Cooper · 1847
Shaftesbury and the Ten Hours Act
On the evening of the eighth of June 1847, in the Commons Chamber at the Palace of Westminster, the Ten Hours Bill (more formally, the Factories Act 1847), introduced as a private member's bill by John Fielden of Todmorden on behalf of the Yorkshire Short-Time Committees and the wider factory-reform movement, passed its third reading by 145 votes to 66 and became law on the eighth of June. The Bill limited the day for women and children under eighteen in textile mills to ten hours, ending the fourteen-and-sixteen-hour mill-day of the 1830s and 40s. The senior parliamentary architect of the fifteen-year campaign was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, then Lord Ashley (he would inherit the earldom of Shaftesbury from his father in June 1851), forty-six years old at the 1847 passage, the Tory backbencher and Evangelical Anglican philanthropist who had carried the Ten Hours bills (1832, 1833, 1844) through five previous parliamentary defeats. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 is the first effective limit on industrial working-hours in any country in the world and the foundational legislative ground of the modern working-day, the eight-hour day, and the weekend. Shaftesbury continued as the Victorian factory-and-philanthropic reformer (the Lunacy Act of 1845, the Climbing Boys Act of 1875, the Ragged Schools Union, the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews) until his death in 1885.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of the eighth of June 1847, in the Members' Lobby of the Commons at the Palace of Westminster (the temporary Commons Chamber, since the destruction of the previous chamber in the 1834 Westminster fire and the in-progress rebuild under Charles Barry), in heavy summer light through the west windows. He is forty-six years old. He is Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Ashley (he is the eldest son of the sixth Earl of Shaftesbury and will inherit the earldom in 1851; he is in 1847 the Member of Parliament for Bath), born at Grosvenor Square in central London on the twenty-eighth of April 1801, schooled at Harrow and Christ Church Oxford, in the nineteenth year of the parliamentary factory-reform campaign that he has carried since 1828.
The Bill has just received the third reading by 145 to 66 (a Tory-Liberal majority of factory-reform supporters against the Free-Trade-Whig manufacturing interest). The Bill, on the third reading, becomes law: the Factories Act 1847, popularly the Ten Hours Act, the first effective hours-limit in the modern industrial world.
He thinks: the fifteen-year campaign is over. The 1832 standing Sadler Committee Report. The 1833 standing Althorp Act (which limited child labour to nine hours but allowed adult shifts to run double-shift to maintain the fourteen-hour mill day). The 1844 standing Graham Bill (defeated). The 1846 standing Fielden Bill (defeated by twenty votes). The 1847 standing Fielden Bill (passed). The Yorkshire Short-Time Committees have been working on the ground since 1830. The fifteen-year ground has, this evening, finally produced the Bill.
He thinks: the Lancashire mill-owners (the Bright-and-Cobden free-trade lobby) will, on the passage of the Bill, organise the evasion-relay system in which the women-and-children-under-eighteen will be employed on the staggered shifts to maintain the fourteen-hour mill-day. The evasion will, by the Inspectors-of-Factories reports of the next five years, succeed in part. The 1850 Act will, by the amendment of the 1847 Act, close the evasion.
He thinks: the eight-hour working day, the weekend, the trade-union political-economy of the late nineteenth century, the Beveridge Report of 1942, the Welfare State of 1945, all of it stands, in some sense, on the ground the 1847 Act has just established this evening.
He thinks: Lord John Russell, the Whig Prime Minister, has not opposed the Bill on the floor of the House. The Whig free-trade ideology has accepted the Tory factory-reform principle on the grounds that the country can no longer politically sustain the fourteen-hour-mill-day at the scale of the 1840s industrial conditions.
He thinks: I have been called, by the Manchester press, a aristocratic-Tory-paternalist-busybody. The press is, in plain reading, correct about the description and wrong about the implication. The aristocratic-Tory-paternalism is, at the 1847 moment, the only political-philosophy in the Westminster system that takes the industrial-working-class as a moral-political-subject. The Liberal manufacturers do not. The Free-Trade Whigs do not. The Chartists do, but the Chartists have no parliamentary seats. The Tory paternalism is, in 1847, the effective political-vehicle for the question.
Lord Ashley walked out of the Commons Chamber at the ten o'clock division-bell and was met in the Members' Lobby by his old friend John Fielden of Todmorden (the Yorkshire Quaker mill-owner who had introduced the Bill on the Short-Time Committees' behalf, and who had, against the evidence of his economic interest as a Lancashire-textile-employer, supported the Ten Hours principle through the five previous defeats). The two men shook hands. Fielden, by the Ashley diary entry of the next morning, said: my Lord, the day is yours. Ashley replied, by the same source: no, sir. The day is the country's.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper became the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury on the sixth of June 1851 on his father's death. He served on the Lunacy Commission of the 1840s and 50s, the Ragged Schools Union, the 1857 Climbing Boys Act (which banned the use of small boys for chimney-sweeping in residential premises), the 1864 Factory Acts Extension Act, and the 1875 Climbing Boys Act (the final Act that closed the loopholes of the 1857 Act). He died at Folkestone on the first of October 1885, eighty-four years old. He is buried at the family seat of Wimborne St Giles in Dorset. The Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain at Piccadilly Circus (the statue of the Greek-mythological Anteros, the god of selfless love, in aluminium, by the sculptor Alfred Gilbert, 1893) is the public memorial to him in central London. The Memorial is, by the popular Londoners' name for it, called Eros; by Gilbert's explicit intention, it is Anteros, the twin of Eros, the god whose name means not Eros, the god of selfless-philanthropic love rather than the romantic-erotic love.