AIMS OF THE SURVEY

The Lancashire cotton towns in the middle of the nineteenth century were in many ways a half-way house between a predominantly rural pre-industrial England, and the predominantly urban–industrial/commercial post-capitalist England of the present day. Communities like Preston, the town I shall most be concerned with here, had between a quarter and a third of their adult male population directly involved in factory industry. Because of the extensive use of child labour, however, a considerably higher proportion of the population were at one time or another of their lives employed in the dominant cotton textile industry. The domestic handloom sector still survived, but it was of evershrinking size. Of those not employed in industry hardly any had agricultural occupations. The prosperity of the mass of the population of almost 70,000 was firmly linked to the cotton textile industry.

These communities were, then, firmly a part of the urban–industrial order, oases in the midst of a predominantly rural nation. In them were to be found all the problems which beset capitalist societies – cyclical unemployment, overcrowding, large families struggling on low wages, factory working wives and mothers, and large inmigrant populations. But this was still an early stage in the transition to the more integrated advanced industrial society we know today. The problems had emerged with full force but the social changes which were to ameliorate or remove them had not yet appeared.