Unpacking Historical Writing: The use of Literary Devices in
The Town Labourer, 1760-1832 by J. L. and Barbara Hammond
Tanya Baxter
Amundsen High School
Chicago, IL
2008 NEH Seminar for School Teachers
Interpretations of the Industrial revolution in Britain
Every good writer has an agenda, a strongly-held belief or perspective that impels him or her to
commit pen to paper. This impulse colors every word the writer chooses, every detail the writer
includes, and even influences the writer’s manipulation of syntax. In the hands of a skillful
writer, these literary elements function to persuade the reader to adopt the writer’s perspective.
Analysis of these literary elements usually falls under the provenance of the literature student,
but knowledge of these techniques can aid the student of history, too, as he or she seeks to
understand the various perspectives and persuasive tools at work in historical documents.
Writers J.L. and Barbara Hammond, in the nonfiction book The Town Labourer 1760-1832: The
New Civilization, manipulated literary techniques to critique the social costs of the Industrial
Revolution.
In the first chapter of the book, the Hammonds used literary allusion, syntax, and telling
detail to express the astonishing novelty and fast-paced change that characterized the Industrial
Revolution.
Even to-day when the most fantastic of Mr. Well’s dreams seem to tumble
into life before one’s eyes in quick succession, the story of the changes
that transformed travel, transport, commerce, manufacture, farming,
banking, and all the various arts and means of social life, reads like a
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chapter of Arabian Nights. The blind Metcalf had introduced the art of
making roads; the illiterate Brindley, the art of building aqueducts;
Telford, a shepherd’s son, had thrown a bridge across the Menai Straits;
Bell, a millwright’s apprentice, had launched the first steamer on the
Clyde; Stephenson, the son of a fireman, had driven his first railway
engine; while a long line of inventors and organizers—Watt, Arkwright,
Wedgwood, Crompton, Hargreaves and a hundred others—by their
patience and their courage and their imagination, had between them made
England the workshop of the world. (1-2)
The changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution were magical—like an H.G. Wells novel, they
seemed to “tumble” from some unimagined future, and they were as exotic as the tales of
Sheherezade. And what was even more astonishing was the fact that these changes were dreamed
up by ordinary men. The Hammonds manipulated syntax to emphasize the scope of the
accumulated changes, brought about by men of ordinary circumstances, that changed an agrarian
world into an industrial one. There are only two sentences in this passage; the second is
lengthened by the use of semicolons. In this second sentence, the Hammonds used these
semicolons to connect all of the different inventions and improvements, performed by men from
all over England, to elaborate upon the idea of the mystifying pace of change. The use of the
semicolon acknowledges that these changes were independent of each other, but also yokes the
changes together, each a part of a single, larger process. The semicolons also affect the pacing of
the sentence. Rather than present the reader with a series of short, choppy sentences, the
Hammonds built a rhythm that emphasizes a second dash and leads us to the effect of all of these
accumulated changes—England became the “workshop to the world.” But what did the
Hammonds think of these men? Their use of epithet, an adjective before a name, and patronymic,
reference to the father before or after a name, is telling. The use of epithets and patronymics as
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literary devices go back at least as far as Ancient Greece, when Homer used these techniques to
describe heroes, gods, and monsters. The Hammonds evoked “illiterate Brindley” and “blind
Metcalf”, using as epithets what some would consider weaknesses, but the literary effect is quite
the opposite. Brindley may have been illiterate, but he still built aqueducts; Metcalf may have
been blind, but he taught the English how to make roads. The Hammonds wanted us to know that
these were strong men. Similarly, the use of patronymic also emphasizes the power of these
regular people. Telford may have only been the son of a shepherd, but he could still throw a
bridge like a god. Stephenson may have only been the son of a fireman, but he could still harness
the power of steam. By using epithet and patronymic, the Hammonds connected these innovators
to the epic heroes of the past, and ennoble their work.
But there are other effects of the Industrial Revolution, social effects, and the Hammonds
used literary techniques to critique the effect of the factory on the workers’ sense of time and
agency, and therefore their quality of life. The Hammonds described this change as a new
discipline (20). They wrote,
. . . we have to remember that the population that was flung into the
brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and
that the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage. To
understand what this discipline meant to men, women, and children, we
have to remember too that poor people rarely had a clock in the house.
Sadler said that you could hear the feet of children pattering along the dark
streets long before the time for the mills to open. No economist of the day,
in estimating the gains and losses of factory employment , ever allowed
for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he
passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he
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pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for
fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. (20-21)
In this passage, the use of diction is particularly powerful. The factory rhythm is “brutal” and
therefore relentless, and the discipline required of the workers is “savage”. The use of these
words implies that the workers have lost their humanity and the veneer of a civilized life as a
result of the Industrial Revolution. The Hammonds juxtaposed the economists’ concerns for
“gains and losses” with the “strain and violence” on the emotions of the workers as their
freedoms were curtailed. They further downplayed the economic concerns by elaborating on the
workers’ vanishing freedoms as a kind of pastoral ideal. What is so bad about smoking, eating,
digging, or sleeping when you want? Under the factory system, the Hammonds made clear, the
workers lost all agency and were little better than animals that are locked in cages, and worse off,
perhaps, because they cannot even whistle. Finally, the use of imagery is designed to tug at the
reader’s heartstrings as the Hammonds described the “pattering” of the factory children’s feet as
they rush through the darkness to get to work on time.
The Hammonds used literary devices to effectively illustrate the inhuman working and
living conditions in the factory towns. Workers’ surroundings left little room for the imagination:
“In their work they had none of the excitement or pleasure of handicraftsmen; they worked
among ugly things, in ugly factories or ugly mines, for though an engine or a wheel may have a
noble beauty and design, its beauty is obscured for those who are tending one small part of it and
doing nothing else” (39). In this short passage, the Hammonds used repetition for emphasis:
there was absolutely no room for aesthetic pleasure in the workers’ lives. Even if they work on
something that will eventually result in a beautiful object, they are only allowed to work on a
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small part of it. To the Hammonds, this was one of the evils of the factory system. They quoted
from a Trade Union magazine to further illustrate the poverty of the factory workers’ daily lives:
‘Have we not seen the commons of our fathers enclosed by insolent
cupidity—our sports converted into crimes—our holidays into fast days?
The green grass and the healthful hayfield are shut out from our path. The
whistling of birds is not for us—our melody is the deafening noise of the
engine. The merry fiddle and the humble dance will send us to the
treadmill. We eat the worst food, drink the worst drink—our raiment, our
houses, our everything, bear signs of poverty, and we are gravely told that
this must be our lot.’ (45)
The power of this passage lies in the juxtaposition of ideas and images. The workers’
innocent pastimes were illegal; their feast days were now times of scarcity. Rather than
the sound of birds, they were allowed only the “deafening” engine. The fiddle and the
dance are replaced by the repetitive labor represented by the treadmill. Everything around
them is substandard, and when they complain, the workers are told that this is just the
way it is; they are condescended to.
In a later section, the Hammonds made use of allusion and juxtaposition to condemn the
use of child labor and illustrate the economic and social disparities that help fuel the Industrial
Revolution. They wrote:
It requires an effort as we think of the children in the mill, punished with
the punishment of Sisyphus for the pleasures of a life they had never
tasted, and of the children in the mines, keeping their blind vigil before the
sun had risen, and keeping their blind vigil after the sun had set, to
remember that this was an age in which childhood and all the promise and
mystery of childhood were taking a new place in the affections of the
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cultivated classes . . . Charles and Mary Lamb were publishing Poetry for
Children and the Tales From Shakespeare . . . The greatest portrait painter
of the age was describing the charm and grace and laughter of happy and
careless childhood. But so deep and distant was the underworld where
children were stolen from the sunshine as soon as they could creep
beneath an engine or watch a trap-door in a mine, that the sleep of those
rulers who admired Sir Joshua’s portraits of innocence, and took pride in
their sensibility and tenderness, was never broken or haunted by an echo
of the
‘Voces, vagitus et ingens
Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,
Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et ab ubere raptos
Abstulit atra dies.’ (192-193)
The Hammonds made frequent reference to Greek and Roman mythology in this excerpt to
illustrate their points. They compared the work of the children in the mills to the punishment of
Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a stone up a hill for all of eternity. This comparison
emphasizes the monotonous, boring, and punishing nature of the children’s work. The children
who work in the mines are deprived of sensory experience because their “blind vigil” keeps them
underground from before dawn until the sun has set; they were in effect like Persephone, who
also was “stolen” from the sunshine and forced to live in the underworld. But while Persephone’s
abduction was suffered for by all, the children of the mines and factories did not disturb the rest
of the privileged. These children were buried so deep that the fortunate never heard their cries.
The Hammonds used a quote from Virgil to compare these children of the Industrial Revolution
to the babies who weep on the threshold of Hades, the babies who can never be saved, and so
emphasized the hopelessness of their lives: they are already dead. But their experiences were not
shared by all. The Hammonds made use of allusions more current to the Industrial Revolution to
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juxtapose the very different experiences of the children of privilege and the children of the
working class. While poor children were punished like Sisyphus or condemned to Hades, the
more fortunate children were reading books written especially for them, and having their
portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In a time when, thanks to Rousseau, the idea of
childhood as a stage to be nurtured and valued was taking hold of the popular imagination, “the
charm and grace and laughter of happy and careless childhood” was a condition enjoyed only by
one segment of the British population. But the reality was that the children of the working class
were not in Hades, the Hammonds imply, they were right here on Earth, and the reason why the
“rulers” were not “haunted” by the echoes of their sufferings is because they chose not to be,
they turned a deaf ear. Their pleasures were bought at the expense of the workers.
The Hammonds quoted a passage rich with evocative diction and imagery from The
Mendip Annals, written by Hannah and Martha More, to illustrate the prejudiced views some
evangelicals held of the working class, even while they hoped to save and help them. The More
sisters visited a glassblowing factory, and this was their report:
‘Both sexes and all ages herding together: voluptuous beyond belief . . .
The wages high, the eating and drinking luxurious—the body scarcely
covered, but fed with dainties of a shameful description. The high
buildings of the glass-houses ranged before the doors of the cottages—the
great furnaces roaring—the swearing, the eating and drinking of these
half-dressed, black-looking beings gave it a most infernal and horrible
appearance. One, if not two, joints of the finest meat were roasting in each
of these little hot kitchens, pots of ale standing about, and plenty of early
delicate-looking vegetables.’ (227)
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Clearly, the More sisters believed the glassblowers were all going to Hell—their use of diction
and imagery makes this obvious. First of all, the workers were too self-indulgent. The interaction
between men and women was “voluptuous.” Their drinking was ‘luxurious.” They did not eat
good, solid peasant food, but feasted on “dainties of a shameful nature,” “the finest meat,” and
“plenty of early delicate-looking vegetables.” One wonders if the More sisters would fault
members of the aristocracy or the middle-class for such a diet, and if they would not, then the sin
of the glassblowers lies in eating better than they deserve. In fact, the More sisters viewed these
workers as somewhat less than human, perhaps animals or demons already. The glassblowers did
not gather; they met in herds. They lived surrounded by the roaring of furnaces as “half-dressed,
black looking beings” so that their homes had an “infernal” appearance. The Hammonds chose
this quote to illustrate the unsympathetic nature that many evangelicals had towards the working
classes that they were pledged to aid and support. The More sisters were so interested in saving
the workers’ souls that they begrudged them any creature comforts.
In the very last paragraph of the book, the Hammonds used diction and imagery to
express their horror at the long lasting effects of the Industrial Revolution.
. . .the new system grew up, almost without challenge or protest, in the
atmosphere of a discipline as rigorous as that of any army, for it seemed to
the possessing classes that any acknowledgements of human rights would
imperil its power, and even its existence. Hence it was that amid all the
conquests over nature that gave its triumphs to the Industrial Revolution,
the soul of man was passing into a colder exile, for in this new world, with
all its wealth and promise and its wide horizon of mystery and hope, the
spirit of fellowship was dead. (329)
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The world created by the Industrial Revolution is fundamentally different from any that has
come before. The imagery that the Hammonds used to express this is imperialistic in nature: the
factory system required “a discipline as rigorous as that of an army” and achieved “conquests
over nature” to create a “new world”. And what of the old ways? The hope for satisfaction,
family feeling, and the experience of beauty? These experiences—the soul of our humanity—
were likened metaphorically to a vanquished race that must pass into a “colder exile” to be
forgotten forever because “the spirit of fellowship was dead.” From the Hammonds’ point of
view, the connections of mutual obligation between people of different classes that had defined
life in Great Britain for centuries had been unraveled by the impact of the Industrial Revolution.
No one could deny that the Hammonds were intensely critical of the social costs of the
Industrial Revolution. But could one look at the same facts and interpret them another way? Of
course. That is why the Hammonds shaped their use of language to persuade others to share their
beliefs. The Town Labourer emphasizes the human aspect of the Industrial Revolution: the
dizzying pace of change, the degradation of human dignity, and the breakdown of antique social
connections, so that in the new century that was dawning before them, the people of Great
Britain might work together to heal the rifts caused by the upheaval of the social landscape. The
Hammonds manipulated literary devices such as powerful word choice, repetition, allusion,
juxtaposition, and imagery to affect their readers emotionally, so that they would be moved, just
as the Hammonds were moved by their own research into the dawning of a new era for
humanity.
Works Cited
Hammond, J.L. and Barbara. The Town Labourer: The New Civilization 1760-1832, New York: Harper
& Row, 1970. First published by Longmans, Green and Company, London, 1917.
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