The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory: The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914-60 by Vicky Long (review)

For labor historians, the image of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British factories is indelibly linked to the "dark, satanic mills" of William Blake. The early Industrial Revolution drew people off the land and into the bleak surroundings of factories and workhouses. Charles Dickens's working-class London was a drab, depressing, dangerous world built around urban poverty, moral and social degradation, and the factory system where men, women, and children were made to work at machinery from dawn until dusk in the most unhealthful and frightening conditions. By 1845, Frederick Engels would write that industrial capitalism had created a "social disorder" that was akin to disease itself: "The social disorder from which England is suffering is running the same course as a disease which attacks human beings." Out of this "disease," however, would come a resolution, perhaps a revolution, that would leave "the English people . . . reborn and rejuvenated." His conclusion was perhaps perversely optimistic: "Consequently we must welcome any circumstances which bring this disease to its climax." (Engels, The Conditions of the English Working Class [1845]. Reprint, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968, p. 139.)

Historians have largely seen the development of industrialism through Engel's and Marx's lenses. While the exploitation was undoubtedly severe, out of it came a "triumph" of sorts, perhaps not revolution, but certainly a transformation in political power, consciousness, and culture. E. P. Thompson, of course, saw in the horrors of the Industrial Revolution the making of the English working class, a process that created a self-consciousness and culture that would reshape English history; others have taken a more jaundiced view of the exploitation that accompanied the expansion of the industrial state.

This interesting book examines the emergence of a broad movement in the early decades of the twentieth century aimed at averting the social disruption envisioned by Engels by remedying the worst excesses of British factory production. Vicky Long, a lecturer in British history at Northumbria University, describes the "rise and fall of the healthy factory" movement as it emerged as an antidote to the demands of a maturing working class. "Developments in the late nineteenth century reflected the growing consensus among the State and the medical profession that . . . the health of the labour force was of concern," she points out, "not only for workers and employers but for the nation" (p. 10).Health and disease, the latter Engels's metaphor for the exploitation of the British working class, had become, by the turn of the twentieth century, a concrete reality affecting the future of England. The "burgeoning trade union movement" was a "powerful, disruptive, and potentially threatening force" (p. 10) that not only spurred the development of a nationalized health service, but also internal reforms in the working place.

For U.S. historians, Long's account provides a needed supplement to a labor history that is broadly conceived of as the story of struggles over better wages, workplace control, and culture. For Long, medical historians have missed the boat if they do not see the struggles over wages and hours or control of production as critical to the debates over health and disease. Conversely, labor historians have to understand that health and disease and accidents and injuries were as central to the history of labor (and, specifically, to British political debates and negotiations) as were salaries, speedups, and the mind-numbing repetition of the assembly line and Taylorized production processes. She argues that discussions of wages and hours were intrinsically negotiations over the health and well-being of workers, their families, and communities. Improved wages and hours affected diet, heating, and clothing; shorter hours directly affected social relationships among families, women, and children. Control of the work process directly impacted the sense of worth and the mental well-being of the worker and her family. Debates over health might have been grounded in...