ABSTRACT

The word “worker” first appears in English in John Wyclif s translation of the Bible from the Latin (1382). The term “working class,” on the other hand, emerged for the first time in English only in 1813, appropriately enough in a book entitled A New View of Society, by the utopian socialist Robert Owen. Wyclif s “worker” was, not surprisingly, an agricultural laborer (operaio agrario), while Owen’s “working class” comprised “workers”—men, women, and children-whose work and workplaces increasingly were being shaped by the industrial revolution of the 18th century. Owen reckoned that in 1813 the “poor and working classes” of the British Isles numbered some 12 million persons. This figure probably would have accounted for the whole of the nonagricultural labor force of Britain and Ireland, including the artisans and home workers of the “old” working class who still represented the great majority of the manual workers, as well as the factory workers of the new industrial labor force.