Sheffield and Sweet Auburn—Amenities and Living Standards in the British Industrial Revolution: A Comment

Abstract

Jeffrey Williamson has found some interesting correlations the Britain of 1905: the wages of unskilled labor in the building trades correlated well with infant mortality rates in 72 British towns, such that life these workers in high-mortality towns had to be compensated for by higher real wage rates.' Equating unskilled building workers with all workers, average infant mortality rates with all urban amenities, the urge to migrate with the ratio between wages and amenities, and 1905 with the 1840s, he then finds that the disamenities of the dark satanic mill town, called short, cannot have been very great, and that the pessimists in the standard of living debate, who point to them as a major factor in the life experience of the working classes in the industrial revolution, must be wrong. In the light of all the evidence, however, these conclusions seem somewhat rash. No doubt all these relationships exist, but they are each a good deal less than perfect, and by the time four or five probabilities have been multiplied together, the apparent certainties which may still exist each individual leg of them (a 10 percent rise in the infant mortality rate implies a 2 to 3 percent rise in the nominal wage) disappear.2 What is left is far too weak to carry the enormous weight placed on it. To reexamine the issue, we may take in turn each of the four main relationships: the decision to migrate, infant mortality rates, wage rates, and the shift from 1905 to the 1840s. Throughout, Williamson assumes something approximating to a perfect labor market, high infant mortality in a given city ... could be avoided only through outmigration between towns until adjusting nominal wages tended to clear these urban labor markets affected by the migration; We ... .ask by how much workers had to be bribed to move into the large, industrial, dark satanic mill towns.3 The picture of working-class families consulting an infant mortality or an amenities map and deciding whether the additional wage offered is enough to make them move, and if so, which town to choose, is an attractive one, but bears little relation to the facts. Labor markets in the 1840s, as Williamson himself notes, were regional; between regions wage levels in given occupations varied randomly, according to industrial demand, the power of trade unions, traditions, and many other factors, and national correlations would therefore be meaningless. Workers from the southern half of Britain, if they wanted to move, did not move to the industrial towns at all, as they should have done on the Williamson model, but went to London or the colonies. In the north, they tended to go to the nearest town, as Redford showed long ago England as a whole, and as Buckatzsch has shown the real Sheffield as distinct from the archetypal Sheffield.4 They therefore did not choose the best bargain but the town that was accessible, just as they did not move out