The Industrial Revolution by popular consideration has provided humanity with the blueprint for technological and intellectual advancement. In so doing it has driven humanity down a road that has led all the way into today’s time of twenty-first century postmodernism. Whether or not human progression can be defined as good or bad, I do not know, but progression is in the very least a moving concept. Therefore, to dare to define the Industrial Revolution is to say that mankind has moved from one way of thinking to another.
Eighteenth century England was a poor and troubled society, whereas before the Industrial Revolution it was, in a contemporary sense, simple, traditional, and predominantly a rural land. Due to this new era of industrialization Englishmen came into contact with socioeconomic and cultural changes, which was a significant turning point for human society.
The changing face of England during this time period explicitly required much of the human mind, body and soul, and though the Industrial Era impinged on everyone’s life in some shape or form, I assert that it more dramatically affected the blue-collar worker, both man and woman, as well as the underprivileged and innocent children.
The industrialization period brought preliminary evils of exploitation, pollution and urban nastiness to England. It was an era that challenged every fiber of the working and poor man, to an extent that is both heartbreaking and admirable. It was also a time that unquestionably advocates man’s capacity to adapt, endure, and prosper through what would seem psychologically and physically impossible.
The element of challenge for the working and the poor was an inheritance from the tumultuous seventeenth century, which had undermined man’s faith and most of the fundamentals in which he previously believed in. Man was no longer the center of this universal concept. He was no longer under the close and personal control of God the Father and redeemed by Christ the Son. Instead he had become a part of Newton’s vast, impersonal system.[1] Political certainties had also gone. There was no longer a monarch that was divinely ordained as the director of the land. He was also no longer considered God the only ruler of everyone. Instead Parliament was now claiming to share that control in both Church and State. Therefore, beliefs that in previous ages had been questioned only by a daring individual’s mind had now become a matter of argument for all thinking men.
Another element of challenge appeared in the economic sphere as well. The seventeenth century had created a new empire of trade in India and of settlement in the West Indies and in the American colonies, which overwhelmingly influenced the pattern of trade and the growth of wealth in England.[2] It was specifically due to the use of coal, the invention of the steam engine, and the promise of more food for the common man that activated industrial prosperity and expansion.
As the various industrial and agricultural advancements developed, both the rich and the poor began to experience an increase in either money or personal material goods. Therefore, rural work, suppression, and complacency became a way of the past, and essentially the whole concept of a feudal system in England was abandoned in concentration on keeping up with or succeeding within the walls of industrial England. However, this switch contained serious repercussions that the working class and poor suffered greatly through.
As the number of factories grew people from the countryside began to move into the cities looking for better-paid work. The wages for a farm worker were very low and the Enclosure Acts, which originally began in fourteenth century England, had made land less available for the working class to take on farming as a means of making an income, especially during the eighteenth century. These Enclosure Acts applied to about 4.5 million acres, or a quarter of England, which according to Arthur Young and William Cobbett greatly harmed the poor, and also turned the small landholders into landless laborers causing them to leave rural life and to move to urban cities.[3] Thus, a great migration of thousands of landless, homeless, poor, and desperate people moved to cities like London and Manchester in search for employment.
The new machinery of the time was still in need of manual operation, and with the great influx of labor seekers factory owners were provided with a constant work force and also a security supply of replacements if there was ever, and there was, an occupational disagreement, dissatisfaction, or loss of life. Worker disagreement most commonly noted dealt with an expression of unfair compensation for the amount of labor put in, causing internal frustration, depression and a sense of worthlessness.
The most abundant forms of work were largely located in the cities, which consequentially became the primary outlet for the additional thousands of desperate workers. Effectively the cities weren’t, understandably enough, able to sustain an ever-increasing population, let alone a basic standard of living for all of its inhabitants. Nevertheless, the cities continued employing and the concept of making money and the ladder of opportunity facilitated a society built upon competition, selfishness, and dishonesty. This was life for the common man. It was instinctive and compulsory.
With everyone in need of job opportunities or a means to somehow advance their lives, it seemed as if the common man regressed into a primordial and animalistic mode of behavior in response to the competitive nature that prematures capitalism. A manifestation of disorderly, confusing, and emotionally agonizing conditions arose among the largest class of people founding an environment of constant struggle for survival. A dominant weight, and an endless burden of pressure required each person to uniquely deal with his or her own concerns. This produced rivalries under every circumstance, and protectiveness over anything and everything that could have been used towards one’s own comfort.
This same concept is later found in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which essentially reveals that society was designed to reward the strongest best people, while inferior people were kept down at a suitable level. Sinclair basically takes the concept of a group of honest, hardworking immigrants who are destroyed by corruption and evil by rebutting the idea of Social Darwinism, implying that those who succeed in the capitalist system are not the best of humankind but rather the worst and most corrupt of all.
This sort of jungle theme during England’s Industrial Revolution among the working and poorer people becomes very prevalent when reviewing the circumstances in which the working and poorer classes lived. A son of a Manchester factory owner, Friedrich Engels combined his real life experiences and his social conscience in regard to the conditions of the working class in England during 1844. When in the city of Manchester, England he wrote the following:
…the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the same time. Of the irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways, which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey an idea. And it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of Manchester, which are to blame for this; the confusion has only recently reached its height when every scrap of space left by the old way of building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is left to be further occupied.[4]
Overcrowding made every kind of tolerance virtually normal for everyone. Extreme poverty made thieving and bullying the only alternatives to starvation. Congestion, poverty, and ill-health together with monotonous food and over-long hours of work lead people to find relief or reparation in drunkenness, in a love of brutal sports, and in violence that broke out again and again when the pressures of their lives became too great.[5] Life was difficult and harsh. The world for the masses was singularly devoid of pity. Disease and violence came early and sudden deaths were extremely ordinary.
Henry Fielding, an eighteenth century novelist and judge articulated in one of his writings titled Inquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers his depiction of how precarious life in England really was. Fielding having run into several consequences of a general luxury among the lower people, all which, were intended to bring them relief he felt instead brought mischief, improper regulation, and abusive laws. Fielding acknowledged that:
It must be a matter of astonishment to any man to reflect, that in a country where the poor are, beyond all comparison, more liberally provided for than in any other part of the habitable globe, there should be found more beggars, more distressed and miserable objects, than are to be seen throughout all the states of Europe.[6]
The climate of England had become so utterly depressing that people from various fields of study openly agreed that England during this period was a living nightmare. Personal frustrations and opinions were expressed as a means to inform others of the evils of exploitation, pollution and urban nastiness that were so much a part of their lives. Their expression was also a means to reflect on their own personal experiences that the hard times brought upon them.
Famous romantic poets like William Wordsworth from Cumbria England, John Keats of London, and William Blake of London were all men who came from broken families who all intimately knew the effects of disease and the sort of heartache and resentment that death left behind. For instance, William Wordsworth’s mother had died, when he was the age of eight, and not too long after his father died leaving him and his four siblings as orphans. He spent his young adulthood in France during the French Revolution, where additional rough times brought about Wordsworth’s interest and sympathy for life, troubles and speech for the common man.
These issues proved to be of the utmost importance to Wordsworth’s most famous work, such as his poem titled The World is Too Much with Us; Late and Soon, which essentially depicts how machine power and the fast momentum of technology has taken away man’s appreciation for or opportunity to appreciate nature. He tells us “we have given our hearts away, a dirty gain” and that it is “for this, for everything, we are out of tune…I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn.”[7] William Wordsworth also asserted in his Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads that the rise of technology “dulled the mind to a state of almost savage torpor."[8] Wordsworth, along with other romantics, saw nature as the window to life and life's meaning. He believed that nature held the answer to a simple, plentiful, happy, healthy life. He tried to express to his readers that the factories, mines, and other fields of the Industrial Revolution were the cause of all the social and economic problems. He desperately wanted the readers to recognize that all these new inventions were the fundamental causes for all the new hardships of life.
Since every kind of tolerance became a habitual characteristic of life the individual became self-seeking and avaricious. They became like this as a means to elevate their lives, unfortunately at the expense of others who couldn’t adequately compete. Between the rich and the working class social contrasts sharpened. This meant that though the working class was not necessarily remaining poor it did, however mean that the rich were getting richer at the expense of the working classes productivity, widening the income gap even further.
At the feet of competition the middle class were consistently coming up with ways to improve and to develop higher standards of comfort in their everyday life. For instance, they constructed new foundational frameworks for city houses, which were everywhere being built, but it is still the English country home that remains the most aesthetically welcoming. The worker's houses, which made up all of the cities, were usually near the factories so that people could walk to work. They were also built very quickly and cheaply. These inexpensive houses had between two and four rooms - one or two rooms downstairs, and one or two rooms upstairs offering more families permanence and a sense of stability and closeness.
These flats, however didn’t supply any running water or toilet facilities. It was typical for a whole street to share an outdoor pump and a couple of outside toilets. Most of the poorer homes were generally built back to back or built in double rows. These houses had no windows in the front, there were no backyards and a sewer down the middle of the street.[9] All of the new and more sustaining houses were built crammed close together, with very narrow streets between them. Though these houses offered more rooms as a means to accommodate to an increasing population it also meant its inhabitants developed violent and reckless characteristics, which was a response to the competitive nature of crammed spaces.
Florence Nightingale (18201910) customarily presented as a sort of secular saint for her work on improving nursing during the Crimean War (1854-1856) is an example of a woman who turned away from conventional domesticity to engage in a career. Nightingale used very unsentimental statistical data and worked in the area of public health, hospital administration, and sanitary reform. In her selected writings she tells us “large numbers of the poor cottages have been recently condemned as unfit for human habitation, but though unfit many are still inhabited, from lack of other accommodation.”[10]
Dr. James Kay of the eighteenth century wrote The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes … in Manchester in regard to his dissatisfaction with what he discovered throughout the township of Manchester.
To condemn man to such severity of toil is, in some measure, to cultivate in him the habits of an animal. He becomes reckless. He disregards the distinguishing appetites and habits of his species. He neglects the comforts and delicacies of life. He lives in squalid wretchedness, on meager food, and expends his superfluous gains on debauchery.[11]
In observation of the whole population he wondered about the variety of effects that exhaustion and tormenting lifestyles would have on their futures. Thus, he expressed his attack on the development as “the grosser parts of our nature,”[12] or as previously suggested a regression back into a primordial and animalistic mode of behavior, which was in reaction to the conditions of an exploitative, urbanized, mechanical age.
In this new era of over-populated regions, both the new and old cities inevitably became polluted and unsanitary. It was routine for every household to throw their garbage out into the streets. It was also not unusual to find people, for lack of convenience, relieving themselves at the head of the main channel, also a location where the remains of dead dogs and other stray animals would be found as well. This posed serious and problematic issues for everyone because the channel was for all intents and purposes the only location where households could draw their water source.
Such conditions were perfect breeding grounds for diseases to infiltrate all classes of society. The poor and the working class had no means of any cleanly water supply, sanitary eating, bathing or sleeping areas, but regardless their interaction with others were necessary and unavoidable. It is said that more than 31,000 people died during the first outbreak of cholera in 1832 and lots more were killed by other diseases such as typhus, smallpox, and tuberculosis.[13]
Cholera became a greatly feared disease. It was caused by contaminated water that spread throughout England with devastating consequences. Industrial England was hit by an outbreak of cholera in 1831 -1832, 1848-1849, 1854 and also in 1867, due to the fact that sewage came into contact with the water.[14] As many people used river water as their source of drinking water, the disease spread effortlessly. The attack of cholera was sudden and painful, though not necessarily fatal. In London alone it is thought that 7,000 people died of the disease during the 1831-1832 outbreak, which represented one of the largest percentages of death rate (about fifty percent) for those who caught it. The disease usually affected those who lived in the poorer city areas, but the rich were also known to be unable to escape it. In addition to cholera, smallpox played its role in the industrial cities, even after Edward Jenner’s vaccine.[15] The reason was because many of the cities remained ignorant to the fact that Jenner’s vaccine had even been created.
Typhoid and typhus were fairly common during the industrial era and were just as feared as cholera and smallpox were. Typhoid was caused also by infected water, unlike typhus, which spread due to lice and poor hygiene. The greatest killer in the cities however, was tuberculosis or TB. Micro bacteria in humans caused this infectious disease. Tuberculosis attacked the lungs and also affected the central nervous system, the lymphatic system, the circulatory system, and even the skin. The classical symptoms that were most prominent during the eighteenth century were chronic cough that contained blood, fever, night sweats, and significant weight loss.[16] Tuberculosis affected those who had been poorly fed and who were mal-nourished. It also affected those who lived in dirty and damp homes. As people breathed in the exhaled sputum the disease easily proliferated from person to person. In the overcrowded tenements of the industrial cities, one infected person could have spread the disease to multiple people fairly quickly. It is believed that TB killed one third of all those who died in England between 1800 and 1850.[17] It wasn’t until fourteen years later when Louis Pasteur (1864) discovered a vaccination that would immunize a person from the disease.
Obtaining greater standards of life for the poor and the middle class came with competitive attitudes. A rampant sense of individualism was inspired by the concept of acquiring money which according to author George Trevelyan in chapter XV “Cobbet’s England (1793 -1832)” of English Social History; A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria “set up the cheap and nasty model of modern industrial life and its surroundings.”[18] Trevelyan who quoted eighteenth century writer Daniel Defoe, saw that the social and economic fabric of England went from a harmonious place to a “shattered place of chaos, of rival interests, town against country, rich against poor.”[19]
Most everyone’s incomes were spent on rent, fuel, and food.[20] Food was the purchase that ordinarily absorbed most of their income. The cheapest and most consumed products were cereals and potatoes. The least purchased was meat, with the exception of perhaps bacon and an occasional stew. Laborers saw very little of milk, even young children from the northern parts of England received hardly any or none of it.
Based off of Eden’s budget located in G.D.H., Cole & Raymond Postgate’s writings regarding How the People Lived, a typical family’s earnings greatly depended on whether the wife worked for pay, and also on the earnings of the children. It was the wife’s work that supplemented the families’ income as well as the earnings from children. Children often worked equally long hours and were typically treated badly by their supervisors. Sometimes the children started their working career as young as four or five years old. A young child could not earn much, but even a few pennies were enough to buy some sort of provisions, which made it worthwhile.
Children would work in places like coal mines where it wasn’t unusual for roofs to cave in or for explosions to go off accidentally, killing workers. The younger children often worked as “trappers” who worked trap doors. They sat in a hole hollowed out for them and held a string that was fastened to the door. When they heard the coal wagons coming they had to open the door by pulling the string. This job was one of the easiest down in the mines, but it was very lonely and the place where they sat was usually damp and draughty. Other children were employed as “coal bearers” who carried loads of coal on their back in big baskets. While thousands of children worked in the mines, thousands of other children worked in the cotton mills. Mill owners were known to hire on orphans to their workhouses. These orphans lived at the mill and were obligated to work as hard as humanly possible. They spent most of their working hours at the machines with very little time to rest. Like any other dangerous job, the mills caused serious accidents for children. Some children were scalped when their hair was caught in the machine, hands were crushed and some children were killed by sleepily falling into the machines.[21]
With both parents at work the children were often neglected and left alone to take care of themselves. The early age, at which girls were admitted into the factories, prevented them from learning how to run domestic household duties. An infant was also a victim of the system. Infants were abandoned to the care of a nanny or neighbor while their mother worked. Sometimes little girls took care of the infants, sometimes two or three of them from different households.
With parents at work or without any parents at all, hordes of dirty, ragged children roamed the streets with no regular source of money, and no home to go to. The children of the streets stole, picked pocketed to buy food, and slept in outhouses or doorways. A famous depiction of a child’s life during the Industrial Revolution is Charles Dickens Oliver Twist, who was a boy born into a life of poverty and misfortune in the city of London. Orphaned at the death of his mother during his birth, and his father’s unexplained absence, Oliver was provided for under the terms of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834,[22] which was a poverty relief system passed by Whig government. Unsatisfied with the relief system he took on other typical orphan means of surviving in a big city.
The adult world was too much, too soon a part of the innocent child’s life during this time. It was almost at their first steps when they were thrown into the workforce. To have had a childhood was inexistent, but to have a job, regardless of its hazards and to have a source of income was anticipated. This goes to show that industrial England for the working class and poor meant to sacrifice either a mother’s nurturing time with her infant and/or even the innocence and playfulness of her children for survival that was how competitive and demanding the world for them was.
Indeed the demands of life were hardly manageable, and for the great majority of people it was fatal. Defoe, in Giving Alms No Charity referred to “the dearness of wages, which in England outgoes all nations in the world.” Arthur Young, ninety years later, estimated in his Travels in France that “wages were, on the average, 76 percent higher in England than in France, and that the English laborer lived 76 percent better than the French.“[23] This conclusion was based on taking the English laborer’s wage at an average of 8s. (Shillings) 5 days a week for the country as a whole. The people of England during this time considered their economic and social situation considerably better than that of other nations. Through Young’s statistical representation on the wages above reveals their considered opinion to be genuine, it doesn’t relieve them of their experiences, which stands to be still very disconcerting.
Eighteenth century England was by all the above descriptions a poor and troubled society during the early stages of industrialization. The great challenges, sacrifices, and heartache that the English working class faced were clearly admirable and have left us with technological advancements that we have been able to even further develop. With their independent resourcefulness and hardened hearts the working class powered through and made the industrial age a successful and historically popular event. To some the Industrial Revolution was a great turning point in the history of the world, because it essentially changed Western civilization from a predominantly rural and agriculturally based society to an urban and industrial metropolis that has contributed much to our twenty-first century ways of living.
It is hard to proclaim that the Industrial Revolution was worth all that was sacrificed, because of the sheer significance, beauty, and value that even one person’s life has over any mechanical man-made creation. However, having reflected on personal biographies, stories, and poems from the Romantics I have come to understand and appreciate the pieces of evidence that has shown the psychological and physical rough experiences of the working class and the poor during that time. I have also come to consider that these individuals more than likely didn’t endure all they did consciously expecting that their struggles were going to have such an impact on future generations or even that they sincerely cared to see the Industrial Age succeed. Rather these individuals endured all they did simply because they had to out of necessity, as do most suffering civilizations.
[1] Lacey B. Smith, English History made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2007) 89.
[2] Frederic, Young, The English Heritage; Third Edition Volume 11: Since 1689 (Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1999) 247.
[3] http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Enclosure+(Agricultural+Revolution) (accessed April 16, 2009)
[4] Friedrich, Engels excerpts from Paul Halsall. The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844. (London: Swan Sonnenschien & Co., 1892) 45, 48-53.
[5] Walter, L. Arnstein, The Past Speaks; Sources and Problems in British History Volume II: Since 1688 (Lexington: D.C. Heath & Company, 1993) 44.
[6] Ibid.
[7] http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/546/ (accessed April 10, 2009)
[8] Ibid., (access April 12, 2009)
[9] Walter, L. Arnstein, The Past Speaks; Sources and Problems in British History Volume II: Since 1688 (Lexington: D.C. Heath & Company, 1993) 156.
[10] Florence, Nightingale. Edited Lucy Ridgely Seymer. Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1954) 38287.
[11] Walter, L. Arnstein, The Past Speaks; Sources and Problems in British History Volume II: Since 1688 (Lexington: D.C. Heath & Company, 1993) 155.
[12] Ibid.
[13] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/diseases_industrial_revolution.htm (accessed April 12, 2009)
[14] Ibid.
[15] Stefan Riedel, MD, PhD, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination.” (2005)
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1200696 (accessed April 12, 2009)
[16] Bi, Puranen, “Tuberculosis; The Occurance and Causes.”
http://www.bikupan.se/tuberculosis/tuberc.html (accessed April 12, 2009)
[17] http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/diseases_industrial_revolution.htm (accessed April 12, 2009)
[18] George McCauley Trevelyan, English Social History; A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria. (New York: Longmans, 1946) 463.
[19] Ibid., 465, 466.
[20] George Douglas Howard, Cole & Raymond, Postgate, The British People 1746-1946 (New York: Methuen & Co., 1961) 81.
[21] Lewis, Hackett, “Industrialization: The First Phase.” (1992)
http://history-world.org/Industrial%20Intro.htm (accessed April 12, 2009)
[22] http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Lpoor1834.htm (access April 12, 2009)
[23] George Douglas Howard, Cole & Raymond, Postgate, The British People 1746-1946 (New York: Methuen & Co., 1961) 79.
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