Myth, history and the Industrial Revolution

D. C. Coleman (1989)

Introduction

Julian Hoppit

Donald Coleman’s Creighton Lecture formed part of his final intellectual project, a history of economic history in Britain that included his History and the Economic Past: an Account of the Rise and Decline of Economic History in Britain (Oxford, 1987) and ended with Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1992), a volume collecting together some of his most celebrated articles, with an extended version of his Creighton Lecture given pride of place. That is to say, his lecture related to his interest in how the discipline of economic history had changed in Britain and provided the capstone to his own studies of the development of the British (more usually English) economy since the early sixteenth century that had occupied him since he became a researcher in the late nineteen-forties.

Coleman was highly suspicious of developments within the field of economic history since the nineteen-sixties. In particular, he complained at its increasing narrowness, of subject and of method, which he believed diminished the popularity of the subject and led to the promulgation of false nostrums. He was especially agitated by ‘cliometric’ history (also known as ‘econometric history’), which came to the fore first in the U.S.A. but which by the nineteen-eighties had some devoted practitioners within the U.K., because, he thought, it put too much store upon certain ahistorical economic theories and quantitative methods. It is notable that his Creighton Lecture turns upon anthropological notions of ‘myth’, at one point wittily comparing the Trobriand islanders famously studied by Malinowski with British islanders. Coleman believed that the unwillingness of cliometricians even to countenance such ideas meant that their findings could only ever be highly partial, quite apart from the fact that many of the key statistics they employed were little more than educated guesses.

Yet Coleman was certainly no free spirit as a historian. Quite the opposite. He loathed imprecision, which helps to explain his considerable impatience towards much social history, and relished cutting fashionable concepts down to size: that ‘mercantilism’ was an anachronism, fathered by Adam Smith for rhetorical and polemical reasons; that ‘proto-industrialization’ was a ‘concept too many’; and, critically, that the alleged discovery by historians of ‘industrial revolutions’ in periods stretching back to the bronze age debased the term. On this last point, he had completed pioneering studies of both the British paper industry, 1450–1860, and of the textile giant Courtaulds, from its nineteenth-century origins to its battle with I.C.I. He knew better than most how distinctive were the changes wrought in Britain from the late eighteenth century and how complex were the interactions between markets, technology, entrepreneurship, culture and the state. To him the industrial revolution in Britain involved understanding all those elements and more.

Of course, Coleman’s Creighton Lecture did not enter upon virgin territory. In 1952, Sir G. N. Clark had lectured at Glasgow on ‘The idea of the industrial revolution’, tracing the uses of the term from its early nineteenth-century origins. This was taken significantly further in a stimulating article by David Cannadine in Past & Present in 1984.¹ Yet despite these important contributions, F. M. L. Thompson and Peter Mathias have described Coleman’s lecture as ‘the most perceptive study in English of the historiography of the Industrial Revolution’.² One aspect that marks it apart is its willingness to engage seriously, if necessarily briefly, with the intellectual contexts within which the term was first developed in France and in Germany, particularly of romanticism and socialism. Another is an appreciation of the social and political importance of myth, and of how the mushrooming ‘heritage industry’ was contributing to that. Throughout, the extraordinary clarity of Coleman’s thinking and writing shines through.

At the end of his lecture Coleman warned that unless the concept of the industrial revolution ‘is addressed by historians in more comprehensive terms than is currently fashionable, then I fear that the gap between the truth which historians seek and the myth which societies need will not be narrowed and may even be widened’ (p. 247). More than anyone else, E. A. Wrigley has risen to that challenge, escaping from the constraints of the national income approach by using plausible estimates of population, occupations and urbanization to look at long-run changes. Another notable widening of scope has included locating Britain’s industrial revolution globally, with Kenneth Pomeranz and Patrick O’Brien, among others, making highly important interventions. And recent interest in the history of consumption and the culture of commerce has allowed some significant bridges to be rebuilt between economic and social history. But I suspect that Coleman, who died in 1995, would be bemused or infuriated by some well-known recent contributions to the historiography of the industrial revolution, by the barely implicit politics behind popular books by David Landes and Niall Ferguson, or by the astonishingly perilous statistics employed in places by Gregory Clark. However, not the least of the merits of Coleman’s lecture is that it provides a means critically to appreciate such contributions.

Myth, history and the Industrial Revolution*

D. C. Coleman (1989)

A popular tourist venue in Shropshire welcomes its clientele with the alluring claim: ‘The Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’.¹ It has its rivals, further north, which commonly figure as ‘cradles’ of the same phenomenon. Note the anthropomorphic label. Not quite Mecca or Bethlehem perhaps; but certainly shrines. Like Drake and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Industrial Revolution has attained the status of myth in the nation’s history.

At this point I must clarify the meaning of myth. The word has two definitions. First, it means a notion or narrative, sometimes though not necessarily involving supernatural or imaginary persons, which embodies popular ideas on natural or social phenomena. This may be called its anthropological definition. Of myth in primitive cultures, for example, it has been said that it ‘expresses, enhances, and codifies belief ’.² In its second, or vulgar, definition myth means simply a fictitious thing, idea or person. My main theme in this lecture is the Industrial Revolution as myth, in accordance with the first definition.

History clearly contributes to the myth-making process. Perhaps, indeed, it is one of its chief social functions. Of course, particular myths appeal to particular groups or classes; and some myths, like unwanted monarchs, are eventually dethroned. Those two eminent Victorians, Macaulay and Marx, for example, must rank high among great historical myth-makers; yet both their legacies have lost some of their shine. Each of their differing visions of history acquired the status of myth by providing accounts of the past which seemed to carry a special relevance to the present – albeit to different groups in different places – by energizing, dramatizing, even sanctifying current attitudes and actions. In such ways are myths generated and sustained. How, then, has the historical idea of the Industrial Revolution come to acquire the status of myth? How, indeed, did the term originate and come into circulation?

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Over the years various articles have enquired into the origins and dissemination of the term. Received wisdom in Britain assigns responsibility for its adoption and extended usage to Arnold Toynbee. His Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century in England, posthumously published in 1884, was the first book to deploy the term in its title; and his immediate successors gave him the credit both for originating the revolutionary label and for providing the first account of the subject. In 1953 Sir George Clark examined, elaborated upon and in effect confirmed that priority.³ Very much more recently David Cannadine, in an article relating interpretations of the Industrial Revolution to contemporary historical changes, has accepted it by taking Toynbee’s as the first of those interpretations.⁴

Alas, it is not so simple. The first writer not only to use the term repeatedly but also to present it as a traumatic and revolutionary event, possessed of great historical significance for England, was Friedrich Engels. It is with Engels that the idea of the Industrial Revolution began its career as a crucial myth for the political Left. Most later writers on English economic history, even when they knew Engels’s work, have said little or nothing of this original usage. In 1906 Mantoux, for example, in a footnote to the original French edition of his textbook, conceded that the Condition of the Working Classes in England was the location of an early use of the term but left it at that.⁵ Clark went some way towards noting the distinctive nature of Engels’s (and later of Marx’s) usage but then dropped all further reference to these foreigners.⁶ Although a few more recent writers have heeded Engels, the significance of his use of the term is normally ignored.⁷

Engels was, of course, by no means its earliest user. The first sightings of that once unidentified flying object, the Industrial Revolution, were not surprisingly made in France. The political revolutions of 1789 and 1830 invited the drawing of parallels with technical changes in manufactures. They were duly drawn in the eighteen-twenties and thirties. Most were little more than literary similes, underlining the potency of the new spinning machines or steam engines, a ‘révolution industrielle’ being seen to happen in, for example, the textile manufacturing town of Rouen.⁸ In 1837 Jerome Adolphe Blanqui in his Histoire de l’économie politique briefly noted the wider social implications and observed that ‘la révolution industrielle se mit en possession de l’Angleterre’.⁹ Two years later the Belgian writer Natalis Briavoinne made extensive use of the term in his book De l’industrie en Belgique. In a chapter entitled ‘Révolution Industrielle’ he wrote discursively about the growth of population, trade and wealth in later eighteenth-century Europe, especially in England and France. France he saw as pre-eminent in scientific advance, England in the Industrial Revolution.¹⁰

It was presumably such usages as these that enabled Engels, in the opening sentences of the Condition of the Working Classes in England, to say that it was ‘well-known’ that the textile inventions together with the steam engine had given rise to ‘an industrial revolution’. He went on to assert that this industrial revolution was as important for England as the political revolution had been for France and the philosophical revolution for Germany.¹¹ He could hardly have derived the term from England because, despite much contemporary comment on industrial and social change, the concept of an Industrial Revolution seems at that time to have been virtually unknown in the country which was supposed to be experiencing it. In none of the major sources which Engels used does the term appear. It was not used by such popular English historians of the period as Harriet Martineau, let alone Macaulay. It does not figure in the terminology of contemporary literary protest, not even in Carlyle’s denunciations of the England of his day which so appealed to Engels that he translated some very selective chunks of them into German. His long article ‘Die Lage Englands’ – inspired by Carlyle’s Past and Present, incorporating those translations and published in three parts in the course of 1844 – contained much that was subsequently to appear in the Condition of the Working Classes. It included one of his key definitions, namely the contention that the most important effect of the eighteenth century for England was ‘the creation of the proletariat by the industrial revolution’.¹²

The word ‘revolution’ by itself was, of course, often used in various ways. Baines, for example, in his History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain of 1835 spoke of the textile inventions effecting ‘as great a revolution in manufactures as the invention of printing effected in literature’; Carlyle talked of ‘these revolutionary times’.¹³ Peter Gaskell on whose work, The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), Engels drew heavily, talked of a ‘complete revolution’ in the distribution of property. He came nearest to offering the vision which was later to become familiar when he wrote: ‘One of the most striking revolutions ever produced in the moral and social condition of a moiety of a great nation, is that which has been consequent to the application of steam to machinery’.¹⁴ All this, however, without once using the tell-tale term.

As an idea, the Industrial Revolution was a child of romanticism. In shaping, creating and distorting popular images of the past, romanticism has been a good servant to the generation of myths, be they of golden ages, of ancient equalities or, indeed, of general pre-lapsarian bliss. The particular concept of the Industrial Revolution as a thing-in-itself sprang from the marriage of romanticism and revolution, a familiar union which, of course, flowered with especial luxuriance in Continental Europe. The young Engels was borne along by a current of ideas which ran, very roughly, from Rousseau to Bakunin. It absorbed en route all manner of revolutionaries and revolts against absolutist regimes. In insular Britain, by contrast, romanticism’s revolutionary force was feeble. Shelley and Byron (despite the latter’s fate at Missolonghi) left a literary rather than a political legacy; not even Tom Paine could ignite the fire of revolution against a less than absolutist regime, and Chartism, for all its rhetoric, failed. In effect, literature and painting remained to enshrine romanticism in Britain save for one initially unnoticed foreign importation: the idea of the Industrial Revolution.¹⁵

In the three years before he sailed, aged twenty-two, for the Manchester branch office of his father’s firm in November 1842, Engels had moved from being a clerk with literary aspirations to being an enthusiastic revolutionary. From publishing poems and satirical pieces attacking the religious and cultural milieux of the pious bourgeoisie from which he sprang, he came, under the influence of sundry radical mentors, to believe that England would be the setting for a great social revolution.¹⁶ When he had arrived, observed some striking contrasts of wealth and poverty, and absorbed the various sources upon which he drew, then he conceived and presented the uniquely English Industrial Revolution as crucial for carrying through the social revolution. It had ‘world-historical significance’ and England was ‘the classical land’ wherein to study the consequences of the transformation of the social order and the creation of the proletariat; its factory workers were ‘the eldest children of the industrial revolution’ and it provided the example of the link between industrialization and the worker’s movement.¹⁷

To what extent Engels exaggerated and distorted the condition of the English working classes in the eighteen-forties is not my concern here. That there were some startling visible contrasts of wealth and poverty, alike in Manchester and London, is surely incontestable. The ‘condition-of-England question’ had been raised; and the relevant social circumstances had been depicted, sometimes in lurid colours, not only by domestic commentators of varying political hues but also by foreign visitors as diverse as the French radical revolutionary Ledru Rollin or the king of Saxony’s physician Karl Gustav Carus.¹⁸ But when Engels presented an entity called ‘the industrial revolution’ as the cause of the trouble he was both justifying a conviction and also incorporating into his vision a picture taken over from others, especially from Peter Gaskell and Carlyle, of sudden and sweeping change. It had seemingly happened in the later eighteenth century to an England which was still feudal and in which rural workers had vegetated in an idyllic life and, but for the Industrial Revolution, would have gone on so doing.¹⁹

Die lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England was published in Leipzig in 1845 and reprinted in 1848. Engels’s concept of the Industrial Revolution as well as the term itself was taken over by Karl Marx and used in the first volume of Das Kapital published in German in 1867.²⁰ In Marx’s hands, however, the concept lost some of the romantic flavour which Engels had given it. This is, of course, merely a particular case of the general way in which Marx – himself in his youth swept along by romantic enthusiasm – sought to de-romanticize revolution.²¹ Dialectical materialism, scientific socialism, Marxist economics: these were the intellectual replacements for the idealistic yearnings of romantic revolutionaries. But the concept of the Industrial Revolution survived.

To be more exact, it survived as ‘die industrielle Revolution’ or ‘la révolution industrielle’ but still very little in English. Even by the mid century, for example, it does not appear in the second edition of Porter’s Progress of the Nation or later in the writings of Leone Levi or Robert Giffen or in reports of official bodies.²² It was used neither by enthusiasts for entrepreneurial zeal, such as Samuel Smiles, nor by satirists of the self-made such as Trollope in The Way We Live Now of 1875. Exceptions to prove the rule are provided by some economists perhaps familiar with French usage, for example John Stuart Mill and W. S. Jevons. In the 1848 edition of his Principles of Political Economy Mill wrote of the opening of foreign trade sometimes working ‘a complete industrial revolution’. But this is no more than a passing phrase and is given no particular significance. Moreover, the cautious Mill subsequently qualified even this by changing it in later editions to ‘a sort of industrial revolution’.²³ Similarly, Jevons, in The Coal Question of 1865, has again merely one passing use of the term which he seems to have derived from Briavionne’s work.²⁴

Before considering how and why the term came later to make so triumphant and enduring an arrival into the English language, another obvious question poses itself: why not earlier?

Arguing from negative evidence is notoriously hazardous but so curious a gap in this myth-making sequence can hardly be passed by without some inspection. To early nineteenth-century insular Englishmen the word ‘revolution’, though diversely used, carried a reminder of the ‘excesses’ of the French Revolution – and that was something which happened to foreigners. At home, as Macaulay observed, the revolution of 1688 was ‘our last revolution’; and was peculiarly different from those ‘Continental revolutions’ which have ‘during the last sixty years, overthrown so many ancient governments’.²⁵ As the word took on the associations of the French Revolution it became all the more difficult in English to have ‘industrial’ grafted on to it and for the result to be applied to a bunch of technical innovations. Despite reactions, horrified or admiring, such things did not represent opposition to the established government; nor were they visibly led by dangerous men needing to be suppressed by the authority of the state. Moreover, ‘industry’ was still normally used to mean work or industriousness: the opposite of idleness as in Hogarth’s celebrated moral prints. ‘There are some sorts of industry’, wrote Adam Smith, ‘which can be carried on nowhere but in a great town. A porter, for example, can find employment and subsistence in no other place’. Comparing the manufacturer and the soldier, he observed that ‘application and industry have been familiar to the one: idleness and dissipation to the other’.²⁶ Half a century later, writers on the achievements of the day normally used, like Smith, ‘manufacture’ or ‘trade’ to designate what we have come to call industry. Likewise, ‘industrial’ was little used save in the sense of ‘the industrial classes’.²⁷ A typical example in the mid century is provided by this commentator on the Great Exhibition of 1851: ‘Let anyone who wishes to be instructed as to the character of the industrial classes of England and London especially go to the Exhibition and watch how well they behave themselves’.²⁸

So it is hardly surprising that for much of the nineteenth century, although Britons talked of factories (by which they almost always meant textile mills) or the ‘manufacturing system’, they did not normally talk of the Industrial Revolution. Carlyle, who had got nearest to it in coining the word ‘industrialism’, fulminated against ‘Midas-eared Mammonism’ and the ‘millocrats’, much as Cobbett thundered against tax-eaters and the Wen, or Chartists such as Julian Harney roasted ‘the vile shopocracy’.²⁹ And romantic vistas of furnaces, forges and the like were illumined on the canvases of such artists as John Joseph Cotman, Turner or Joseph Wright as well as inspiring the illustrative fantasies of John Martin. But only a romantic outsider, burning with a new philosophy, could conceive of England as undergoing that industrial revolution which was a necessary step to the great revolution of all working men.

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From the eighteen-sixties and seventies onwards, the vocabulary of British comment changed. It was not merely the spread and consolidation of factories and railways, the alleviation of some of the worst poverty and social hardship or the extinction of the older sorts of political radicalism which brought these changes. It was a growing awareness of new sorts of challenges; and they appeared well before the ‘condition-of-England question’ resurfaced in the eighteen-eighties. The very name and location of the ‘New York Industrial Exhibition’ of 1854 was no more than a symbol or portent. When, however, the select committee on scientific instruction reported worryingly in 1868 on ‘the relation of industrial education to industrial progress’, the new connotation of these words mirrored a new concern³⁰ – a consciousness of living in ‘the modern industrial system’ or of being troubled, in the eighteen-seventies, by ‘the great industrial questions of the day’,³¹ unequivocally signalled in the title as well as the content of that massive enquiry of the eighteen-eighties, the royal commission on … the depression of trade and industry.

The times were obviously propitious for that historical Industrial Revolution to be discovered, or rather rediscovered. Yet, we cannot know precisely why Arnold Toynbee decided to use the term for the book which he was planning to write under that title while he was giving the lectures on that topic in Balliol between October 1881 and mid summer 1882.³² He had certainly read Mill and Jevons but he imparted to the term a far greater significance than they had, one nearer to that of Engels. When W. J. Ashley later observed that Toynbee was ‘but scantily acquainted with German economic discussions’, he was almost certainly referring to the German school of historical economists whom Ashley so much admired.³³ Toynbee did, however, refer on a number of occasions to Marx’s ideas and he spoke of Das Kapital as one of the ‘great text-books of socialism’.³⁴ As it was not translated into English until three years after Toynbee’s death, this suggests some familiarity with either the German original or the French translation of 1875.³⁵ As early as 1873 in a letter to his sister, then in Germany, Toynbee had looked forward to her returning with ‘a great deal of German’ so that she would be able to help him ‘in reading German books and learning the language’.³⁶ It is possible, therefore, that Toynbee made the acquaintance with the idea of the Industrial Revolution, as something more than a mere metaphor, in Engels’s work. In 1940 that very eccentric Cambridge economic historian C. R. Fay asserted: ‘Ask an Oxford student who is being viva’d in Modern Greats, “who invented the term Industrial Revolution?” and he will reply smartly: “Arnold Toynbee, who got it from Marx”’.³⁷ Toynbee was, however, at pains to distance himself from Marxian socialism. Yet, his evocation of the suffering masses and of the cataclysmic nature of industrial change, arriving at the end of the eighteenth century and replacing a rural, feudal and medieval England, clearly has echoes of Engels as well as of Gaskell and Carlyle from whose Past and Present he quotes.³⁸

Within a few years of the posthumous publication of Toynbee’s Industrial Revolution, Engels’s Condition of the Working Classes had appeared in English, in New York in 1887 and in London in 1892.³⁹ Before then, however, in fact even before Toynbee’s book came out, Marx’s and Engels’s usage of the term had appeared in English in H. M. Hyndman’s The Historical Basis of Socialism in England. Published in 1883, much of it is derived directly from their writings. To give one example, Engels’s comparison of political, philosophical and industrial revolutions in France, Germany and England duly appears, in a modified form, in Hyndman.⁴⁰ So by the turn of the century, when the revived ‘condition-of-England question’ was still vibrating with ample resonance, the two lines of argument, Marxist and non-Marxist, which created the concept of the Industrial Revolution as a social disaster for the British working classes were available in English.

Outside that concept the two streams of thought remained as strikingly divergent as were Engels and Toynbee themselves. The contrasting characteristics of these two founding fathers of a myth merit a moment of emphasis. The one, detesting the Pietism of his parents, saw the Christian church as an arm of the repressive state and regarded its Evangelical manifestations in England as the hypocritical outpourings of the ‘parsonocracy’; the other, drawing upon an Evangelical background and much influenced at Oxford by the idealism of T. H. Green, was a deeply religious man in whom intellectual interests and Christian convictions were fused in the interest of social reform. The one thundered against classical political economy; the other was rare among its historicist critics in trying to combine its teachings, suitably humanized, with the study of history. The one sought the revolutionary overthrow of the state by the workers; the other urged the desirability of more intervention by that state on behalf of the workers. And, perhaps the most striking contrast in view of their having both sprung from comfortable circumstances in the bourgeoisie, the one preached hatred of the middle class as an essential ingredient of socialism; the other, suffused by a sense of sin, saw an awareness of middle-class social guilt as the pathway to reforms to be carried through by enlightened leaders of the middle class on behalf of the alienated workers.

For the myth-making process such divergences scarcely matter. However diffused, the idea of the Industrial Revolution (by now very much in capital letters) as social catastrophe gathered momentum for sixty or so years, from roughly the eighteen-nineties to the nineteen-fifties. Its dissemination via the newly emergent subject of economic history, and embodied in a series of well-known texts, has been amply treated and will certainly be familiar to this audience. Two particular points about this aspect of the diaspora may perhaps be stressed.

First, although the Toynbeean, non-Marxist stream was certainly the dominant influence in Britain, the Engels/Marx treatment of the Industrial Revolution left an early mark albeit limited in impact. As well as Hyndman’s diffusion of a somewhat garbled version of this approach, there was, for example, Sidney Webb in the very first volume of the Economic Journal writing in 1891 of ‘the subtle and pregnant analysis of the facts of the Industrial Revolution by Karl Marx’; and the bibliography of the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism of 1894 cites Engels’s Condition of the Working Classe s in both German- and English-language editions as well as Das Kapital in both languages, but does not include Toynbee.⁴¹ Engels’s work also appeared in other relevant bibliographies around the turn of the century, for example in those of the textbooks by Cunningham and Beard.⁴²

Second, and more important, was the notable enthusiasm for economic history evident in the university extension and workers’ educational movements, especially the latter. By 1914 over half of all Workers’ Educational Association (W.E.A.) tutorial classes were studying economics and economic history; and the especial popularity of industrial history ensured that various mutants of the Toynbee version of the Industrial Revolution were being disseminated in extra-mural lectures and W.E.A. classes.⁴³

From one viewpoint the topic and the treatment were peculiarly well suited to that ‘consciousness of sin’ which had afflicted T. H. Green, Toynbee, Canon Barnett, Beatrice Webb and similar reforming spirits. For the consolidation of the role of the Industrial Revolution as myth, it mattered not at all that, from another viewpoint, there was hostility to the rapidly expanding W.E.A. on the part of the Plebs League and the Labour College which had been founded in 1909.⁴⁴ The Engels/Marx version was readily deployable in support of such confident assertions as that of Raymond Postgate who, in 1924, announced that the W.E.A. approach, and indeed ‘all education that is not based on the central fact of the class struggle’, was ‘false history and false economics’.⁴⁵

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Such remarks take us beyond economic and social history as an academic subject and into the wider world of politics and popular usage. Along diverse paths, both intra-mural and extra-mural, the idea of the Industrial Revolution reached the adherents, growing in number and variety, of the New Liberalism and the New Socialism. At Harrow in the nineteen-hundreds, via Townsend Warner’s textbook, it reached the future whig historian G. M. Trevelyan;⁴⁶ in Liverpool in the nineteen-twenties, via Karl Marx, it reached the future trade union leader Jack Jones. As the latter recalled, he attended the local Labour College and ‘even had a go at Marx’s Capital … the first part made a big impression on me ... the enclosures and the revelations about factory conditions’. He admitted it was hard going but as ‘an exposure of capitalism it helped me a great deal’.⁴⁷

For trade unionists such historical offerings had an obvious appeal. They seemed so much more pertinent to their past and expressive of their hopes than conventional historical learning. Indeed, the trade union movement as a whole, growing in strength and confidence, increasingly drew upon its own history as myth. Its early struggles were readily identified with the trauma of the Industrial Revolution, complete with heroes, banners and martyrs. Of these the Tolpuddle farm labourers, celebrated in a centenary volume published by the Trades Union Congress in 1934, are the best known. This collective folklore provides a pertinent example of myth, enhancing and dramatizing belief.⁴⁸ The need for working men to be better educated and thus better equipped for the class battle was a theme of early socialists such as Hyndman and Morris; and appeals to history have long remained an important ingredient of reformist as well as revolutionary political thinking. So between the poles of Marxian socialism and middle-class, guilt-inspired reformism, the emergent Labour party and the trade unions created yet another focus upon the Industrial Revolution.

The term soon began to appear in sundry sorts of popular books, thus implanting it in ever-widening circles of public consciousness. It appeared in bestselling histories by authors as divergent in the political spectrum as H. G. Wells and Arthur Bryant.⁴⁹ In Wells’s Outline of History, for example, first published in 1920 and then selling widely in popular editions during the inter-war years, the ‘great change in human affairs known as the Industrial Revolution’ brought a ‘new barbarism’.⁵⁰ From the nineteen-thirties onwards sundry writers on philosophy, politics and literature took it up, underlining both the romantic and the catastrophic associations of the term. Stephen Spender, Bertrand Russell and Raymond Williams are merely a few of the better known examples of such disseminators.⁵¹ It was increasingly paraded in all sorts of publications in the literary field. The introduction to a 1969 paperback edition of Dickens’s Hard Times, for example, spoke of ‘the first maniac onset of the Industrial Revolution’.⁵² Across the Atlantic, American contributors to literary and political history likewise continued the catastrophic emphasis. In 1957, for instance, Richard Altick quoted Engels and presented the Industrial Revolution as an era when ‘the English masses approached a state of downright bestiality’.⁵³ And the Toynbeean theme of rapid and total transformation can still be heard in the nineteen-eighties enunciated by various reputable writers.⁵⁴ In art and architecture, too, historical enquiries latched on to it as a great transforming agent. F. D. Klingender’s Art and the Industrial Revolution of 1947 stressed its impact on romantic painting and poetry; and a decade later J. M. Richards’s The Functional Tradition recorded and depicted its role in furthering the construction of mills, docks and warehouses. In a popular television series of 1969–70, Civilization, Kenneth Clark illuminated the familiar catastrophic vision and categorized the Industrial Revolution as ‘part of the Romantic movement’.⁵⁵

Widening awareness and the build up of myth were in no way impeded by the scholarly attack upon the interpretation of the Industrial Revolution as social catastrophe. Although Sir John Clapham’s massive volumes never reached the sales levels enjoyed by the popular works of the Hammonds or Cole and Postgate, the reverberations of criticism grew louder from the nineteen-fifties onward. They came from the familiar writings of T. S. Ashton, Freidrich Hayek, W. W. Rostow and R. M. Hartwell; from the post-war boom in economic history in a much expanded university population; and from the dissemination through television, radio and the press of a growing general interest in the country’s economic and social past. Attack brought counterattack from more sophisticated Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson (the latter, in the nineteen-sixties, was still emphasizing the ‘truly catastrophic nature of the Industrial Revolution’).⁵⁶ The range of debate between ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’ was limited in the main to embattled intellectuals, though more and more of the interested public caught a whiff of the smoke of battle.

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By the nineteen-seventies, however, new influences outside this learned debate on interpretation were bearing upon the idea of the Industrial Revolution. As they made themselves felt so was the popular image shifted away from catastrophe to achievement; and the myth became, at least in part, a totem for the political Right rather than for the political Left.

Technical advance, especially in power-driven machinery, had, of course, been stressed by many authors, contemporary and later. It was central to the arguments of such enthusiasts as Sir Edward Baines, Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure; it formed a crucial part of Marx’s economic analysis; and, until very recently, it has also been a main pillar of virtually all non-Marxist interpretations of the Industrial Revolution.⁵⁷ As the usage of the term widened it was picked up by quite disparate writers concerned not with social catastrophe but with technological change. The twentieth-century diffusion of the term also coincided with an increasing range of innovations affecting everyday life. Not surprisingly, therefore, other so-called ‘industrial revolutions’ were discovered to have happened at sundry times and in sundry places. They ranged from the bronze age to the twentieth century and were presented by a variety of scholars.⁵⁸ By the nineteen-fifties this multiplicity of revolutions was moving out of learned works into more popular media; and there was much talk of a ‘second industrial revolution’ going on or just about to happen. Various engineers and writers on science and industry presented it as a creature of factory automation, bringing massive social change.⁵⁹ Politicians took it up and in the nineteen-sixties the ‘white heat’ of yet another technologically based industrial revolution was being promised, even by left-wing enthusiasts who seemed to have entirely mislaid their copies of Engels. The term had really entered into common parlance. If its precise meaning was becoming obscured that was, after all, the normal fate of any truly worthwhile historical myth.

What, however, was finally to establish it in the great mythic pantheon of English history was not any new industrial revolution but the shrinkage or collapse of just those industries upon which the original Industrial Revolution had been founded. This, in turn, induced a massive wave of nostalgia, an emotion to which the British public seem curiously devoted. Taken in conjunction with the rise, for quite other reasons, of mass tourism, these developments have combined to transform the relics of Britain’s industrial past into tourist shrines.⁶⁰ As cotton’s glory finally departed, as textile mills closed and as blast furnaces, steel works, shipyards, venerable docks and rural railways went the same way – so did the Industrial Revolution and its heroes enter Valhalla. Pioneered by the British but acquiring a name from the vocabulary of European romanticism, it achieved an appropriate immortality. Attended at its obsequies by cohorts of steam railway buffs, industrial archaeologists, canal restorers, cotton mill conservers and a gaggle of tourists, it suffered the ultimate take-over: it passed into the hands of the heritage business.

In the nineteen-seventies some 200 industrial sites of Britain’s former glory were being restored. Laudatory testimonials rang out from celebrants: ‘The Industrial Revolution was Great Britain’s greatest single contribution to world civilization. The monuments to its early stages are as unique to Great Britain as those of classical antiquity to Greece or the Renaissance to the cities of northern Italy’.⁶¹ Long obsolete machinery has been lovingly restored and put to work in museums. By the mid eighties, no fewer than 464 museums, many of them founded only since 1970, possessed collections of industrial material.⁶² The Industrial Revolution, complete with much dubious history, had at last become a myth to be venerated; a new tradition had been invented.⁶³

Engels and Toynbee may well both be turning in their graves. What on earth has happened to social catastrophe? The answer lies, of course, in the politics of economic policy. When the ‘condition-of-England question’ surfaced and resurfaced in the nineteenth century, the issue on both occasions was essentially the paradox of poverty amidst wealth. The fact of wealth was not in contention; the concern was for its distribution. In the new version of the nineteen-seventies, however, the paradox was reversed: much redistribution had been carried out but the wealth which had permitted it was seen to be slipping away as the industrial base decayed. The policy response, sanctioned by the return to power at three successive elections of the Thatcher governments, has uniquely sought to promote wealth creation by a return to what are now believed to have been the circumstances and attitudes attendant upon the Industrial Revolution.

The name of Adam Smith is today regularly invoked by influential bodies concerned to promote the maximum of competition and the minimum of government intervention; an ‘enterprise culture’, presented as the reason for Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial glory, is contrasted with a ‘dependency culture’ which is said to have sapped entrepreneurial vitality. The advocacy of economic freedoms, as popularized in classical political economy, allied to a celebration of past technical advances has echoed and re-echoed, even though not necessarily traced back to the works of Ure or J. R. McCulloch. A new edition, in 1986, of Smiles’s Self-Help, complete with the imprimatur of an introduction by Sir Keith Joseph, sanctified ‘Victorian values’.⁶⁴ Hayek is in and Keynes is out. Historians not normally associated with enquiries into our economic past have testified to the value of free enterprise in bringing about the Industrial Revolution. In 1978, for example, Hugh Thomas (now Lord Thomas) provided just such an offering. It was duly published with a foreword by the prime minister herself in which she deplored that ‘the blackest picture of precisely those periods of our history when the greatest progress was achieved … and when Britain was furthest in advance of other nations’ had been drawn by ‘our Socialist academics’.⁶⁵ A new, entrepreneurial version of the great Industrial Revolution myth has thus been consecrated. The trophy has been captured by the radicals of the Right; the trade unionists have lost a banner; the Marxists have been alienated; and Toynbeean liberals and democrats pushed into a wet wilderness.

***

What, meanwhile, are the economic historians doing about that one piece of the British economic past which the public has taken to heart? Here there is a nice irony, for the latest fashion is so to cut the Industrial Revolution down to size as almost to make it disappear. Disapproval of the term has long been familiar in learned debate, evident of course more among the neutralists and optimists than among reformists and pessimists. Reservations are regularly aired in articles or in the introductory pages of textbooks. For various reasons it is said to be inappropriate or confusing; and it has even been suggested that the Industrial Revolution is a myth in the vulgar definition of that word.⁶⁶ Limiting definitions are periodically offered and revised. In recent times, however, these reservations have acquired a new force as a result of the work of econometrically minded historians. They have largely reduced the experience of those years to an assemblage of sectoral and aggregate growth rates: of output in agriculture, industry and commerce; of gross national product, capital formation, productivity and population. The prime result is to squash the Revolution into evolution: its origins are to be found earlier, its effects evident only later. Before 1830 economic growth was slow, with neither output nor incomes per head showing much increase; notable change was severely limited in extent. Only after the mid century was the economy much different and even then it was more a matter of structural change, from agriculture to industry, than the attainment of higher productivity. In short, continuity is stressed and the discontinuity implied by the idea of a revolution dismissed or, at best, downgraded. N. F. R. Crafts’s British Economic Growth offers the clearest embodiment of this approach.⁶⁷

The contrast between these econometric findings and those of the romantic versions, be they catastrophic or entrepreneurial, could hardly be greater. In one, just a little happened. In the other, individual endeavour was crowned by transformation, wonders proliferated, suffering and exploitation were endured, wealth and poverty alike multiplied. In the one, the only contemporary evidence used is that which can be made to yield statistics.⁶⁸ In the other, mighty volumes of committee reports and evidence, literary outpourings, travellers’ commentaries, moralists’ reflections and political thunderings are all pressed into service. A musical analogy may help to bring out the contrast. Wagner’s Ring cycle enshrines the romantic, revolutionary myth. (The Ring has itself, of course, been variously interpreted as myth; and it is no coincidence that in one well-known production, symbols of the Industrial Revolution have figured on stage, with Wotan as a Victorian entrepreneur.) Conversely, the econometric version is patently equivalent to the current fad of minimalism – sets of repetitive sequences with minimal marginal variations.

‘Historians of all persuasions’, it has been observed by Joel Mokyr, have come to the conclusion ‘that the Industrial Revolution in Britain constituted a new point of departure in human history, an event of such moment to daily life that it compares to the advent of monotheism or the development of language’.⁶⁹ Yet, this is certainly not how it appears in some recent influential studies. Historians tackling any ‘new point of departure in human history’ might reasonably be expected to take heed of contemporary reactions. In practice, however, the perceptions of those experiencing that new departure in human history, whether they rejoiced in it or deplored it, are almost totally ignored by our quantitative minimalists. Views of the past consisting of measurable economic conclusions or judgements based upon assumptions of rational self-interest bear only a partial resemblance to history. This is not to imply that they are either unimportant or irrelevant. But to salute them as saviours come to demonstrate the falsity of a Marxist myth (as is done by Jonathan Clark)⁷⁰ is as misleading as to hail them as scientific truths hidden from those bunkered by conventional techniques of enquiry (a greeting favoured by some of the econometric historians). The entrepreneurial vision is as much a half truth as the catastrophic. Both, however, are reflections of the past which cannot but elude those who confine their attention to the measurable. What contemporaries believed they were witnessing, feeling, enjoying or suffering is an essential component of history as myth and demands the historian’s attention. For it is upon such beliefs that many subsequent actions and convictions have rested.

The historian must therefore take proper cognisance of the Industrial Revolution as potent myth. In that capacity it has, as Bronislaw Malinowski put it, ‘expressed, enhanced and codified beliefs’. Malinowski’s statement was derived from his observations, as an anthropologist, of the Trobriand islanders. Yet, his extended comments on the subject are only too recognizably pertinent to the British islanders: ‘The historical consideration of myth … shows that myth, taken as a whole, cannot be sober dispassionate history, since it is always made ad hoc to fulfill a certain sociological function, to glorify a certain group, or to justify an anomalous status’.⁷¹ So what is the moral of this tale for the historian whose topic has thus been swept up into this mythic category? What dangers lurk in these historical depths?

Truth is what historians seek; myth is what societies need. Governments have long demonstrated their awareness of the latter by including historical myths in their arsenals of coercion and control. Theocracies have burned books and people alike in the name of religious myths; secular tyrannies, of more than one political hue, have at best deprived people of rights and at worst exterminated whole groups in the name of myths of colour, race or class. States mercifully free of such odious habits have been content gently to burnish sundry historical myths, blessing them both as part of their cultural inheritance and as suitable aids to their retention of power. In this country today a rosy version of the Industrial Revolution as myth, sanitized for tourists and theme parks, is being dutifully burnished and circulated.⁷² This puts the serious historian of the Industrial Revolution into a difficult but challenging position. A trahison des clercs would be disgraceful; a return to the romantic version of catastrophe is clearly untenable; and a continued devotion to econometric minimalism, however seductive to professional cognoscenti, looks like a pathway to neglect by the laity.

What lines should the historian follow? Obviously he (or she) should continue to debunk the pretentious or absurd, no doubt facing the while the same sort of indignation as recently greeted scholars who deflated the great Spanish Armada myth. To ‘Disgusted, Plymouth Hoe’ may well be added ‘Outraged, Coalbrookdale’. Obviously, truth must be pursued along whatever lines seem right to the researcher. But it seems to me overwhelmingly important that historical enquiry should not ignore contemporary perception, be it political or religious, social or economic. Contemporaries knew only the partial truths of their own limited vision – filtered and distorted through the glass of irrationality and prejudice, ignorance and conviction.

Because the concept of the Industrial Revolution is enjoying a new incarnation as a symbol for a revived entrepreneurial enthusiasm, it is especially necessary that historians should present it in the round. There it should stand: warts and all, successes and failures, the howls of indignation and the cheers of approval, the reality of poverty along with unimagined improvements, the tribes of dreary imitators as well as the triumphant innovators, enlightenment and brutality, change and continuity, the measurable and the immeasurable. Furthermore, it needs to be placed in the continuum of earlier history. Because it has been seen as a romantic thing-in-itself, because of the extreme chronological specialization of historical studies, and because of the whiggishness of economic history, it is commonly treated as a necessary gateway to the future, a ‘take-off’ to the industrialized world of today. Most authorities on the Industrial Revolution do little more than glance at the world of Tudor or Stuart England. Who studies the period, say, 1450–1850 or 1500–1900? Too much of its current treatment is both limited in range and ahistorical in approach. The real gains in analysis have too often been made at the expense of narrative. The two must complement each other just as an appreciation of the economics of the Industrial Revolution needs to be complemented by an understanding of the political and social structure in which it took place or the variant brands of Christianity which inspired so much of contemporary response.

In the final analysis the term is a metaphor for a complexity not otherwise describable. The metaphor has become myth – emotive, politically useful, detachable from reality. To quote Malinowski once again: ‘Myth is an indispensable ingredient of all cultures. It is constantly regenerated; every historical change creates its mythology, which is, however, but indirectly related to historical fact. Myth is a constant by-product of living faith, which is in need of miracles; of sociological status, which demands precedent; of moral rule, which requires sanction’.⁷³ Spawned by romanticism and its meaning variously distorted, the idea of the Industrial Revolution can now join the ranks of potent myths and take its place alongside those diverse images of the past which Bernard Lewis has so neatly categorized as history remembered, recovered or invented.⁷⁴ Whatever its position in a wider analysis of economic growth, the Industrial Revolution cannot but remain a central topic in this country’s history. Unless, however, it is addressed by historians in more comprehensive terms than is currently fashionable, then I fear that the gap between that truth which the historian seeks and that myth which societies need will not be narrowed and may even be widened. I hope it is not too late.

____________

¹ ‘The present and the past in Britain’s industrial revolution, 1880–1980’, Past & Present, ciii (1984), 131–72.

² ‘Donald Cuthbert Coleman, 1920–95’, Proc. British Academy, cxv (2002), 182.

* This article is a revised version of the Creighton Lecture delivered in 1989. It was first published by the University of London, 1989. The editors would like to thank Continuum Publishing for permission to reproduce it here.

¹ Brochure of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum.

² B. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and other Essays (New York, 1948; 1974 edn.), p. 101.

³ G. N. Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution (Glasgow, 1953).

⁴ D. Cannadine, ‘The past and the present in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880– 1980’, Past & Present, ciii (1984), 131–72. Likewise Koot: ‘Toynbee brought the term into the English language’ (G. M. Koot, English Historical Economies, 1870–1926 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 86).

⁵ P. Mantoux, La révolution industrielle au XVIII siècle (Paris, 1906), p. 1, n. 1. The same note appears in the English translation, The Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century (1928), p. 25, n. 1.

⁶ Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution, pp. 13–14.

⁷ A notable exception is G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (1984) where she observes that Engels used the term ‘not once but repeatedly, and with the full force of a revolutionary event’ (p. 282).

⁸ See A. Bezanson, ‘The early use of the term Industrial Revolution’, Quarterly Jour. Economics, xxxvi (1922), 343–9.

⁹ Quoted in Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution, p. 10.

¹⁰ N. Briavoinne, De l’industrie en Belgique (Brussels, 1839), pp. 185–6, 191–2 and ff. In 1770, he observed, ‘la révolution industrielle avait pris en Angleterre un caractère déterminé’ (p. 197). A number of other uses in French can be found at about this time, e.g. L. Faucher, Etudes sur l’Angleterre (2 vols., Paris, 1845), i. 307, ii. 135.

¹¹ F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845, ed. and trans. W. H. Chaloner and W.O. Henderson; 2nd edn., Oxford, 1971), pp. 9, 23.

¹² The first part of the article, written early in 1844 and containing most of the translations from Carlyle, was published in the Deutsch-Französiche Jahrbücher. The remaining two parts were intended for the same journal but as it ceased publication, they appeared in Vorwärts. That dealing with the Industrial Revolution, ‘The condition of England: the 18th century’, came out in nos. lxx–lxxiii, Aug.–Sept. 1844. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, iii (1975), pp. 444–68 and 469-88, esp. p. 487.

¹³ E. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1853, ed. W. H. Chaloner; 1966), preface, p. 6. The same author uses much the same terminology in his Account of the Woollen Manufacture in England (originally presented as a paper to the British Association in 1858, printed in 1875, ed. K. G. Ponting (1970), pp. 126–7). In neither is the term ‘industrial revolution’ used. T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1839), in Sartor Resartus and Selected Prose, ed. H. Sussman (New York, 1970), p. 35.

¹⁴ P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), p. 52. On other occasions in the book he wrote of a ‘complete revolution’, e.g. pp. 33, 173–4.

¹⁵ The literature on romanticism is, of course, enormous, but the following have provided some suggestive ideas on these points: E. H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles (1933); G. Kitson Clark, ‘The romantic element 1830–50’, in Studies in Social History, ed. J. H. Plumb (1955); R. Williams, Culture and Society (1958); H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics (1966); G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983); The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1984); and R. Ashton, Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England (Oxford, 1986).

¹⁶ W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (2 vols., 1976), i. 6–10; Chaloner and Henderson, pp. xxx–xxxi; P. Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets (Chicago, Ill., 1967), pp. 9–25, 34–5.

¹⁷ See Marx-Engels Werke, ii (Berlin, 1962), pp. 237, 253. The translation in the Chaloner and Henderson edition (p. 9) does not convey the full implication of England’s providing for Engels a classical example of what theory predicted (‘England ist der klassiche Boden dieser Umwälzung, die um so gewaltiger war, je geräuschloser sie vor sich ging, und England ist darum das klassiche Land für die Entwicklung ihres hauptsächlisten Resultats, des Proletariats’). The translation of this passage in the Wischnewetzky edition (see below, n. 39), as in the Collected Works, iv. 307, though generally more literal and less readable, is in this particular matter more accurate. It should also be noted that although Engels did indeed use the term ‘industrielle Revolution’ frequently, that frequency was not so great as appears in the Chaloner and Henderson version. Cf., e.g., Marx-Engels Werke, ii. 243, 254, 306, 313, and Chaloner and Henderson, pp. 16, 28, 88, 95.

¹⁸ A. Ledru Rollin, De la décadence de l’Angleterre (2 vols., Paris, 1850); K. G. Carus, England und Schottland im Jahre 1844 (Berlin, 1845), trans. as The King of Saxony’s Journey through England and Scotland in the year 1844 (1846). For the ‘condition-of-England’ question, see T. Carlyle, Chartism (1840), ch. 1.

¹⁹ Chaloner and Henderson, p. 1.

²⁰ Marx-Engels Werke, xxiii. 392, 296, 498 etc. The term was also used by Marx and Engels in their Grundsätze des Kommunismus (Marx-Engels Werke, iv. 363), a draft for the Communist Manifesto in the final form of which, however, it is not used.

²¹ Marx, like Engels, found an early outlet in the writing of poetry; his concept of alienated man in industrial society has a romantic charge (see Demetz, pp. 48–64).

²² See, e.g., G. R. Porter, Progress of the Nation (2nd edn., 1847); L. Levi, The History of British Commerce, 1768–1870 (2 vols., 2nd edn., 1880); R. Giffen, The Progress of the Working Classes (1883).

²³ J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), ii. 19, and 7th edn. (1871), ii. 122. Mill’s, though not Jevons’s, usage of the term is noted in Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution, p. 12.

²⁴ W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question (1865), p. 341. Elsewhere, in referring to Briavoinne’s work, Jevons uses the term ‘commercial revolution’ (p. 181), despite Briavoinne’s own use of ‘révolution industrielle’, even when translating the very phrase quoted in n. 10 above. There is no mention of industrial revolution in Jevons’s papers and letters (see Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jones, ed. R. D. Collinson Black and R. Könekemp (7 vols., 1972–81)).

²⁵ T. B. Macaulay, History of England (2 vols., 1889 edn.), i. 651–5.

²⁶ A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; Modern Library edn., 1937), pp. 17, 437.

²⁷ In general on these usages, see R. Williams, Keywords (2nd edn., 1983).

²⁸ Quoted in The Great Exhibition of 1851: a Commemorative Album, comp. C. H. Gibbs-Smith for the Victoria & Albert Museum (1950), p. 64.

²⁹ Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 129; his Past and Present (1843) is particularly rich in such examples of rhetorical and declamatory prose attacking his especial hates in the economic and social environment. For Harney on, e.g., the ‘nasty, filthy, crawling Aristocratic and Shopocratic bugs’, see A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge (1956), pp. 49, 96.

³⁰ Select Committee on Scientific Instruction (P.P. 1867–8, XV), p. 20.

³¹ Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction (P.P. 1872, XXV), p. 623.

³² A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution (1884; 1969 edn., with introduction by T. S. Ashton), p. 27, n. 1. For an examination of Toynbee’s prior acquaintance with the work of Engels, Marx, Mill, Jevons, and their use of the term, see the valuable biography by A. Kadish, Apostle Arnold: the Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee, 1852–83 (1986).

³³ W. J. Ashley, Surveys Historic and Economic (1900), p. 430. Ashley had attended Toynbee’s lectures and been, in part, responsible for gathering the notes which were printed as Lectures on the Industrial Revolution.

³⁴ Toynbee, Lectures, pp. 127, 130, 212. He sought to distinguish his brand of radicalism from both Marxist socialism and ‘tory socialism’ in his lecture ‘Are radicals socialists?’, given in London in 1883 (see M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience (1964), pp. 287–90).

³⁵ The first French translation of vol. i of Das Kapital came out in parts between 1872 and 1875. The translation, which did not meet with Marx’s approval, was by Joseph Roy (see K. Marx, Oeuvres, i (Paris, 1963), pp. 538–41).

³⁶ Reminiscences and Letters of Joseph and Arnold Toynbee, ed. G. Toynbee (n.d.), pp. 113– 14, 116–17.

³⁷ C. R. Fay, English Economic History mainly since 1700 (Cambridge, 1940), p. 8.

³⁸ Toynbee, Lectures, p. 193.

³⁹ Translated by Florence Wischnewetzky (New York, 1887; London, 1892).

⁴⁰ H. M. Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (1883), p. 138.

⁴¹ S. Webb, ‘The difficulties of individualism’, Economic Jour., i (1891), 360. S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (1894), pp. 499–543; this bibliography, compiled by R. A. Peddie, does not appear in the 1920 edition. On the dissemination, in sundry guises and through various channels, of Marx’s and Engels’s ideas, including the role of the Industrial Revolution, see B. Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920 (1965).

⁴² W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, iii, pt. ii (1907), p. 955. In the text (p. 807), Cunningham comments that Engels’s ‘painstaking description of the housing of the Manchester poor is well worth perusal’. See also C. Beard, The Industrial Revolution (1901).

⁴³ A. Mansbridge, An Adventure in Working Class Education (1920), pp. 10, 42, 66; W. H. Draper, University Extension: a Survey of 50 Years 1873–1923 (1923), pp. 71, 91–101; T. Kelley, A History of Adult Education in Great Britain (2nd edn., 1970), p. 254.

⁴⁴ Simon, pp. 330–4; Kelley, p. 258.

⁴⁵ Quoted in M. Stocks, The Workers Educational Association (1953), p. 88.

⁴⁶ G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography and other Essays (1949), pp. 11–12. G. Townsend Warner, Landmarks in English Industrial History (1899) was an early, best-selling textbook much influenced by Toynbee, as was its immediate predecessor, H. de B. Gibbins, The Industrial History of England (1890) (see The Study of Economic History, ed. N. B. Harte (1971), p. xxiii).

⁴⁷ J. Jones, ‘A Liverpool socialist education’, History Workshop, xviii (1984), 95.

⁴⁸ See especially H. Phelps Brown, The Origins of Trade Union Power (Oxford, 1986), p. 215; A. Fox, History and Heritage: the Social Origins of the British Industrial Relations System (1985), p. 91.

⁴⁹ A. Bryant, English Saga 1840–1940 (1940). This work provides a notable example of history as myth replete with a golden age, patriotic sentiments and a demon king in the shape of laissez-faire industrialism. Bryant swallows Engels more or less whole and quotes him on ‘the industrial revolution’ (p. 48). H. G. Wells, Outline of History (1920).

⁵⁰ Wells, Outline of History (1930 edn.), pp. 856–7.

⁵¹ S. Spender, Forward from Liberalism (1937), pp. 35, 87; B. Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1951) and his Autobiography, ii (1968; pbk. edn. 1971), p. 203 (‘The Industrial Revolution has destroyed the home, and the discovery of contraceptives is destroying the family’); Williams, Culture, pp. xiii–xiv, 30–1, 56–7.

⁵² C. Dickens, Hard Times (Harmondsworth, 1969, ed. D. Craig), p. 16.

⁵³ R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, Ill., 1957), pp. 94–6.

⁵⁴ E.g., I. Webb, From Custom to Capital: the English Novel and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1981), pp. 9, 162; I. Kramnick, ‘Children’s literature and bourgeois ideology: observations on culture and industrial capitalism’, in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. P. Zagorin (Berkeley, Calif., 1980), pp. 204–5.

⁵⁵ F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947); J. M. Richards, The Functional Tradition (1955); K. Clark, Civilization (1969; pbk. edn. 1971), p. 324 and ff.

⁵⁶ E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1965), p. 198.

⁵⁷ Despite variations in the treatment of the role of machinery – be it in Charles Babbage’s On the Economy of Manufactures (1832), Andrew Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) or in vol. i of Marx’s Das Kapital – its central importance remained, just as it does in such modern works as P. Mathias, The First Industrial Revolution (1969; 2nd edn., 1983).

⁵⁸ See Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution, pp. 12–13.

⁵⁹ D. C. Coleman, ‘Industrial growth and industrial revolutions’, Economica (Feb. 1956), pp. 1–22.

⁶⁰ See R. Hewison, The Heritage Industry (1987), esp. ch. 4.

⁶¹ B. Trinder, ‘Industrial conservation and industrial history’, History Workshop, ii (1976), 172.

⁶² Hewison, p. 91.

⁶³ Cf. other examples in Hobsbawm and Ranger; and for examples of myth-making and image-creating from popular prints, see R. Porter, ‘Seeing the past’, Past & Present, cxviii (1988), 186–205.

⁶⁴ S. Smiles, Self-Help (1859; 1986 edn., with introduction by Sir Keith Joseph). The introduction includes the claim that ‘of all economic histories ever written, it is Smiles’s Self-Help that most explicitly and vividly portrays, celebrates and – above all, understands – the “entrepreneur”’ (p. 16). One cannot but wonder how many of ‘all the economic histories ever written’ Sir Keith had in fact read.

⁶⁵ M. Thatcher, foreword to H. Thomas, History, Capitalism and Freedom (1978). This pamphlet originated as a lecture given under the auspices of the Centre for Policy Studies at the Conservative party conference in 1978. I am grateful for the reference to my colleague James Raven whose article, ‘British history and the enterprise culture’, Past & Present, cxxiii (1989), 178–204, provides some interesting examples of the links between present politics and past history.

⁶⁶ Clapham had reservations about the use of the term and used it only very sparingly in his Economic History of Modern Britain. T. S. Ashton similarly distrusted it but saw it as ‘so firmly embedded in common speech that it would be pedantic to offer a substitute’ (T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution (1948), p. 2). For an orthodox modern consideration, see Mathias, pp. 1–19; for a sophisticated reinterpretation, E. A. Wrigley, Continuity and Change: the Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1986); and for one recent view of its capacity to mislead, see R. Cameron, ‘A new view of European industrialization’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxviii (1985), 1–23. The contention that it simply did not happen can be found in M. Fores, ‘The myth of a British Industrial Revolution’, History, lxvi (1981), 181–98; and a stout rebuttal in A. E. Musson, ‘The British Industrial Revolution’, History, xlvii (1982), 252–8. A rather different sort of attack on the concept, particularly on the catastrophic vision, can be found in J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 64–93 and in his Revolution and Rebellion (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 37–9 wherein it is suggested that it should be added to the ‘list of spurious revolutions’ (p. 38).

⁶⁷ N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985). See also The Economic History of Britain since 1700, ed. R. Floud and D. McCloskey (2 vols., Cambridge, 1981), especially vol. i; and C. H. Lee, The British Economy since 1700 (Cambridge, 1986).

⁶⁸ A striking illustration is provided by the bibliographies in modern econometrically-orientated texts. They are almost completely bare of contemporary sources of any sort. The student is thus given virtually no guidance towards contemporary opinion, ideas or reactions.

⁶⁹ The Economics of the Industrial Revolution, ed. J. Mokyr (1985), p. 1.

⁷⁰ Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 39.

⁷¹ Malinowski, p. 125.

⁷² Here is a nice example of the procedure apropos the former Quarry Bank textile mill. The apprentice house there is ‘reinstated as a visitor attraction of historical significance and value … visitors are guided around the house by costumed staff who bring to life the working and living routines of the mill children in the Industrial Revolution’ (National Trust Magazine, Spring 1989, p. 41).

⁷³ Malinowski, p. 146.

⁷⁴ B. Lewis, History Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, N.J., 1976).