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The Ten Hours Movement and the Working-Class Family in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2021

Colin Creighton*
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar

Abstract

The Ten Hours Movement of the 1830s and 1840s in Britain was the first large-scale working-class struggle to challenge the impact of industrial capitalism upon working-class family life. Yet its discourse on family has been relatively neglected by historians of the movement. This article examines the nature of the movement's critique, the vision of family life that it tried to realize, and the challenge that this posed to the emerging bourgeois order and, on this basis, to reconsider its contribution to the gender ordering of working-class family life.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2021

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References

NOTES

1. Cowherd, Raymond G. The Humanitarians and the Ten Hour Movement in England (Boston, MA, 1956)Google Scholar; Ward, J. T., The Factory Movement 1830–1855 (London, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walby, Sylvia, Patriarchy at Work: Patriarchal and Capitalist Relations in Employment (Cambridge, 1986), 97134Google Scholar; Rose, Sonya O., Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1992), 138–48Google Scholar; Valverde, Marianne, “‘Giving the Female’: The Legal, Social and Moral Regulation of Women's Work in British Cotton Mills, 1820–1850”, Journal of Social History 21 (1988): 619634CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weaver, Stewart A., “The Political Ideology of Short-Time in England, 1820–1850” in Cross, Gary (ed.), Worktime and Industrialization (Philadelphia, PA, 1988)Google Scholar; Gray, Robert, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.

2. Ward, Factory Movement; Driver, Cecil, Tory Radical: The Life of Richard Oastler (New York, 1946)Google Scholar. E.P. Thompson also makes only fleeting reference in his discussion of the Movement in The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), 336–349. A partial exception to this neglect is Creighton, Colin, “Richard Oastler, Factory Legislation and the Working-Class Family,” Jn. of Historical Sociology 5 (1992): 292320CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Jane Humphries, “Household Economy” in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2004), 262. See also, Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, “The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: the Case of Nineteenth-Century Britain,” International Review of Social History 42: (1997, suppl. 5): 25–64. For reviews of the earlier literature, see Colin Creighton, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 310–37 and Angelique Janssens, “The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate,” International Review of Social History 42: (1997, suppl. 5): 1–23.

4. Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960: gender, class and ethnicity (London, 1994), 67–81; Carl Chinn, They worked all their lives: women of the urban poor in England, 1880–1939 (Manchester, 1988), 12–44; Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman's Place: An oral history of working-class women 1890–1940 (Oxford and New York, 1984), 110–21, 125–68.

5. Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 69–84, 108–109, 137–139, 193–197; Shani D'Cruze, “Care, diligence and ‘usfulpride’ [sic]: gender, industrialisation and the domestic economy, c. 1770–1840,” Women's History Review 3 (1994): 315–45.

6. Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, “‘The Family Wage’: Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists,” Capital and Class 11 (1980): 51–72; Walby, Patriarchy at Work, 100–126; Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 55–75.

7. Katrina Honeyman, Women, gender and industrialization in England, 1700–1870 (Basingstoke, 2000), 56–68, 115–153; Sonya O. Rose, “Gender Antagonism and Class Conflict: Exclusionary Strategies of Male Trade Unionists in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Social History 13 (1988): 191–208; Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 102–125. The classic exposition of this approach is Heidi Hartman, “Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex” in Z. R. Einstein (ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York, 1979).

8. Valverde, ‘“Giving the Female’,” 629.

9. Walby, Patriarchy at Work, 116–117.

10. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 138–148. See also her arguments about masculinity in “Gender at Work: Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal 21 (1986): 113–131; “Gender Antagonism and Class Conflict,” 191–208.

11. Robert Gray, “The Languages of Factory Reform in Britain, c. 1830–1860” in The historical meanings of work, Patrick Joyce (ed.), (Cambridge, 1987); “Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs in the North of England, 1830–1860,” Gender and History 5 (1993): 56–80; The Factory Question, 23–37.

12. Carol E. Morgan, “The Domestic Image and Factory Culture: The Cotton District in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 49 (1996): 26–46; “Women, Work and Consciousness in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Industry,” Social History 17 (1992): 23–41.

13. Jane Humphries, “Class struggle and the persistence of the working-class family,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 1 (1977): 241–258.

14. R. G. Kirby and A. E. Musson, The Voice of the People: John Doherty, 1798–1854 Trade unionist, radical and factory reformer (Manchester, 1975), 346–364.

15. Ward, Factory Movement, 33–41.

16. For fuller accounts of the emergence of the Movement, see Driver, Tory Radical, chaps. 4–8 and Ward, Factory Movement, chap. 2.

17. For a modern biography of Sadler, see Kim Lawes, Paternalism and Politics: The Revival of Paternalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2000). For Bull, see J. C. Gill, The Ten Hours Parson: Christian Social Action in the 1830s (London, 1959) and Parson Bull of Byerley (London, 1963).

18. For the wider history of the Tory/Radical alliance, see David Walsh, Making Angels in Marble: The Conservatives, The Early Industrial Working Class and Attempts at Political Incorporation (London, 2012). There was occupational diversity, too, since the Movement brought together handloom weavers, artisans, and factory workers from the various branches of the cotton, woollen, and worsted industries (Gray, The Factory Question, 12–16).

19. Driver, Tory Radical, 90–103; Ward, Factory Movement, 36–46.

20. Ibid., 46–57; Driver, op. cit., 125–150.

21. Ibid., 164–177, 206–208, 219–221; Ward, op.cit., 58–63.

22. Ibid., 110–113, 131–134, 146–155; Driver, op. cit., 242–250, 307–330.

23. Bull, The sins of the poor and of the great men, exposed and reproved (Huddersfield, 1834), 18.

24. For a discussion of the distinction between humanitarianism and human rights, see Richard Ashby Wilson, “Introduction” in Humanitarianism and Suffering ed. Richard Ashby Wilson (New York, 2009), 4–18.

25. For fuller treatment of this theme, see Colin Creighton, “The Ten Hours Movement and the Rights of Childhood,” International Journal of Children's Rights 20 (2012): 457–485. For the wider context of changing attitudes toward the children of the poor, see Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1991).

26. Bailey, Parenting in England, 1700–1830: emotion, identity and generation (Oxford, 2012).

27. John Hanson, Humanity against Tyranny (Leeds, 1831), 25.

28. Ibid., 17; Bailey, “‘Think Wot a Mother Must Feel”: Parenting in English Pauper Letters, c. 1750–1834,” Family and Community History 13 (2010): 5–19. See also her discussion in Parenting in England, 60–70.

29. The Factory bill: Lord Ashley's Ten-Hour bill and the scheme of the Factory Commissioners compared (n.p., 1833), 4.

30. Bailey has drawn attention to the importance of physical caregiving for the validation of parental identity (Parenting, chap. 2).

31. Alfred, The History of the Factory Movement 1 (New York, 1966), 234.

32. Parliamentary Papers [P. P.] XV (1831–32): 108, 455. See also Coulson, ibid., 192.

33. The Ten-Hour bill. Report of the Proceedings of the Great Leeds Meeting. . . Jan. 9, 1831 (Leeds, 1831), 12.

34. Bull, A Respectful and Faithful Appeal, 9.

35. P. P. XV, 295.

36. Kirby and Musson, The Voice of the People, 73.

37. Meeting at Hebden Bridge . . . 1833: 19.

38. Report of the most important Meeting of the Operatives of Glasgow upon the Ten-Hour Bill on Thursday August 1st, 1833, (Bradford, 1833), 1; Short-Time Committee of Preston, Reverend Sir (Preston, 1833), 1.

39. Bailey, Parenting, chap. 3 and 108–109. Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany, NY, 2006) provides an extended discussion of the common acceptance by both conservative and radical thinkers that the family was indispensable for providing the foundations for civic virtue.

40. Cavie Richardson, Factory Children (Derby, 1832), 4.

41. Oastler, The Factory System (Bolton, 1832), 10; Bull, The Sins of the Poor, 18.

42. P. P. XV, 89, 99, 106, 134, 155, 413, 473.

43. P. P. XV, 309, 379; Oastler, Letter to Hoole, 7.

44. P. P. XV, 88, 140, 297, 453.

45. BLP, 238–239.

46. Hanson, Humanity, 16. For fuller discussion of the importance that radicals attached to education, see Harold Silver, English education and the radicals, 1780–1850 (London and Boston, 1975), chaps. 4–5; Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870 (London, 1960), chaps. 4–5.

47. P. P. XV: 154. See also 97 (Crabtree).

48. Ibid.: 380.

49. Oastler, Infant Slavery, 9.

50. P. P. XV: 28, 142, 295–296, 308, 473, 538; Bull, Respectful Appeal, 8–9.

51. Oastler, Letter to Hoole, 14.

52. Alfred, Factory Movement 1: 342.

53. Michael S. Edwards, Purge this Realm: the life of Joseph Rayner Stephens, 1815–79 (London, 1994) provides a recent full-length study of Stephens.

54. J. R. Stephens, The Rev. J.R. Stephens in London: three sermons preached by the Rev. J.R. Stephens in London on Sunday May 12, 1839 (n.p., 1839), 8.

55. British Labourer's Protector and Factory Child's Friend [BLP], 241.

56. P. P. XV, 79, 509.

57. Ibid., 5.

58. Ibid., 495; Hansard, 11, (1832): 345, Fitton, National Regeneration, 10–12.

59. Cavie Richardson, The Factory System: or, Frank Hawthorn's Visit to his Cousin, Jemmy Cropper of Leeds (Leeds, 1831), 8.

60. G. S. Bull, Factory Children: speech in Bradford to a Meeting of Children . . . on Tuesday June 11, 1833 (London: 1833), 3.

61. P. P. XV, 403–404.

62. Ibid., 309.

63. Stephens, Three Sermons, 8, 23.

64. The Champion, I (1849–1850): 8.

65. Bull, Sins, 16.

66. Bailey, Parenting, 23–25 and chap. 6.

67. Stephens, Three Sermons, 23.

68. “The Captive's Dream” in McDouall's Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate 7 (1841): 56.

69. David Eastwood, “Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism,” English Historical Review 104 (1989): 308–331. For accounts of working-class political economy, see Noel Thompson, The people's science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816–34 (Cambridge, 1984); The Market and its Critics: Socialist Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London and New York, 1988), 58–85; Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From moral economy to socialism (Cambridge, 1987).

70. Hanson, Humanity, 3–5, 17–19, 25–6; Oastler, Eight Letters: 38–50, 127–130, 141–144; Bull, Appeal: 29; Weaver, John Fielden, 42, 91–92, 142, 149. The belief that shorter hours would help to spread work was widespread amongst trade unionists in this period, see Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and his Times (Folkestone, 1979), 225, 228, 268–269, 307, 316, 330.

71. Lawes, Paternalism and Politics, 143–148.

72. Address to the Friends of Justice and Humanity, 3–4.

73. Lawes, Paternalism and Politics, 29–37, 45–58, 106–113. Oastler, Facts and Plain Words (Leeds, 1833), 13.

74. The Ten-Hour Bill (Leeds, 1831), 12.

75. Hanson, Humanity against Tyranny, 13–14; Friends of Justice, 24. Weaver has argued that short time itself “was a variation on a traditional demand for political citizenship” (“Political Ideology”, 91).

76. Kirby and Musson, Voice of the People, 53, 109, 153, 272–301, 367–368, 384, 393; Ward, Factory Movement, 114–115, 117–119.

77. Ward, Factory Movement, 113–115, 117–119; Driver, Tory Radical, 260–267; Kirby & Musson, Voice of the People, 272–301.

78. Lawes, Paternalism and Politics, 57–60, 112–113.

79. Fleet Papers 3, 1843, 9–10.

80. Friends of Justice, 4.

81. Fleet Papers, 3, 1843, 254, 435. For the classic exposition of the older moral economy, see E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136.

82. Alfred, Factory Movement, vol.1, 117.

83. Acceptance of this sexual division of labor was not only ubiquitous but seen as bestowing power on women, since husbands were expected to respect wives’ right to govern the household, see Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2003), 76–84.

84. Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–1980 (Oxford and New York, 1997), 31–34; Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Basingstoke and New York, 1985), 62, 190, 284–291. Even Owenites proposed to diminish women's domestic drudgery by co-operation between women rather than by transforming the sexual division of labor. See, Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983), 37–8, 50–3.

85. Bailey, Parenting, 22–39, 48–60, 77–79, 83–87.

86. Herald of the Rights of Industry, 1 (1834): 8.

87. Walby, Patriarchy at Work, 117–118.

88. Clark, Struggle, 215–218.

89. For the prevalence of joint provisioning, see Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 62–76. Rose considers that joint provisioning remained accepted and widespread into the second half of the nineteenth century, Limited Livelihoods, 139–140, 210 fn, 7. For this reason, use of the term “breadwinner” in this period is ambiguous since it can refer to the man as either the sole or the chief provider (Gray, “Factory Legislation,” 60, 65–66).

90. Kirby and Musson, Voice of the People, 29, 78, 93–94, 109, 111, 125–126, 142–143, 273.

91. Katrina Honeyman, Women, gender and industrialization, 58–62. Gray offers a similar opinion, “Factory Legislation,” 64–5.

92. Turner, Trade Union Growth, 128–135, 144–147; S. Moore, “Women, Industrialization and Protest in Bradford, West Yorkshire, 1780–1845” (Ph.D. diss., Essex University, 1986), 134, 178–181.

93. Valverde, “Giving the female,” 627–629; Walby, Patriarchy at Work, 116–119; Meg Gomersall, Working-class Girls in Nineteenth-Century England: Life, Work and Schooling (Basingstoke, 1997), 13; Morgan, Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835–1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries in England (London, 2001), 46–49, who points out that even at this point, messages were mixed; B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (Westminster, 1903), 65.

94. Gomersall, Working-class Girls, 18.

95. Walby, Patriarchy at Work, 117.

96. The Home, I, 1851, 109.

97. Clark, The Struggle, passim.

98. Taylor, Eve, passim.

99. Cowell believed that “male and female workers should enjoy their leisure together, at their own firesides, in walking abroad, reading their Bible, or in deriving delight from perusing the works of the greatest minds that ever lived,” cited in Morgan, “Domestic Image,” 37.

100. HTA, 22 (1831): 338.

101. HRI, 1 (1834): 8.

102. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 145. Morgan, “Domestic Image,” 28–32.

103. Meg Gomersall, Working-class Girls, 23; Carol Morgan, “Domestic Image,” 29–32, 38–41; Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke, 1991), 91–93.

104. Dorothy Thompson, “Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics: A Lost Dimension” in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1976), 112–138; Katherine Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2001), 24–36.

105. Alfred, Factory Movement, 235, 238, 252, 255–256; BLP, 206.

106. Ward, Factory Movement, 359; Morgan, “Women, Work and Consciousness,” 34–39. Morgan also argues that women in the cotton industry became more integrated into the working-class movement mid-century, providing an exception to the withdrawal from participation in the politics of working-class communities that Dorothy Thompson sees as characterizing women's experiences more generally (“Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics”).

107. J. Ginswick (ed.), Labour and the Poor in England and Wales 1849–1851, vol. 1 (London & Totowa, N J), 117–123; P. P. XXII (1849): 146. See also the discussion in Morgan, “Domestic Image,” 36–39.

108. Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987), 74–80.

109. Bolin-Hort, Per, Work, Family and the State: Child Labour and the Organization of Production in the British Cotton Industry, 1780–1920 (Lund, 1989), 244247Google Scholar; Gittins, Diana, Fair Sex: Family size and structure, 1900–39 (London, 1982), 95107Google Scholar, 130–135.

110. Gray, “The languages of factory reform,” 177; Gomersall, Working-class Girls, 21.