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English Workers' Living Standards during the Industrial Revolution: A New LookAuthor(s): Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. WilliamsonReviewed work(s):Source: The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 1-25Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Economic History Society

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THEE C N1 an- I"S

ECONOMIC HISTORY

R V I W

SECOND $ERIES, VOLUME XXXVI, No. i, FEBRUARY i983

SURVEYS AND SPECULATIONS, XVII

E n g l i s h W o r k e r s L i v i n g Standards

D u r i n g t h Industrial Revolution

e w L o o k

By PETER H. LINDERT AND JEFFREY G. WILLIAMSON

T he politically charged debate over workers' living standardsduringthe IndustrialRevolution'deservesrenewalwith the appearance f fresh

dataor new perspectives.This papermines an expandingdata base andemergeswith a far clearerpicture of workers'fortunes after I750. Whileoptimistsand pessimistscan both draw supportfrom the enterprise,thepessimists' aseemergeswith thegreaterneedforredirection nd repair.Theevidence uggests hatmaterial ainswereevenbiggerafter 820 thanoptimistshadpreviously laimed,even if theconceptof materialwell-beings expanded

* This article is part of a larger researchproject on 'British Inequality since i670', supported by grantsfrom the US National Science Foundation (SOC76-8o967, SOC79-0936i, SOC79-o6869) and the USNational Endowment for the Humanities (RO-26772-78-i9). The authors gratefully acknowledge the ableresearch assistance of George Boyer, Ding-Wei Lee, Linda W. Lindert, Thomas Renaghan, RicardoSilveira,Kenneth Snowden and Arthur Woolf, as well as the helpful comments of G. N. von Tunzelmann,Stanley L. Engerman, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of California(Berkeley, Davis, UCLA), HarvardUniversity, Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin.

Readers are referred to the fuller display of evidence in the discussion paper, 'English Workers' LivingStandardsduring the Industrial Revolution: A New Look', September i980, available either from theDepartmentof Economics, University of California, Davis, 956i6 USA (Working Paper SeriesNo. I44) orfromthe GraduateProgramin Economic History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 53706 USA. Hereafterthis paperis cited as 'DP'.

1 The historicaliteratures too vast tocitehere.Readerswho wanta full bibliographyouldbeginwithsources itedbelowand n M. W. Flinn,'Trendsn RealWages, 750-i850', EconomicHistoryReview, 2ndseries,XXVII, 3 (I974), pp. 395-4I3; A. J. Taylored., The Standard of Living in Britain in the IndustrialRevolutionI975); StanleyL. Engerman ndP. K. O'Brien, IncomeDistributionduring he IndustrialRevolution', n R. C. Floud and D. N. McCloskey ds., The EconomicHistory of Britain since I700

(Cambridge,98i). For heatedeloquence, he best twentieth-centurylash s that betweenT. S. Ashton('The Treatmentof Capitalismby Historians',n F. A. von Hayek ed. Capitalism ndtheHistorians(Chicago,954)) andE. P. ThompsonThe Making of the English WorkingClass (Harmondsworth,968)).

I







2 PETER H. LINDERT AND JEFFREY G. WILLIAMSON

to includehealthand environmentalactors.Although he pessimistscan stillfind deplorable rendsin the collectiveenvironmentafter i820, particularlyrising inequalityandsocialdisorder, hisarticlesuggests hat their case mustbe shiftedto the periodI750-i820 to retain ts centralrelevance.

IWhichoccupationsand social classes are of the greatestrelevance o the

debate?It seemsunlikelythat we wouldget full agreementromthe partici-pants,but there are a fewgroupswhosefortuneshavebeen of primeconcern,bothto the historical tandard f livingdebateandto thecontemporaryebateover Third Worldgrowthand distribution.2

Following establishedconventions n the literature,each group listed inTable I refers to adultmaleemployees: he self-employedandpermanentlyunemployedare excluded.Our lowestearningsgroupconsistsof hired farm

labourers,whorepresent he bottomtwo-fifthsof allworkers.Next comethenon-farm ommon abourers nd theirnear-substitutes, low-skilled"middlegroup". Artisans,whose organizationalffortsand sizablewage gainshavecaused them to be singled out as the "labour- ristocracy",3all roughlybetweenthe 6oth and 8othpercentilesn the overalldistribution f earnings."Blue collar"workers nclude each of thesegroups,and define"theworkingclass"mostclosely,at least within the debateoverlivingstandards.4The listis completedby the additionof a diversewhite-collar roup.

These "class"rankings hanged ittle across he nineteenth entury,at least

betweenI827 and I 85I. However,since therelativegrowthof group ncomeswasrarely he sameover the century ollowing 750, eachwillbe documentedin the sectionswhichfollow.Furthermore,ater n thispaperwe shallexplorejust how much of the real wage trends for the blue collar labourercan beexplainedby shiftsintohigherpaidworkand how muchby wagegainsamongall blue collarworkers.Table I simplyestablisheswho the workerswere andwhere they fit in the size distributionof earnings n the early nineteenthcentury.

II

Quantitative udgementson workers' iving standardshavealwaysbegunwith time serieson ratesof normalor full timepay.5This was certainly he

2 Onthe debateoverthe 'bottom 0 per cent' n theThirdWorld,see H. B. Chenery t al. Redistributionwith Growth(Oxford, 974); W. R. Cline,'Distribution nd Development:A SurveyArticle', ournal ofDevelopmentStudies, II (I975), pp. 359-400; M. Ahluwalia, Inequality,Poverty, and Development',Journal of DevelopmentEconomics,2 (I976), pp. 307-42; andSimonKuznets,Growth,Populationand IncomeDistribution New York,I979).

3 See T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The i8th Century I955), ch. VII; idem., 'TheStandard f Life of the Workersn England, 790-i830', Journal of EconomicHistory, Supplementx

(I949), as reprintedn A. J. Taylored., The Standard of Living; E. J. Hobsbawm,LabouringMen (NewYork, i964), esp. chs. I5 and i6; andHaroldPerkin,The Origins of Modern English Society, I780-1880

(i969), pp. I3I, I43, 395-7, 4I7-4 On thechangingnuancesof the term'working lass',see in particularAsaBriggs, TheLanguage f

"Class"n EarlyNineteenth-Century ngland',n AsaBriggsandJ. Saville ds.Essaysn LabourHistory(i967), and R. J. Morris,Class and Class Consciousnessn theIndustrialRevolution, I780-i850 (I979).

5We followpastauthors n referringo earningsor 'pay'as though hese represented ll pre-transferincome, either gross or net of direct taxes. This simplifications valid for Englishworkersbeforethiscentury.Onlya tinyshareof blue-collarmployees wned heirown homesorsignificant mounts f othernon-human roperty,andonly a tiny sharepaid any direct taxes. The heavier ndirect axes- excises,importduties,and the localratesonproperty werereflectedn the pricesand rentsworkerspaid,whicharemeasured elow.








LIVING STANDARDS 3

Table I. Adult-Male EmployeeClassesand TheirApproximateMean Positions inthe Nineteenth-Century arningsRanks for England and Wales

Occupational "Representative" ApproximateMean-wagePercentileClass Mean-wage Series Positions in the EarningsRanks

used here1827 r85i

(i) Farm Labour (iL) farm labour i3th I4th(Bottom 40%)

(2) Middle Group (2L) non-farm common labour 38th 35th

(5L) police and guards 5oth(6L)colliers 55th 5Ist

(5H) cotton spinners 62nd 58th

(3)Artisans (2H) shipbuilding trades 67th 62nd("Labour aristocracy") (3H) engineering trades 77th 77th

(4H) building trades 74th 63rd(6H) printing trades 75th 7Ist

(4)Blue-CollarWorkers = (I)+(2)+(3)

(5) White-Collar (3L) messengers and porters 78th 7IstEmployees (4L) other government low-wage 65th 62nd

(iH) government high-wage 87th 8oth(7H) clergy goth 8ist(8H) solicitors and barristers 95th iooth(9H) clerks 88th 8oth

(ioH) surgeons and doctors 86th 79th(i iH) schoolmasters 75th 70th(U2H) engineers, surveyors and other 89th 94th

professionals

(6) All Workers = (4)+(5)

Notes and Sources:The sources for the group earnings averagesare discussed in Section II below, and atgreater ength, in Jeffrey G. Williamson, 'The Structure of Pay in Britain, I7Io-I9I9', in P. Uselding ed.Research n EconomicHistory, 7 (i982). The overall earningsdistributions for i827 and i 85I on which thesegroupmeansare ranked are reportedin JeffreyG. Williamson, 'Earnings Inequality in Nineteenth-CenturyBritain',Journalof EconomicHistory, XL (I980), pp. 457-75.

These size distributions refer to employee earnings only, excluding incomes from property, self-employment, pensions or poor relief.

startingpointfor the pioneering ontributions y BowleyandWood,Gilboy,

PhelpsBrown and Hopkins, and others. We also begin in the same way,adding everalnew payseriesalongtheway.

An essentialfirst step is to select appropriate nnualpayrates. Most payseriesare constructed romdailyor weeklyrates,and we still have only thesketchiest videncedocumentingheaveragenumberof daysor weeksworkedper year. It seems sensible to exploitthe normalor full-timepayratesfirst,and then turn to clues about unemploymentor underemploymentrends(SectionV) to infer movements n true annualearnings. Daily and weeklynormalpayratesare aggregated p to a 52-weekyear, using variousestimates

of normaldays per week in differentoccupations.6These annual earnings6 The choice of numbersof weeks per year s arbitrary nd matters ittle to what follows. ArthurL.

Bowley hought hat six weeks was the average losttime' per year (Wages n the UnitedKingdomn theNineteenth enturyCambridge,900), p. 68). The choiceof weeksper yearmattersonly f thenumberofweeks lost'variedgreatlyover ime,duetomovementsn true nvoluntary nemploymentndnot justdueto marginalhifts nemployment atesby persons aluingheir imeabout hesame n andout of work.Wedoubtthat the work year shifted in ways alteringthe conclusionsof this paper, to judge fromtheunemploymentvidence n Sectionv below and fromM. A. Bienefeld's xploration f trends n normalannualndustrial ours:Working ours n British ndustryI972), chs.2, 3.









figuresgenerallyexclude payments n kind, but this rule is violated or farmlabourers,whose large n-kindpaymentshave beenincluded.

Eighteennominalpayseriesaredocumentedn Table2. Theseseriesreflecta numberof additionsandrevisions o thetime-series iterature n wagerates.

The mostconspicuous dditions, houghnot the mostcrucial o theconclusionsbelow, are the service occupations (Series 3L, 4L, iH, and 7H to I2H

inclusive). With the exceptionof clergyand teachers, our view of service-occupationpay leans heavilyon the public salaryfigures reportedin the"AnnualEstimates" printed n the House of Commons'Accountsand Papers

Table 2. Estimates of Nominal Annual Earnings for Eighteen Occupations,I755-i85I: AdultMales,England and Wales (in currentL's)

Occupation I755 I78i I797 i8o5 i8io i8I5 i8i9 i827 i835 i85I

(iL) farm labourers I7-I8 2I.09 30-03 40-40 42-04 40-04 39-05 3I.04 30-03 29-04

(2L) non-farm common labour 20-75 23-I3 25-09 36-87 43-94 43-94 4I-74 43-65 39-29 44-83

(3L) messengers & porters 33-99 33-54 57-66 69-43 76-0i 80.69 8I-35 84-39 87-20 88-88

(4L) other government low-wage 28-62 46-02 46-77 52-48 57-47 60-22 6o.60 59-01 58-70 66-45

(5L) police & guards 25-76 48-08 47-04 5I-26 67-89 69-34 69.I8 62-95 63.33 53-62

(6L) colliers 22-94 24-37 47-79 64-99 6g-22 57-82 50-37 54.6I 56-4I 55-44

(IH) government high-wage 78-9I I04-55 I33-73 I5I-09 I76-86 I95-I6 2I9-25 222-95 270-42 234-87

(2H) shipbuilding trades 38-82 45-26 5I-7I 5I-32 55-25 59-20 57-23 62-22 62-74 64-I2

(3H) engineering trades 43-60 50-83 58-o8 75-88 88-23 94-9I 92-7I 80.69 77-26 84-05

(4H) building trades 30-5I 35-57 40-64 55-30 66-35 66-35 63-02 66-35 59-72 66-35

(5H) cotton spinners 35-96 4I-93 47-90 65-I8 78-2I 67.60 67-60 58-5o 64-56 58-64

(6H) printing trades 46-34 54-03 66-6I 7I-II 79-22 79-22 7I-I4 70-23 70-23 74-72

(7H) clergy 9I-90 I82-65 238-50 266-42 283-89 272-53 266-55 254-60 258-76 267-09

(8H) solicitors and barristers 23I-00 242-67 I65-00 340-00 447-50 447-50 447-50 522-50 II66-67 I837-50

(9H) clerks 63-62 IOI-57 I35-26 I50-44 I78-II 200-79 229-64 240-29 269.II 235-8I

(ioH) surgeons & doctors 62-02 88-35 I74-95 2I7.60 2I7.60 2I7.60 2I7.60 I75-20 200-92 200.92

(iiH) schoolmasters I5-97 I6-53 43-2I 43-2I 5I-I0 5I.I0 69-35 69-35 8I.89 8I.Ii

(I2H) engineers & surveyors I37-5I I70-00 I90-00 29I-43 305-00 337-50 326-43 265-7I 398-89 479-00

Sources and Notes: From Williamson, 'The Structure of Pay', Appendix Table 4. Some of theseoccupations need no elaboration. Those that do are explained as follows: (4L) - watchmen, guards, porters,messengers, Post Office letter carriers, janitors; (iH) - clerks, Post Office sorters, warehousemen, taxcollectors, tax surveyors, solicitors, clergymen, surgeons, medical officers, architects, engineers; (2H) -

shipwrights; (3H) - fitters, turners, iron-moulders; (4H) - bricklayers,masons, carpenters, plasterers; (6H)- compositors.

from I797 onwards).This is a rich sourcefor consistent ime series on well-definedoccupations.Annualearningsarereported hereforlargenumbersofemployeesn each occupational ategory,spanning he wholeearningsdistri-butionoverage, tenure,and skillwithin a given occupational roup.The keyissueunderlying heir use is whethertrendsin public"civilservice"salariesreplicated rendsin the sameprivatesectoroccupations.Elsewherewe haveofferedevidence confirming he correlation,at leastfor the nineteenthcent-ury.7

Service-sectorpay, againfor public posts, is also available or I755 andI78I. For the latteryearwe havefiguresreportedo the Houseof Commons.8

7See JeffreyG. Williamson,The Structure f Payin Britain, 7I0-I9I I'.8 Reportof 'CommissionAppointed o Examine,Take,and Statethe Public Accountsof the United

Kingdom',Houseof CommonsPapers, 782 andI786.








LIVING STANDARDS 5

John Chamberlayne'sstimatessupply figuresfor I755, though for feweremployees and departments than is true at the later dates.9 Theseeighteenth-centuryublicpaydatamust,of course,betreatedwith care, sincea trulybaroquepayments ystemprevailedn the upperechelons. 0

For clergyand schoolmasters,we have made use of privatepay series.Clergymen'smeanannualearnings including he rentalvalueof thevicarage)canbe estimated or the greaterpartof the nineteenthcenturyby using TheClericalGuide and EcclesiasticalDirectory nd The ClergyList. A randomsampleof 550 clergymen,from all patronage ources (royal,ecclesiastical,university, ndprivate),yieldstheirpayfor I827, I835, and I85I. Forearlierbenchmark earswe had to use public payratesforclergy,splicingthese onto theprivateseriesat i827. This procedure eems to haveyieldedplausiblepayseries ortheaverage lergymanbackto I755, judgingby the similarityn

trendbetweenpublicandprivateclergysalaries rom i827 on.Schoolmastersad low monthlycashearnings,bothbecausemuch of theirincomewasin kind (rentsandfuel), and because hey oftenreceivedsupple-mentaryeesandholidaybonuses. We haveassumed hat income n kind wasa stableshareof totalincome,so that the twelve-month ash-income eries nTable accuratelyeflects rends ntotal ncome.For I755-I835, ourestimatesrelyonschoolmasters'arningsn severalCharitySchools n Staffordshire ndWarwickshire. he I85I figurerefersto civilianschoolmastersn publicpay,asreportedn the AnnualEstimates.11

Fornineteenth-centurymanufacturingndbuildingcrafts Series H to 6Hinclusive),the well-known estimatesof Bowley and Wood suffice.12Theavailable eries on eighteenth-centuryrtisans'pay refer only to the buildingcrafts, but Gilboy's data on these crafts offer the advantageof regionaldiversity.To give proper weight to the well-knownregionalvarianceinnominalwages, and to the shift in eighteenth-centuryopulations,we haveconstructed nearningsaverageorbuildingcraftsmenhatreflectschanges n"regionalmix" between I755 and I797.13 The result is a steeper rise in

9 John Chamberlayne,Magnae Britanniae Notitia, Or the PresentState of GreatBritain, I7th ed. (I 755).Earlier ditions,begunby EdwinChamberlayne,ate back to the i68os. We are indebted to DavidGalensonor alertingus to theChamberlaynelmanacs.

10Forexample,departmenteadsandhigh itledclerkswerepartof a patronageystem.Oftenextremelyhighreported alariesweregrosssalaries ut of whichthe recipienthad to maintain is staffof clerks.Wehave gnoredhe payof all officialsor which hisseemed o bethe practice.

In othercases,salariesurelyunderstated arnings.Customs fficials, or example, eceived portionofthetaxes collected n addition o the reportedncomes. These were excluded romourestimates.Alsoexcludedwereofficials orwhomthe statedstipendswerebutpartialpolitical ide-paymentsnd heraldicperquisites.For example, n an earliereditionof Magnae Britanniae Notitia (i694 ed. p. 238), EdwinChamberlayneisted the LancasterHerald'spayasonly?26 I3S.4d. perannum.The Herald n thiscasewas GregoryKing. Were this his only income,King would havebeenno better paidthana common

seaman, messenger ra porter.11Fora fuller discussionof all schoolmaster ayseries, with comparisonso other availableeriesonbenchmarkates, seeWilliamson,The Structure f Pay'.

12 Bowley, Wages n theUnitedKingdom, nd the seriesof Bowley-Wood rticles hatappearedn theJournalof theRoyal StatisticalSocietybetween i898 and i906.

13 Forthe Londonareawe usedan unweighted verageof wage seriesfromWestminster,GreenwichHospital,Southwark nd Maidstone.The Londonareaseries is then combinedwith series from sixcounties:Oxfordshire,Gloucestershire,evon,Somerset, he NorthRiding,andLancashire. hesecountyearningsstimates recombinedusing heregional opulationweights eportedn PhyllisDeaneandW. A.Cole,BritishEconomicGrowth, i688-i959 (Cambridge,nd ed. i969), Table24, p. I03.








earnings n the buildingtradesup to I797 thanthat reportedby BrownandHopkins,whoseseriesreferred o southernEnglandonly.14

Threeverylargeunskilledoccupations emain:colliers,non-farm ommonlabourers,andfarmlabourers.The colliers'earnings iguresrefer to under-groundminingby adultmales.The I85I figure s derived romWood'swageseries.15The i835 figureis fromBowley,as are the i8i0-i9 estimates,thelatterreferring o southernScotland.We have also used figuresfor I755 toi805 inclusive,and(again) 835 from AshtonandSykes,referringo colliers'dailywagerates n the northern ounties, n Lancashire ndin Derbyshire.16These diverseestimatesare inkedtogetheratvariousdatesand convertedntoannual arnings atesusingtheproceduresketchedabove.Non-farm ommonlabourers' arningsare basedon two sources. For the period I797-I85I, wehave accepted the Phelps Brown-Hopkinsestimatesfor labourers n thebuilding rades.For I755-97, their estimateshave beenset asidein favourofa multi-regionaleries basedon Gilboydatafor buildinglabour,using thesameproceduredescribed or buildingcraftsabove. For farm abourers, heI797-I85I figuresare based on Bowley's wagesfor a "normalworkweek",takingaccountof both incomein kind and seasonalwage-rate ariation butnotseasonal mploymentvariation).7 Fifty-two"normalweeks"arearbitrar-ily assumed n constructingan annualfull-timeseries.The I78I figurealsoreliesonBowley,buthere t is anunweighted verage f thefigures orSurrey,

Kent, Hertfordshire,Suffolk,Cumberland,and Monmouth,splicedto thenational series at I797. The I755-8i estimatesare constructedfrom rawearningsdatacollectedby Rogers. 8

Table2 represents ur bestinterimviewof trends n occupationalarnings.It is confinedto ten benchmarkyears simply becausethe data are moreabundantorthese years.

Table3 reportsaverage ull-timeearnings or the six groupsidentified nSectionI. The employmentweightsusedin theaggregationver oureighteen

14 E. H. PhelpsBrownandSheilaV. Hopkins, SevenCenturies f BuildingWages',Economica,XII

(I955), pp. 205-6.

15As reproducedin Brian Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, AbstractofBritishHistoricalStatistics Cambridge,

I97I).16 Bowley,Wages;T. S. AshtonandJ. Sykes,The Coal Industry n theEighteenthCentury Manchester,

I929).

17 A. L. Bowley, TheStatistics f Wagesn theUnitedKingom.Part . AgriculturalWages', ournal ofthe Royal StatisticalSociety, LXI (i898).

Alternativestimatesorthe period 790-i840 arealsoavailableor Kent,Essex,Dorset, Nottingham-shire,Lincolnshire,Hampshire, ndSuffolk n T. L. Richardson,TheStandardf LivingControversy,I790-i840' (unpub.Ph.D. thesis,University f Hull, I977), Pt. ii. Richardson'sominaldailywages or'fullyemployed griculturalay abourers'howsomewhatess steeprisesacrosshe I790s thandoBowley'snational verages.The discrepancymayreflect hemorerapidrise n wages n the north,anareagiven ts

duemorefullyin the Bowleyaverages. n anycase,the BowleyandRichardsonverages onform atherclosely between i8o5 and i840.

18 JamesE. ThoroldRogers,A History of Agricultureand Prices in England, vii (I902). Onceagain,wehave triedto buildan earnings verageor Englandand Wales hatreflects hifts n population etweenregionsacross he eighteenth entury, histime for farm abour.The task s complicated ythe paucityoftime seriesdata,and the resulting verages hardlydefinitive.Ouraveragewagefor southernEnglandsa weightedaverageof CambridgeshirendGloucester,he onlytwo counties or whichRogerssuppliescontinuousdailywageseriesfor adultmalefarm abourers.The north s representednly by Brandsby,Yorkshire,hough henumber fobservationsor this ocations large.Thenorthernndsouthern verageswereweightedby population stimatesrom DeaneandCole,where he 'south' s definedby the twentycounties ncluding,or southof, Gloucester,Oxford,Northampton,Cambridge,nd Norfolk.The 'north'in thiscase consistsof Lancashire ndthe threeRidings.The resulting veragedailywage s thenlinked

with the I78i annual arnings stimate.








LIVING STANDARDS 7

occupationsare very rough. Those for I8II and earlierare basedon workpreviouslypublished,while thosefor lateryearsarebased on manipulations

of theimperfect arlycensusdataonoccupation. 9Table3 reveals heearningshistoryexperienced y differentclassesof workers.The variety s striking.Inthe atterhalfof theeighteenth entury, armandnon-farm ommon abourersgainedgroundonhigher-paidworkers, he labouraristocracyspecially.Fromi8I5 to the middle of the nineteenthcentury,on the otherhand, the gapbetweenhigher-andlower-paidworkerswideneddramatically.Farmwagessaggedbelow, while white-collarpay soared above, the wagesfor all othergroups.20 able3alsocompares ur resultswith earlier eries hathaveshapedpast impressionsof wage trends and played a key role in Flinn's recentsurvey.21 he newandold seriesexhibitbothconformity nd contrast.Wheretheydiverge,we standby the new seriesas improvements,and urge otherscholars o harvest additionalwage series from the archives.22The major

Table 3. Trends in Nominal Full-Time Earnings for Six Labour Groups,Comparedwith ThreePreviousSeries, I755-i85i

(i85I = Ioo)

(I) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)PhelpsBrown-

vs. Bowley's vs. Hopkins vs. Tucker's All

Farm Farm Middle Building Labour London Blue White AllYear Labourers Labourers Group Labourers Aristocracy Artisans Collar Collar Workers

I755 59.i6 42.95 48.5 50.86 69.8 5I.05 2I.62 38.62

I78i 72-62 75-5 54.88 57-6 57.38 69.8 59.64 26.42 46.62

I797 I03-4I 93-9 72.92 66.7 64.86 8i.o 74-42 32-55 58.97

i805 I39-I2 98-89 83-3 79-44 87.0 96.58 38.88 75-87i8io I44.76 IIO-95 97-0 92-03 I05-6 I07.8i 43.0I 84.89

i8I5 I37-88 I05-55 97-0 95.28 II2-I io6.i8 46-55 85.30

I8I9 I34-47 99-4I 97.0 9I 92 I03-3 IOI.84 50-77 84.37

I827 I06.89 ioo-8 98-89 97-0 93-55 I05-I 97-59 55-09 83.II

I835 I03-4I II2-3 96-98 97-0 88-68 98-9 94-II 75-03 88.77

i85i I00-00 I00.0 I00-00 00.000-00 100.0 100-00 I00-00 I00-00

52 weeks'earningsin I85I: ?29-04 ?29-04 ?52-95 ?42-90 ?75-I5 n.a. ?52-62 ?258-88 ?75-5I

Sourcesand Notes: The indices are aggregatedfrom the finer groups listed in Table i, using wage seriesfrom Table 2 and employment weights. The employment weights for I755-I8 I5 draw on Lindert, 'EnglishOccupations, I670-I8 i i', Table 3, while those for i8i5-i85i are derived from censuses. The derivations ofthe employment weights are described in DP, Appendix A.

For the three previous series, see Bowley, Wages n the UnitedKingdom, table in back; Phelps Brown andHopkins, 'Seven Centuries', Rufus S. Tucker, 'Real Wages of Artisans in London, I729-I935', Journal oftheAmericanStatistical Association, 3I (1936), pp. 73-84. The conversion of the Phelps Brown-Hopkinsseriesfrom daily to annual wages assumed 3I2 working days a year.

19 The occupational umbers or i8 Ii and earlierare estimated,with comparisonso contemporaryestimates y MassieandColquhoun,n Peter H. Lindert, EnglishOccupations,670-i8 i I', JournalofEconomicHistory,XL (i980), pp. 685-7I2.

201 For moredetailson thesedistributionalhanges, ee Williamson,The Structure f Pay', and dem.,'Earningsnequalityn NineteenthCenturyBritain', . Econ. Hist., XL (i980), pp. 457-76.

21 M. W. Flinn, 'Trendsn RealWages'.22 Bernard cclestonhasassembled new seriesonMidlandswagerates orbuilding raftsmen, uilding

labourers, stateworkersandroad abourers'A Surveyof WageRates n Five MidlandCounties, 750-

I834', unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Universityof Leicester, 976). Consistentwith our findings s Table3, forcommon abourersEccleston inds thePhelpsBrown-Hopkinseriesrisingtoo slowlybetween 755 andi8I5, andagreeshat he PhelpsBrown-Hopkinseriesmisses he slightpostwar eflation s well.Eccleston








conclusionsof thispaperarereinforcedby, butnot conditional n, ourchoiceof thesenewnominalpayseries.23

III

Several cholarshaveattemptedo construct ost-of-livingndicesto deflatesuchnominalearning eries.The periodI790 to i850 hasattractedparticularattention.The fourpriceindicesmostoftencitedare thoseofferedby Gayer-Rostow-SchwartzGRS),Silberling,Rousseaux, ndTucker.24Thesepioneer-ing effortscanbe criticizedon threefronts: I) the underlyingpricedata; 2)

the commodities ncludedin the overallindex; and (3) the budgetweightsapplied o eachcommoditypriceseries.

Wholesalepricesareusedby GRS, Silberling,andRousseaux.GRS,in fact,usedwholesalepricescollectedby Silberlingwho, in manycases,chosenot touse them. Rousseauxalso borrowed rom Silberling,as well as fromJevonsand Sauerbeck.Silberling's hiefsourcewas thePriceCurrentists "issuedbyseveralprivateagencies n Londonfor the use of businessmen".25 Tucker'schief sourceswere the contractprices paid by-three London institutions:Greenwich,Chelsea,and BethlemHospitals.Otherwritershave criticizedtheseseriesfor relyingon wholesaleandinstitutionalLondonprices,ratherthanon retailprices actuallypaid by workers' amiliesacrossEnglandandWales.26As Flinnhasargued,27 owever,wholesalepricesareafairproxyforconsumerpricesover thevery ongterm.In mostcases,there s noalternativeanyway.Anexception s clothing,for whichwehaveuseda GRScotton-textileexportpriceseries nsteadof Tucker's nstitutionalLondonprices,leading oa slightlymoreoptimisticview of the cost-of-living rendbetweenI790 andi850.

The commodities ncludedin the cost-of-living ndex also need revision.Wehaveaddedmorerelevantworking-classommodities, speciallypotatoes.Someirrelevant ndustrialraw materials, ncludedin the GRS series, havebeenremoved.But the most important hange s the additionof houserent.

Whiletheclassic ndicesall omitted hisimportantpartof thecost-of-living,28

finds asterwageadvancesorcraftsmen etween 755andi8I5 thanPhelpsBrown-Hopkinsr thepresentestimates,whichalso showfasternominalgainsthanTucker's luggish eries.Eccleston's esults erve oemphasize geographicontrastalready uggestedby pastwriters:nominalwagegainswereconsiderablygreatern themidlands ndnorth han n Londonandthesouth,at leastupto i8I5. Past mpressionsboutthe lateeighteenthcenturyand the waryearshaveunderestimatedominalwagegainsby relyingtooheavilyon southerneries.

23 For fullerdocumentationf the pointsmadein this section,see DP, Section4 andAppendicesBandC.

24 A. Gayer,W. W. Rostow,andA. J. Schwartz,The Growth and Fluctuationsof the British Economy,

I790-1850 (Oxford,I953); N. J. Silberling, BritishPricesandBusinessCycles,I779-i850', Review ofEconomicsand Statistics, 5 (I923), pp. 223-6i; P. Rousseaux, Les mouvements efond de l'jconomieanglaise

(Louvain, 938);andTucker, RealWagesof Artisansn London'.25 Silberling, ritishPrices, p. 224.26 T. S. Ashton, 'The Standard f Life of the Workersn England',p. 48; DeaneandCole,British

EconomicGrowth, p. I3.27 Flinn,'Trendsn RealWages',p. 402.28 Houserentshavebeenmeasuredorpartsof England overing lightly horter r morerecentperiods:

see G. J. Barnsby,TheStandard f Living n theBlackCountryduring heNineteenthCentury',Econ.Hist. Rev., 2nd ser. XXIVI97I), pp. 220-39; and R. S. Neale, 'The Standard of Living, I780-i844: A

Regional ndClassStudy',Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser.xix (i966), p. 6o6, givingrents or Bath, i8I2-i844.







LIVING STANDARDS 9

ours includes a rent series based on a few dozen cottages in Trentham,StaffordshirejustoutsideStoke-on-Trent).While the database is narrow, t

doesapplyto a housingstock of almostunchangingquality.29The rent seriesimpliesthat the cost of housing (at a fixed location)rose relative to otherconsumertemsthroughoutheIndustrialRevolution, hus offering omenewsupport o thepessimists.30

Finally, hecost-of-livingndex shouldusecommodityweightswhichreflectworkers'budgetsshares.Past series do not fullysatisfythis requirement.Allexcludeanyweightforhousing,some nclude ndustrialnputs, andothersaresimply vagueabout their weights. One set of workers'household budgetsstems romthe pioneeringworkof Davies and Eden on the ruralpoorin the

lateeighteenth entury.31Another s a miscellaneous roupof urbanworkers'budgets rom the lateeighteenthandearlynineteenthcenturies.32The urbanworkers' udgetsreveala lowersharespenton food, and a highersharespentonhousing, han do the ruralpoorstudiedby Davies and Eden.

29 We wereable to hold the qualityof the cottagesvirtually onstantby (a) splicing ogether ubseriesthat ollowed ixed setsof cottagesand(b) conducting edonicrentregressionestson detailedTrenthamcottage urveysof i835, i842, and i849. The regressions uantifiedhe impactof cottagequalitiesandattributesf the tenantson the rentcharged. t turnedout that the rentsfetchedby the best andworstcottages iffered ery ittleforgiven typesof tenants.SeeDP, AppendixC.

It has not been possible o pursue he issue of qualityvariation or otherconsumertems. Perhaps hequality f clothingandbeddingrose,andperhaps he qualityof meatdeclined, n waysnot revealedby

prices.The quantitativeelevance f suchpossiblequalitydrifts s doubtfulgivenwhatwe know aboutexpendituresmongworkers' ouseholds. f, forexample,hequalityofmeat ellbyhalfbetween 780 andi850, thehidden xtra ost to workerswouldstill be only *0 X *I I I = 5-5% since* I I is the shareof meatexpendituresn theaveragebudget DP, AppendixB). The true net drift n qualitywas almost urely arlessthan his.

30 Theimportancef addingrents,andof replacingnstitutional riceswithmarketprices orclothing,canbe seenfrom hefollowing alculations, sing"southern rban"budgetweights see Table4 and DP,Section andAppendixB):

Costof Living Percentagechangeover the periodI790-i8I2 i812-1850 I790-1850

WithTucker's nstitutionallothingprices,and withoutrents 96-4 - 56-o -I3.0

Withexportpriceof clothing,withoutrents 8i 0 -62.3 -3I.7

Withexportpriceof clothing,with rents Table4, "BestGuess") 87.2 -57.6 -20.6

Thenet effect of the two cost-of-livingevisions s to tip the trendtowardoptimism towardsdeclininglivingcosts)but the inclusionof rentsby itself addselevenper cent to the net cost-of-living ncreasebetween790 and i85o.

Readers houldbe warned, however,that the smallTrentham amplemay give too pessimisticanimpression bouttrends.Acrossthe nineteenth entury he Trentham erieshas the same trendsas twourban eries Barnsby,Standard f Living', p. 236; andH. W. Singer, AnIndexof UrbanLandRentsandHouseRents n England ndWales, 845-I9I3', Econometrica,9 (I941), p. 230). If rural ottage entsrosemoreslowlyacross he nineteenth entury, hen the Trentham eriesoverstatesherise in a nationalaverage esidentialent ndexusingfixed ocationalweights. Asforthemigrationrom ow- to high-rentlocations, eeSectionVIbelow).Fromabout he I770S toabout he i840s, the Trentham eriesrisesmuch

faster han wo otherrural eries T. L. Richardson,Standard f Living',pp. 245-8; andSirJamesCaird,EnglishAgriculturen I85o-I85i (New York, 967), p. 474). The differencen trend s so greatas to implyanunreasonablyapidrisein urbanrents f Trenthamweretakenasa national rural-and-urban)verageindex.So for boththe IndustrialRevolution raandthenineteenthentury, he Trentham eriesrose asterthan he most ikelytrends n national esidentialents.

31 Rev. DavidDavies,The Case of Labourersn Husbandry Bath, 795) andSirFrederickMortonEden,TheState of the Poor (I797), II andIII. PhelpsBrownandHopkinsalso usedbudgetweights romEden,thoughwithouthouserents PhelpsBrownandHopkins, SevenCenturies', p. 296-3I4).

32 Five urbanbudgetsfor I795-i845 are presentedby J. Burnett,A History of the Cost of Living(Harmondsworth,969). Neale (Bath,pp. 597-9) givesa labourer's ouseholdbudget or Bath n i83I.

Tucker'RealWagesof Artisansn London',p. 75) venturedwo non-farm ousehold udgetsasaveragesof someunderlyingtudies'budgets.







IO PETER H. LINDERT AND JEFFREY G. WILLIAMSON

Choosing he most appropriateet of budget weightscould mattera greatdeal. Goods and servicesareconsumed n differentproportionsby northern

and southernhouseholds, by the ruraland urban, or by the poor and rich.Costof livingtrends coulddifferacrossclassessimplybecauseof differencesin budget weights,as happenedoften in Americanexperience.33 his possi-bility was pursuedwithfourseparate ost-of-livingndicesusing weights romthe ruralnorth, ruralsouth, urban northand urbansouth. As it happens,pricesmoved n suchawaythatthe choiceof weightsmattered ery ittle. Thereason s that the net risein the priceof food relative o manufactures,whichwould have impoverished he ruralpoor more than the better-paidurbanworkers, was offset by the equally impressiverelativerise in house rents,whichtooka greater oll on urbanhouseholds.The analysisbelowcontinuesto use southernurbanweights,but we nowknowthat the choice makes ittledifference.

Theresulting"best-guess"ostof living ndex s displayedn Table4. FromI788/92 to I820/26, our index fallsmidwaybetweenoptimists (GRS, Rous-seaux, Silberling)and pessimists (Phelps Brown and Hopkins, Tucker).Between i820/26 and I846/50, our index is more optimistic, showing asomewhatbigger dropin livingcosts thananyof the pastindices.34For thecentury as a whole, the "best-guess" ndex supportsthe middle groundbetween he optimistandpessimistextremes.

IV

Deflatingthe nominal full-timewage series from Table 3 by the cost oflivingindex in Table 4 yields the realwagetrends in Table 5 and Figure Ibelow.The resultssupportMichaelFlinn'sconclusion hat"therearerelativelyfew indicationsof significant hange n levels of real wages eitherway beforeI8Io/I4".35 For lateryears,however,Table5 offerssome revisions.Flinnwas

33 JeffreyG. Williamson,AmericanPricesand UrbanInequality ince i820', 7. Econ. Hist., xxxvi(I976), pp. 303-33. See also Jeffrey G. Williamsonand Peter H. Lindert,American Inequality; AMacroeconomicHistory(NewYork, 980), ch. 5.

34To wit: Per cent change n prices

I788-92 i809-iS i820-26

to to to

I809-IS I820-26 I846-50

Silberling 74. I -3I.2 -I6-7

Tucker 85.2 -24.5 - I0-0

Rousseaux -34.8 - i6.4

Gayer-Rostow-Schwartz 65-7 -30-7 - I9-4

PhelpsBrown-Hopkins 84.6 -23.5 -I0-5Table 4, 'Best Guess' 72-5 -27.3 -26-0

(SeeFlinn,'Trendsn RealWages',p. 404.)35 Ibid., p. 408. There would be clearersignsof deterioration etweenabout i8oo and i820 if the

earnings f weavers ndothernon-spinningottonworkerswereadded o the overall verages, s couldbedonefrom i8o6 on. Usingour"best-guess" eflator, he Bowley-Woodwage rates orall cottonworkers(Mitchell and Deane, Abstract,pp. 348-9) yield the following real wage indices: i8o6, 78-62; i8io, 66.57;

i8I5, 75.43; i8I9, 54.67; i827, 66-96; i835, 78.62; and i85I, ioo-oo. Compared with blue collar earningsinTable5, theserealearnings f allcottonworkersellsharplyrom 8o6 to i8i9, butkeptpace hereafter.

Eventhe famoushandloomweaversmaynot have sufferedanyfurthernet losses after 820. Bowley'sdataon piecerates orhandloomweaversn the Manchesterrea WagesntheNineteenth entury, pp. p.







LIVING STANDARDS II

struck by the concentration f all realwage improvementsnto a periodofonly a dozen years of deflationbeginningaround I8I3. Table 5 does not

conform with Flinn's view.36There was generalreal wage improvement

Table 4. A "Best-Guess"Cost-of-Living ndex, I 78I-1850,

UsingSouthern Urban ExpenditureWeights(I850 = IOO)

COL COL COLYear Index Year Index Year Index

I78I ii8.8 I805 I86-7 I828 I43-2

I782 I9-3 i8o6 I78.5 I829 I43-9

I783 I2I-9 I807 I69.I I830 I4I-3

I784II8-4

i8o8 I80-5 I83II4I-3

I785 II2-3 I809 204-9 I832 I33-9

i8io 2I5-4

I786 I09-6 I833 I24-7

I787 II2.5 i8ii 204-5 I834 II7.6

I788 II5-9 I8I2 235-7 I835 II2.8

I789 I22-3 I8I3 230-0 I836 I26-4

I790 I25-9 I8I4 203-3 I837 I29-2

I79I 2-2 I8I5 I82.6 I838 I38-3

I792 II8-3 i8i6 I92-I I839 I42-3

I793 I27-3 I8I7 I97.5 I840 I38-4

I794 I30-7 I8I8 I92-4 I84I I33-3

I795 I53-8 I8I9 I82-9 I842 I23-4

I796 I59-5 I820 I70-I I843 I09-6

I797 I38-8 I82I I55.5 I844 II4.5

I798 I36-9 I822 I39.8 I845 12-0

I799 I55-7 I823 I46-0 I846 II6-4

I8oo 207-I I824 I54-6 I847 I38-0

I8oI 2I8-2 I825 I62-3 I848 II0.9

I802 I60.9 I826 I44-4 I849 IOI-2

I803 I56-8 I827 I40-9 I850 I000

I804 I60-2

Source:DP, AppendixB.

between i8io and i8I5, and a decline between i8I5 and i8i9, after whichtherewas continuousgrowth.Afterprolongedwage stagnation,realwages,measured y the evidencepresentedhere, nearlydoubledbetweenI820 andI850. Thisis a far argerncrease hanevenpast "optimists" ad announced.37

i19) implya realwagegainof I5-3 percentbetween8i9 and i846, withmostof the gainachieved y i832.

Allcottonweavers,handloomplus power oom, gainedan apparent 8o per cent from 8i9 to i850. Eventhepiecerate eriesprobably aveapessimisticrendbias.They failto reflect isingproductivityfweaversof givenageandsex, and thedwindling roupof handloomweaverswhosepay seemed o plummetbeforei820 appears o have been increasingly ominated y womenand children,as adultmales led to better-paying rades DuncanBythell,TheHandloomWeaversCambridge,969),pp. 50-I,6o-i). On womenandchildren's arning, ee SectionVIIbelow.

36 Flinn'sdatingof thereal-wage pturnhas alsobeen questionedby G. N. vonTunzelmann,Trendsin RealWages,I750-i850, Revisited',Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser.XXXIII979),pp. 33-49,esp. p. 48.

37 The closestapproacho thepresent inding or the firsthalf of the nineteenth enturys theguardedconjecture y DeaneandColethat"realwages improved y] about 5 percentbetween 8ooand i824andover 40 per cent between i824 and i850" (BritishEconomicGrowth, pp. 26-7.)

Somereaders f an earlierdrafthavewonderedwhether heapparent pturnafterI820 is notdependenton our use of the i827 and i835 benchmarksnsteadof nearbyyears.Someprefer o followpessimisttraditiony stressinghedepression f i842-3,whileothers hoose he peak-price ear 839. Yet eventhese







I2 PETER H. LINDERT AND JEFFREY G. WILLIAMSON

Figure I. AdultMale AverageFull-TimeEarningsforSelectedGroupsof Workers,I755-i85i, at Constant rices

?30()-

?200() ?258-88

White-collarEmployees

Artisans ?7515

? 61 94 - - ?5295

?50-

?4()0 42)30( Middle Group

?30?

29-04?25. 17 - - - - - -Farm Labourcrs

?20 - 19 01--

I ~~~~~II 1--11 -I l1755 1781 1797 1805 10'15 19 '27 1835 1851

It is also large enough to resolve most of the debate over whether real wagesimproved during the Industrial Revolution. Unless new errors are discoveredor a host of new declining wage series added, it seems reasonableto conclude

that the averageworker was much better off in any decade from the I830s onthan in any decade before I820. The same is true of any class of worker inTable 5.

Why has this announcement not been made before? One might haveexpected it from any of several devout optimists. The answer lies partly in thesteady accumulation of data. Yet past findings have also been muted by thebelief that trends in real full-time earnings of adult males failed to measuretrends in workers' true "living standards". Each time a recent writer has comeclose to announcing the pOSt-I820 improvement, the reporthas been disarmed

by a confession of ignorance regarding trends in unemployment and in"qualitative" dimensions to life: perhaps health became poorer, work disci-pline more harsh and degrading, housing more crowded, and social injusticemore outrageous, and perhaps these more than cancelled any improvementworkers might have gained from rising real wages. These important issuesdominate the remainderof this paper.

V

Time and again the unemployment issue has brought discussion of trends

extreme choices do not remove the post-I820 gains, as evident from these available real-wage data andunemployment estimates:

1819 1835 1839 1843 i8SiReal wage index, farm labourers: 73.52 9i.67 80-04 I03.9I I00 00

Real wage index, middle group: 54 35 85 97 68. I7 88o50 I00.00

Estimated EMS unemploymentrate (Section VI below): n.a. 3.9% 2.2% Io.0% 3.9%

In the real-wage trough year I839 fewer workers were denied income by unemployment. The depressionyear I843 was a time of high real wages, thanks to cheap provisions. Neither of these extreme benchmarkslooks as bad as i8i9.







LIVING STANDARDS I3

in workers' living standards to a halt: lacking national unemployment databefore I85I, how can the real wage series be trusted as indicators of annual

Table 5. Trends n Real Adult-maleFull-Time Earnings or SelectedGroupsofWorkers,755-i85i

Benchmark Farm Middle All Blue White AllYear labourers Group Artisans Collar Collar Workers

I755 65-46 47-54 56.29 56.50 23.93 42-74I78I 6i-I2 46.19 48.30 50-I9 22-24 39.24

I797 74-50 52.54 46-73 53.6I 23.45 42.48I805 74-5I 52.96 42.55 5I-73 20-82 40-64I8Io 67-2I 5I.54 42-73 50-04 I9.97 39.4I

I8I5 75-5I 57.8I 52.I8 58.I5 25.49 46.7I18I9 73-52 54-35 50-26 55.68 27.76 46.I3

I827 75.86 70-I8 66.39 69.25 39-10 58.99I835 9I.67 85.97 78-62 83.43 66-52 78.69I85I I00-00 II00-o 100.00 IQOQO 100-00 I00-00

PercentageChange, I78I-I 85I, under three sets of cost-of-living weights and price assumptions:Mostpessimistic 3I.6% 75.I% 68.o% 6I.88% 294-5% I03-7%

"Best guess" 63.6% II6-5% I07-0% 99.2% 349.6% I54.8%

Mostoptimistic I07-0% I75-3% I64-2% I54-4% 520-3% 220-3%

SourcesandNotes: The indices in the upper panel use the data in Tables 3 and 4, as does the row of "bestguess" estimates in the lower panel. The most pessimistic and most optimistic variants are based onrelatively unrealistic cost of living indices, selected as extreme cases from i6 alternatives. The mostpessimistic used a cost of living index combining northern urban expenditure weights with Tucker'sinstitutionalclothing prices and Trentham cottage rents, while the most optimistic used an index combiningnorthernruralweights with export clothing prices and no rents. Again, we prefer the "best guess" index,combiningsouthern urban weights with export clothing prices and Trentham rents.

The I755 figures are derived by relying on the Phelps Brown-Hopkins index to extend our I78I-I850series(Table 4) backwards.

earnings?Into this empirical vacuum Hobsbawm has injected fragmentaryhints about unemployment in the industrial north, suggesting that the depres-sion of I84I-3 was "almost certainly the worst of the century".38

Yet no conceivable level of unemployment could have cancelled the near-doubling of full-time wages and left the workers of the I840S with less thantheirgrandfathershad had. Such a

cancellation of gains would require that thenationalunemployment rate would have had to rise from zero to 50 per cent,or from Io per cent to 55 per cent-jumps which even the most ardentpessimist would dismiss as inconceivable. Even in the I930S, unemploymentwas less than a quarterof the labour force.The I840S lacked the availability ofunemployment compensation, the sharp drop in output, wages and prices, as

38 Hobsbawm, LabouringMen, p. 74. We have checked Hobsbawm's discussion of unemploymentagainst the materials he drew from Finch, Adshead, Facts and Figures, Ashworth, and the Leeds TownCouncil. In all cases we found the primary materials shaky enough to make them unreliable even astestimony on purely local unemployment, let alone as national averages. The sources repeatedly countedpersons not fully employed in a particular trade as unemployed, a procedure that ignores the widespreadshifting of individual workers between sectors over the year. Thus a worker employed 40% of the time asa carpenterand 50% of the time in harvesting and assorted odd jobs is simply counted as a carpenter whocan find work only 40% of the time (and who may also be counted as an underemployed harvest worker).Many of the sources include as unemployed those who have left for other towns or America. Some,especially Ashworth, ignore newcomers who came to town recently and found jobs, while taking a verygenerousdefinition of the unemployment of those previously at work. In one case, Hobsbawm (p. 75) citesfiguresshowing that about iI% of the town of Leeds had averageweekly incomes of I i4pence as evidencethat "I5-20 per cent of the population of Leeds had an income of less than oneshilling per head per week",a conclusion that ignores the obvious difference between a group averageand a group upper bound. Twofinaldifficulties: all of the sources were designed to influence Parliament with pleas of special distress, andat no time does Hobsbawm compare these scraps from the i840s with similarmaterials for earlierperiods.








well as the fall in the investment share that accompanied record jobless ratesninety years later.

We can be more precise about the extent to which the unemployment issuehas been overstated in the standard of living debate. We have a number ofclues about early nineteenth-century unemployment in Britain that have yetto be exploited. Let us examine these, focusing on the controversial periodI820-50, beginning with the non-agriculturalsectorbeforetackling the knottierproblem of agricultural underemployment.

We can put an upper limit on non-agricultural unemployment in the I850sby starting with the share of engineering, metal and shipbuilding unionmembership who were out of work: in I 85 I, 3 9 per cent were out at any one

time, and the average was 52

per cent for i85I-9. This sector had all theattributes to suggest that unemployment would exceed economy-wide rates:early unionization, an unemployment insurance scheme, and business cyclesensitivity typical of all capital-goods industries. Indeed, from I 85 I to WorldWar I the unemployment rate in the engineering-metals-shipbuilding sector(EMS) fell below overallunemployment for insured workers in only two years,both of them boom years. Between I923 and I939, the EMS unemploymentrate exceeded that of all insured workers by far.39Thus, the 3.9 and 5-2 percent EMS figures clearly overstate unemployment for the non-agriculturalsector as a whole. These figures establish upper bounds on the extent to which

non-agricultural unemployment could have worsened.How much worse could non-agricultural unemployment have been in the

"hungry forties" than in the I850s? That unemployment history can beapproximated by appealing to the behaviour of other variables. We know thatunemployment varies inversely with output over the business cycle. Further-more, EMS unemployment must have been closely tied to the share of capitalformation in national product. There was also a tight nonlinear relationshipbetween unemployment and wage rate increases in Britain between i862 andI957, accordingto A. W. Phillips's classic study of the Phillips Curve.40Aside

from the influence of these three variables, one might also suspect that thestructure of the economy drifted over time in a way that shifted the unem-ployment rate.

These propositions can all be tested for the second half of the nineteenthcentury. If they are successful, then they can be used to predict non-agricultural unemployment back into the I830s. Regression analysis can sortout the determinants of the unemployment rates in engineering-metals-ship-building I85I-I892) where

UEMS = the EMS unemployment rate (a I per cent rate measured as"1*.0");

GNP Ratio = the ratio of current nominal gross nationalproduct at factorcost to its averagelevel over the immediately preceding five years;I/GNP = the share of gross domestic capital formation in gross nationalproduct at factor cost;w = the rate of change from the previous year in the wage rate forshipbuilding and engineering (a I per cent rise is "0oi"); and

39 Mitchell and Deane, Abstract,pp. 64-7.40 A. W. Phillips, 'The Relationship between Unemployment and the Rate of Change in Money Wage

Rates in the United Kingdom, i862-I957', Economica, xxv (I958), pp. 283-99.







LIVING STANDARDS I5

Time = the year minus I85I.

The regression results on annual data for the United Kingdom are (with

standarderrorsof coefficients in parentheses) 41

UEMS= 32*96-I6 I5 (GNP Ratio)- I68o02 (I/GNP) 7I.37W

(7.85) (63.81) (2I.83)

-288 45(w)2-0*0032 (Time)+o I48 (Time)2

(I2I.80) (0-0036) (O-I5I)

UEMS= 5.78, SEE= 2-50, R2 = .543, F = 91ii, d.f. = 35.

The results confirm that EMS unemployment was lower when GNP was onthe rise, when investment was a higher share of national product, and whenengineering and shipbuilding wage rates were rising. The results also fail to

reveal any other structural drift over the second half of the century: thecoefficientson the time variables are statistically insignificant.

The regressioncan now predict EMS unemployment rates for the 1840s andlate I83OS.42 It would be unwise to make any predictions earlier than this,given the Poor Law reform of I834 and other structuralchanges in the earlieryears. For the period I837-50, the equation generates the following estimates:

Boundsfor UEMS=

Point estimate? twostandardPeriod Estimateof UEMS errors

I837-I839 2 70% 0-7.70%i840-I850 4-4I% 0-9-4I%

(two worst years: (9.44%) (4.44-I4.44%)

I842-I843)

The overallrateof non-agriculturalunemployment was probablylower thanthese estimates. Of the different sectoral output series availablefor the I830s

and I840s,43 only brick output showed as bad a slump in the early forties asdid shipbuilding, the latter reflected in the EMS unemployment figures. It is

not at all clear that the slump of the early forties was the "worst of thecentury".The availableevidence make it no worse than the slumps of the lateI870s ormid-I 88os. More importantto the standardof living debate, industrialdepressionmight have been as bad in the immediate post-war years (I8I4-I9)

41 The EMS unemployment rates are from ibid., pp. 64-5; the GNP ratio and I/GNP are from PhyllisDeane, 'New Estimates of Gross National Product for the United Kingdom, I830-I9 I4', Review of Incomeand Wealth,XIV (i968), pp. I04-5; the rate of nominal wage increase in engineering and shipbuilding is theBowley-Wood series from Mitchell and Deane, Abstract, pp. 348-5I.

42 Serial correlationwould imply that the text is too generous in setting an upper bound on unemploymentin the I84os and late I830s. The Durbin-Watson statistic was I-40, suggesting the possibility of serial

correlation.A first-orderCochran-Orcutttransformationwas performed (rho = 0 30). The altered regressionhad a lower standard error of estimate (2-33), but still had a Durbin-Watson statistic of only I-59, farenough from 2-00 to encourage the suspicion of continuing serial correlation.

In the spirit of seeking overestimates of likely unemployment, we have reverted to the original equation,unadjusted for serial correlation, instead of pursuing successive iterations to push the Durbin-Watsonstatistic up toward 20oo. This yields inefficient estimates, overstating the standard error of the unbiasedestimatespresented here. (The fact that serialcorrelation also causes underestimationof the standarderrorsof the coefficients has little bearing here, since we seek accurate predictions ratherthan significance tests oncoefficients.)

43 For sectoral output series, see Mitchell and Deane, Abstract, passim, and Sidney Pollard, 'A NewEstimateof British Coal Production, I750-I850', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser. XXXIII (I980), pp. 2I2-35.







i6 PETER H. LINDERT AND JEFFREY G. WILLIAMSON

as in the early forties, given that the earlierwage-price deflation was far moresevere. We conclude that non-agricultural unemployment was not exception-

ally high in either the I840s or the I85os, and even if it did rise after I 820, thatunlikely event could have had only a trivial impact on workers' real earningsgains.

How might employment conditions in agriculturehave affected the unem-ployment trends for the economy as a whole? Darkness is nearly total on thisfront. Seasonal unemployment was, of course, a serious problem throughoutthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.44To guess when under-employmentreachedcrisis proportions, we can be guided by literary evidence, grain yields,and the terms of trade. The literary signs of distress were strongest during the

harvest failures of the I790Sand in the

twenty years after Waterloo45

Post-Napoleonic wheat yields were trendless from i8i5 to I840, and then rose.46The terms of trade shifted drastically against agriculture only twice in thecentury surveyed here-by about 20 per cent against wheat from c. I770 to C.I780 and by about IO per cent against agricultural products from i8I2-I4 toI822-24.7 The common denominator emerging from this evidence is that theearly postwar period, especially the decade I8I5-24, probably witnessedexceptional unemployment in agriculture, followed by overallimprovement toI850.

All of this evidence suggests two plausible inferences: first, that unemploy-

ment among workers listing non-agricultural occupations was less than 9*4Iper cent in the I840s and i85os; and second that unemployment amongagriculturalworkers was no worse in the I840s or I85Osthan around 1820. Wealso know that the share of the British labour force engaged in agriculturedropped from 28.4 per cent for I82I to 217 per cent for I85I.48 Thisinformation is sufficient to demonstrate that the (alleged) net rise in unem-ployment could not have exceeded 7*37 per cent, and it may well have fallen.49

The trend in unemployment thus could not have detractedgreatly from theimprovement in workers' real wages, and it may even have contributed totheir improvement. Furthermore, even a pessimist's reckoningof the influenceof unemployment overstates its relevance by assuming that time spent unem-ployed has no value as either leisure or non-market work.

44 C. Peter Timmer, 'The Turnip, The New Husbandry, and the English Agricultural Revolution',QuarterlyJournal of Economics,LXXXIII (i969), pp. 375-95; E. J. T. Collins, 'Migrant Labour in BritishAgriculture in the Nineteenth Century', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser. XXIXI976), pp. 38-59.

45 E. L. Jones, Agricultureand the IndustrialRevolution (New York, I974), ch. Io; T. L. Richardson,'The Agricultural Labourer's Standardof Living in Kent, I790-i840', in D. Oddy and D. Miller eds. TheMaking of the ModernBritish Diet (I976), pp. I03-i6; and E. J. Hobsbawm and G. Rude, Captain Swing(New York, i969).

46 Jones, Agriculture, h. 8.47 Deane and

Cole,British Economic

Growth, p.9i; Mitchell and Deane, Abstract,ch. xiv.

48 Deane and Cole, British EconomicGrowth, p. I42.

49 The proof runs as follows. Let the 0 superscript denote I820, and the I superscript denote I850.Further, let the a subscript refer to agriculture and n subscript to the rest of the economy. Let 'a' be theshare of the labour force in agriculture, and U the rate of unemployment. The nationalunemployment rate.(no sectoral subscript) is linked to the sectoral rates by definition as follows:

UO= a0U~a+(ia0)Un?and U1 =a'U+(i -a')UlSince allis *284 and a' = .2I7, the net change in the unemployment rate becomes

U'-U0 = (-2I7Ua-*284Uoa)+-783UA-.7I6Un.

Given that Un<.094I, and that UO?3Ul, t follows that only the second of these right-hand terms can bepositive, and its value must be below *783 X-094I = 7-37%. This exercise for Britain can be repeated withthe same results for England and Wales.







LIVING STANDARDS I7

VI

Thus far we have taken the orthodox path by focusing solely on adult male

purchasing power. Yet questions about work and earnings by women andchildren have always been lurking in the wings throughout the standard ofliving debate. The rise of their employment in mills and mines is deplored asmuch today as it was during the public outcry prior to the Factory Acts. Theincreasingdependence of working-class families on the earnings of children,and the shifting of both children and single young women from the authorityof fathers to the discipline of capitalists, are thought to have underminedtraditional amily roles and fathers' self-esteem.50 Such social side-effects willbe treated as part of the larger issue of urban and industrial disamenities in

SectionVIII below. This section will address the prior question of how trendsin the earning power of women and children compared with those in men'sreal wages.

What data there are suggest the tentative conclusion that the earning powerof women and children marchedroughly in step with the realwage of unskilledlabouring men, a group with whom women and children tended to compete assubstitutes. The evidence for this view begins with data on the ratios ofwomen's and children's pay relative to that of adult male labourers, bothwithin sectors and overall. The best single indicator of the relative earningpowerof a woman's or a child's time is the ratio of their hourly rate to that ofmen, averaged over all seasons and including home commodity production.Yet such hourly rates are seldom given in historical sources before I850. Wetherefore gather clues on some close substitute measures.

Table 6 presents the best available evidence on two measures that shouldserveto bracket trends in the value of women's and children's time. One is theweekly earningsratio. The other is the ratio of hourly hired-labourwage rates,basedon data that do not reflect differences in hours worked per week.

Working women may have gained ground on unskilled men during thecenturyfrom I750 to I850. Our gleanings of data on relative weekly earnings

hint as much, both for women within ruralareas and for a shifting rural-urbanaverage.Yet hints about relative hourlywages (the second column in Table 6)warn that we cannot be sure that there was any upward trend in the truerelativevalue of women's time. It may simply be that the relativeweekly hoursof those working rose, though this seems unlikely. Our tentative conclusion isthat the relative earning power of women did not decline. It may have stayedthe same, or it may have risen.

The relative earning power of children probably stayed the same above theage of fifteen or thereabouts, while declining slightly for younger children.

This conclusion is derived mainly from the data on relativeweekly earnings inTable 6. These data again may differ in trend from the true average timevalues because of changes in relative weekly hours, but relative hours wouldhave had to have risen at an implausibly high rate to reverse the mainconclusions advanced here.

Thus, it appearsthat an employment-weighted averageof the wage rates of

50N. J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, I959), chs. ix-xi; Thompson,English WorkingClass, ch. io.








Table 6. Relative Earnings of English Working-ClassWomenand Children, asFractions of those or Full-Time AdultMale Labourers, 742-i890

(i -000 = earnings or wage rate of full-time adult male labourers)EmployedChildren

Employedwives/women (unweightedboy-girlaverages)Weekly Hourly Weekly Hourly

Data context earnings wage rate Ages earnings wage rate

(a) i8th-centuryrural:Brandsby, Yorkshire, I742-5I: <.488a <-488 not given <-495a <-495

Corfe Castle, Dorset, I790: *202 >-202 ageI3/age I7 *253/-330 >-253/>-330

English ruralpoor, I787-I796: .I34 >-I34 age I3/age I7 .i96/-2I4 >-i96/>-2I4

(b) igth-centuryrural:Rural England and Wales, I833: .224 *224--365 9-I5 yrs. .I30 .I30--253

Norfolk-Suffolk, I838: .284 >-284 over io yrs. .I72 >-I72

(c) i9th-century own:Textiles in towns, England andWales, I833: .47I >-47I age I3/age I7 *233/-4I3 >-233/>-4I3

Birmingham, I839: .327b >-327 age I3/age I7 *I53/-230 >-I53/>-230

Manchester,839: >-350 I4-I8 yrs. > 230

Industrial workers'wives and child-ren, England and Wales, I889-

I890: .407 >-407 age I3/age I7 *I85/-345 >-I85/>-345

Sourcesand Notes:a Relative daily wages, not weekly. For this reason, and because the hired-labourdataare in this case biasedtoward the peak-demand season more for women and children than for men, the "Weekly" (here, daily)

wage ratio overestimates the hourly ratio more than for later observations.b63 working women, ages 2I-70.

Two different concepts of an "employed" state are being applied here. The averages for weekly earningsare for persons employed either at or away from home for a significant part of the year. This concept ofemployment is close to the broad definition of labour force participation. The average hourly wage ratesrefer to persons when hired outside the home, thus excluding any unemployment.

Brandsby hired women and children: J. E. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture nd Prices in England,VII, pp. 499-509. Men: io,657 days at 9-779d., all seasons; women, 2,06i15 days at 4.772d.; boys: I,948days at 5 I94d.; girls, I22.5 days at 4.486d. Similar ratios for womens' earnings are given for I770 inArthur Young, A Six Month's Tourof the North of England (I77I).

Corfe Castle, Dorset: all wives, 20-59, and children with stated occupations including outwork; from thedetailed I790 census at the Dorset Record Office. 26i families.

English rural poor: I72 poor families with children, calculated from Davies and Eden data as describedin Peter H. Lindert, 'Child Costs and Economic Development', in Richard A. Easterlin, ed. Population andEconomicChangein DevelopingCountries Chicago, ig80), pp. 5-79.

RuralEngland and Wales, I833: Poor Law Commission, Rural Queries, n House of Commons, SessionalPapers, I833, drawing on parishes giving explicit answers to questions about earnings. Similar wage ratesfor women and children are quoted for I843 in House of Commons, Special Assistant Poor LawCommissioners, Reportson theEmploymentof Womenand Children n Agriculture I843).

Norfolk-Suffolk farms, I838: 64 couples without children, I20 families with one child over IO, fromJ. P. Kay, 'Earnings of Agricultural Labourers in Norfolk and Suffolk', J3ournal f the Royal StatisticalSociety, I (I838), pp. I79-80.

Textiles in towns, England and Wales, I833: weekly earnings for i,864 children at age I3, I,434 childrenat age I7, and 972 women at ages 26-30 from Dr James Mitchell's report in Factory Inquiry Commission,Supplementary Report of the Central Board . . . as to the Employment of Children in Factories, in House

of Commons, Sessional Papers, I834, vol. xix. The other factory inquiry volumes of that era are also a richsource for earnings profiles by age and sex.

Birmingham, I838: 'Contributions to the Economic Statistics of Birmingham', by a local Subcommittee,Journal of theRoyal StatisticalSociety, 2 (I840), p. 44I.

Manchester, I839: hourly wage rates from several industries, in David Chadwick, 'On the Rate of Wagesin Manchester and Salford . . . I839-59', Quarterly3Journalf the Statistical Society, XXIII(I860), pp. I-36.The comparisons used here were biased against our argument somewhat by choosing lower-paid groups ofwomen and children and better-paidadult male labourers. The I849 ratios from the same source are similar.

Industrial workers' wives and children, I889-I890: 857 industrial workers' wives and I59 families withone child over IO, fron US Commissioner of Labor, Sixth and SeventhAnnualReports, pt. III (Washington,I89I andI892).







LIVING STANDARDS I9

women and children together would have advanced about as fast as those foradult male farm labourers in the course of the century I750-I850. This

conclusion would not be overturned by noting the decline in overall labour-force participationof both women and children.51An optimist might interpretthis decline as voluntary, that is as showing that the implicit purchasing power(the "shadow price") of time spent away from work rose faster than theobserved wage rates. A pessimist might counter that the trendwas involuntary,that women and children were being thrown into involuntary unemploymentfaster than adult males. The latter position is hard to sustain. Aside from"protective" hours legislation from I833 on, no institutions compelled em-ployers to pay women and children wage rates that were increasingly abovetheopportunitycost of their time out of work. The realwage gainsdocumentedfor men in Table 5 were not achieved at the expense of women and children.As for the perceived disamenities of having women and children shift theirwork from home toward factories, these become part of the net disamenitiesappraised n Section IX below.

Since wage rates differ between occupations, migration from low-paid tohigh-paid employment can raise average wages for the working class as awhole, even if wage rates do not change for any one occupation. How much ofthe wage gains up to I850 were due to such mobility-induced wage drift? The"blue collar" and the "all worker" wage series in Tables 3 and 5 already

capturethis mobility effect. It can be factored back out by applying fixed wagerates to shifting employment numbers. Detailed calculations described else-where show that occupational mobility contributed less than 5-3 per cent tothe rise in average full-time earnings of all blue-collar workers between I78I

and I85I, using either Laspeyres or Paasche weights.52 Virtually all of theapparent wage gains were gains within occupations, not wage drifts due tochanging occupational weights.

Migrationfrom low-wage to high-wage regions can also raise wages for theaverageworker even if wages fail to rise in any one region. That nominalwagesvaried widely across English counties well into the nineteenth century

has been well known at least since Arthur Young's late eighteenth-centurytours. Elsewhere we have analyzed the causes of the regional differences inwageratesfor agriculturallabour.53It appearsthat realwage gaps persist evenafterregional adjustments for variation in cost of living and disamenities aremade. Furthermore, it has long been appreciatedthat labour drifted from thelow-wage south to the high-wage north during the Industrial Revolution.54

51On rates of labour-force participation, see DP, Section 3.4, and the sources cited in Table 6.52 For all workers, the Paasche measure of the mobility effect was as high as I7 2 per cent between I78I

and I85 I, but this was again a very small share of the overall real wage gains. These are improvements overthe estimates discussed in DP, Section 6, due to slight revisions in the employment weights.

Some additional shift toward higher-paying occupations after 8 i has eluded our measures. We couldinclude only those occupations that supplied pay proxies, and the excluded groups (about a third of thelabourforce) shifted from a low-skill mix dominated by domestic servants to a high-skill mix dominated bynew occupations created by the Industrial Revolution. More complete measures would show faster averagewage gains between i8ii and I85I.

51See DP, Section 7.54 In this section, 'migration' is defined as changes in the labour force distribution across regions. There

is, of course, an extensive literature which debates the demographic source of the population and labourforce shift to high-wage areas over the period which bounds the standard of living debate. This section isnot concerned with whether the observed shift can.be attributed to natural increase (and whether to birthor death rate differences) or to actual migration.








Since the average "blue collar" and "all worker" wage series in Tables 3 and5 already include most of these regional migration effects, it is now a simple

matter to explore their quantitative impact on real wage gains up to I850.It appears that regional migration contributed very little to the real wagegains for the average English worker after the I780s. True, some periodsregistered far larger regional migration gains than others: I84I-5I was a decadeof impressive gains through migration to high-wage regions; and the lateeighteenth century records some small positive gains.55 But over the periodI78I-I 85 I as a whole, regional migration contributed less than 3.6 per cent tothe observed real wage gains. It was real wage gains within regions thatmattered most.

VII

Most of us care more about people's consumption per lifetime,rather thanjust per year. Conclusions based on trends in real earnings per annum riskgrave error if the workers' length of life deteriorated. Alternatively, anyimprovements in the workers' length of life implies that standard of livinggains are understated in Table 5, especially if sickness and longevity areinversely correlated. The standardof living debate commonly fails to confrontthe issue of lifetime incomes. There are exceptions to this characterization ofthe debate, and surely the most famous is Engels' original broadside on TheConditionof theWorkingClass in England, which indicted industrialcapitalismfor killing workers with unhealthy conditions:

... society n Englanddailyandhourlycommitswhattheworking-men's rgans,withperfectcorrectness, haracterise s socialmurder . . its deed is murder ustas surelyas the deed of the single individual;disguised,maliciousmurderagainstwhich none can defendhimself,whichdoes not seem whatit is, becauseno manseesthemurderer...56

To link workers' early deaths with rising capitalism, Engels drew on several

available estimates showing that mortality was worse in the cities than thecountryside, appalling in Liverpool and Manchester, and worst in the mostcrowded neighbourhoods of the same cities. A host of studies has sinceconfirmedthis spatial pattern of mortality.

Two pitfalls await anyone trying, as Engels did, to infer from such patternsthat working-class longevity diminished as the Industrial Revolution pro-gressed. First, it is important to remember that the working classes were notneatly segregated from the upper classes by place of residence. Liverpool wasno closer to being purely working-class than was England in the aggregate. On

the contrary, census figures show that the socio-occupational group mostconcentratedin the unhealthy cities was the bourgeoisie, althoughmost boughttheir way out of the worst sections by paying higher rents in the moresalubrious sections of the same unhealthy cities. The rise of centres of badhealthgives no more supportto the pessimists' view of working-classconditions

55But hardly of the size suggested by the qualitative literature. See, for example, Deane and Cole, BritishEconomicGrowth,ch. III.

56 F. Engels, The Conditionof the WorkingClass in England, translated from the i845 German edition,with an introduction by E. J. Hobsbawm (St. Albans, I974), pp. I26, I27.







LIVING STANDARDS 2I

than the nineteenth-centurydecline in nationalmortality gives to the optimists'position.

Thanks to the energies of William Farr and a few other scholars, a fairlyclear picture of adult male working-class life expectancy can be put togethertowardsthe end of the Industrial Revolution. As we have shown elsewhere,life expectancies did not differ dramatically across occupations for Englandand Wales as a whole. The occupational differences were far smaller than thespatial differences, though the estimates may be slightly biased towarduniformity by migration effects and by the omission of paupers from theavailable igures.57We are warned that occupational differentials were unlikelyto have been as greatas stark contrasts between Manchesterand rural Norfolkwould suggest.

The otherpitfall is mistaking a snapshot for a motion picture. Past observershave inferred that mortality must have worsened for city-dwellers (and for theworkingclass) since mortalitywashigher in fast-growingcities. Such inferencesare unwarranted.In fact, mortality improved (receded) in the countryside andmost cities, and did so by enough to improve national life expectancy fromabout i8oo on. The exceptional cities were Liverpool and Manchester, wherecrude death rates stayed about the same from I8oI to I85I, while age-adjusteddeathratesappearto have risen only slightly up to I820 and declined slightlyto mid-century.58

In short, while we cannot yet determine trends in working-class infant andchild mortality, it can be shown that any tendency of the rising industrialcentres to lure adult workers to an early death was fully offset, or more thanoffset, by the lengthening of life both in the cities and the countryside.59

VIII

Where in our measures is the degradation and demoralization associatedwith the long rigid hours spent at mind-numbing work for an insensitive

avariciouscapitalist? The disruption of traditional family roles? The noise,filth, crime, and crowding of urban slums? Until we can devise ways ofweighing these varied dimensions against material gains, we cannot answerquestionsabout living standards,but ratheronly questions aboutrealearnings.

In judging the importance of these quality of life factors, we must avoidimposing twentieth-century values on early nineteenth-century workers. Wemust avoid both facile indifference to past suffering and excessive indignationat conditions that seem much more intolerable now. The workers of that era

57 See DP, Table 20. 'Migration effects' could bias the life expectancy measures toward uniformitybecause persons whose health had been damaged by high-mortality environments (e.g., mining orManchester) may have migrated to healthier environments to no avail, dying there (e.g., recorded rurallabourers)and raising rural mortality rates for misleading reasons.

58 On national life expectancy, see E. A. Wrigley and R. Schofield, The Population History of England,i54i-i87I: A ReconstructionCambridge, i98i), esp. Table A3. I. For crude death rates by county and city,see Deane and Cole, British EconomicGrowth, p. I3I; and House of Commons, Sessional Papers, i80i-02,

vols. VI and VII, i849, vol. XXI, and i865, vol. XIII, pp. I4ff. For London, we have calculated thefollowing infant mortality rates as percentages of live births, using the bills of mortality plus the thirdEnglish life table up to i830 and annual reports of the Registrar General thereafter: I729-39 - *3746,I750-9- .3322, I780-9- .2406, i800-09- -i864, i820-30- .I428, i85i-6o- .I548.

59See DP, Table 2i and the accompanying text.








must themselves be allowed to reveal how much a "good" quality of life wasworth to them.

How is their voice to be heard?Most of them lacked the right to vote. Someprotested violently, while most remainedsilent, but we cannot infer a majorityview from either the outcries or the silence. The most satisfactory clue to aworker's view is his response to living and working conditions that offereddifferent rates of pay and different qualities of life.

Employers in the rising industries and cities had to pay workers more toattracta growing share of the labour force. How muchmore is a valuable clueto the importance which the workers attached to quality of life. To err on theside of exaggerationon so sensitive an issue, let us contrastthe pay of unskilledcommon labourersin two extreme settings in the late I830s: cotton and metalmills in Manchester in I839 versus year-round farm labour in Norfolk andSuffolk in I837.60 Among the better paid unskilled in Manchester werelabourersin metal mills and adult male warehousemen in cotton mills. Thesegroups received I8 shillings a week, or ?4I 4 for a normal 46-week year. Othercommon labourers generally got less. In healthy East Anglia, a single adultmale farm labourer averaged ?25. I in I837. The extreme Faustian "Satanicmill" wage premium was thus 65 per cent.

At some human cost of moving, labourers could choose to suffer thedisamenities of Manchester work, even if it looks like a Hobson's choice to us

today. And choose they did, in significantnumbers. The census of I85I showsthat every county in England, and even the rural districts of every county,attracted persons born in every other county. Workers also shuttled betweenthe industrial and agriculturalsectors on a seasonal basis.61They were free tomove, and many of them knew enough about conditions in other sectors ifthey cared to consider moving.

The possibility of migration implies that the wage premium offered inManchestercannot understate the importanceof urban-industrialdisamenitiesand living costs to those workers who were actually near the margin in

choosing between Manchester and East Anglia. Indeed, it may well overstatethis importance not only because the continued flow toward the cities implieda true gain for movers, but also because we have selected two extreme cases forcontrast. Manchester was as "bad" a city as any (except perhaps Liverpool),and farm workers in East Anglia were paid a good deal less than theircounterpartsin the rural north.

The Manchester-EastAnglia "wage gap" must be viewed as an upper boundon what it took to induce rural labour to modern industry in the secondquarterof the nineteenth century. This gap can be viewed as compensation fortwo closely related costs: the payment necessary to compensate workers (in

their own eyes) for a lower quality of life, and the payment necessary tocompensate workers for the higher urban cost of living (e.g. expensivehousing).

60 The earnings data come from David Chadwick, 'On the Rate of Wages in Manchester and Salford, andthe Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, i839-i859', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A,xxiii (i86o), pp. I-36, and J. P. Kay, 'Earnings of Agricultural Labourers in Norfolk and Suffolk', T.Royal Stat. Soc., I (i838), pp. I79-83. Both estimates posit some partialunemployment. This took the formof lower winter earnings in the Norfolk-Suffolk farm data and a 46-week year for Manchester.

61 On migration countercurrents, see also E. G. Ravenstein, 'The Laws of Migration', T. Royal Stat.Soc., Series A, XLVIII (i885), pp. i67-235, esp. pp. i87-9.







LIVING STANDARDS 23

The 65 per cent gap in the I83os and I850s is wide, but how much long-rundeteriorationdoes it reveal? Very little, as it turns out. First, it is a contem-

poraneous comparison between sectors. Workers did not choose between theliving conditions of I780 and those of I850. Yet workers'migration behaviourin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows that they would have chosenthe conditions of i85o overwhelmingly, not only because real wages rose overtime but also because the quality of life was improvingwithin both the urbanandthe rural sectors over time. We infer this mainly from trends in mortality,the best single proxy for the disamenities associated with demoralization, badhealth,and low resistance to disease. As we have seen in Section VII, mortalitywas declining within the countryside and within the cities (though it was only

stable n Liverpool and Manchester). Thus, disamenitiesweredeclining withinboth sectors, an improvement we have not measured in monetary terms.What of the impact of population shift from low-density rural areas of high

quality of life to high-density urban areas with unpleasant disamenities? Forthis implicit spatial migration taking place between generations, the full 65per cent gap might be applied. But it could apply only to that share of thepopulationmaking the implicit move. An overestimate of this fraction is therisein the shareliving in urbanplaces, a measure that generously assumes thatallcities were as bad as Manchester. This fractionalshift is only I4.89 per centfrom I78I to I85I ,62 making the disamenities and living-cost increases for the

averageworker only .I489X.65 = 9-7 per cent. To repeat, even this is agenerousoverestimate. Elsewhere, one of the present authorshas analyzedtheurban-industrialdisamenities and cost of living effects in greater detail, andfound that the former was probably under 2.5 per cent and the latter wasprobablyunder 3-3 per cent around the I840s.63

Many workers did suffer from the higher disamenities and living costs inthe rising industrial centres, and many others resisted them by resolving tolive and work elsewhere. Yet the value implicitly put on these human costs bythe marginalworkers, who actually moved into the urban-industrialcentres,

was not large enough to cancel even a tenth of blue collar workers' real wagegains. Nor should this surprise us. The development process inevitably findsworkers and policymakers more intent on basic purchasing power in thehungry early phases of development, as the history of environmental qualityin Manchester, Pittsburgh, Manila, and Sdo Paulo clearly shows.

Ix

We now have a much broader empirical basis for inferring how workers

faredin the century between I750 and I850. Our tentative findings can besummarized most easily by focusing on the relatively data-rich IndustrialRevolutionera from I78 I to I85 I.

62 Urban populations for i80I-5I were taken from Mitchell and Deane, Abstract,pp. 24-7. Deane andCole (British Economic Growth, p. 7) suggested that the urban population share in the mid-eighteenthcentury was about I5-i6 per cent, and we extrapolated between I75i and i8oi using this figure for theformer date.

63 See Jeffrey G. Williamson, 'Urban Disamenities, Dark Satanic Mills, and the British Standard ofLiving Debate', J. Econ. Hist. XLI (i98i), and 'Was the Industrial Revolution Worth It? Disamenities andDeath in i9th Century British Towns', Explorations n EconomicHistory, i9 (i982), pp. 22I-45.








Table 7 collects our best estimates of workers' experiences, beginning withour "best-guess" realwage trends andproceeding through severallong-needed

adjustments. Table 7 suggests impressive net gains in the standard of life: over6o per cent for farm labourers, over 86 per cent for blue-collar workers, andover I40 per cent for all workers. The hardships faced by workers at the endof the Industrial Revolution cannot have been nearly as great as those of theirgrandparents.

The great majority of these human gains came after I820. Pessimists mustretreat to the pre-i820 era, where workers' net gains look as elusive in thispaperas in past studies of single occupations. Optimists might feel a temptationto proclaim victory by shifting attention away from the classic IndustrialRevolution era, but this inference seems premature. After all, the bestmeasures of industrialization are still so uncertain for the years before I83Ithat the timing of the Revolution itself is debatable. Furthermore, the separateinfluence of the French Wars has yet to be factored out of the longer-rundevelopment experience.

Pessimists in tune with larger intellectual currents of the i960s have calledfor less attention to conventional measures of real income and more to theenvironmental aspects of the Industrial Revolution-all of those appallinghealth conditions and social injustices with which workerswere affronted. Theshift is certainly welcome. Yet the results presented here suggest that

nineteenth-century environmental influences on health-such as crowding,infection, and pollution-could hardly have lowered average quality of lifeover time.

Research inspired by the pessimists' allegations about the Industrial Rev-

Table 7. Revised Measures of English Workers'Standard-of-Living Gains,I78i-I85I

Overallimprovement,78i-i85I

Sourceof Improvement Farm All Blue AllLabourers CollarWorkers Workers

i. Real full-time earnings("Best guess", Table 5) 63.6% 99-2% I54.8%ia. Due to occupational change (DP,

Section 6) (0) (<5-3%) (<I7-2%)

ib. Due to regional migration (DP,Section 7) (<3.6%) (<3.6%) (<3.6%)

ic. Residual: real wage gains withinoccupations and regions (>6o.o%) (>90.3%) (>I34-0%)

2. Diminished by an "upper-bound" risein unemployment, r <7.4% (SectionVIabove) 63.6% >9I.8% >I47-4%

3. Diminished by the shift toward higherurbanivingcosts,or <3-3%* 63.6% >88-5% >I44-I%

4. Diminished by urban-industrial disa-menities, or <2-5%* 63.6% >86-o% >I4I.6%

5. Augmented by adult mortality gains,which were not negative (Section VIII) >63.6% >86.o% >I4I.6%

Notes: *These figures are taken from DP, Section 8. Readers preferring the estimates in Section IX abovemay wish to substitute the 9-7 per cent figure for Rows 3 and 4 together in the "blue collar" and "allworkers" columns.







LIVING STANDARDS 25

olution will now have to shift to social injustice and social disorder. Reportedcrime, alcoholism, protest, and illegitimacy appear to have been on the rise inthe first half of the nineteenth century. In addition, rising material inequalityseems to characterize the period, and these trends were likely to haveinfluenced social disorder. We know from related research, for example, thatcommon labourers failed to experience gains as rapid as those for better-paidemployees, as even Table 7 shows in comparingthreeworking-class aggregates.Earnings inequality statistics suggest the same between the I82os and thei88os. Our preliminaryresults on probated wealth and land rents also suggestrising inequality between upper and lower-middle classes in the course of thefirsthalf of the nineteenth century. Inequality between workers and the verypoor may also have widened: we need far better information on the material

condition of those below the working classes-vagrants and disabledpaupers-than the large literature on poor relief has yet been able to supply.These issues, not trends in absolute living standards, are likely to mark thefuture battleground between optimists and pessimists about how workersfaredunder nineteenth-century British capitalism.

University f California,DavisUniversity f Wisconsin,Madison

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Industrial Revolution English Workers Li