Mind your language | 9 July 2011

Last week’s industrial action did not quite convey the certainty with which in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies) opened the preamble to their constitution: ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ That was an era when anarcho-syndicalists excitedly spoke of industrial unionism. ‘Capable and courageous industrial activity,’ declared the revolutionary Tom Mann in 1909, ‘forces from the politicians proportionate concessions.’ It was another 62 years before the national press of Britain announced that newspapers would not be published the next day ‘because of industrial action’.

The word industrial came into the language in the 16th century, then slept until the end of the 18th century, with the advent of the industrial revolution (a term not used before 1848, by John Stuart Mill, and sanctified by Arnold Toynbee’s Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England in 1889). Before the birth of Marx, the 18th-century phrase industrial accession meant something like ‘added value’. Industrial products were not always made in manufactories. Even today, at the country town where we go on holiday, the summer show has an industrial tent, displaying prize items made through the industry of rivals: crochet and poker-work, that sort of thing.

The industrial proletariat were introduced into English by the translator of Engels’s Condition of the working-class in England. This was Florence Kelley (1859-1932), the daughter of a Philadelphia Congressman, ‘Pig-Iron Kelley’. She was living in Zurich when she translated Engels, marrying a Russian (by whom she had three children before a divorce after seven years). She thus figured in the book as  F.K. Wischnewetzky. In the same translation she was the first to use jus primae noctae as a synonym for droit du seigneur, ‘an alleged custom of medieval times’, as the OED rightly calls it.