The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester, 1832–67 by Martin Hewitt

Author:Martin Hewitt [Hewitt, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351890748
Google: 0KCoDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05T01:36:43+00:00

Thrift and self-help

The pub remained unchallenged in the demonology of the middle-class reformers because it epitomised working-class improvidence and rejection of respectability. The promotion of frugal, moral and sober habits was integral to moral imperialism from the beginning of the 1830s. Indeed, the first major city-wide response to the social cleavage and working-class unrest in the period after 1832, the District Provident Society, was explicitly designed to promote thrift and sobriety. Founded in 1832 by an interdenominational alliance ranging from high churchmen to unitarians, the DPS aimed to use domestic visitation by volunteers to bridge the social divide between rich and poor, save the working classes from the ‘the guidance of unprincipled demagogues’, and inculcate appropriate domestic virtues.58 Unfortunately, the society never attracted sufficient visitors to move beyond the more prosperous districts such as Pendleton into larger working-class enclaves where middle-class inhabitants were few, and although the society’s visiting continued into the 1850s, it was very soon peripheral to the main business of the society, which came to be the regulation of charity.59

Nevertheless, the ideal of the promotion of provident habits by domestic visitation was not abandoned. From the early 1830s temperance societies in Manchester not only organised regular visitation to society members, but also attempted to develop aggressive missionary activities, from the distribution of temperance placards and pamphlets outside pubs to the domestic visitation of drunkards.60 By the early 1850s the Manchester and Salford Temperance Society employed two full-time temperance missionaries whose duties included addressing temperance meetings and visiting drunkards in their homes.61 By 1860 there was even a separate Salford Temperance Missions Society, sponsoring visitation and tract distribution.62 The missionaries of the Manchester City Mission and other parochial visitors also devoted a considerable amount of their time to the discouragement of profligacy and drunkenness.63 Briefly in the early 1850s the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, and then more permanently from 1862, the Ladies Sanitary Association, visited the poor in an attempt to improve standards of domestic sanitation and those areas, particularly domestic management and expenditure patterns, which played a critical part in them.64 By the 1860s scattered working-class adoption of such missionary activities is visible. The best example is the Pendleton Working People’s Association, governed principally by working men from various local congregations, which in the mid-1860s developed both working men’s club type activities and a band of 120 distributors, circulating tracts on religion, temperance and household economy to over three thousand houses in Pendleton.65

Considerable effort was also directed towards the provision of practical advice from the lecture platform. The success of the Sanitary Association lectures in the mid-1850s on various aspects of ‘sanitary science’ (the thrust of which was epitomised by one 1858 lecture, ‘How to preserve Health and secure Wealth’) encouraged the proffering of a welter of practical advice to working men and women.66 This propaganda was accompanied by increasing attention to the support of the practical institutions of self-help, including clothing clubs, sewing classes, cooking depots, penny banks, temperance associations, bands of hope, and sick and burial societies.

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