The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford Read Free Book Online Page B

production and textiles leading the way—then coal-fired Manchester was leading the charge.
    From a population of 6,000 in 1685, the town—with its ready access to the shipping port of Liverpool and its proximity to coal deposits and rapidly flowing rivers providing power—had become the world’s first modern industrial city, growing to 300,000 by 1830, and to more than 400,000 by the time that Dickens arrived. There were about 16 million residents in all of England at the time, and about 2 million living in London—a striking contrast to the United States, which had a comparable 17 million, but only 312,000 in its largest metropolis, New York City.
    Prosperity for factory and mill and transportation interests had not come without cost, however. Owners lived like potentates, and a growing number of managerial workers were beginning to enjoy the relative ease of a middle class. But most of those who made the factories run were laborers, and they and their families lived in squalor.
    In Manchester, Tocqueville wrote, “humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.” Most of the city’s streets were unpaved, and its laborers’ districts were “untraversed by common sewers,” leaving piles of excrement and trash for pedestrians to dodge. Many homes had dirt floors, lacked for windows and doors, and were described as “ill ventilated” and “unprovided with privies.” As a result, wrote the social activist James Kay in 1832, “the streets which are narrow, unpaved and worn into deep ruts, become the common receptacles of mud, refuse, and disgusting ordure.”
    A decade later, just prior to Dickens’s visit, Joseph Adshead’s Distress in Manchester pointed out that things had only become worse: “[D]estitution in its most rigorous form prevails to an appalling extent in Manchester,” wrote Adshead, quoting a local doctor who said that “no inconsiderable portion of our fellow-creatures is living on food and in dwellings scarcely fit for brutes.”
    Friedrich Engels, who, at the time of Dickens’s visit, was gathering steam for the economic analysis upon which Karl Marx would base the 1848 publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, wrote a treatise that decried the cycles of boom and bust that only exacerbated such conditions, and turned laborers from whole human beings into “hands,” of which many were needed when demand for goods was high, and which would be discarded when business turned slow. Mechanization had turned men into one more statistical element in an equation of production, Marx and Engels would argue, putting an end to all paternal relationships between owners and workers left over from the feudal days, to leave “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”
    Conditions were so bad in Manchester, more than one modern labor economist has surmised, that had Engels come of age in some far more pleasant surroundings such as London, The Communist Manifesto might not have been written the way it was. Says analyst David McLellan, had Engels spent more time in that capital, “where manufacture was still dominated by artisans, he would have got a different picture.” Of course, Dickens, who had spent some time in the so-called patriarchal employ of a London “artisan,” might have begged to differ, but there is little disagreement with the fact that the Manchester of 1843 was a hellhole.
    One out of every thirty-one people living in that city died each year, compared with a rate of one in forty-five for the country as a whole. Fifty-seven percent of children born to working-class parents died before they reached the age of five.
    And the effects of the great depression of 1841–42 were still lingering, with as many as 3,000 people per day lining up at soup kitchens. A number of the city’s 130 smoke-and gas-spewing mills