Abstract
The new factories, with their massive wheels churning in the mill-race and their great chimneys towering over the landscape, together provided probably the most potent symbol of the energies of the new industrial order. When Sir George Head visited Leeds in 1835, for example, he made a point of climbing up into one of the engine-houses of a woollen factory, where he found ‘the harmony of the movements of the engine altogether was so perfect, and free from friction, the brilliancy of the polish bestowed on so many of its parts so lustrous, and the care and attention paid to the whole so apparent, that imagination might readily have transformed the edifice to a temple, dedicated by man, grateful for the stupendous power that moved within, to Him who built the universe’.1 Not everyone had such a vivid imagination, however, and when William Dodd — an old factory-hand — visited the city some five or six years later, he was struck by ‘the many marks by which a manufacturing town may always be known, viz., the wretched, stunted, decrepit and, frequently, the mutilated appearance of the broken-down labourers, who are generally to be seen in the dirty, disagreeable streets; the swarms of meanly-clad women and children, and the dingy, smokey, wretched-looking dwellings of the poor.’
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
G. Head, A Home Tour Through the Manufacturing Districts of England in the Summer of 1835 (London, 1836).
W. Dodd, The Factory System Illustrated (London, 1842).
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968) 209–11.
P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980) 61.
H. Fong, The Triumph of the Factory System in England (Tientsin, 1930);
R. M. Hartwell, ‘The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries 1800–1850’, unpub. D.Phil thesis, Univ. of Oxford, 1955.
D. T. Jenkins, ‘The Validity of the Factory Returns, 1833–1850’, Textile History 4 (1973) 26–46.
See, for example, W. B. Crump, G. Ghorbal, History of the Huddersfield Woollen Industry (Huddersfield, 1935);
R. M. Hartwell, op. cit.; M. T. Wild, ‘An Historical Geography of the West Yorkshire Textile Industries to c. 1850’, unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Birmingham, 1972.
Cited in W. O. Henderson, Industrial Britain under the Regency: The Diaries of Escher, Bodmer, May and de Gallois (London, 1968) 134–5.
E. Parsons, The Civil, Ecclesiastical, Literary, Commercial and Miscellaneous History of Leeds … and The Manufacturing Districts of Yorkshire (London and Leeds, 1834) 202 and 171.
A. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London, 1835) 17–19.
K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867: Harmondsworth, 1976 edn) I 548 f.
D. T. Jenkins, ‘West Riding’, op. cit. table 27. Jenkins’s estimates are all of prices current, so that their interpretation is complicated by the ravages of inflation, especially during the Napoleonic Wars. While it would perhaps be more useful to measure capital formation in terms of notional constant prices, Hibbert warns that the problems involved are so formidable as to place ‘very real limitations’ on such estimates and that, in particular, different results can be obtained by using different base-levels: J. Hibbert, ‘Modern Practices and Conventions in Measuring Capital Formation in the National Accounts’, Aspects of Capital Formation in Great Britain 1750–1850, ed. J. P. P. Higgins, S. Pollard (London, 1971). Feinstein, op. cit. table 5, nevertheless provides the following constant price series for plant and machinery (1851–1861 = 100), which might offer some corrective:
S. E. Thomas, The Rise and Growth of Joint-stock Banking (London, 1934);
L. Pressneil, County Banking in the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1956).
K. Pankhurst, ‘Investment in the West Riding Wool Textile Industry in the Nineteenth Century’, Yorks. Bull. Ec. Soc. Res. 7 (1955) 93–116;
see also P. L. Cottrell, Industrial Finance 1830–1914: The Finance and Organisation of English Manufacturing Industry (London, 1979).
See D. Harvey, ‘The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory’, Antipode 1 (1975) 9–21.
K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1885: London, 1974 edn) III 441.
K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867: Harmondsworth, 1976 edn) I 497.
Boulton and Watt MSS.; G. N. von Tunzelmann, Steam Power and British Industrialisation to 1860 (Oxford, 1978) 71.
J. Tann, ‘The Employment of Power in the West of England Wool Textile Industry 1790–1840’, Textile History and Economic History: Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann, ed. N. B. Harte, K. G. Ponting (Manchester, 1973) 196–246; PP 1836, XLV; PP 1839, XLII.
G. Rimmer, ‘Middleton Colliery, near Leeds 1770–1830’, Yorks. Bull. Ec. Soc. Res. 5 (1953) 41–56.
This point is also made in V. Gattrell, ‘Labour, Power and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century’, Ec. Hist. Rev. 30 (1977) 95–149.
E. O. Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London, 1978).
D. Levine, ‘A Theory of the Growth of the Capitalist Economy’, Econ. Dev. Cult. Change 24 (1975) 47–74; see also idem, ‘Accumulation and Technical Change in Marxian Economics’, unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Yale Univ. 1973.
T. Barlow, A Few Remarks addressed to the Manufacturers, Shopkeepers and Operatives of Yorkshire on the Subject of Trades’ Unions (Leeds, 1832).
See M. Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy (Cambridge, 1980) 287.
K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867: Harmondsworth, 1976 edn) I 591.
R. Samuel, ‘Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop J. 3 (1977) 9–10.
Cf. G. Stedman Jones, ‘Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution’, New Left Review 90 (1975) 35–69.
The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. P. Sraffa, M. Dobb (Cambridge, 1951) I 105.
See, for example, P. Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study of Working Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford, 1970) chap. VII; M. Berg, op. cit.
See G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement, 1789–1947 (London, 1948); idem, Attempts at General Union: A Study in British Trade Union History 1818–1834 (London, 1953);
H. Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Harmondsworth, 1971).
See R. Oastler, A Serious Address to the Mill-owners, Manufacturers and Cloth-dressers of Leeds … (Huddersfield, 1834).
E. Tufnell, Character, Object and Effects of Trades Unions (London, 1834).
R. G. Kirby, A. E. Musson, The Voice of the People: John Doherty 1789–1854 (Manchester, 1975) 249; see also G. D. H. Cole, ‘Attempts’, op. cit.
J. T. Ward, ‘Leeds and the Factory Reform Movement’, Trans. Thoresby Soc. 45 (1960) 87–118.
See M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971); idem, ‘Sociological History and the Working-Class Family’, Soc. Hist. 3 (1976) 317–34;
J. Humphries, ‘Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working-Class Family’, Camb. J. Econ. 1 (1977) 241–58.
P. Richards, ‘The State and Early Industrial Capitalism: The Case of the Handloom Weavers’, Past and Present 83 (1979) 91–115.
R. G. Cowherd, Political Economists and the English Poor Laws (Athens, Ohio: U.P., 1977);
N. C. Edsall, The Anti-Poor Law Movement 1834–44 (Manchester, 1971).
N. C. Edsall, op. cit.; M. E. Rose, ‘The Anti-Poor Law Movement in the North of England’, Northern History 1 (1966) 70–91.
A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London, 1959) 11.
G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971); as such, this was a clear challenge to the precepts of the traditional moral economy.
Lt-Gen. Sir W. Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier (London, 1857) II: 25 April, 29 June 1839.
M. Hovell, The Chartist Movement (1918: Manchester, 1966 edn);
F. C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (Manchester, 1959);
D. Bythell, The Hand-Loom Weavers (Cambridge, 1969)
J. T. Ward, Chartism (London, 1973)
PP 1840, XXIII: Report from H. S. Chapman; J. Lawson, Progress in Pudsey (1887: Firle, 1978 edn).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1982 Derek Gregory
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gregory, D. (1982). The Factory System in the Yorkshire Woollen Industry. In: Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution. Critical Human Geography. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16849-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16849-1_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-31086-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-16849-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Business & Management CollectionBusiness and Management (R0)