Lindstrom 1 Nathan W.

Lindstrom Professor Trullinger World History 2, Circa 1600 Present January 2, 2010

I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book. Thomas Kempis

L
(Pacey).

ondon in the 18th century was a crowded, dirty, and noisy place. Living as I do in the 21st century, far from London, it can be difficult to comprehend the vast differences between my own life and that of my alter ego in that time and place. As

someone born to the poor underclass of the city, my alter ego suffered from poor work opportunities, constant health hazards, and perhaps most different of all from the current day, virtually non-existent education opportunities. The concept of the knowledge worker something that is my bread and butter in this modern era did not exist then. As he had not been born into the nobility, my alter ego was condemned to a life of working for one of the manufacturing units named factories, which employed wage-laborers under conditions of such intensive labor and such loss of control over their work that the workers called it wage slavery

I live in a very crowded modern city, San Francisco. There are throngs of people walking everywhere, the buildings stand shoulder-to-shoulder and crowd out the sunlight, and the roads are choked with busses, cabs, trucks, cars: all the menagerie of vehicles that fill the busy

Lindstrom 2 downtown streets. Yet I can walk upon the sidewalk without fear of anything greater than pickpocket trying his luck on me. My alter ego, on the other hand, enjoys no such luxury. London in 1750 was honeycombed with what were intended to be temporary dwellings but which grew to be permanent ones. Hovels and shacks were commonplace. Sizeable numbers of the citys inhabitants both lived and worked below ground level (Schwartz). Of course, living in California as I do, earthquakes are an oft-overlooked but omnipresent threat, even if they only rarely strike. For my alter ego, earthquakes are nothing compared with the simple danger of walking past the average building. So many structures in London made from poor materials and assembled with such shoddy workmanship that building collapses were not unusual. A melancholy accident happened in a street called Perkins Rents, Westminster, begins a newspaper story in a 1784 edition of The Chronicle. A large old house, inhabited by a number of poor families, suddenly fell in, about half past ten oclock, with a horrible crash (A House Collapses Upon the Unfortunates Within). A number of the inhabitants were killed, and many more wounded, including a person who unfortunately happened to be walking past at the time of the event. While I do worry about the odd earthquake, and increasingly pay attention to the innumerable manhole covers that dot San Franciscos streets, I have never feared for my life while walking near a building. Aside from the occasional underground explosion that flings manhole covers skyward and sets fire to nearby buildings (Lee), the underground drainage and sewer systems in San Francisco function smoothly enough that I almost never think of them. So too, does my alter ego in London never think of them: for they do not exist. Water purification did not exist, and it was common to see streams of raw sewage running along in open drains. There were no toilets; instead, people flung the contents of their chamber pots out open windows into the streets below.

Lindstrom 3 Garbage of all kinds was left to simply rot on the side of the street. Writing in 1782, C. P. Moritz observed that nothing in London makes a more detestable sight that the butchers stallsthe guts and other refuse are all thrown on the street and set up an unbearable stink (Hart). Ive had to deal with the occasional drain backing up, or the kitchen sink becoming stopped up; but nothing even remotely like that which my alter ego must trod through and dodge among on the streets of London. Fresh water, if it could be called that, came into London by way of hollowed-out tree trunks buried beneath the city streets, or was drawn from the River Thames. In my era, I need only turn on a faucet to have immediate access to clean water. While I choose to use a filter to purify the water I drink, I nevertheless could simply imbibe straight from the tap without fear of contracting a horrible disease or dying a terrible death. But for my alter ego, it is as Tobias Smollet wrote in 1771: If I would drink water, I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the River Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London (Inwood). It is little wonder then that in the 18th century the life expectancy of my alter ego was a mere 36.4 years (Houston). The reason such an incredible level of filth and decay was so widely tolerated in my alter egos era, but not in my own, can be entirely attributed to knowledge. Education can be thanked for that knowledge; and the foundation of education lies with an ability to read something that my counterpart in 1700s London almost certainly lacked. In Great Britain and Ireland, writes Sarah Trimmer, an early advocate for state education, at least 1,750,000 of the population at an age to be instructed, grow up to an adult state without any instruction at all, in the grossest ignorance (Vincent). And had my alter ego been able to read, it would almost certainly have brought him into sharp conflict with the world he knew outside of the classroom. It is indeed a

Lindstrom 4 sad and evil necessity, continues Trimmer, [that] the first lesson which they learn at school is to beware of their own parents and to look with disgust, if not horror at the filthiness and abominations of their own homes (Vincent). Painful though this progress might have been, a close reading of such books as Literacy and Popular Culture in England 1750-1914 will lay plain the case that my alter egos societys rise from the stench of the grave is directly attributable to an increase in the level of education provided to children. Yet despite the clear gains in society as a result of the increase in literacy levels it was not until 1880 that all parents were required by law to send their children to school. One possible cause for the delay in this happening was the pressing need, at least in many poor parents minds, to employ their children as workers from the earliest possible moment in their lives. The modern day label of sweatshop has its origins in the manufacture of cheap goods in the homes or back-alley workshops in my alter egos era. The tasks involved in these particular manufacturing tasks were of a simple and highly-repetitive nature, and the labor was most often done by children. The pay was often wholly inadequate for even subsistence living, the hours excessively long, and the working conditions unsafe and thoroughly overcrowded. This was known as the sweated system, and despite its origins long ago in my alter egos era it persists to this very day in the East End district of the city (London). As a knowledge worker I am valued not for my ability to perform repetitive actions or for having a strong back, but instead for the skills and proficiencies I have learned in short, for the knowledge I possess. I am paid extremely well for this knowledge, and work in an environment that is both closely regulated (for example, by the government mandating minimum wage, the maximum number of hours one may be required to work in a day, etc.) and made intentionally attractive by the employer in order to obtain and retain talent. This is in marked contrast with the employment opportunities that my

Lindstrom 5 alter ego faced in London: long, unregulated hours; dirty, cramped, unskilled work; dangerous and unsafe employment conditions; and pay that would often not suffice to cover even the basic necessities of his life, however scant those were. There was certainly no concept of insurance or retirement; my alter egos lot in life was to work until he was either too old or too crippled to continue living. As was previously mentioned, the average age of an individual living in London in 1750 was just over thirty-five years. At thirty-four years of age I am not even considered to be of middle age; while my alter ego, at the same age in the 18th century was an old man. At best, if he was lucky, he might live to see his fortieth birthday. His life was truly, as Thomas Hobbes says in Leviathan, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I am reminded once more of the tremendous debt I owe those who have come before me for the vast breadth of knowledge that appears in written form, and that I, thanks to the miracle of modern education, can so easily access it with no more effort than the opening of a book and the turning of a page. To be able to read, and to possess an education, is truly what separates my lot in life from that of my poor alter ego, suffering away in the dank and dirt of far away London.

Lindstrom 6 Works Cited

"A House Collapses Upon the Unfortunates Within." The Chronicle 1784. Hart, Roger. English Life in the EIghteenth Century. New York: Putnam & Sons, 1970. Houston, R. A. The Population History of Britain and Ireland 1500-1750. London: Macmillan, 1992. Inwood, Stephen. A History of London. New York: Carrol and Graf Publishers, 1998. Lee, Henry. "Study Cites Water Leak in PG&E Manhole Blast." San Francisco Chronicle 4 September 2005. London, Museum of. Trade and Industrialisation 1750-1900. Retrieved 2 January 2010. <http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/.../Trade_1750_1900.htm>. Pacey, Arnold. Technology in World Civilization. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. Schwartz, Richard. Daily Life in Johnson's London. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture in England 1750-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.