The Skilled Labourer is the third volume of the husband-and-wife team J L and Barbara Hammond’s three-part history of the English working classes and their struggles to survive in the early decades of the industrial revolution, from 1760 up to the Representation of the People Act (also known as the Great Reform Act) of 1832. The first volume, The Village Labourer, was published in 1911; the second, The Town Labourer, in 1917; the third in 1919.

Their publication thus straddles the beginning of the modern age; it is much harder now than it was then to see back into what is now the distant past, before the Victorians began building the physical fabric of the world we live in today. There is much that has been generally forgotten. Which is a pity, because after 40 years of increasing inequality, with investor rights taking primacy over those of workers, and in the last decade the erosion of many people’s economic status towards subsistence level, it looks like, step by step, we’re on our way back to where we were 200 years ago. And it really wasn’t a nice place.

In the villages of what was still then an overwhelmingly rural society, the problem started with the seizure of traditional common land by local landowners seeking to increase their wealth. These actions were justified by academic theories about efficient land use and formalised through acts of parliament. For ordinary villagers, though, they were not just breaches of a centuries-old social contract; the loss of the right to graze animals or gather firewood on common land meant the difference between sink or swim. In order to survive, huge numbers of independent smallholders were forced into insecure short-term labour for the very landowners who had dispossessed them of the commons, under atrocious conditions and at atrocious rates set by those very landowners; while hundreds of thousands more were forced, destitute, off the land and into the destitution of the growing industrial towns. In the countryside, the notorious Speenhamland system (instituted in 1795) encouraged agricultural employers to pay their labourers as little as they could get away with, pauperising them while maximising profits, by shifting the burden of subsistence to “poor relief” from the local parishes. This relief was funded by all who paid rates, including those struggling just above the breadline (echoes here of 21^st-century taxpayers having to top up via universal credit what employers won’t pay as a living wage?) The ultimate result was a large-scale rural uprising, the Swing Riots of 1830, which finally helped to force reform.

The second and third volumes look at those who were forced into the towns to try and make a living there. Conditions were no better. Families were seen as an economic unit, with children as young as four being expected to work in the mills to edge their parents’ income up to subsistence level. There are heart-breaking tales of small children being forced to work up chimneystacks and even dying there. In some trades some of the time employers paid a living wage or better, and there was relative prosperity; but in most cases, the pressure on pay was downward, with ratepayers again left to pick up the tab for keeping workers and their families sufficiently alive to continue their labours. Inevitably, workers began to unionise, but employers’ friends in parliament ensured the passage of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, which outlawed trade unions and collective bargaining. (One of the prime champions of these laws was William Wilberforce, lionised in the history books for his role in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade; it’s less well known that he was at the same time enthusiastically legislating large numbers of workers into conditions of near-slavery in England). The Acts were vigorously prosecuted by local magistrates, aided by a government spy network, and agitators were sentenced to jail terms and worse. Naturally the employers were not under any such constraint, and freely collaborated to cut wages. The result was not just destitution but unrest, culminating in the Luddite rebellion in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire from 1811-17, the focus of which was the smashing of factory machinery which the Luddites held responsible for driving their income down. The government’s initial response to this was to send north an army of 12,000 men, a larger number than the future Duke of Wellington was simultaneously leading against Napoleon’s forces in Spain and Portugal. Some agitators did commit murders, but many more were executed or sentenced to long terms of transportation across the world for criminal damage and theft. The Combination Acts were repealed in 1824, but reimposed in 1825, and extreme conditions and destitution remained the norm for decades to come, as readers of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, describing Manchester in 1842-44, will know.

All this happened in England. Could it happen again? Apart from a few linguistic flourishes and his now-defunct trade, could John Baines, a 66-year-old hatter from Halifax, be speaking of the state of the nation in 2023? “’Oh that the long suffering people of England,’ he cried, ‘would rise in their strength and crush their oppressors in the dust. The vampires have fattened too long on our hearts’ blood…by usurping the House of Commons, [they] have got the purse strings of the nation into their hands also. They have provoked wars and lived and fattened upon them…All the offices in the land are held by them and their friends; salaries and pensions are showered upon them from the national treasury, and still like the horse-leech they stretch forth the greedy, ravenous maw, and cry, “Give! give!”’” Certainly, things are far from being as bad yet as they were 200 years ago – we do still have public services – but the outlines, and the direction of travel, are clear…

There was another way of proceeding, though, and sometimes it even became real through parliamentary action. Notably, disturbances among the silk weavers of east London in 1769 and 1773 led to the Spitalfields Act, setting a fixed rate of renumeration for the trade which held for 50 years. During this time, the “weavers passed their leisure hours, and generally the whole family dined on Sundays, at the little gardens in the environs of London, in small rooms, about the size of modem omnibuses, with a fireplace at the end. There was an Entomological Society, and they were the first entomologists in the kingdom. They had a Recitation Society for Shakespearean readings, as well as reading other authors…a Musical Society…They were great bird fanciers, and breeders of canaries…Many of the houses in Spitalfields had porticos, with seats at their door, where the weavers might be seen on summer evenings enjoying their pipes.”

The Hammonds, in the conclusion to their third volume, remained optimistic: “it was easier to invent the spinning machine than to construct the human associations that could make that machine a help rather than a hindrance to human fellowship… In the greater moments of his history man has aimed at something more than outward order: he has aimed at a society in which men can live and work together in a spirit of freedom and mutual respect ; he has thought of the State, in the words of Aristotle, as a community of free men [sic].”