Hungerstone

Hungerstone is set against the backdrop of Sheffield’s booming 19th-century steel industry, a world of immense wealth, technological innovation, and brutal labor conditions. The novel references two key historical realities of this era, the Bessemer converter and the Sheffield Outrages. Patented by Henry Bessemer in 1856 and first demonstrated publicly in Sheffield, the Bessemer converter was a pear-shaped vessel that blasted air through molten pig iron to burn off impurities, allowing steel to be produced in vast quantities at a fraction of its previous cost. The process transformed Sheffield, already a center of cutlery and edge-tool manufacture, into the steel capital of the world. By the 1870s the city’s population had swelled past 280,000, its skyline crowded with furnaces, and its rivers blackened by industrial runoff. Fortunes were made by a small class of ironmasters and works owners while the labor force endured punishing hours in conditions that produced high rates of grinder’s asthma, crush injuries, and fatal accidents around molten metal.

These conditions produced some of the most militant trade unionism in Victorian Britain. From the early 19th century, Sheffield’s skilled trades, including saw grinders, file cutters, fork grinders, and edge-tool makers, had organized into small, fiercely protective craft societies and used union dues to support members during illness, unemployment, and strikes. When individual workers refused to pay dues or accepted work under non-union rates, union enforcers retaliated with a practice known locally as “rattening,” which entailed stealing tools, driving bands, or wheel-nuts to prevent the offender from working. In the 1860s these intimidation tactics escalated into serious violence, including beatings, shootings, and the use of gunpowder to blow up the homes and workshops of non-compliant workers. The most notorious incident was the Hereford Street explosion of October 1866. This drew national outrage and prompted the government to establish a Royal Commission the following year to investigate what became known as the “Sheffield Outrages,” a period of “explosions and murders carried out by union militants” against non-union workers and exploitative employers (“Sources for the Study of the Sheffield Outrages.” Sheffield City Council, 2018). Testimony before the commission exposed the involvement of union leaders like William Broadhead of the Saw Grinders’ Union, who admitted to organizing several attacks.

Though the revelations damaged the reputation of the Sheffield trades in the short term, the commission’s broader findings contributed directly to the Trade Union Act of 1871, which for the first time gave unions legal recognition and protected their funds, and to the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875, which legalized peaceful picketing. The novel integrates this history when a journalist questions Henry about declining safety at his factory and Lenore discovers Henry is violently suppressing labor organizers and denying compensation to injured workers. This context frames Henry’s personal cruelty as part of a larger, historically documented system of industrial exploitation.