The idea of class was a new phenomenon that began to develop in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It helped to delineated between the socio-economic groups within the newly industrialized European sphere and created a set of social customs, economic ideologies and political alignments associated within each of the classes. These were highly apparent in England as the leader of the Industrial Revolution. The stratification of economic class in nineteenth century shaped the major concerns of politics of the time in literature like Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and the character therein, served as an allegorical report on the “Social Question” and comments on society’s views on the different social classes.
My Thoughts always return to the Necessity of exer-cising Politicks in cultivating & protecting & extending our Manufactures as the principal Source for improving our Lands, multiplying our People & increasing & establishing our Commerce & Naval Force.[1]
The factors that contributed to this economic boom were the increase in population, better agriculture, the expansion of worldwide trade and banking, better transportation of goods and technological innovations. In the late eighteenth century new developments in the textile industry helped to increase the production of thread and finished cloth. This gave English merchants the advantage to undersell the textile markets in continental Europe, the Americas and India. As a result of these factors, the classes began to take their forms with the aristocracy who still had power through parliament, the rising middle class rapidly gaining wealth and the wage workers whose lifestyle had only minorly improved with the industrialization of England.
The rise of the industrial revolution was a key factor in the development of class. No longer did the gentry control mercantile and industrial enterprises because the shift in the economy from agricultural to manufacturing opened the doors for the growing middling or bourgeoisie class of English peoples with expendable wealth. The increase in population and the production of manufactured goods helped to standardize life that granted even the lowest class’s basic needs of clothing and food. The change from arduous handicraft like woodworking to streamlined mass production allowed for the middle class to use their wealth to enrich their lives with fancy knockoff furniture that populated the homes of the aristocracy. There were many factors that contributed to the success of the bourgeoisie namely their personal views of class drawn from the complex political and economic views of society.
The fractioning of English society constructed class on various levels; the first being traditional religious responsibility and social views. The faith of the aristocracy was of an orderly sort where the gentry had a Christian obligation to care for the welfare of the lower classes. They preferred to maintain parish poor relief and charity. The bourgeoisie drew heavily from the philosophies of Malthus and viewed the poor as having:
“…the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition.”[2]
The bourgeoisie viewed the condition of the poor as a result of their immoral lifestyle. The two room hovels that the working class occupied were a result of the poor spending their earnings on gin and betting on bull baiting, cockfight, bare knuckle boxing and shin kicking. To the middle class, the wage workers are tied down with their filthy lifestyle of unrestrained sexuality and sin. While the working class did live in squalor, they had little choice in mobility as the only regular jobs were in urban areas in the crowded factory. The conditions of these factories were abhorrent to the aristocracy who viewed the management of the middle class as little more than wage slavery. Yet, there was little concern over their condition except when it was politically advantageous.
Another outlook that divided the classes were politics and access to lawmaking. The aristocracy was established as the caretakers of the British peoples. They represented the concerns and issues from their constituencies in the boroughs and counties which sought to maintain tradition. However, in 1780 there was little representation of the “Black Country ironmasters, West Riding woolen manufactures and Lancashire cotton magnates[3]” it was only until the election of Sir Robert Peele in 1790 that the middle class interested became represented in the House of commons. Lacking direct representation in Parliament, the bourgeoisie began to lobby members of parliament with newspapers and pamphlets as well as manipulate the working class in large rallies and demonstrations against the gentry’s dominant voice in politics. The bourgeoisie began to place collective pressure on Parliament through organizations like Chambers of Manufacturers, trade committees, local and regional associations. Men like John Norris viewed the Chamber of Manufacturers as a “vital manifestation of the industrialists’ sophistication and political expertise: in its after math local groups, organized for industrial lobbying and became, in consequence, steadily more powerful and proficient[4]”
The industrialists’ lobbying of Parliament, gave some of these aristocrats an opportunity to grab the advantage of supporting the industrial upstarts. The Whig political party began to push for free trade and individual liberty and freedoms because between 1760 and 1800 the party, which had become increasingly corrupt and dependent upon political patronage, disintegrated into a number of smaller groups. The rising middle class wanted a piece of that power and began to put their support behind the Whigs and radicals in parliament. The bourgeoisie supported the reformation of the voting districts and changing the property requirements for voting Members into Parliament. The Tory party and the aristocracy feared this as an upheaval of the natural order and tradition of the English government. The Whig party therefore became the political supporter of the new financial and mercantile interests who would profit, in the early nineteenth century, from the wars against France; just as the Tories represented the old landed interests who, because they were taxed to support the same wars, opposed them.
Leaders like John Charles Spencer, Viscount Althorp and third Earl Spencer were motivated by the belief that reform was desirable and in accordance with Whig principles. They felt that the existing system was inadequate and they wanted to get rid of the rotten boroughs and corrupt practices. They genuinely were concerned about the disharmony between the distribution of seats and the wealth and population. They wanted to include the middle classes in the system of government. This allowed the system of economics that developed out the construction of class blurred the lines that separated the gentry from the middle class. Where once only the gentry were able to hold economic monopolies on goods and trade, good investments and savings allowed the middle class to break through and accommodate themselves in great country homes and urban apartments. Through the eighteenth century developments of the Bank of England and the stock market, the ideas of a “laissez faire” economy were allowed to mature under the careful eye of the English government. This was because the newly industrialized English economic machine was seen as a benefit to the economic growth of England in the world market. England was able to compete with China with their development of porcelain production; compete with India in cotton processing and weaving; and the discovery of pig iron with coal made them a major producer of cheaper iron.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South represents the inter-class conflict in Milton, a town Gaskell based on newly industrialized Manchester, England. Gaskell represents each class accord to their role in society: disconnected and self-absorbed aristocracy, pragmatic middle class industrialists and downtrodden, sickly workers on the verge of rioting. The characters that Gaskell depicts serve as a response to the ever present “social question,” that is what to do about the working class’ demands and work environmental conditions. She creates a situation in Milton that is endemic of the time period, a labor strike which pits the managerial or bourgeoisie class against the cotton mill workers or proletariat class. The reaction to the situations and each character interpretation represents Gaskell’s view of England in the early nineteenth century.
Gaskell creates an image of aristocracy concerned with idle matters. The protagonist Margaret Hale is caught in the middle of a class struggle she cannot truly comprehend because her in her own rural aristocratic life she has only known workers and servants to be loyal and content with their work because they seemingly are taken care of and self-sufficient. Her mother’s servant, Dixon, is devoted to the daughter of Sir John Beresford, Maria, despite her marrying for love to a poor vicar Richard Hale, Margaret’s father. Gaskell depicts Richard Hale as a man torn between his alignment to the Church of England and his own personal beliefs. While she never goes into detail about the issue directly, it is assuredly associated with his son, Frederick’s role in a mutiny at sea and the disgrace it has brought to their family. Margaret’s mother and her family are depicted as focusing on matters of advantageous marriages, the overbearing heat of Italy and the frivolous items of exotic Indian shawls and fancy gowns. They never really concern themselves with the world outside their upscale London home or country houses. It is from this view of the world that Margaret is tossed into the conflict between the growing middle class and the impoverished wage worker when she arrives in Milton.
As Margaret Hale enters the newly industrialized town of Milton she notices the stark contrast from her country house in Helstone. The air is thick with smoke and its seems like there is a raincloud above the town but as Gaskell describes:
Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out ‘unparliamentary’ smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain[5]
This is the common depiction of mill towns of the period with their smokestacks pouring black smoke high from the parliamentary decreed height smokestacks. The air quality is terrible and gives the town an ominous feel. It is in this context that Gaskell introduces John Thornton, a highly idealized ambitious manager of the local mill and student of Richard Hale. Thornton has worked his way up from a Merchant Shop and used his knowledge of the textile business to achieve his role as manager of the Marlborough Mills. He has reconstructed himself by refining his speech from the local colloquialism to standardize English which was the track that many of the middle class of this era were following to separate themselves from the working classes. In his home his mother Mrs. Thornton dominates the household and maintains her son’s wealth through her rabid support of his liberalism.
Thornton’s life exemplifies the middle class between the landowners and the working class because he adheres to the liberal idealism of self-reliance and free trade. Thornton’s view of the worker-manager relationship is very clear as he explains to Margaret Hale’s question over the concerns of the workers. Thornton see himself as the “the unquestioned and irresponsible master of my hands, during the hours that they labour for me. But those hours past, our relation ceases; and then comes in the same respect for their independence that I myself exact[6].” He, like many of the managers and owners of factories, see nothing wrong in their apathy to the plight of the worker because they choose to live in squalor and drunkenness. Yet unlike the other managers, Thornton does attempt to understand the workers and when the rioters come to Marlborough Mills he does confront them. He also tries to understand Margaret’s views of the workers base on her relationship with the newly met Bessie and Nicholas Higgins but Thornton cannot help but disagree with her. He understands that if he raises the wages it will drive up the costs of finished cotton textiles and his buyers will choses other factories to deal with because both domestically and internationally there will always be cheaper means of production. Thornton does not see it as his “oppression” but only his means of self-preservation.
Gaskell’s depicts two views of the working class, the malcontent John Boucher and the hard-working but downtrodden Nicholas Higgins. Gaskell uses the union metaphorically as a plowshare preparing the ground for daisies (i.e. the workers) to prosper but men “Such as Boucher - 'twould be settin' him up too much to liken him to a daisy; he's liker a weed lounging over the ground[7]” Boucher’s character is the type of worker that the middle class fears. He is a drunkard, a terrible loom worker and has eight children under the age of eight that he cannot feed. Boucher complains about finding work to support his family yet what little earnings he makes he spends on alcohol. Boucher turns to violence and leads the rioters that marched on Thornton’s Marlborough Mills sabotaging the union’s diplomatic bargaining hopes. After the riot, Boucher goes into hiding and come out to beg for work at another textile mill in Milton, but is turned away because of his association with the union. In a last desperate moment, Boucher commits suicide in the stream that the textile mills used for dyeing cloth and is found with a heavily discolored and bloated face.
Where Boucher is the worst kind of worker, Nicholas Higgins is Gaskell’s idea of the conflicted yet good worker. His speech in heavily accented and he lives in a hovel with his two daughters. When Margaret Hale visits his daughter, Bessie Gaskell uses their dialogue as a means of stating the condition of the worker at the time. This is seen as Bessie explains that even though her father is not like the other strikers who drink away their wages, Mr. Higgins drinks because he is at his wit’s end. Higgins makes the case that he cannot make ends meet and does not understand why if Milton’s mills are doing well why the workers are not reaping the benefits of it. Higgins relates his faith in the unions to Mr. Hale after Bessie’s death by stating after the masters’ fathers had abused and overworked the mill workers’ fathers that:
In those days of sore oppression th' Unions began; it were a necessity. It's a necessity now, according to me. It's a withstanding of injustice, past, present, or to come. It may be like war; along wi' it come crimes; but I think it were a greater crime to let it alone. Our only chance is binding men together in one common interest; and if some are cowards and some are fools, they mun come along and join the great march, whose only strength is in numbers.[8]
Higgins is not a rambunctious troublemaker like his fellow mill worker, Boucher but he none-the-less sympathetic to the strike. Instead of joining with the rioters, Higgins wants to better the worker through the union committees and negotiations with the mill managers and owners. Higgins agrees with the idea of the managerial class not interfering with his life outside the mill but he still wants something to assist in his outside of work life so he can be a better worker and to provide for his surviving daughter and Boucher’s children. Gaskell uses Higgins’ humility and idea of responsibility as the “natural” character that Thornton identifies with, because like Higgins, Thornton had assumed the responsibilities of his father’s mistakes. It was because of this similarity that hires Higgins for his mill.The socio-political and economic effect of class on English society helped to create the Victorian Age, where a lot of the values of both the aristocracy and middle class were blended to form the virtue of English traditions in the nineteenth century. The ideal of a “nuclear family” isolated from the historic multigenerational households, show the end result of the idea of self-reliance and personal liability proposed by the middle class in the early half of the century. The idea of a gentleman as a sober, industrious man of frugality was born from the union of Whiggish and bourgeoisie philosophies that stemmed from Malthus and Smith socio-economic theories. While these ideas helped to make a stronger middle class, it left the working class to find its own way in a world of uncertainty. The life of a factory worker like Higgins was harsh despite his dutiful loyalty to a hard day’s work.
The Industrial Revolution made class a central issue in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Great Britain because of the burgeoning financial and political power of the middle class. The Whig party took advantage of this chance to manipulate the wants of the bourgeoisie into a viable platform to build the new Liberal party. This growing power shaped the social and political culture of England and paved the way for the reformation of the voting districts and rights as well as the severe changes in the Poor Relief. The idea of self-reliance and liberty proved to be the foundation of the class system of the Victorian Age. While these placed people into categories of behavior and stereotypes it helped to avoid the turmoil and social upheaval of the French Revolution by taking the leadership of the workers, the managerial class and granting them the privilege once reserved for the gentry.
[1] McCahill, Michael W. “Peers, Patronage, and the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1800” The Journal of British Studies Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976). p.84
[2] Malthus T.R. 1798. An essay on the principle of population. Chapter II, p18 in Oxford World's Classics reprint
[3] McCahill, Michael W. “Peers, Patronage, and the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1800” The Journal of British Studies Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976). p.85
[4] Norris, J. M. “Samuel Gabett and the Early Development of Industrial Lobbying in Great Britain,” Economic History Review. second series 10 (1958) p.450
[5] Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855. Reprint. Hollywood, FL: Simon & Brown, 2010. Print. P.41
[6] Gaskell. North and South. p.89
[7] Gaskell, North and South p. 212
