English Workers’Living Standards During The Industrial Revolution: A Comment*

Abstract

professors Lindert and Williamson have made a most interesting contribution to the standard of debate, though not perhaps such an original one as might appear at first reading.1 They have added valuable data in two main areas: earnings series for white-collar workers and for some bluecollar workers, and a new price series incorporating original rent data. Their conclusions, leaving aside the more discursive comments in sections V to VIII of their article about unemployment and other non-pecuniary aspects of living standards, are that real wages for many substantial classes of workers for whom earnings data are available remained broadly constant between I755 and i820, but that thereafter the rise in real wages was rapid and substantial, amounting, for some classes of workers, to a doubling by i850. These conclusions differ from those arrived at in my article Of I9742 in two significant respects: I found the rise in real wages to have begun during the period i8io/ I4, while the evidence I used suggested a rather more moderate rise between i820/24 and i846/50. The differences between our rival conclusions are not great, but are of interest because they highlight one or two differences of approach. Lindert and Williamson's location of a major turning-point in i820 arises, it can be argued, not so much out of real differences as out of their method of selecting data. Rather than work from annual money wage series they have selected (or been obliged by the nature of their sources to select) data relating to a few isolated years. Thus, at the end of the eighteenth and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, they present data for the years I797, I 805, i8io, i8I5, i8i9, i827 and i835 only, a choice which prevents them from grappling with one of the main problems of measurement I raised in my I974 article. When prices fluctuated as severely in both short and long run as they did in the period of the French Wars, the possibility of these fluctuations distorting measurement cannot be ignored. In particular, the years i8I2-I3 represented a sharp peak of prices in both the short and the long run. On either side of this peak the secular movement, somewhat broken by sharp short-term fluctuations, was steeply upwards and downwards. Trends taken