ABSTRACT
Unlike the occupations so far considered – agricultural labourers who represented the lowest paid group of any regularly employed workers, and the handloom weavers who gradually sank from relative prosperity to abject poverty – skilled workers were the elite of nineteenth-century labour. Their expectations, if not always their achievements, were of respectable, honourable lives and a comfortable standard of living derived from regular work in a trade which required skill and experience. Although only a declining minority were still independent, a strong sense of pride and possession characterized the craftsman – possession of his knowledge and of the tools of his trade, pride in his relations not only with fellow workers but also with the master with whom he felt on terms of near equality. In all probability formally uneducated, he was not illiterate: his children would have at least some schooling, his home was modestly comfortable, his food plain but ample and his domestic life managed by a wife who was not expected to contribute to the family earnings.
