Was factory work better than labouring?
There are some interesting bits in chapter 37. Mr Higgins tells Mr Hale and Margaret that he intends to go south and find work digging. They try to persuade him out of it. They tell him he would get paid nine or ten shillings a week. He was being paid fifteen shillings a week in the factory before he lost his job. They say he would have to work outside in all weathers, that he would suffer rheumatism, that he was not used to that work and could not cope with it at his age (45), that the work was extremely dull and stupefying, that the labourers were so exhausted by the end of the day all they cared about was food and rest. This does not sound like Thomas Hardy. The weekly wages are similar to the farm workers' in Far From the Madding Crowd, but their lives do not sound as miserable. Actually, I think the fifteen shillings a week the factory workers were being paid is what Bob Cratchit was paid in A Christmas Carol. I thought that was dramatic exaggeration, but I suppose that it was not utterly implausible. It surprises me that the Hales consider factory work to be easier and more stimulating than labouring. Being tied to a weaving loom for ten hours a day does not sound very stimulating to me. Perhaps this digging they refer to is not farm labouring but navvying, that is digging routes for railways.
Also, this bit in chapter 37:
'How proud that man is!' said her father, who was a little annoyed at the manner in which Higgins had declined his intercession with Mr. Thornton.
'He is,' said Margaret; 'but what grand makings of a man there are in him, pride and all.'
'It's amusing to see how he evidently respects the part in Mr. Thornton's character which is like his own.'
'There's granite in these northern people, papa is there not?'
'There was none in poor Boucher, I am afraid; none in his wife either.'
'I should guess from their tones that they had Irish blood in them...'
That is an outrageous racial slur. My mum is Irish. I am deeply affronted.
Come to think of it, I expect many of those diggers were Irish navvies. Margaret previously referred to 'poor, Irish starvelings' when talking about some Irish workers that Mr Thornton had brought in to break a strike. This was just after the Irish potato famine.