London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 3

by Henry Mayhew

A pale young man, working in a room with two others, but in different branches, gave me the following account:—

“I have been two years making looking-glass frames. Before that I was in the general cabinet line, but took to this when I was out of work. I make frames only; the slaughter-houses put in the glasses themselves. If I had other work I couldn’t afford to lose time going from one to another that I wasn’t so quick at. I make all sizes of frames, from nine-sevens to twenty-four-eighteens (nine inches by seven, and twenty-four inches by eighteen). Nine-sevens are most in demand; and the slaughter-houses give 10s. 6d. a-dozen for them. Two years back they gave 15s. All sizes has fallen 3s. to 4s. a-dozen. I find all the material. It’s mahogany veneered over deal. There’s only five or six slaughter-houses in my way; but I serve the Italians or Jews, and they serve the slaughter-houses. There’s no foreigners employed as I’m employed. It’s not foreign competition as harms us—it’s home. I almost ask more than I mean to take, for I’m always bid less than a fair price, and so we haggle on to a bargain. The best weeks I have had I cleared 25s.; but in slack times, when I can hardly sell at all, only 12s. Carrying the goods for sale is such a loss of time. Things are very bad now; but I must go on making, and get a customer when trade is brisker if I can. Glass has rose 1s. a-foot, and that’s made a slack in the trade, for my trade depends greatly on the glass trade. I know of no women employed in my trade, and no apprentices. We are all little masters.”

I shall now proceed to the other branch of the trade. The remarks I have made concerning the wretched social condition and earnings of fancy cabinet-makers who are in society, apply even more strongly to the non-society men. The society men are to be found chiefly in Clerkenwell; the non-society men in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. With these unfortunate workmen there is yet a lower deep. The underpaid men of Clerkenwell work generally to order, if the payment be never so inadequate. But the still more underpaid men of Spitalfields work almost universally on speculation. The Spitalfields cabinet-maker finds his own material, which he usually purchases of the great cabinet-makers or the pianoforte-makers, being the veneers which are the refuse of their work. The supply of the east-end warehousemen is derived from little masters—men who work at their own abodes, and have the assistance of their wives and children. It is very rarely that they, or their equally underpaid fellows in the general cabinet trade, employ an active journeyman. Almost every man in the trade works on his own account, finds his own material, and goes “on the busk to the slaughter-houses” for the chance of a customer.

I found the fancy cabinet-makers certainly an uninformed class, but patient, temperate, and resigned. Some few could neither read nor write, and their families were growing up as uninformed as the parents. The hawking from door to door of workboxes made by some of the men themselves, their wives assisting them with hawking, was far commoner than it is now; but it is still practised to a small extent.

I called on an old couple to whom I was referred, as to one of the few parties employed in working for the men who supplied the warehouses. The man’s appearance was gaunt and wretched. He had been long unshorn; and his light blue eyes had that dull, half-glazed look, which is common to the old when spirit-broken and half-fed. His room, a small garret in Spitalfields, for which he paid 1s. 3d. a-week, was bare of furniture, except his work-bench and two chairs, which were occupied by his wife, who was at work lining the boxes her husband was making. A blanket rolled up was the poor couple’s bed. The wife was ten years younger than her husband. She was very poorly clad in an old rusty black gown, tattered here and there; but she did not look very feeble.

“I am 63,” the man said, and he looked 80, “and was apprenticed in my youth to the fancy cabinet trade. I could make 4l. 4s. a-week at it by working long hours when I was out of my time, forty-two years back. I have worked chiefly on workboxes. I didn’t save money—I was foolish; but it was a hard-living and a hard-drinking time. I’m sorry for it now. Thirty years ago things weren’t quite so good, but still very good; and so they were twenty years back. But since the slaughter-houses came in, men like me has been starving. Why here, sir, for a rosewood workbox like this, which I shall get 6d. for making, I used to give a brother of mine 6s. 6d. for making twenty years ago. I’ve been paid 22s. 6d. years ago for what I now get 2s. 6d. for. The man who employs me now works for a slaughter-house; and he must grind me down, or he couldn’t serve a slaughter-house cheap enough. He finds materials, and I find tools and glue; and I have 6s. a-dozen for making these boxes, and I can only make a dozen a-week, and the glue and other odds and ends for them costs me 6d. a-dozen. That, with 9d. or 10d. a-week, or 1s., that my wife may make, as she helps me in lining, is all we have to live on. We live entirely on tea and bread and butter, when we can get butter; never any change—tea, and nothing else all day; never a bit of meat on a Sunday. As for beer, I haven’t spent 4s. on it these last four years. When I’m not at work for a little master, I get stuff of one, and make a few boxes on my own account, and carry them out to sell. I have often to go three or four miles with them; for there’s a house near Tottenham-court-road that will take a few from me, generally out of charity. When I’m past work, or can’t meet with any, there’s nothing but the workhouse for me.”

The decline which has taken place within the last twenty years in the wages of the operative cabinet-makers of London is so enormous, and, moreover, it seems so opposed to the principles of political economy, that it becomes of the highest importance in an inquiry like the present to trace out the circumstances to which this special depreciation is to be attributed. It has been before shown that the number of hands belonging to the London cabinet trade decreased between 1831 and 1841 33 per cent in comparison with the rest of the metropolitan population; and that, notwithstanding this falling off, the workman’s wages in 1831 were at least 400 per cent better than they are at present; 20s. having formerly been paid for the making of articles for which now only 5s. are given. To impress this fact, however, more strongly upon the reader’s mind, I will cite here a few of many instances of depreciation that have come to my knowledge. “Twenty years ago,” said a workman in the fancy cabinet line, “I had 6d. an inch for the making of 20-inch desks of solid mahogany; that’s 10s. for the entire article: now I get 2s. 3d. for the same thing. Smaller desks used to average us 6s. each for wages: now they don’t bring us more than 1s. Ladies’ 12-inch workboxes twenty years ago were 3s. 6d. and 4s. a-piece making; now they are 5d. for the commoner sort and 7d. for those with better work.” “I don’t understand per cents,” said another workman, “but this I do know, the prices that I get have within this twenty years fallen from 4s. to 5d., and in some cases to 4½d.”

Here, then, we find that wages in the competitive portion of the cabinet trade—that is among the non-society hands—(the wages of the society men I have before explained are regulated, or rather fixed by custom)—were twenty years ago 400 per cent better in some cases, and in others no less than 900 per cent higher than they are at present, and this while the number of workmen has decreased as much as one-third relatively to the rest of the population. How, then, is this extraordinary diminution in the price of labour to be accounted for? Certainly not on the natural assumption that the quantity of work has declined in a still greater proportion than the number of hands to do it, for it has also been proved that the number of new houses built annually in the metropolis, and therefore the quantity of new furniture required, has of late years increased very considerably.

In the cabinet trade, then, we find a collection of circumstances at variance with that law of supply and demand by which many suppose that the rate of wages is invariably determined. Wages, it is said, depend upon the demand and supply of labour; and it is commonly assumed that they cannot be affected by anything else. That they are, however, subject to other influences, the history of the cabinet trade for the last twenty years is a most convincing proof, for there we find, that while the quantity of work, or in other words, the demand for labour, has increased, and the supply decreased, wages, instead of rising, have suffered a heavy decline. By what means, then, is this reduction in the price of labour to be explained? What other circumstance is there affecting the remuneration for work, of which economists have usually omitted to take cognizance? The answer is, that wages depend as much on the distribution of labour as on the demand and supply of it. Assuming a certain quantity of work to be done, the amount of remuneration coming to each of the workmen engaged must, of course, be regulated, not only by the number of hands, but by the proportion of labour done by them respectively; that is to say, if there be work enough to employ the whole of the operatives for sixty hours a-week, and if two-thirds of the hands are supplied with sufficient to occupy them ninety hours in the same space of time, then one-third of the trade must be thrown fully out of employment: thus proving that there may be surplus labour without any increase of the population. It may, therefore, be safely asserted, that any system of labour which tends to make the members of a craft produce a greater quantity of work than usual, tends at the same time to over-populate the trade as certainly as an increase of workmen. This law may be summed up briefly in the expression that over-work makes under-pay.