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FOR IDLE HANDS TO DO:
REDEFINING THE NATURE OF WORK, POVERTY AND IDLENESS
Brenda Petersen
Baltimore City College High School, MD
NEH Summer Seminar 2000
Historical Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth at the University of Nottingham
As commerce played a greater role in medieval society, new currents of thought weakened the traditional authorities of the monarchy and the church. Historians like R. H. Tawney and Barbara and J. L. Hammond argue that the merchant classes, rising in power and prestige, selected and modified new ideas of individualism and liberty to serve their own interests. Similarly, the emerging capitalistic classes redefined the problem of idleness in a way that would subdue the aristocracy and the poor. Examining Poor Laws, children's stories, and art, one hears the merchant classes' voices attempting to convince others and themselves that bourgeoisie values represented the economic, political, and cultural ideal. The propaganda put forward to support new definitions of idleness confirms Tawney's and the Hammonds' analysis of the middle class mindset that evolved from the time of the Reformation onwards. While it is unclear the level of success the middle classes achieved in converting other classes to their views, the moral economy formulated during the Reformation still shapes modern views of industry and idleness.
The Protestant Reformation and the Changing Moral Economy
The Protestant Reformation transformed the moral economy altering the definition of idleness. R. H. Tawney argues in his book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that Protestant thinkers paved the way for a society accepting of free markets, high finance, and laissez faire. "Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church; and this is granted him by God, even without letters of pardon." Thus Martin Luther sanctioned the rise of individualism, the separation of the church and the state, and the breakdown of religious hierarchical authority. Non-conformist and Dissenters theology fought the old institutions of feudal society while validating values complimentary to capitalism. For example, Calvin's writings de-stigmatized money-making by spiritualizing commerce: "whence do the merchant's profits come, except from his own diligence and industry." Thinkers placed a new emphasis on human agency. During and after the Reformation, man began a transformation into an "economic animal" in control of his own destiny with a new mission and a new set of values reinforced by experience. The intellectual climate of the Reformation and Restoration coincided with transforming economic events and technological innovation of the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to confirm a new conception of the world. Classical liberal views constructed a world in which individuals acted rationally, markets operated imperviously, and God was the watchmaker who set the earth in motion, but no longer physically guided man. The rising merchant classes faced a new era:
. . . they saw the world of business and society as a battlefield, across which character could march triumphant to its goal, not as crude materials waiting the architect's hand to set them in their place as the foundations of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The world was changing and the merchant classes viewed themselves as having more power over their lives than many generations before them.
Opportunistic Applications of Reformation Theology
Even as the thinkers of the Reformation recorded their ideas, society modified and adapted them. The merchant classes adopted Protestant theology in ways "Luther, who had earned eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would have been horrified." This is not to say the middle class consciously selected only Reformation ideas to compliment their interests. Rather, "the turn in which social history takes in any age results in part from the ideas and opinions that are in the ascendant." New ideas of individualism and liberty supported the transformation of the economic fabric of society that the middle class favored. For example, new views of industry and idleness validated the enclosure movements. As Joseph Lee wrote in 1656 in A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, "it is an undeniable maxim that everyone by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage . . . The advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public.'"
However, middle class notions of advancement through industriousness led to clashes with working class notions. In EP Thompson's essay, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," he notes that for many laborers the "work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own lives." On Saint Mondays and Saint Tuesdays many families rested. Members of the middle class felt the working class did not use their time effectively; while man was free not all men used their liberty wisely. John Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester described working class activities in 1745, abhorring "Such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing, and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority . . . our people are drunk with the cup of liberty." Reverend J. Clayton's Friendly Advice to the Poor warns, "if he spends his Time in Sauntering . . . and dulls his spirit with indolence...[he] can expect poverty as reward." The Poor Family's Book recommends industriousness "for precious time is not to be wasted in unnecessary sluggishness" and advocates, "saving all the time you can for best purposes." Even Milton made "the strongly protestant assertion that Adam's work in Paradise declares his dignity, his idleness had been worse."
The merchant class strove to remove idleness among the poor, but also to convert the aristocracy, their rivals for power, to their values. In her article, Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians, Debora Shuger argues that the middle classes maintained a "commitment to bourgeois existence as a cultural ideal" which they wanted the aristocracy to adopt as well. Within liberal plans to civilize the Irish, descriptions of the barbarous Irish match those of the warrior aristocracy of England. Like the Roman historians, referring to the German barbarian who "thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be got quickly by the loss of a little blood," reformers of the Restoration period disliked the "endless warfare, resistance to central authority, bands of armed retainers, strong kinship loyalties, lawlessness, and predatory violence-[that] also characterize the English aristocracy." The tracts provide the solution to these idle and unruly men; they "uniformly advocate the introduction of private property." In both cases, to these reformers "civilization is not a matter of exchanging heroic self-sufficiency for servile constraint, but passing from feudal bondage to the status of a 'free subject' with full legal rights and protection . . . they equate the civilizing process with the rise of bourgeoisie." As liberal reformers deplored the habits and mores of the working class, they also scrutinized the aristocratic lifestyle for idleness and waste. Moving towards a more capitalistic economy required stability among the upper classes and complicity among the lower. Discussion of the problem of idleness reveals how the moral economy shifted in these centuries to reign in both the upper and lower strata of society into the middle class mission.
The New Definition of Idleness: Poor Laws
Changes in laws governing poverty and relief reveal the merchant classes' redefinition of idleness. As the feudal era drew to a close, new poor laws insured harsher punishments for the "idle" poor. In 1649, the state gained the power to apprehend vagrants and gave them a choice between whipping and work as punishment. Tawney explains:
The rise of commercial civilization, the reaction against the authoritarian social policy of the Tudors, and the progress of Puritanism among the middle classes all combined in the next half-century to sharpen the edge of [Poor Laws].
Society held individuals accountable for poverty and increasingly dismissed scarcity as a source of want and instead concentrated on the moral failings of the poor. For example, Richard Steele professes in 1684 in The Tradesman's Calling, being a Discourse concerning the Nature, Necessity, Choice, etc., of a Calling in General, "As for idle beggars happy for them if fewer people spent their foolish pity upon their bodies, and if more shewed some wise compassion for their souls."
Some middle class reformers tried to universalize negative notions of idleness by tracing the history of punishing idleness. John Disney, son of Dissenters and Vicar of St. Mary's Church in Nottingham in 1722, illustrates middle class attitudes through his scholarship. In his elaborate history of moral punishments, he traces idleness as a sin to the time of Adam, since Adam had to work in the Garden of Eden and was sentenced to more work for eating from the fruit of knowledge. He argues that God believes in industriousness by citing that Jesus was a carpenter. He summarizes, "A man who has nothing to do is always willing to do ill." To prove his point, he reviews the culture of the Jews, Egyptians, Athenians, and Sardinians and their punishments against idleness. The "Ancient Germans would throw idle, good for nothing fellows into a deep slough of mud and water, casting a hurdle upon them; stifle them there." Other cultures in India made the idle fast during feasts. Reaching back to Ancient Greece, he quotes Plato, "let not a beggar be suffered in our establishment . . . that the country may be cleared of this sort of cattle." Similar to his fellow thinkers, Disney concludes that "best natured means to prevent the practice of begging...for such as are able and strong, the only fit provision is to find them work." Members of the ruling class could rest assured in their judgment against the idle knowing their views were congruent with the ancients.
Not only did the moral economy sanction the view that the idle individual is responsible for his own downfall, but it also emphasized the potential downfall of society if corrupted by idleness. The Perversity Thesis, as coined by A. O. Hirshman, stipulated that helping the poor only perverts them and society into dependent human beings. Thus comments like, "The Poor Law is the mother of all idleness" and "men and women growing so idle and proud that they will not work, but lie upon the parish wherein they will dwell for maintenance" began to pepper the discourse about relief for the poor. Designed to help the poor deal with price fluctuations, the Speenhamland Act, according to reformers, led to a Malthusian population increase and depravity among the working classes. "Yet, the landlords who deprived the working classes of the protection of the State in the name of Adam Smith saw nothing unenlightened in protecting their rents by Corn Laws." However, contradictory views of state intervention were not new. In a story retold by the Roman historian Tacitus, Tiberius, sounding like an 18th century classical liberal, makes a speech about the evils of government intervention 'Otherwise industry will anguish and idleness be encouraged, if a man has nothing to fear, nothing to hope from himself, and every one in utter recklessness, will expect relief from others, thus becoming useless to himself and a burden to me." Both in Roman times and in the rise of the modern age, the perversity thesis allowed those benefiting from the moral and political economy to ignore those who were not.
By the end of the 18th century, the perversity thesis was gospel as evidence by Arthur Young, who wrote in 1771, "every one but an idiot know that the lower classes must be keep poor or they will never be industrious." The new moral economy explained poverty through the moral shortcomings of the poor, and sought solutions through the improvement of individuals, not through interventions by the state.
With this philosophy in mind, the1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was designed "to deter the poor from resorting to public assistance and to stigmatize those who did by 'imprisoning [them] in workhouses, compelling them to wear special garb, separating them from their families, cutting them off from communication with the poor outside and, when they died, permitting their bodies to be disposed of for dissection." New ideas about idleness destroyed old notions of social relationships and obligations. These desperate measures were necessary to guard against the "human proclivity to idleness"
Lessons on Idleness: Stories for Children
Fears of idleness not only guided social policy, but also dominated the rhetoric in children's stories during the 18th and 19th centuries. These stories, published in chapbooks, sold for one penny. For the working class, chapbooks were often the only reading material for a poor family; they featured a variety of topics like magic tricks, travel, household tips, religious texts, and children's stories. Through these children's stories, the middle class preaches the gospel of industriousness to others; the liberal view remains constant throughout each narrative. For example, In Cottage Stories for Children, industrious Betsy helps her idle sister Ellen to see the folly of her ways. Betsy is confident and cheerful despite the dreadful poverty she shares with her sister and aging Grandmother. This optimistic character depiction is reminiscent of liberal philosopher and textbook writer William Paley's views of the world:
All the provisions which a poor man's child requires is contained in two words, 'industry and innocent.' With these qualities, though without a shilling to set him forwards, he goes into the world prepared to become a useful, virtuous, and happy man."