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Examine the extent to which the advent of urban industrialism heightened

the contrasts between rich and poor members of society in England

For this essay I shall define the period of urban industrialism as beginning during the late 18 th century,
and ending around 1870, while specifically focusing on the urban landscape, which became such a
prominent centre of society during the Industrial Revolution. Firstly, I will describe the preindustrialist and then industrialist urban landscape, especially the industrialist urban city. Secondly, I
intend to analyse empirical literature on the subject, focusing on the works of so-called optimists
who argue that industrialism led to higher wages and GDP per capital, and pessimists who say that
living conditions did not increase during the industrial revolution. Lastly, I shall analyse the problem
myself and draw conclusions based on available evidence, such as Chadwicks Sanitary Report of
1842 and Engels 1844 work, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Before the 18th century, pre-industrialist cities were essentially small-scale settlements based on a
residual mercantile economy with rigid social structures originating from medieval feudalism. (Knox,
P & Pinch, S, 2010) Although we have few resources and evidence about the pre-industrialist city,
Sjoberg (1960) gives an idealistic overview of its social geography, whereby there is a spatial
expression of division, with a small elite in the pleasant and exclusive central core, while lower
classes and outcasts lived in surrounding poorly built periphery. In these cities, the elite group
controlled religious, political, administrative and social functions, and even wealthy merchants were
excluded from these tasks. (Knox, P & Pinch, S, 2010) Other historians question this central
organisation of the cities and Vance (1971) puts greater emphasis on occupational clusterings and
economic organisation due to craft guilds, proposing many centred pre-industrialist cities.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, this social fabric of cities became turned inside out as
the elite exchanged their location for the suburbs. (Knox, P & Pinch, S, 2010) Power and status were
determined by wealth, ownership of land gets divorced from its use and workplace and home were
separated. Accumulation of capital did not only become morally acceptable, but became the basis of
socioeconomic power entrepreneurs introduced a materialistic value system to urban affairs. (Knox,
P & Pinch, S, 2010) This led to the rise of two new social classes, the industrialist capitalists and the
unskilled workers. These two groups formed the new elite and proletariat that replaced the old order.
As Disraeli, Britains Prime Minister at the time put it: we are a country of two nations, between
whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and
feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed
by different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not
governed by the same laws ... the rich and the poor. (Disraeli, 1844) Status, based on money, became
synonymous with rent-paying ability and new neighbourhoods were created along status divisions.
Inevitably, lowest quality housing became the home of the poorest, crammed in at high densities,
leading to growing areas of poor areas adjacent to factories. (Knox, P & Pinch, S, 2010) This was
most illustrative in Manchester, as observed by Engels in his famous work, The Condition of the
Working Class in England. He described unmixed working quarters, stretching like a girdle,
averaging a mile and a half in breadth. (Engels, 1844) This pattern of concentric zones, with
working mass in centre becomes typical of many Victorian cities. This new city layout could be
perceived clearly in London, where Charles Booth described, in his work Life and Labour of the
People of London (1903) 4 concentric zones around the unpopulated commercial centre of London,
being:

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1st zone: severe crowding and extreme poverty except in West End where there was extreme
affluence
2nd zone slightly less wealthy in western sector and less crowded and impoverished elsewhere
3rd zone inhabited by short distance commuter (lower middle class)
4th zone exclusively inhabited by the wealthy.

Now that we have described the urban landscape of the industrial city, we must visit the original
question, whether the Industrial Revolution increased social inequality of not. The debate around
industrialisation and poverty - its nature, extent, and impact - continues to sharply divide historians. In
general terms, 'optimists' argue that industrialisation brought higher wages, and a better standard of
living, whereas 'pessimists' argue that the quality of life for workers deteriorated especially between
1780 and 1850, with only limited improvements for some skilled sectors before the 1870s. (de
Pennington, 2011) For this essay, we can say that whilst industrialisation brought a number of
dramatic changes and opportunities, insecurity and the resultant downwards spiral into poverty
remained a deeply entrenched problem in industrialist England. However, many Victorians had
difficulties in explaining the causes of such poverty. Some viewed it as the result of personal
misfortune, and at the beginning of the 19 th century, poverty was regarded as the natural condition of
the labouring poor masses. In England, from 1780 and into the first quarter of the 19th century, the
poor relief system was under strain with an increasing population and agricultural depressions. The
enclosure movements dispossessed a generation from the land and where common land was enclosed
labourers lost a number of rural benefits such as grazing and fuel-gathering rights. (de Pennington,
2011)
As I have described above, with the divide between the wealthy elite and the labouring poor growing,
by 1832 the situation had become so bad that the Royal Commission was set up to review these
issues. During this, the mismanagement and inefficacy of the old Poor Law was also becoming
apparent and Malthuss and Benthams ideas about rapid population growth and utilitarianism
respectively advocated the use of rational criteria, underpinned by the principle of 'the greatest good
of the greatest number' in order to avoid overpopulation and starvation. The combination of these
ideas and problems led to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 in England and Wales, but the Act
continued to rely on the parish rate and, set the principles of social policy for the rest of the century
and beyond. Chadwicks Sanitary Report of 1842 was another major milestone in the review of the
growing social inequality, which was conducted between 1839 and 1841. His work formed the basis
of the 1848 Public Health Act. Engels used Chadwick's work for his Condition of the Working Class
in England (1844).
The Report was an objective work, which followed the 1840 Report of the Health of Towns
Committee. The 1842 Report was sponsored by the Poor Law Commission. It sold over 30,000
copies, but did not have the authority of an official document, as it was published in Chadwick's
name. It presented four main themes, with a mass of examples offered as proofs. The cholera scares of
1831 and 1839 helped with the Report becoming more accepted, and the 1848 Health Act coincided
with another outbreak of cholera. The Report pointed out the correlation between the lack of
sanitation and a) disease, b) high mortality rates and c) low life expectancy, but was done without
medical knowledge.
What is clear from official records is that a high proportion of women were forced to resort to the
workhouse - not only the 'fallen women' characterised in some Victorian novels but also deserted
wives, widows with young children and unemployed servants. However, by the end of the Victorian
period the largest group of inmates was elderly men, often long-term residents, along with the infirm
and young orphans, although many of these youngsters were increasingly sent to 'foster homes', a
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practice which had first been widely adopted in Scotland. Because the operations of the Poor Law
were so circumscribed and the poor were unwilling to apply for relief, other ways of dealing with
life's misfortunes became increasingly important. (de Pennington, 2011) Recent research has shown
that there was an early growth paradox, that economic growth (in terms of an increase of per capita
GDP) only after some decades resulted in increases in real wages earned by industrial and agricultural
labourers, and that the biological standard of living as read from the evidence on heights sometimes
tended to lag behind even more. (Pamuk & Zenden, 2000) In the early 1980s, optimist historians
Lindert and Williamson created new indices with wider coverages to argue that standards of living
improved sharply in Britain by as much as 50 or more from 1780 to 1830 and about 100 percent for
the period 1780 to 1850 as a whole. (Lindert and Williamson, 1983)
Feinstein, a pessimist historian, who created a new cost of living index challenged Lindert and
Williamsons findings, claiming that the prices of goods fell much less after the Napoleonic Wars than
previously thought, and thus real wages were lower. The Feinstein indices showed much smaller
increases for real wages, about 20 percent for the period 1820-1850 and less than 40 percent for the
entire period 1780-1850. They indicated another increase of 9 percent for the period 1850-1870.
(Feinstein, 1998) Later, GDP per capita series compiled by historians Crafts and Harley indicated that
industrial and overall growth in Britain until the 1830s was much slower than estimated earlier.
A usually very good indicator of human health is the average height of people, and there has been
expensive research done in this area, with for example, the total decline in heights of English soldiers
reaching two centimetres during the period of industrialisation, suggesting a net decline in living
conditions. A historian researching on this area, Komlos emphasizes that the causal linkage between
socio-economic and structural changes and heights should be applied for the period of Industrial
Revolution as well. He argues that a number of developments may have adversely influenced average
heights during the early decades of industrialization. Amongst them, he cites rapid population growth
and rising relative prices of nutrition that may have led to the substitution of more carbohydrates for
proteins, rapid urbanization which may have put the town dwellers at a disadvantage for nutrition,
growing inequalities in income and intensification of labour. These structural changes may have
created a divergence between average incomes and wages on the one hand, biological well-being on
the other. (Komlos, 1998)
Another crucial factor in this widening of social inequality is the implementation of the factory
system across England. This led to labourers having to be disciplined due to the capital intensive
mode of production in factories namely that machines had to be kept running. This labour hours
were extended, and the labour of women and children was also increasingly used. That working hours
went up until the middle decades of the 19th century is now well documented, in particular for
England (Voth, 2000) There is strong rationale to suggest that these factors may have held back real
improvements in the standard of living amongst the urban population. (Thompson, 1967)
In conclusion, this specific pattern of labour-intensive industrialisation that was arguably
characteristic of the English Industrial Revolution, in which textiles were made with the heavy use of
cheap womens and childrens labour, resulted in a period of strong economic expansion, during
which human capital formation stagnated. As many historians, especially Crafts (1985) have
demonstrated, levels of human capital formation during the British Industrial Revolution were much
lower than those of similar continental countries during their industrialisation, and thus I conclude
that the advent of the urban industrialisation in England did heighten the contrasts and inequalities
between the rich and poor members of society.

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