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The Standard of Living Debate: Glasgow, 1800–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

R. A. Cage
R. A. Cage
Affiliation:
University of New England, New South Wales, Australia
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Abstract

This analysis of the condition of the working classes in Glasgow in the first half of the nineteenth century is provided in two stages. An average real wage index for 1810–1840 exhibits a marked decline as a result of the high proportion of textile workers in the labor force. Quality indicators, such as housing conditions and mortality rates, deteriorated, and working-class diets at best did not improve. The evidence examined for Glasgow suggests no improvement in the standard of living of the city's working-class population.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 175 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1983

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References

1 See Handley, J. E., The Irish in Scotland (Glasgow, 1945)Google Scholar and The Irish in Modern Scotland (Glasgow, 1947).Google Scholar

2 Cleland, James, Statistical Tables Relative to the City of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1828), pp. 132–33.Google ScholarBaird, Charles, “On the General Sanitary Condition of the working Classes,” Reports on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Scotland (London, 1842), pp. 164–65.Google Scholar

3 Gourvish, T. R., “The Cost of Living in Glasgow in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 25 (02 1972), 65–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Handley, Irish in Scotland, p. 275.Google Scholar

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6 Slaven, Anthony, The Development of the West of Scotland (London, 1975), pp. 148–49.Google Scholar

7 Watt, Robert, An Inquiry into the Relative Mortality (Glasgow, 1813), pp. 15–44,Google Scholar and Glaister, John, The Epidemic History of Glasgow during the Century 1783–1883 (Glasgow, 1886), p. 11.Google Scholar

8 Murray, Handloom Weavers, p. 99.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 101.

10 Cleland, James, Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the City of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1832), pp. 112–16.Google Scholar