ABSTRACT
The occupational structure of Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, taking the cross-section at the 1851 census, shows how far the progress of industrialization had affected the employed population after a century of development. The main conclusion that emerges from the table is the high proportion of people whose context of employment was still outside the factory and the mine, or outside large plant ‘industry’, as generally defined, altogether. This is not to say that the lives and jobs of such people were unaffected by industrialization, of course, but the figures are still remarkable. First comes agriculture. By numbers alone agriculture was still for Britain, in Clapham's words, ‘by very far the greatest of her industries’. Over 1.75 million persons were engaged in it — over 1.5 million men and a little under 0.25 million women. Over a quarter of all men over the age of 20 were directly concerned in agriculture, over 1.25 million as agricultural labourers, about 280,000 as farmers and graziers. Most of the women employed in agriculture were ‘indoor farm servants’ (domestic servants but also helping in the dairy, cheese making, etc.). 1 This was much the largest occupational group, and total numbers in agriculture had been rising right through the first half of the nineteenth century, even though at a much smaller rate than numbers employed in other sectors of the economy. Some of the corollaries of this fact are worth noting in the social history of rural England. No English county experienced rural depopulation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Numbers in all counties went up, despite the generally current fear of redundant labour in the agricultural counties. Rural pauperism proved to be the greatest single scourge of the 1820s and 1830s. Poor rates rose to a peak of £7 million per annum in the early 1830s. When the incidence of poor relief costs is plotted by counties, it is at once apparent that they were highest exactly in the regions where agricultural employment dominated local employment patterns. The 1834 Poor Law Act was particularly designed to combat the evils of rural destitution by encouraging, if necessary in a brutal way, migration away from areas where employment did not offer a living minimal wage for a family. The practice of supplementing wages with poor relief payments, started in 1795 by the Berkshire magistrates' meeting at Speenhamland by Newbury, had proved a serious social and economic liability as a longrun solution of this problem. As an emergency method of coping with the crisis of high food prices in the Napoleonic Wars, it might also have served as an acceptable short-term device for relieving the cyclical unemployment in manufacturing areas during occasional depression years. In fact the practice spread mainly in rural areas in the south in response to the chronic problem of subsistence-living standards in agriculture. In this context it demoralized the labourers who received help, induced a lowering of ordinary wages by farmers in anticipation of poor relief supplements to make up the difference when bread prices were high or work scanty and acted as a brake against migration—which was the best long-term economic and social solution to the problem of rural underemployment and destitution. In this sense the Speenhamland system took over where the Settlement Laws left off as a device which discouraged the free mobility of labour.
