“Wednesday and Thursday were occupied with day work only. From Friday morning till Saturday night, the same labour as that of Monday and Tuesday was repeated.”
The mill-owners, of course, felt outraged when Parliament passed the first Factory Act, and when the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and subsequent legislation, designed to put an end to the scandal of women being sent underground to work, and to rescue children from conditions hardly less horrible than those of negro slavery, was under discussion, Bright and Cobden characterised the proposals as “harassing the manufacturers,” and as “a blow at liberty.”
Manchester was a place of especial unrelieved grimness in the early years of the nineteenth century. It had ceased to be a picturesque overgrown village, and was assuming the earlier and more forbidding aspect of an industrial town. It was, of course, compared with the widespreading city of to-day, a small place, and the surrounding country came close up to its centre, and is said to have been not unpleasing. But the toil and the striving were then unrelieved by any urban graces. There was no “Society” at Manchester, but a great deal of discontent existed and short commons were then the rule. Manchester was regarded in those days of depression, after the close of the great Continental wars, as a dangerous place; and here, indeed, Radicalism was born, of injustice and hunger. “Manchester! your Royal Highness,” exclaimed the fastidious Beau Brummell, in horror, to the Prince Regent—“only think of Manchester!” when his regiment was ordered there. He sped swiftly away and sold out of the Army, rather than be banished to a benighted place where the correct set of a cravat was unknown, and not considered especially worth knowing.
Manchester, as an industrial centre, has, in common with other great cities similarly placed, always keenly felt the vicissitudes of national prosperity, and, with the surrounding towns and districts of Lancashire, has ever ridden on the crest of the waves of commercial expansion, or wallowed in the depths of its depression. There is perhaps no other great city, nor any other county than Lancashire, in England which so surely feels the warming glow of good times, or the chilling nip of bad; caused by influences almost wholly beyond control.