Time and work in England 1750-1830

by Hans-Joachim Voth

"Did working hours in England increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution? Marx said so, and so did E.P. Thompson; but where was the evidence to support this belief? Literary source are difficult to interpret, wage books are few and hardly representative, and clergymen writing about the sloth of their flock did little to validate their complaints." "This study calls more than 2,800 witnesses to the bar of history to answer the question: 'what were you doing at the time of the crime?'. Court records from both urban and rural areas over the period 1750 to 1830 are used to reconstruct patterns of labour and leisure during the Industrial Revolution." "During this time, England began to work harder - much harder. By the 1830s, both London and counties in the North had experienced a considerable increase - of approximately 20 per cent - in the length of the annual working year. What drove these changes was not longer hours per day, but the demise of 'St. Monday' and a large number of r