“It is time … to seek for a radical, a permanent cure of the evils that afflict society”
William Thompson’s Utilitarian Socialism
The immiseration of handicraft workers wasn’t the only downside of industrialization. Two years after Byron wrote his tribute poem to the Luddites, an underground journal based in London, Black Dwarf, published a firsthand account of conditions in the Manchester cotton mills, where a new class of industrial workers, many of them women and children, were working long hours for low wages. The anonymous author, who identified himself as a cotton spinner, invited his readers to “stand in an avenue leading to a factory a little before five o’clock in the morning, and observe the squalid appearance of the little infants and their parents taken from their beds at so early an hour in all kinds of weather.”1
In the mills of Ancoats and other cotton-manufacturing districts, workers—some of them as young as eight or nine—were working twelveor fourteen-hour days. To prevent the yarns from snapping, mill owners kept their factories hot and damp, which caused respiratory ailments. The owners also imposed strict discipline on their workers. “There they are (and if late a few minutes, a quarter of a day is stopped in wages) locked up until night locked up in rooms heated above the hottest days we have had this summer,” the cotton spinner wrote, “and allowed no time, except three quarters of an hour at dinner, in the whole day.” The mill owners in their domestic lives put on an “ostentatious display of elegant mansions, equipages, liveries, parks, hunters, hounds, &c,” the writer noted. At work, their overriding goal was to “keep wages low for the purpose of keeping the spinners indigent and spiritless … as for the purpose of taking the surplus to their own pockets.”2
4