Handout #201

Eighteenth Century English Society

It is certain that country people would soon degenerate into a land of savages and barbarians were there not such frequent returns of a stated time, in which the village met together in church with their best faces, and in their cleanest habits, to converse with one another upon indifferent subjects, hear their duties explained to them, and join together in adoration of the Supreme Being.

The great eighteenth-century English pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgewood (1730-95 A.D.) had no doubts of the benefits which industrialists like himself conferred on their country: his description of the change in his native Staffordshire is redolent of the exuberant self-confidence and optimism which would characterize English society in the Industrial Revolution:

...ask your parents for a description of the country we inhabited when they first knew it; and they will tell you that the inhabitants bore all the marks of poverty to a much greater degree than they do now. Their houses were miserable huts, the land poorly cultivated and yielded little of value for the food of man or beast, and these disadvantages, with roads almost impassable, might be said to have cut off our part of the country from the rest of the world, besides rendering it not very comfortable to ourselves. Compare this picture, which I know to be a true one, with the present state of the same country, the workmen earning near double their former wages, their houses mostly new and comfortable, and the lands, roads and every other circumstance bearing evident marks of the most pleasing and rapid improvements ... Industry has been the parent of this happy change.

Industrial society might breed radical views which seemed to threaten church and state, as this worried report to the Secretary of War in 1792 A.D. makes clear. 'Paine' is the Radical activist Tom Paine (1737-1809 A.D.); although he was a celebrated free-thinker, the Associations for political reform , mentioned here gained their main support in Sheffield not from the religiously unorthodox, but from mainstream Protestant Dissenters. 

...At Sheffield... I found that the seditious doctrines of Paine and the factious people who are endeavoring to disturb the peace of the country had extended to a degree very much beyond my conception; and indeed they seem with great judgment to have chosen this as the center of all their seditious machinations, for the manufactures of this town are of a nature to require so little capital to carry them on that a man with a very small sum of money can employ two, three or four men, and this being generally the case there are not in this, as in other great towns, any number of their dependents, act with any effect in case of a disturbance. As wages given to the journeymen are very high, it is pretty generally the practice for them to work for three days, in which they earn sufficient money to enable them to drink and riot for the rest of the week, consequently there can be no place more fit for seditious purposes.

The mode they have adopted for spreading their licentious principles has been by forming Associations on terms suited to the circumstances of the lowest mechanics, of whom about 2500 are enrolled in the principal Society, and that it may not be confined, they allow any man to be present who will pay for admission. 

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