Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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a particularly noxious corner of Bermondsey on the south side of the Thames immortalized by Dickens in Oliver Twist. Mayhew promised readers a sensational portrait of the district’s inhabitants “according as they will work, they can’t work, and they won’t work.”73 He assured the audience that he was no “Chartist, Protectionist, Socialist, Communist,” which was perfectly true, but a “mere collector of facts.”74 With a team of assistants and a few cabmen more or less on retainer, he plunged into the houses with “crazy wooden galleries . . . with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter.”75
Mayhew found that London’s working population was by no means a single monolithic class but a mosaic of distinct and highly specialized groups.76 He ignored the city’s single biggest occupation—150,000 domestic servants—whose numbers demonstrated how large the rich loomed in the city’s economy. Nor did he take an interest in the 80,000 or so construction workers employed in building railroads, bridges, roads, sewers, and so on. Instead Mayhew concentrated on a handful of manufacturing trades. As the historian Gareth Stedman Jones explains, London’s labor market was a marriage of extremes. On the one hand, the city attracted highly skilled artisans who catered to the wealthy and who earned one-fourth to one-third more than in other towns, as much as the clerks and shopkeepers who comprised the “lower” middle class. On the other hand, it thrived on an uninterrupted influx of unskilled labor. Laborers also earned higher wages than their counterparts in the provinces, but their living conditions were apt to be worse because of the overcrowded, decrepit housing in areas like Whitechapel, Stepney, Poplar, Bethnal Green, and Southwark, which had been exhaustively documented by parliamentary commissions of the 1840s. Clerks, salespeople, and other white-collar workers could afford the new omnibuses or trains and were escaping to the fast-growing suburbs. Unskilled workers had no choice but to stay within walking distance of their places of employment.
Competition from provincial towns and other countries was a constant source of pressure to find ways to save on labor costs. The system of “sweating” or piecework, often performed in the worker’s own lodging, was tailor-made to keep industries such as dressmaking, tailoring, and shoe manufacturing that would otherwise have migrated out of London on account of its high rents, overheads, and wages. Thus, Stedman Jones concludes, London’s poverty, with its sweatshops, overcrowding, chronic unemployment, and reliance on charity, was, in fact, a by-product of London’s wealth. The city’s rapid growth led to rising land prices, high overheads, and high wages. High wages attracted more waves of unskilled newcomers but also created constant pressure on employers to find ways to replace more expensive labor with cheap labor.
London’s needlewomen epitomized the phenomenon, and they were the subjects of Mayhew’s most sensational stories. “Never in all history was such a sight seen, or such tales heard,” he promised.77 Using census figures, Mayhew calculated that there were 35,000 needlewomen in London, 21,000 of whom worked in “respectable” dressmaking establishments that ranged from the bespoke to those that catered to the lower middle class. The other 14,000, he wrote, worked in the “dishonorable” or sweated sector.78 Mayhew contended that piecework rates “of the needlewomen generally are so far below subsistence point, that, in order to support life, it is almost a physical necessity that they must either steal, pawn, or prostitute themselves.”79
On this occasion, Mayhew was more impresario than observer. In November, with the help of a minister, he organized “a meeting of needlewomen forced to take to the streets.” He promised strict privacy of the assembly. Men were barred. Two stenographers took verbatim notes. Under dimmed lights, twenty-five women were given tickets of admission. They mounted the stage and were encouraged to share their sorrows and sufferings. The minister exhorted them to speak freely. To Mayhew’s amazement, they did:
The story which follows is perhaps one of the most tragic and touching romances ever read. I must confess that to myself the mental and bodily agony of the poor Magdalene who related it was quite overpowering. She was a tall, fine-grown girl, with remarkably regular features. She told her tale with her face hidden in her hands, and sobbing so loud that it was with difficulty I could catch her words. As she held her hands before her eyes I could see the tears oozing between her fingers. Indeed I never remember to have witnessed such intense grief.80
Mayhew’s account in the Morning Chronicle confirmed Thomas Carlyle’s worst fears about modern industrial society, inspiring a choleric rant against economists:
Supply-and-demand, Leave-it-alone, Voluntary Principle, Time will mend it; till British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such a Curtius’ gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun never saw till now. These scenes, which the Morning Chronicle is bringing home to all minds of men, thanks to it for a service such as Newspapers have seldom done—ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind.81
Among these unspeakable reflections was the image of a volcano on the verge of eruption. “Do you devour those marvelous revelations of the inferno of misery, of wretchedness, that is smoldering under our feet?” Douglas Jerrold, then editor of Punch and Mayhew’s father-in-law, asked a friend. “To read of the sufferings of one class, and the avarice, the tyranny, the pocket cannibalism of the others, makes one almost wonder that the world should go on.”82
Mayhew’s series in the Morning Chronicle, “Labour and the Poor,” ran for the entire year of 1850. When about half of the articles had run, he revealed his larger ultimate aim. He wanted to invent, he confessed, “a new Political Economy, one that will take some little notice of the claims of labour.” He justified his ambition by suggesting that an economics that did “justice as well to the workman as to the employer, stands foremost among the desiderata, or the things wanted, in the present age.”83
Carlyle’s friend John Stuart Mill had given precisely the same reason for embarking on his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, only two years earlier, and already the most-read tract on economics since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
“Claims of Labor have become the question of the day,” Mill wrote during the Irish potato famine in 1845, when he conceived the idea for the book.84 At the time, the thirty-nine-year-old Mill had long been in love with Harriet Taylor, an unhappily married intellectual whom Carlyle described as “pale . . . and passionate and sad-looking” and a “living Romance heroine.”85 As Mill’s frustration over Harriet’s husband’s refusal to grant her a divorce grew, so did his sympathy with her Socialist ideals.
In taking up political economy, Mill hoped to overcome Carlyle’s objection that the discipline was “dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next”86 and Taylor’s that it was biased against the working classes. Agreeing with Dickens, Mill saw a particular need to “avoid the hard, abstract mode of treating such questions which has brought discredit upon political economists.” He blamed them for enabling “those who are in the wrong to claim, & generally to receive, exclusive credit for high & benevolent feeling.”87
Mill no doubt had in mind David Ricardo, the brilliant Jewish stockbroker and politician who took up economics as a third career at age thirty-seven. Between 1809 and his untimely death in 1823, Ricardo not only recast the brilliant but often loosely expressed ideas of Adam Smith as an internally consistent, precisely defined set of mathematical principles but also proposed a remarkable number of original ideas concerning the benefits of trade for poor as well as rich nations and the fact that countries prosper most when they specialize. Nonetheless, many potential readers of his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation were as repelled by Ricardo’s tendency to convey his ideas in abstract terms as by his dour conclusions. His iron law of wages—stating that wages may go up or down based on short-run fluctuations in supply and demand but always tend toward subsistence—incorporated Malthus’s law of population and ruled out any meaningful gains in real wages.88
Mill