Discuss the impact of Industrial Revolution on social, political life and literature

of the nineteenth century

During the Industrial Revolution, the social structure of society changed

dramatically. Before the Revolution most people lived in small villages, working
either in agriculture or as skilled craftsmen. They lived and often worked as a
family, doing everything by hand. In fact, three quarters of Britain's population
lived in the countryside, and farming was the predominant occupation. With the
advent of industrialization, however, everything changed. The new enclosure
laws—which required that all grazing grounds be fenced in at the owner's
expense—had left many poor farmers bankrupt and unemployed, and machines
capable of huge outputs made small hand weavers redundant. As a result, there
were many people who were forced to work at the new factories. This required
them to move to towns and cities so that they could be close to their new jobs. It
also meant that they made less money for working longer hours. Add to this the
higher living expenses due to urbanization, and one can easily see that many
families' resources would be extremely stretched.

As a result, women and children were sent out to work, making up 75% of early
workers. Families were forced to do this, since they desperately needed money,
while factory owners were happy to employ women and children for a number of
reasons. First of all, they could be paid very little, and children could be
controlled more easily than adults, generally through violent beatings. Children
also had smaller hands, which were often needed to reach in among the parts of a
machine. Furthermore, employers found that children were more malleable, and
adapted to the new methods much better than adults did. Children were also sent
to work in mines, being small enough to get more coal and ore from the deep and
very often unsafe pits . They could also be forced to work as long as eighteen
hours each day. For these reasons, children as young as eight years old were
sent to factories—usually those which manufactured textiles—where they
became part of a growing and profitable business.

This unprecedented growth and profit was another social change that occurred
during the Industrial Revolution. The laissez-faire approach taken by the
government—and advocated by philosopher-economist Adam Smith—
allowed capitalism to flourish. There were little or no government regulations
imposed upon factory policies, and this allowed the wealthy, middle-class owners
to pursue whichever path was most profitable, regardless of the safety and well
being of their workers. This relentless pursuit of money caused another important
social change: the ultimate breakdown of the family unit.

Since workers, especially women and children, were labouring for up to eighteen
hours each day, there was very little family contact, and the only time that one
was at home was spent sleeping. People also had to share housing with other
families, which further contributed to the breakdown of the family unit. As a
result, children received very little education, had stunted growth, and were
sickly. They also grew up quite maladjusted, having never been taught how to
behave properly . The living conditions were indeed horrible; working families
often lived in slums with little sanitation, and infant mortality skyrocketed. During
the early Industrial Revolution, 50% of infants died before the age of two.

However, the social changes that took place were not all negative. Most classes
eventually benefited in some way from the huge profits that were being made,
and by 1820 most workers were making somewhat better wages. The "widespread
poverty and constant threat of mass starvation…lessened, [and] overall health
and material conditions of the populace clearly improved". The government,
however, did have to eventually intervene in order to put an end to child labour
and other unacceptable practices.

Although Britain had become a constitutional monarchy a century earlier, the

vast majority of the population remained disenfranchised from the electoral
system. As industrial strength grew along with a more forcible middle class,
electoral reform was a necessity to balance the new society's power structure.

The dissent and insubordination of the English workingmen reached its peak in
the mid- nineteenth century with Chartism, an ideology that called for political
reform in the country. Its name was based on the People's Charter, a document
written in 1838 by William Lovett and other radicals of the London Working
Men's Association, and adopted at a national convention of workingmen's
organizations in August of that year.

Chartism rapidly gained support among the poorer classes and in Northen
England, where economic depression was common and the people were upset
about the new Poor Law Amendment. The public attention was largely thanks to
Feargus O'Connor, a fervent radical with excellent oratory skills. However, the
movement soon lost its momentum when its leaders became divided over how
its demands were to be enforced. A petition to Parliament was rejected in July of
1839, and most of the movement's leaders were arrested by the end of the year
after the November clash between Chartists and the military at Newport, Wales.

O'Connor attempted to revive Chartism in 1840 by founding the National Charter

Association, but the people had generally lost interest, appeased by better
economic conditions, a revival of trade unionism, and the growth fo the the Anti-
Corn Law League (Chartism). After a mass demonstration and procession
planned for London during an economic crisis in 1848 failed to take place, the
Chartist movement faded away altogether. Decades later, in 1884, the majority of
males were finally granted the right to vote unit .

When a society finds that it must become an industrialized one, to build factories
bigger, with higher production value, to replace the connection they had with
Mother Nature with machines, it is also expected that society’s authors and
scholars will seek to define new philosophical ideals. For example, while
novelists like Charles Dickens warned society of the consequences associated
with abandoning human emotion and adopting the way of the machine in novels
like Hard Times, poets like William Wordsworth wondered where the introspective
artist belongs in a time known as the “Mechanical Age.” Surely, just as the Watts
steam engine sought to redefine expectations of an industrialized society, the
British literati searched for a new perspective inside Romanticism that would
explain the switch between appreciation of man and a newfound reliance on the
machine.

The most intellectual scholars and authors of England expressed an early interest
in the rationality and preciseness of science. This quickly changed, however,
when Romantics came to view this evolution of machine as a threat to the
individual (Gale). In “Preface to the Second Edition of ‘Lyrical Ballads’”,
Wordsworth proclaimed that as technology moves ever closer to being at the
forefront of culture, the mind is reduced “to a state of almost savage torpor.”
Similarly, Dickens’s Hard Times presented the reader with a very valid portrayal
of industrial towns that appear as wastelands inhabited by the working class.

Industrial Revolution in Victorian Period also had terrible social effects: abject
poverty, overcrowded dwellings, child labor, sexual exploitation, dirt and
drunkenness. It converted the Merry England into a sooty and squalid England.
Money values prevailed as a result of increased materialism of the age. Utilitarian
and Laissez faire became the popular philosophy of the time. The Utilitarian
emphasized the spiritual requirement of human being. Hundreds of thousands of
workers had migrated to industrial towns, where they made up a new kind of
working class. The institution of the factor came with many injustices including
harse working conditions, ruthless child labor, as well as smog and pollution.
Kellow Chesney described the situation as follows: Hideous slums, some of them
acres wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a
substantial part of the metropolis…In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more
people of all ages may in habit a single room.7 The children of the streets were
often orphans with no one to care for them. Charles Dickens wrote about these
children in his novel Oliver Twist . In this novel, Dickens condemns the comic but
also the bitter effects of industrialization on the 19th century’s England. The book
attract peoples’ attention to various contemporary social evils, including the
Poor’s asylum where the poor have to work, child labor and the recruitment of
children as criminals. Dickens often depicted the exploitation and repression of
the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed
such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of
this condition is in Hard times (1854) . Dickens’ only novel – length treatment of
the Industrial working class. In this work he uses both vitriol and satire to
illustrate law this marginalized social stratum was termed Hands by the factory
owners. As J.W. Beach pints out, Dickens in Hard Times attacks the
characteristics ideology of industrial England. Hard times shows Dickens’
antagonism to both utilitarianism and Laissez Faire. It is a passionate attack upon
the Victorian scientific and pragmatic education that prevalent in English school
of that period. Grad grind tells the school headmaster, in this life, we want
nothing but facts, plant nothing else, and root out everything else…this is the
principle on which I bring up my own children stick to the facts, sir. Mrs. Gaskell
was also against utilitarianism and exposed the cruelty of the Industrial system.
She portrayed the Victims of this new world with sympathy, but expressed fear
that working class would someday rise to overthrow the economic system that
had created them with such cruelty. She begin her writing career with the novel
‘Mary Barton’ in order to portray the suffering of the working class and to give
voice to Manchester’s poor. In her novel, she shows the class conscious attitude
of John Barton towards the mill owners. She portrays the conflict between rich
and the poor. Mrs. Gaskell wanted that there would be a change of heart before
any social change can become effective. Disraeli’s novel sybil also describes the
conditions of England. There are aristocrats, industrialization, the rural poor, the
working class etc. in the novel. It is a true social novel that highlights the division
of England between the rich and the poor. Other voices also testified powerfully
to the extremities of working class existence in Industrial England. Mayhew in his
work London Poor describe the miserable life of the working classes of Victorian
London. Poverty Knock, 19th century British folk song, catalogues the hardship
of the weaver’s job. William Booth’s in In Darkest England compares the dense
and gloomy urban slums to the equatorial forests of Africa. Thackrey in his
Magnum Opus, Vanity Fair, attacked the rank materialism of the period. In her
poem ‘the Cry of the Children’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning portrays the suffering
of children in mines and factories. Friedrich Engel’s ‘The Condition of the
Working Class in England’ is a masterpiece of committed reportage and a classic
of social history. He not only describes the horrors of Industrial growth, he also
wants to do something about them. In 1848, he teams up with Karl Marx in the
communist Manifest’ and asserts that revolution is the necessary response to the
inequality of Industrialist Capitalist society. Mathew Arnold shows in poem Dover
Beach [8]. How people suffered from spiritual hollowness and insensitiveness in
Victorian period. In the following lines …neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor
certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, he draws a very bleak and nihilistic view of
the worked he living in. He uses the sea as a symbol of this moral, religious and
spirituals decline. He laments here the loss of religious faith in the Victorian Age.
The receding waves in the sea are symbolic of the loss of moral values. He said
that there is no joy, beauty or peace in a materialistic worked in which there is
nothing but pain. His poem Dover Beach clearly brings out the impact of
Industrial Revolution on people’s mind. He writes:

The sea of faith

Was once, too, all the full, and round earth’s shore.
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar