Misery or the production of misery: defining sweated labour in 1890.

The imprecision of the term ‘sweating’ in the 1880s and 1890s (and since) is part of its historical meaning. That ambiguity was fixed in a political struggle, in which Beatrice Potter was involved, over the text of the Report of the Lords Select Committee (1890) to ensure that the Report should acknowledge only discrete ‘forms of sweating’, a condition of misery, and ignore sweating as a system for the production of misery. The public debate over sweating around 1890 thus entertains while finally rejecting a new sort of knowledge of the nature of the late Victorian/Edwardian capitalist social formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]