This is admittedly to call in the unknown to justify the half-known, for we know much less about eighteenth-century standards than we do about those of the period after 1790. Certainly we know too little to settle the argument in quantitative terms. Yet we do know enough to reject certain common contentions of the optimists, or rather to suggest that these express hope rather than research or even thought. These contentions are that urban conditions were better, or at any rate no worse, in the early nineteenth century than in the eighteenth, and that factory work was greatly superior to eighteenth-century domestic work.
Nobody doubts that rookeries as bad as those of the nineteenth century can be cited from the eighteenth. The issue is not whether "slums and adulteration were peculiar products of industrialization" but whether there was more of both in 1840 than in 1780. And of course there was. It is not only likely. but we actually know it. The issue is not whether in some unquantifiable sense ..rural life was naturally better than town life." It is also, among other things, why the labourers of Wiltshire, hardly a pampered group, had on average something like twice the life-expectancy at birth of the labourers of Manchester and Liverpool, a comparison which is the staple of sanitary reformers' arguments in the 1840's and 1850's. If it is objected that the superiority of rural health was not new, then it may be pointed out with equal legitimacy that the proportion of the urbanized was now much greater.
The problem of domestic industry and its exploitation and oppression is slightly more complex, for the optimists' view here is based not on simple error or omission, but on misconception. There can be little doubt that where the two coexisted in the nineteenth century. factory work was generally- far more materially attractive, at least after the decline of domestic industry- set in. The optimists' mistake here is to contrast an eighteenth century identified with "domestic work" with a nineteenth identified with "factory work." But this is wrong. The Industrial Revolution did not merely replace cottage or slum work shop by factory, but multiplied both domestic industry and factories; the former either in direct dependence on the latter (as in cotton weaving), or in the rapidly expanding branches of production as yet quite untouched by the factory (as in the garment industry), or in industries whose scale remained small even when they adopted new power. It also eventually killed off many of the expanded domestic industries it had created. The fate of these vastly expanded and then sacrificed domestic branches is therefore just as much part of the social impact of the industrial Revolution as the fate of the factory population. It is entirely illegitimate to reject the half-million and more handloom weavers of 1830 or the army of seamstresses as survivals from pre-industrialism. But for the Industrial Revolution most of them would not have been there, or at any rate their life would have been very different.
Moreover, domestic industry in this new phase was-at least after its early boom-probably much less attractive than before the revolution, even setting aside extreme cases such as the slow strangulation of the handloom weavers. Thus in Sheffield grinders' disease was "scarcely known" towards the end of the eighteenth century, but in 1842 it affected 34 per cent of all razor grinders (and between 50 and 100 per cent of all above the age of 30); a natural consequence of expanding the volume of production without adequate corresponding alterations in working and living conditions. It is therefore plain that neither an optimistic nor a gloomy case can rest on a comparison of factory and outworkers at the same time, yet optimists still continue to make such comparisons.
The question how social conditions in the period of the "take-off" and after compared with those before the industrial Revolution must, in the present state of our knowledge, still be left open. All that can be said is that hitherto the attempts to bring it into the optimistic argument have been more marked by a desire to prove preconceived notions than by careful research.
However, to compare the pre-industrial with the industrial age in purely quantitative terms is to play Lear without the King. For the debate between the optimists and the pessimists has been sociological as much as economic. Engels' own case in favour of the eighteenth century, for instance, was not merely that the standard of living of the cottagers was "much better than that of the factory workers today," which is debateable, but that they lived in a far more secure, psychologically satisfactory and fuller community, though at the cost, which he freely admitted, of ignorance and stagnation. The crux of the Hammonds' argument was not simply that the early industrial age was poor, but that it was bleak. In other words, poverty and dirt alone are not the issue. The change from one way of life to another is equally at stake. But while the careful student of poverty can only say that the case for deterioration, while not implausible, cannot be proved, though that against a marked improvement is extremely strong, the sociological argument for deterioration is far more powerful.
Now this argument has been virtually absent from the debate since Clapham apparently worsted the Hammonds a generation ago, and recent antiClaphamites have deliberately not stressed it, for they have rightly chosen to fight the Claphamites on their own chosen ground of quantitative indices. If the Claphamites were right, the nonquantitative arguments became irrelevant or at any rate secondary. The labouring poor might have been subjectively disturbed or unhappy, but at all events they wept all the way to their increasingly large Sunday dinners. Consequently the most effective way of controverting them was to show that there was no reason to believe that the Sunday dinners were becoming larger, and the case would be even stronger if the anti-Claphamites deliberately refrained from bringing in those non-quantitative considerations which the optimists had (mistakenly) dismissed as sentimental and misleading. But this does not mean that these considerations were ever unimportant. And now that the original Claphamite assault has been repulsed, it is time to say firmly that the attempt to dismiss the qualitative and sociological case against early industrialism must also be regarded as unsuccessful.
In fact no such attempt was really made. For the sociology of industrialization implicit in most of the meliorist arguments is extremely primitive. It is barely more advanced than that of Peacock's "Steam Intellect Society," and greatly inferior to, say, Engels'. We need hardly comment on extreme examples such as Chaloner and Henderson's remark that "in the 1840's much hardship among workers was due to `secondary' or `self-induced' poverty, the result of excessive and feckless expenditure on drink, gambling and tobacco." The more moderate tendency, which merely holds that some people had one view about the social effects of industrialization, some another, is equally futile. For we now know quite enough about the immense human strains imposed by the process of sudden and large-scale social transformation to state firmly that its eventual-or even its immediate-material benefits cannot be used to offset these strains, and that those who underestimate mass unhappiness or disturbance merely because they can see no adequate reason for it are unqualified to talk about the subject.

HARTWELL REPLIES

In my two articles on the standard of living during the Industrial Revolution, which Dr. Hobsbawm now criticizes, I was concerned both with surveying the literature of the controversy, and also with analysing the available evidence to see if conclusions could be made. The conclusions I came to were, first, the controversy has been confused by arguments about values and by people talking about different things as though they were talking about the same thing, and second, that there had been "an upward trend in living standards during the Industrial Revolution" and that "the standard of living of the mass of the people of England was improving . . . slowly during the war, more quickly after 1815, and rapidly after 1840." This conclusion I modified by stressing that the standard of living was not high and was not rising fast before the forties, and also that there was "dire poverty" and "cyclical and technological unemployment of a most distressing character." I emphasized also that increasing real income was no measure of "ultimate well-being" and that the period of the Industrial Revolution was one of political discontent and social upheaval-but also that it was a period of increasing opportunity for working-class men and women. To this "extreme" view I still hold, and it may be compared with the latest conclusions of Dr. Hobsbawm, which seem mild enough-consumption figures "are compatible with a slight decrease, possibly with a slight increase," the case for deterioration "while not implausible, cannot be proved," "the view that there was substantial, or any, deterioration has not yet been firmly established," "the argument that real incomes remained roughly stable will commend itself as the most acceptable formula"-but which are established in such a fashion as to create an impression of pessimism, quite apart from the grand final conclusion that, whatever can be said about material standards, "the sociological argument for deterioration is far more powerful." Indeed, Dr. Hobsbawm's convictions show not so much in his mild conclusions as in the fervour with which he defends Engels and attacks the optimists.
Dr. Hobsbawm's discussion is "to survey the battlefield." The military metaphor reflects Dr. Hobsbawm's idea of how historical controversy should be conducted; when he is a combatant, he believes in total war. And so he spends much time attacking the expertise and the evidence of the historians with whom he does not agree. Thus, the optimists (J. H. Clapham, T. S. Ashton, etc.) are "committed" to an "a priori case for amelioration" and have "a desire to prove preconceived notions"; their sources and evidence are "suspect for their optimist bias," "irrelevant," "anachronistic," "feeble props," "too negligible," "highly untypical"; their analysis and conclusions are "brash" (about Ashton and Clapham!), "unqualified," "implausible," "improbable," "frivolous," "careless," "cursory," "ill-informed," "inconclusive," "unsupported," "illegitimate," "futile," "not now based on reliable evidence," "carry no serious weight," "purely rhetorical," "striking perversions of fact." At the same time as he batters the opposition with pejorative adjectives, Dr. Hobsbawm assumes victory and righteousness; he assumes the optimists and their sources are wrong, until they prove the pessimists wrong: "the onus of proving the gloomy and traditional views are wrong, continues to rest squarely on the optimists." As part of the assumption of being right, Dr. Hobsbawm posits time and time again an alleged generally acceptable "conventional view"-"the traditional case for deterioration in labour conditions"-and imputes agreement with his interpretation of history by the majority of good men: "few would doubt," "common consent," "a predominance of informed opinion," "the mass of contemporary evidence," "general agreement," etc. He tries also to discredit the optimists by attributing to them statements they have never made and views they have never held. This is done partly by stating optimist generalizations in an extreme form by using unreasonable adjectives and adverbs which, if they were removed, would leave reasonable, or at least debatable, propositions. As Dr. Hobsbawm states them, however, they are convenient "aunt sallies" for him to demolish; for example, "the hypothesis of a marked or substantial rise in the standard of living . . . is . . .an extremely improbable one," or "the view that real wages rose markedly during our period is not now based on reliable evidence" (italics mine). In this way Dr. Hobsbawm ascribes to J. H. Clapham and T. S. Ashton an extreme view and claims in consequence that it is a point now "clearly established . . . that the traditional Clapham-Ashton view has been dislodged without resistance." But J. H. Clapham had already "modified" his original non-extreme position in the 1939 Preface to the second edition of his history: "I did not mean that everything was getting better. I only meant that recent historians have too often, in my opinion, stressed the worsenings and slurred over or ignored the bettering."
More directly, however, Dr. Hobsbawm misquotes or misrepresents the optimists. Thus, for example, my article on "The Rising Standard of Living in England, 1800-1850" is misused. For example, Dr. Hobsbawm chooses from the sentence-"Generally, as historical analyses of economic development have shown, an increase in per capita income has been accompanied by a more equal income distribution" (with a footnote reference to Kuznets)-only the following-"an increase in per capita income [was] accompanied by a more equal income distribution" (Dr. Hobsbawm's "was")-turning a general into a specific statement, and implying that I was referring only to England during the industrial Revolution. There are many other examples, but I do not want here to catalogue all Dr. Hobsbawm's misrepresentations. Nor do I want to discuss the methodological and ethical problems of writing history in this fashion. Nevertheless it is necessary to have some knowledge of Dr. Hobsbawm's methods to make the understanding of his history possible.
Dr. Hobsbawm twice claims that the eighteenth century is "unknown" and that "in the present state of our knowledge," comparisons with the nineteenth century "must . . . still [be] left open." Elsewhere, however, he still posits a golden age, and, in comparison with the earlier period describes how the labouring poor of the Industrial Revolution felt an "unquantifiable and spiritual sense of loss," and how "the self-confident, coherent, educated and cultured pre-industrial mechanics and domestic workers" declined and fell (in spite of agreeing also with Engels that the pre-industrial workers lived in "ignorance and stagnation"). But the researches of Mrs. M. D. George, Miss D. Marshall and the Webbs reveal a pre-industrial society that was static and sordid, with the labouring poor on subsistence wages and periodically decimated by cycles, plagues and famines. What Dr. Hobsbawm has to prove is that living conditions in the eighteenth century were better than in the early nineteenth, not, as we all know, that conditions during the Industrial Revolution were bad. Again, it proves very little that life-expectation was higher in the country than in the cities of the Industrial Revolution; it was also higher in the eighteenth century, and it is still higher to-day. What Dr. Hobsbawm has to explain away is that average life-expectancy increased between 1780 and 1840, during the industrial Revolution. In the most detailed examination yet made of the decline in mortality during and after the Industrial Revolution T. McKeown and R. G. Record conclude that "the main reason for the rise in population in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an improvement in economic and social conditions."
But perhaps the whole debate is irrelevant. In his final paragraphs Dr. Hobsbawm argues that, although the case for deterioration of material standards "while not implausible, cannot be proved" (a disarming concession after so much argument) "the sociological argument for deterioration is far more powerful." The claim is accompanied by the usual accusations that the optimists have neglected sociological problems, that they "underestimate mass unhappiness as disturbance merely because they can see no adequate reason for it, and are unqualified to talk about the subject." As with the debate on material standards, Dr. Hobsbawm has commenced what might become a new debate with a thoroughly gloomy picture, claiming that the social effects of industrialization were all evil. On the relationship of material progress (or deterioration) to social progress (or deterioration), and even on the precise nature of social deterioration, he is more vague, using such phrases as "spiritual sense of loss," "loss and change in status," "immense human strains," and "the extraordinary depth, desperation and bitterness of the social discontent"; and Dr. Hobsbawm's only excursions into social theory to explain these alleged conditions are, on the one hand, to claim the "inevitability" (italics mine) of "the social stresses of industrialization," and, on the other, to generalize, not very originally, that "men do not live by bread alone." This debate on the dynamics of social change cannot be concluded here, but some specific social gains of this period might be mentioned to offset in the minds of more impressionable readers the pessimism of Dr. Hobsbawm: (i) the increasing social and economic independence of women, (ii) the reduction in child labour, (iii) the growth of friendly societies, trade unions, savings' banks, mechanics' institutes and co-operative societies, (iv) the growth of literacy (more of the population could read and write in 1850 than in 1800), and (v) the changing character of social disorder, which, as F. C. Mather recently demonstrated, was much less brutish and destructive in the 1840's than in the 1780's. The Marxist doctrine of social and economic evolution cannot be protected for ever, even by Dr. Hobsbawm, from that misfortune, long ago foreseen by Herbert Spencer, of being "a deduction killed by a fact." And in this case, the facts are legion.