Working Conditions in Victorian Stourbridge

Abstract

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.