89 / 5.000 The HARSH Realities of Victorian Working Life | Ruth Goodman on the Industrial Revolution

Hello, I'm Ruth Goodman and today we're going to be looking at working life in Victorian Britain. In the 19th century, work changed for most of the population, with shift working made possible by gaslight, a new adherence to fixed hours of work, and a fierce concentration upon a smaller number of tasks whilst at work. We'll also be looking at the slow movement towards protection for workers. Many of the things that we all take for granted now about the world of work have their origin in the Victorian period. Take for example, the light. This may not mean much to you, but if you think about it, before there was reliable artificial light, everybody had to do things during daylight hours. There couldn't be night working at all. Yes, people had candles and oil lamps, but if you've ever tried to do anything to the light of a candle, or indeed a small oil lamp, you'll notice how dim the light is, how flickery, how difficult it is to do anything at all precise. And those things would also cost quite a lot of money. You may have heard the phrase, is the job worth the candle? And that really used to mean something when candles were expensive. Was it worth splashing out on a candle that was going to give you a very dim light that you'd end up doing a rather poor job? Or would you be better off waiting for daylight? But that all changed at the very beginning of the 19th century with the invention of gaslight, and it happens first in a factory. In particular, it happens in 1803 in the Soho Manufactory just outside Birmingham. Somebody who worked for that company, in fact one of their main managers, William Murdoch, is the person who came up with the idea in the first place, and he convinced his employers to put it into practice. A couple of lamps went outside as a sort of public demonstration, but they also lit the factory buildings, and once they'd done that, they discovered that you could keep on working after dark. Now, within a very few years, many factories started to take this up. The Soho Factory was open to the public. Members of the elite, members of the business communities were regularly going round on tours so they could see this in action. They went, this is amazing. We could use the machines at night as well. You know, you just got way more production out of the same amount of investment. So factories were really early adopters of artificial light, gaslight, and right across the country within a very few years, ordinary working class people had their lives completely overturned as this new way of working came in. Now there was such a thing as shift work, and people had to live by really quite unnatural rhythms to fit with this new working life. Whole new systems had to come in as to how you were going to cope with working at night and sleeping during the day. How were people going to get up, for example? There weren't any alarm clocks that early. A whole new job had to be invented called a knocker-upper. It was literally a person with a long pole who walked around banging on people's bedroom windows to wake them up in time for their shift. So it was working class people who first experienced this great change in their lives that drew on from artificial light in the workplace. If we were to look before Victoria's era, we'd see that most work life had a certain fluidity to it. People worked long hours, but those hours shifted and changed with how much work came in, how much work came out, when they started, when they stopped, when they took their breaks. It was all really quite sort of open to negotiation, open to responding to the vagaries of the weather and so forth. But during the Victorian period, we see a great tightening up, a belief that work should be regulated by the clock and nothing else, that work had a distinct start time and it had a distinct end, that there would be formalised breaks that were for a particular length of time and you would take them now at this moment. It's a sort of cultural shift. There's nothing in particular that drives it from a technological point of view, but we do see everywhere we look a new formality to working hours, to keeping work and the rest of And even more than that, we see many changes in the length and type of work that people are doing. As the Victorian era progresses, more and more jobs are sort of broken down into smaller bits. So instead of being, say, I don't know, a wheelwright and taking a thing from the beginning to the end of the process and making a whole wheel, what happens in the Victorian era is a breaking apart of that so that one person does this bit, one person does that bit, another person does this bit, another person does that bit. And the thing itself, the wheel, is only assembled right at the end after all these people who only specialise in one tiny portion. And the further the century goes on, the tinier those portions get until you get somebody whose entire work might be doing one movement as if they themselves were a machine. Another thing that we see developing in the Victorian era is workers' safety, workers' rights, a bit of protection in there for working people. And this arrives very piecemeal, very haphazard, a little bit here, a little bit there, over a very long period of time. Some of the very first rules, for example, run out of scandals. There was a terrible scandal when people investigated what was going on in coal mining, and they found evidence that was presented to Parliament and, through line drawings, disseminated through the papers to a wider population about very young children, four and five-year-olds, stuck down mines for 12-hour shifts in the dark alone, opening trapdoors. Terrible stories about small children, under 10s, hauling coal through those mines. A knee-jerk piece of legislation comes in, trying to prevent this cruelty, this cruel employment of very small children in the mines. But you should remember that when that piece is passed, and it is a landmark piece of legislation, it only applied to children working in coal mines. If you were working in an iron mine, none of it had any validity. And that is very much the way the Victorian legislation continued this presence. A little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit there. This little group of workers get protected, that little group of workers get protected in one way or another. It's not a great big blanket, make life safer for everyone. It's very targeted. The people who got left out most often were women. Because women tended not to work in the sorts of industries that attracted politicians' attention. Most women tended to work within things like domestic service. And there, there was no protection at all. When rules came in limiting, particularly in the 1870s, limiting the length of the working hour, so the majority of men from about 1875 onwards find themselves working no more than 10 hour days, this didn't apply to all those domestic servants. And it's very clear from the diaries and other information that we have from those groups, that women in domestic service had no, or next to no time off at all. They were frequently working from five or six in the morning till 11 at night, with no formalized breaks whatsoever. And that of course doesn't even count housework, which just went on and on and on. There is in fact a very famous punch cartoon of a bloke, sat down at the table, elbows on, tucking into a big dinner, and it says 10 hours later, not finished yet, because he's not the focus. The focus of the image is his wife on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Next time, we'll be looking more closely at life in the Victorian home, exploring how the whole family was affected by the male breadwinner pattern.