occupations, severe labour and exposure to the seasons, extreme poverty, bad nursing of children, large towns, excesses of all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plague, and famine’.3
By preventive checks Malthus meant limitation of births by means which are under the control of the individual, and which relate to conscious and voluntary decisions. Some types of ‘vice’, such as sexual perversity and artificial contraception within marriage, he included in this category. But the preventive check with which he was most concerned was moral restraint. This he defined as postponement of marriage until a man could afford to support a family, together with strict continence before marriage. Since mankind could not escape from the workings of the ‘principle of population’, the only way to avoid the evil and unhappiness caused by the positive checks was to embrace the alternative of moral restraint. In so doing a man would rise to his full stature as a rational being.
Malthus was not the first nor the only writer on population problems in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but his brilliant Essay appeared at precisely the moment when those problems were beginning to cause consternation among thinking men. By simplifying the whole matter to a clash between numbers of population and means of subsistence he dramatically presented his contemporaries with the need to make a choice. Not all of them, even among the orthodox political economists, accepted Malthus’ theory in its entirety, but the Essay made a deep impression and defined the terms in which the population debate was carried on until late in the nineteenth century. By the 1830s and 1840s this debate was in full swing, and moreover was given a very practical relevance by the decision to reform the Poor Laws. A convinced Malthusian, writing in 1845, could state baldly:
‘Population must if possible be prevented from increasing beyond the means of subsistence. This can only be done by restraining people from marrying until they can bear the expenses of a family. Whatever other remedies may be prescribed, therefore, restrictions upon the marriages of the poor are an indispensable part of the regime to be observed.’
Though he had to confess that ‘it requires some courage, in these days, to exhibit such principles, the very essence of Malthusianism, in all their naked simplicity’.4
The Malthusian theory was at bottom a very gloomy view of society. A note of pessimism is inescapable in nearly all Malthusian writing, for even Malthus himself, for all his encouragement of moral restraint, does not seem to have believed that mankind would in fact follow his advice. Perhaps this helps to account for Malthus’ domination of the debate: he articulated the fears and pessimism of a great many people. Today these fears still have the power to haunt people. Without the advantage of hindsight the early Victorians can hardly be blamed for their concern (even panic) when they saw the quite unprecedented hordes of people everywhere arising round them. They could not know that industrial growth would ultimately dispel many of their fears – only to create new ones. Nor that democracy would provide a means to assimilate the labouring poor into the body politic. They correctly perceived that this new population would result in a new society, and that discussion of population problems was really about the whole future of society. The fears of the Reverend Mr Malthus were not just fears of numbers of people, but fear of radical social change, even of revolution. Historians have exercised considerable ingenuity in showing why Britain was unique in avoiding a violent revolution in the nineteenth century. But in the following pages we shall see that to the early Victorians it seemed a matter of touch and go.
The Progress of the Nation
In 1847 George Richardson Porter, a statistician at the Board of Trade, brought out a new edition of his Progress of the Nation, in its various Social and Economical Relations, from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. The book professed ‘to mark the progress of this United Kingdom, in which all the elements of improvement are working with incessant and increasing energy’. To enquire into the circumstances which have made one’s own country preeminent, he argued, would almost seem to be a duty; but especially is this so in the case of the present generation, ‘by which have been made the greatest advances in civilisation that can be found recorded in the annals of mankind’. Although he allotted one of the eight sections to ‘Moral Progress’ (comprising chapters on crime, manners, education and postage), most of the book was devoted to economic and financial growth. Progress meant essentially material progress, based on ‘well-authenticated facts’, from which could be drawn conclusions ‘supported by principles, the truth of which has in general been recognised’.
The figures which Porter produced certainly looked impressive. Not one of his innumerable tables covering everything from emigration and manufacturers to taxes and food, failed to show a substantial increase during the previous forty years. By 1847 Britain just had more of everything: more raw cotton imported, more tons of coal dug out, more miles of railway built – also more crime – than ever before. Even the increase in population was taken as evidence of prosperity, and the dark fears of the Malthusians dispelled by the growth in food production. The early Victorians were the last people to claim that worldly wealth was the sole end of man’s existence. Nevertheless the material achievement was so dazzling that at times they were quite carried away and wrote of it in lyrical, even transcendental language. They admitted that of course there were other constituents of progress, but none was so conveniently measurable nor so dear to the heart of a generation which, like Mr Gradgrind, had a veritable passion for ‘facts’. Porter (with all the enthusiasm and brashness of the pioneer generation of social statisticians) thought that because his facts were unconnected with ‘party feelings’ or ‘fanciful theories’, they had an objective validity which put them beyond any questioning. Despite this myopia, his compilation from parliamentary and other official records was a brilliant plundering and a massive testimony to the unprecedented growth of the economy. Porter had difficulty, because of insufficiency of data, in measuring the growth of total national wealth. But modern economists have calculated that the total gross national income of Great Britain rose from £340 millions in 1831 to £523·3 millions in 1851. There could hardly be much doubt, in this sense, about the Progress of the Nation.
The developments which Porter was outlining have usually been described by historians as the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century with a series of inventions in the textile industry, this revolution rapidly transformed the whole basis of British life. The world’s first machine civilisation was born and the transition to the ‘industry state’ commenced. By 1832 the first stage had been completed, with the successful application of steam power to new machines in the textile mills, the expansion of production in the coal, iron and engineering industries, and the concentration of production in the North and Midlands. The 1830s and 1840s saw an intensification of the trend towards factory production and a ruthless exploitation of economic resources.
More recently these developments have been approached from a somewhat different angle. In place of the idea of the Industrial Revolution, as formulated by Arnold Toynbee in 1881, we now have an interpretation which reflects the modern economists’ interest in economic growth. Five stages of economic growth in the life of industrial societies are identified by W. W. Rostow and vividly labelled in language appropriate to the space age.5 According to this nomenclature Britain by the 1830s had long since completed her ‘take-off’ (1783–1802) and was more than half-way through her ‘drive to maturity’. During the forty years or so of this stage (which would be completed by 1850) the economy made sustained, if fluctuating, progress as it moved beyond the narrow range of industries (textiles, coal and iron) which had powered the original take-off. A high proportion of the national income went into investment (thus ensuring that production kept ahead of population increase) and full use was made of the most advanced technology of the day. As yet however the main thrust of the economy was in the basic industries sector and the shift to consumers’ goods and services was still in the future.
Whether we talk of take-off or prefer the older and more familiar term, Industrial Revolution, there are two aspects of the economic history of early Victorian Britain