The exception was Lancashire where workhouses sustained extremely authoritarian regimes for use as factory labour. One example in their report was a young Salford boy given ten strokes of the cat-o-nine-tails whip for talking back to a supervisor. Shades of Oliver Twist!
There was none of this in Bacup when Beatrice Potter was there. The old indigenous population worked in factories now owned by successful entrepreneurs risen from their own ranks. Those who did not find regular work moved to the big towns, as she writes, where “odd jobs” (the informal economy) were more available. In Rossendale, this was still active when I lived there; I could be woken up at night to buy a cheap television from a hijacked truck. Lancashire is now a hotbed of xenophobic racism, stoked up by right-wing newspapers to explain London’s systematic deindustrialization policies; but this has been more evident in the larger towns such as Oldham and Rochdale than in small towns like Bacup.
Our author begins the account of her “sentimental journey” to relatives in the North who might help her learn about the newly discovered waged working class by situating her mission in a particular moment in British political history. For much of the nineteenth century, the enfranchised national electorate was concentrated in rural areas controlled by the traditional enforcers, landowning military aristocrats and gentry. The new industrial cities, including Manchester, were largely excluded from the voting register.
All this changed with the democratic reforms of the 1870s. Beatrice Potter admits that her choice of vocation reflected a vogue in the 1880s for the media, learned societies and some researchers from the elite to explore the social character of the new working-class voters.
Manchester launched the Anti-Corn law movement for international free trade in the 1840s—against the landlords’ domestic monopoly of food supplies. Bosses and their workers were united by liberal economics in wanting to reduce high food prices. Both still speak with the same local accent, as in the Celtic periphery, but unlike the English heartlands. In Lancashire and the New Liberalism (1971), Peter Clarke showed that the Liberal governments of Asquith and Lloyd-George—which launched the welfare state before the First World War—relied heavily on Lancashire for their national electoral victories from the 1880s. The county had a quarter of England and Wales 12 million then; one million of these were born in Ireland, and the previous Liberals’ leader, William Gladstone promised Irish home rule.
This is the historical context for Beatrix Potter’s precocious story of exploration. Bacup did not have the vote when she arrived there. She worries about how secular education, politics, and science will undermine a society grounded in religious faith and ignorance of the world; but that moment had not yet come in the 1880s. She hopes for a future of strong local government succeeding decentralized self-organization. The Webbs upheld the gradualist tradition of cooperative socialism in the British Labour Party. Their Fabian Society was named after a general of the Roman Republic, Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who practised delaying tactics when outnumbered in the Punic wars. The Romans destroyed Carthage later.
To claim to be a subjective “social investigator”, like Beatrice Potter here, is a much better label than “auto-ethnography” and “auto-theory” proposed in these discussions of Self in the World soon after its publication. I have divided her story into four: Part 1 How she hit upon the idea of travelling incognito to Bacup with her old nurse and her mother’s closest friend; Part 2 First encounters and impressions there described in letters to her father, a very rich man with several homes; Part 3 Sociological and political reflections confided in letters to her father; Part 4 Reflections over several years during further visits to East Lancashire, Birmingham and London’s East End as a mature social investigator.