The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

Masters had to control journeymen in order to forbid them to become
independent producers. This was achieved by either stopping them from buying
leather or, with more difficulty, by not allowing them to sell their products on
the market. The autobiography of John Brown, a Cambridge shoemaker who
worked in London in the 1800s explains eloquently both the nature and the
possible risks of this system. The separation of the journeymen's work from
their masters' meant the proliferation of unskilled work carried out in garrets.
John Brown, unable to find work in a proper shop, was forced to enter the
underworld of the lower-quality production, working "in a garret nine feet by
six, and barely high enough for the man to stand upright in". 40 As a 'man's man'
(a man's shoemaker) he worked on a piece rate of nine shillings for six pairs of
shoes and only after months of practice was he able to produce a sample boot
with which to 'occasion', that is to say looking for ajob in a shop.4'
This was the beginning of a new nineteenth-century system of production
based on chamber and garret masters. This pre-mechanised urban production has
been considered as the degeneration of an eighteenth-century small scale-
workshop system that could not cope with an increase of demand and a general
decrease of prices. Unskilled labour of immigrants, women and children
provided the best method to produce cheap shoes within the Metropolis that
could compete with Northamptonshire and other country shoes. 42 On the other
hand research has forgotten the importance of pre-nineteenth-century changes in
production. The role of the provinces or the importance of sub-contracting has
not yet received a deeper investigation assessing their economic relevance
within the metropolitan economy of the eighteenth-century. History of
consumption has shown the high responsiveness of existing productive systems
to new and dynamic consumers' markets. 43 There is a clear contrast between our
vision of traditional pre-industrial urban production and the complexity that
°
J. Brown, Sixty years' gleanings from life's harvest, cit., p. 170.
41
N. Mansfield, 'John Brown a shoemaker in Place's London', History Workshop, VIII - 1
(l9'78),pp. 130-1.
42
On the subject of labour in the nineteenth-century see chapter 7. There is a wide
historiography on the 'sweated trades'. See for instance D. Bythell, The sweated trades.
Outworking in 1^-century Britain (London, 1978); J.A. Schmiechen, Sweated industries and
sweated labour. The London clothing trades, 1860-1914 (London, 1984); D.R. Green, From
artisans to paupers, cit.
218