Investigating Work in late Nineteenth-century London

London is so often spoken of as if it were mainly a commercial emporium or distributing centre that it will be a surprise to many to learn that it is the seat of important manufactures, and competes with provincial towns in several branches of industrial enterprise not commonly identified with the metropolis.¹

Chamber of Commerce Journal, 1898

Introduction

The London manufacturing economy of the late nineteenth century was vibrant and dynamic. Contemporary social inquiry from Mayhew's journalism of the 1840s and 1850s to Booth's detailed empirical survey of the 1880s and 1890s presented economic life in the metropolis as a chaotic, diverse and constantly moving maelstrom of people, trades, industries and commercial exchanges. Recent histories have argued that the geography of London, in particular the regional concentration of people and trades in the East, created networks of small businesses and independent producers that were flexible and adaptable and, as such, particularly able to withstand market fluctuations and respond to changing demands.² However, contemporary inquiry and historical accounts showed that the London manufacturing economy was also highly competitive and unstable. Despite the significance of its manufacturing industry to the national economy, work in sectors characterized by the local concentration of very small businesses, such as the garment and furniture trades of East London, were associated with sub-contracting, irregularity of earnings and poverty. Official inquiries, such as the Royal Commission into Housing of the Working Classes (1884-5) and Labour (1892) and the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System (1887-88), confirmed that the casualization and competition of labour were pushing workers in these industries into poverty. By the time the results of Charles Booth's inquiry were published together in his seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London, East London was already associated with particular forms of industry in which over-population and trade specialization contributed to the proliferation and fast turnover of small businesses, which in turn led to poverty and decline.³

The focus of this article is the world of work in late nineteenth-century London and, in particular, how and why in East London trades such as tailoring and cabinet-making the 'small master', working on his own or employing a few others, became the focus of concerns about stability and poverty in the context of debates about sweating. To do this, the article returns to one of the largest inquiries into work in London, Charles Booth's Industry Series. The Industry Series was Booth's second set of investigations into life and labour in London. The first, the Poverty Series, had investigated people as 'they lived street by street, family by family in their homes'.⁴ The Industry Series was to consider the people 'as they work'.⁵ Booth hoped that together these inquiries would help explain the relationship between work and poverty: the impact of low wages and irregularity of employment on levels of want and the ability of agencies such as trade unions to regulate industry. Like the Poverty Series, the Industry Series employed a number of researchers, including David Schloss, Esmé Howard, Ernest Aves and Hubert Llewellyn Smith, who helped gather data on households, occupations and wages from census data and the Board of Trade and who produced chapters for the published volumes. Questionnaires were sent out and interviews conducted with employers, trade-union officials and workmen inquiring into conditions of work, hours, pay, trade-union membership, and family and community life. The mass of information was arranged in the published volumes according to the various trades but they largely failed to capture the interest of readers and rarely featured in contemporary debate.⁶ Booth's wife Mary noted the 'dreariness that comes over one as one plods through the account of trade and trade'.⁷ In the final volume of the Industry Series Booth, with the help of Ernest Aves, attempted to draw comparisons and contrasts between the trades. Empirical information on the numbers employed and the typical earnings in various trades, detail that Booth noted was 'somewhat forbidding', was presented along with findings on regularity...