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Mid-Victorian Prosperity
What about their employees, the working people who formed the majority of the
population? Did they share in the prosperity? The answer to this is undoubtedly
that most of them did, though the gain made by the individual workman was
nothing like so great as that of the average employer. There were very bad times
like the economic crisis of 1857-58, which caused a good deal of unemployment;
there were troubles affecting particular areas, like the cotton famine caused in
Lancashire by the American Civil War. There were important groups in the
population which benefited very little if at all from the general progress, such
as the agricultural labourers: and there was a large body, perhaps one in ten of
the entire working class, consisting of tramps, casual labourers, dockers and
workers in various "sweated" trades, who remained in desperate poverty
on the edge of starvation, inhabiting the slums of London’s East End and of
industrial cities like Glasgow and Newcastle, or drifting in and out of the
workhouses in the rural areas. But for the majority these years brought an
appreciable improvement in living conditions, especially after 1865. The best
evidence for this comes from a comparison of prices and wages. Prices rose
considerably between 1850 and 1875, probably on account of the great increase in
the world gold supplies; yet the wages of most British workmen, and particularly
those of more skilled men like the engineers, more than kept pace with them. It
has been estimated that "real wages" - that is, the power of the
workman to buy goods at current prices - rose by about one-third between 1850
and 1875. What this meant in practice is revealed by the fact that the average
consumption per head of meat, tea, sugar and tobacco rose considerably in the
same years.