Introduction

Summary

This book will reconsider and try to broaden debate on changes in the quality of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It covers English and Welsh counties south of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Radnor, and deals with the agricultural and artisan sectors and London. A subsequent and comparative book is planned on the north, and I will not deal with that region here. This initial specialisation on the south is felt to be justified by the particular experiences of the region, which separate it in so many respects from the north. Contemporaries recognised a growing split after about 1770 between the ‘North and South’ – epitomised in the title of Gaskell's novel. By the mid-nineteenth century the economic divides between the poorly paid, ‘de-industrialised’ south and the high wage, industrial north were clearly recognised, as for example in James Caird's distinction of high and low wage sectors. Indeed, the high and low wage regions of the early eighteenth century had become entirely reversed. And in contemporary characterisations of the labour force too, the impoverished and stolidly comic figure of ‘Hodge’ in the agrarian south came to have little in common with his unionised and assertive northern counterparts. I want here to outline and assess the southern changes which contributed to this contrast.