The rise of the working class

At the same time as the middle classes were expanding in Victorian Britain, so were the working classes. The Industrial Revolution had now entered its second stage: new industries were developed, new factories were built, Britain’s products were exported all over the world, and Britain became known as “the workshop of the world”.

Life in the new factories and towns was one of terrible hardship. Men, women and children worked fifteen or sixteen hours a day in dangerous, unhealthy conditions for poor wages and lived in dirty, dreary slums, so vividly described by Charles Dickens in the novel Bleak House.

The brickmaker’s house was one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brickfield, with pigsties close to the broken windows, and miserable little gardens before the doors, growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there, an old tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof or they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the doors and windows, some men and women lounged or prowled about...

Mrs Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral determination, and talking with much volubility about the untidy habits of the people, conducted us into a cottage at the farthest corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled. Besides ourselves, there were in this damp offensive room - a woman with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire: a man, all stained with clay and mud, and looking very dissipated, lying at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful young man, fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl, doing some kind of washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in, and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire, as if to hide her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome... “I want an end to these liberties took with my place,” (growled the man upon the floor). “You haven’t no occasion to be up to it. I’ll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a washin? Yes, she is a washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That’s wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin, instead! An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty – it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides.”

Parliament was forced to come to terms with the new social conditions. The Reform Act of 1832, which granted the franchise to tenants of land, was followed by other urgently needed social reforms: the creation of the police force; free, compulsory education (1870); gradual legal recognition of trade unions; the extension of the vote. First to town labourers (1867) and then to agricultural labourers (1884).

Meanwhile the working classes were becoming organized. While the ideas of Karl Marx never won much support among British workers (even though Marx himself studied and wrote most of his works while living in London), the idea of socialism was nevertheless a potent force in late Victorian Britain. In the last quarter of the century there was a massive increase in trade unionism and in 1893 the founding of the Labour Party, led by Keir Hardie, gave the proletariat a greater voice in Parliament.