ABSTRACT
History is about continuity as well as change, and this study of unemployment illustrates some remarkable consistencies over time in public attitudes and personal responses despite the major economic and social transformations which have occurred during the last two centuries. The causes of unemployment changed greatly as Britain passed from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial one. In the early nineteenth century the principal occupation of the people – agriculture – which had always suffered from seasonal unemployment, was unable to absorb a rapidly increasing population, and consequently experienced a surplus of labour until many farmworkers took their own remedy by deserting the land. Autobiographies clearly indicate the economic insecurity of labourers throughout the century, and the inappropriateness of using crude wage rates as a measure of their standard of living when work was so irregular. Their problem should not be lightly dismissed as ‘underemployment’ when their hold on subsistence was already precarious, and a few days or weeks without wages could plunge families from poverty into destitution. While accepting that labourers who wrote their life histories were not ‘typical’ of their kind, their accounts suggest a considerably greater extent of geographical and occupational mobility than has been supposed of a group ‘imprisoned’ by poverty and ignorance. The recruitment of agricultural labourers into construction, nawying, factory work and a range of other industrial employments, not to mention domestic service, the army and police forces, suggests much more fluidity between rural and urban labour, between country and town, both before and after the railway age, than previous studies have allowed.
