Economic historians turned to the indirect evidence offered by nutritional standards, or contradictory trends in real wages and probate inventories, or comparisons of annual full employment income with daily wage rates, all of which were made to yield inferences about time use. Inferences can even be teased from the seasonality of conception, the timing of "crowd events" and the scheduling of weddings. A Sherlock Holmes-type economic historian, Voth clearly enjoys the cleverness of these indirect approaches but acknowledges that they too failed to resolve the issue. "What is needed is a new method that yields direct evidence on patterns of labour and leisure among the population at large, and on a broad empirical basis. This data should be available on a consistent basis, from the same source, and should be collected for more than one location" (p.16). Both are provided by the ingenious use of court records.
From the witness statements of more than 2,800 men and women, Voth extracted all mentions of time use for three periods (1749-63, 1799-1803, and 1829-30). At every opportunity he recorded what a particular individual was doing at a particular time. Originally his attention was limited to London (see Voth, 1998), but anxious to include the crucible of industrialization, the monograph also examines evidence from the Northern Assize Depositions.
The court records reveal the timing (by hour, day, and month) of crime, but also the structure of daily life as lived by the working men and women who happened to witness crime. Voth can estimate when they got up and went to bed, when they started work and stopped. Schedules can be compared over time and between London and the North. In London, an approximately 12-hour working day appears to lengthen and then contract, while the initially longer hours in the North were further extended by 1830. But as both starting and stopping times are observed with an error the statistical significance of these differences cannot be demonstrated.
The court records also facilitate estimation of the working week and year. Non-random variation in the numbers working by weekday while suggestive is not sufficient to demonstrate the existence of St. Monday. To this end Voth constructs a dichotomous variable, one if the witness was working, zero otherwise, and then regresses it on a set of other characteristics including the days of the week so uncovering the probability of working by day of the week. Alas only simple logistic regressions on the day dummies are reported.
Traditional interpretations receive support. For London, the odds of observing somebody in work and its statistical significance suggest that St Monday ceased to be celebrated between 1760 and 1830. The later days of the week, when workloads purportedly increased, show higher than average work probabilities that are statistically significant in the case of Friday for 1800 and in the case of Saturday for 1800 and 1830. In the North there is no evidence of St Monday, either before or after 1800, or of increasing work frequency by Friday or Saturday. In the 1750s, holy days saw a strong reduction in the probability of observing somebody at work both in London and in the North. By 1800 this effect had vanished completely in London but lingered in the North. Similar analyses of the probability of observing a person at leisure were conducted for the London data providing supporting results. Alternative methods of aggregating up to hours per year and combining the results for London and the North are worked through providing seven different indexes of annual hours. The differences are small and all estimates well within the range suggested by earlier authors. Annual hours increased somewhere between 14 and 32 percent (p.131). Elementary, my dear reader!
Voth anticipates objections to his method. One is bothersome. The disappearance of St Monday and decline in the likelihood of not working on holy days might reflect not a net increase in labour hours but rather increasingly randomized time-use as individuals dispersed their holidays through the week and year according to their own increasingly secular preferences. If this were the case, retorts Voth, there would be an increase over time in the proportion of cases misclassified, in the logistic regressions. There is some evidence of this in the London data, though not enough Voth charges, to have obliterated the significance of the coefficients on the holy days and the Mondays.
Why did people work longer hours? Five competing hypotheses are explored: declining nutritional constraints; increasing dependency; better health; cultural changes; and, the desire to consume. Each receives incisive assessment, though Voth displays the prejudices of the economic historian in his snippety treatment of cultural changes.
Voth's preferred explanation remains the increasing attractions of consumption. But there is a wrinkle in his consumer revolution. A firm pessimist on the real wage front, it is the asymmetry between the ability and the desire to spend that drives up labour input. Voth also suggests that the rising dependency ratio explains about a quarter of the increase in hours. This rescues an important and neglected feature of the period and slots it neatly into place. My own current work on increasing child labour implicates rising dependency as an explanatory factor.
In moving from estimates of annual hours to aggregate labour inputs, Voth acknowledges the importance of assumptions about participation rates. In particular, if the participation rates of women were declining between 1750 and 1830, this would offset some of the growth in labour input. On the other hand declining female participation rates imply additional numbers of dependents and strengthen this pressure driving men's longer hours. Gender (and class) differences in the timing of activities are given brief attention with rather predictable results (women dominate unpaid activities and appear less likely to have leisure). More generally, I remain convinced that women's distinctive experience in the labour markets of the period cautions against attempting to uncover a general trend in hours of work especially from a data set in which 84.7 percent of the observations refer to men.
Voth's book lends powerful support to the new view of the industrial revolution. With increased labour input total factor productivity barely grew at all, and the first seventy years of industrialization delivered even more paltry improvements in living standards than hitherto estimated.
Jane Humphries has published extensively on gender, the family and the history of women's work. Her main current research interest is in the relationship between the family and the economy in the past and in the present. Among her recent works are "Cliometrics, Child Labour, and the Industrial Revolution," Critical Review (2000) and "Women's Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family, 1790-1865," with Sara Horrell, Economic History Review (1995).
