The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution

Focus Questions:
What effects did the Industrial Revolution have on urban life, social classes, family
life, and standards of living?
What were working conditions like in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution,
and what efforts were made to improve them?
The Industrial Revolution transfigured the social life of Europe and the world.
Although much of Europe remained bound by its traditional ways, the social impact
of the Industrial Revolution was already being felt in the first half of the nineteenth
century, and future avenues of growth were becoming apparent. Vast changes in the
number of people and where they lived were already dramatically evident.

Population Growth
Population increases had begun in the eighteenth century, but they became dramatic
in the nineteenth century. In 1750, the total European population stood at an
estimated140 million; by 1800, it had increased to 187 million and, by 1850, to 266
million, almost twice its 1750 level. The key to the expansion of population was the
decline in death rates evident throughout Europe. Two major factors explain this
decline: fewer premature deaths and better nutrition. The number of deaths from
famines, epidemics, and war dropped substantially. Major epidemic diseases in
particular, such as plague and smallpox, became less common, although small-scale
epidemics did occur. The ordinary death rate also declined as a general increase in the
food supply, already evident in the agricultural revolution of Britain in the late
eighteenth century, spread to more areas. More food enabled a greater number of
people to be better fed and therefore more resistant to disease.

The Growth of Cities

Cities and towns grew dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century, a
phenomenon related to industrialization. Cities had traditionally been centers for
princely courts, government and military offices, churches, and commerce. By 1850,
especially in Great Britain and Belgium, they were rapidly becoming places for
manufacturing and industry. With the steam engine, entrepreneurs could locate their
manufacturing plants in urban centers where they had ready access to transportation
facilities and influxes of people from the countryside looking for work. In 1800, Great
Britain had one major city, London, with a population of one million and six cities
that were home to 50,000 to 100,000 people. Fifty years later, London’s population
had swelled to 2,363,000, and there were nine cities with populations over 100,000
and eighteen with populations between 50,000 and 100,000. More than 50 percent of
the British population now lived in towns and cities.
Urban Living Conditions in the Early Industrial Era The dramatic growth of cities in
the first half of the nineteenth century produced miserable living conditions for many
of the inhabitants. Of course, this had been true for centuries in European cities, but
the rapid urbanization associated with the Industrial Revolution intensified the
problems and made these wretched conditions all the more apparent. Wealthy,
middle-class inhabitants, as usual, insulated themselves as best they could, often
living in suburbs or the outer ring of the city where they could have individual houses
and gardens. In the inner ring of the city stood the small row houses, some with
gardens, of the artisans and lower middle class. Finally, located in the center of most
industrial towns were the row houses of the industrial workers. This report on
working-class housing in the British city of Birmingham in 1843 gives an idea of the
general conditions they faced:
The courts [of working-class row houses] are extremely numerous; . . . a very large
portion of the poorer classes of the inhabitants reside in them. . . . The courts vary in
the number of the houses which they contain, from four to twenty, and most of these
houses are three stories high, and built, as it is termed, back to back. There is a wash-
house, an ash-pit, and a privy at the end, or on one side of the court, and not
unfrequently one or more pigsties and heaps of manure. Generally speaking, the
privies in the old courts are in a most filthy condition. Many which we have inspected
were in a state which renders it impossible for us to conceive how they could be used;
they were without doors and overflowing with filth.
Rooms were not large and were frequently overcrowded, as this government report of
1838 revealed: ‘‘I entered several of the tenements. In one of them, on the ground
floor, I found six persons occupying a very small room, two in bed, ill with fever. In
the room above this were two more persons in one bed, ill with fever.’’ Another
report said, ‘‘There were 63 families where there were at least five persons to one
bed; and there were some in which even six were packed in one bed, lying at the top
and bottom---children and adults.’’
Sanitary conditions in these towns were appalling. Due to the lack of municipal
direction, city streets were often used as sewers and open drains: ‘‘In the centre of this
street is a gutter, into which potato parings, the refuse of animal and vegetable matters
of all kinds, the dirtywater from the washing of clothes and of the houses, are all
poured, and there they stagnate and putrefy.’’3 Unable to deal with human excrement,
cities in the new industrial era smelled horrible and were extraordinarily unhealthy.
The use of coal blackened towns and cities with soot was well described by Charles
Dickens in one of his novels: ‘‘a long suburb of red brick houses---some with patches
of garden ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves,
and coarse rank flowers; and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under
the hot breath of kiln and furnace.’’ Towns and cities were fundamentally death traps.
As deaths outnumbered births in most large cities in the first half of the nineteenth
century, only a constant flow of people from rural areas kept them alive and growing.

Urban Reformers
To many of the well-to-do middle classes, this situation presented a clear danger to
society. Were not these masses of workers, sunk in crime, filth, disease, and
immorality, a potential threat to their own well-being? Might not the masses be
organized and used by unscrupulous demagogues to overthrow the established order?
Some observers, however, wondered if the workers could be held responsible for their
fate. One of the best of a new breed of urban reformers was Edwin Chadwick (1800--
1890). Chadwick became obsessed with eliminating the poverty and squalor of the
metropolitan areas. As secretary of the Poor Law Commission, he initiated a
passionate search for detailed facts about the living conditions of the working classes.
After three years of investigation, Chadwick summarized the results in his Report on
the Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, published in 1842. In it he
concluded that ‘‘the various forms of epidemic, endemic, and other disease’’ were
directly caused by the ‘‘atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and
vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close overcrowded dwellings
[prevailing] amongst the population in every part of the kingdom.’’ Such conditions,
he argued, could be eliminated. As to the means, ‘‘The primary and most important
measures, and at the same time the most practicable, and within the recognized
province of public administration, are drainage, the removal of all refuse of
habitations, streets, and roads, and the improvement of the supplies of water.’’5 In
other words, Chadwick was advocating a system of modern sanitary reforms
consisting of efficient sewers and a supply of piped water. Six years after his report
and largely due to his efforts, Britain’s first Public Health Act created the National
Board of Health, which was empowered to form local boards that would establish
modern sanitary systems.

New Social Classes:

The Industrial Middle Class
The rise of industrial capitalism added a new group to the middle class. The
bourgeoisie or middle class was not new; it had existed since the emergence of cities
in the Middle Ages. Originally, the bourgeois was a burgher or town dweller---a
merchant, official, artisan, lawyer, or man of letters---who enjoyed a special set of
rights from the charter of his town. As wealthy townspeople bought land, the term
bourgeois came to include people involved in commerce, industry, and banking as
well as professionals, such as lawyers, teachers, and physicians, and government
officials at varying levels. At the lower end of the economic scale were master
craftspeople and shopkeepers. Lest we make the industrial middle class too much of
an abstraction, we need to look at who the new industrial entrepreneurs actually were.
These were the people who constructed the factories, purchased the machines, and
figured out where the markets were. Their qualities included resourcefulness, single-
mindedness, resolution, initiative, vision, ambition, and often greed. As Jedediah
Strutt, a cotton manufacturer said, ‘‘Getting of money . . . is the main business of the
life of men.’’ But this was not an easy task. The early industrial entrepreneurs were
called on to superintend an enormous array of functions that are handled today by
teams of managers; they raised capital, determined markets, set company objectives,
organized the factory and its labor, and trained supervisors who could act for them.
The opportunities for making money were great, but the risks were also tremendous.
By 1850, in Britain at least, the kind of traditional entrepreneurship that had fueled the
Industrial Revolution was declining and being replaced by a new business aristocracy.
This new generation of entrepreneurs stemmed from the professional and industrial
middle classes, especially as sons inherited successful businesses established by their
fathers. Increasingly, the new industrial entrepreneurs---the bankers and owners of
factories and mines---came to amass much wealth and play an important role
alongside the traditional landed elites of their societies. The Industrial Revolution
began at a time when the agrarian world was still largely dominated by landed elites.
As members of the new bourgeoisie bought great estates and acquired social
respectability, they also sought political power, and in the course of the nineteenth
century, their wealthiest members would merge with those old elites.

New Social Classes:

Workers in the Industrial Age
At the same time that the members of the industrial middle class were seeking to
reduce the barriers between themselves and the landed elite, they were also trying to
separate themselves from the laboring classes below them. The working class was
actually a mixture of groups in the first half of the nineteenth century. Factory
workers would eventually form an industrial proletariat, but they did not yet constitute
a majority of the working class in any major city, even in Britain. According to the
1851 census in Britain, while there were 1.8 million agricultural laborers and 1
million domestic servants, there were only 811,000 workers in the cotton and woolen
industries, and one-third of these were still working in small workshops or in their
own homes.

Working Conditions for the Industrial Working Class

Workers in the new industrial factories faced wretched working conditions.
Unquestionably, in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, ‘‘places of work,’’
as early factories were called, were dreadful. Work hours ranged from twelve to
sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with a half hour for lunch and dinner. There was
no security of employment and no minimum wage. The worst conditions were
endured by workers in the cotton mills, where temperatures were especially
debilitating. One report noted that ‘‘in the cotton-spinning work, these creatures are
kept, fourteen hours in each day, locked up, summer and winter, in a heat of from
eighty to eighty-four degrees.’’ Mills were also dirty, dusty, and unhealthy: Not only
is there not a breath of sweet air in these truly infernal scenes, but . . . there is the
abominable and pernicious stink of the gas to assist in the murderous effects of the
heat. In addition to the noxious effluvia of the gas, mixed with the steam, there are the
dust, and what is called cotton-flyings or fuz, which the unfortunate creatures have to
inhale; and . . . the notorious fact is that well constitutioned men are rendered old and
past labour at forty years of age, and that children are rendered decrepit and deformed,
and thousands upon thousands of them slaughtered by consumptions [wasting away of
body tissues, especially the lungs], before they arrive at the age of sixteen. Conditions
in the coal mines were also harsh. The introduction of steam power in the coal mines
meant only that steam-powered engines mechanically lifted coal to the top. Inside the
mines, men still bore the burden of digging the coal out while horses, mules, women,
and children hauled coal carts on rails to the lift. Dangers abounded in coal mines;
cave-ins, explosions, and gas fumes (called ‘‘bad air’’) were a way of life. The
cramped conditions---tunnels often did not exceed 3 or 4 feet in

Women and Children in the Mines.

Women and children were often employed in the factories and mines of the early
nineteenth century. In 1842, the British Mines Act forbade the use of children
younger than thirteen and women of any age in the mines.
Child labor was not new, but in the early Industrial Revolution, it was exploited more
systematically.
Both children and women were employed in large numbers in early factories and
mines. Children had been an important part of the family economy in preindustrial
times, working in the fields or carding and spinning wool at home with the growth of
the cottage industry. In the Industrial Revolution, however, child labor was exploited
more than ever and in a considerably more systematic fashion. The owners of cotton
factories appreciated certain features of child labor. Children had an especially
delicate touch as spinners of cotton. Their smaller size made it easier for them to
crawl under machines to gather loose cotton. Moreover, children were more easily
accustomed to factory work. Above all, children represented a cheap supply of labor.
In 1821, half the British population was under twenty years of age. Hence children
made up a particularly abundant supply of labor, and they were paid only one sixth to
one-third of what a man was paid. In the cotton factories in 1838, children under
eighteen made up 29 percent of the workforce; children as young as seven worked
twelve to fifteen hours per day, six days a week, in the cotton mills. By 1830, women
and children made up two-thirds of the cotton industry’s labor. However, as the
number of children employed declined under the Factory Act of 1833, their places
were taken by women, who came to dominate the labor forces of the early factories.
Women made up 50 percent of the labor force in textile (cotton and woolen) factories
before 1870. They were mostly unskilled labor and were paid half or less of what men
received. Excessive working hours for women were outlawed in 1844, but only in
textile factories and mines; not until 1867 were they outlawed in craft workshops.

CONCLUSION
The Industrial Revolution became one of the major forces of change in
the nineteenth century as it led Western civilization into the industrial
era that has characterized the modern world. Beginning in Britain, its
spread to the Continent and the new American nation ensured its
growth and domination of the Western world. The Industrial Revolution
seemed to prove to Europeans the underlying assumption of the
Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century---that human beings
were capable of dominating nature. By rationally manipulating the
material environment for human benefit, people could create new
levels of material prosperity and produce machines not dreamed of in
their wildest imaginings. Lost in the excitement of the Industrial
Revolution were the voices that pointed to the dehumanization of the
workforce and the alienation from one’s work, one’s associates,
oneself, and the natural world. The Industrial Revolution also
transformed the social world of Europe. The rise of an industrial
proletariat produced a whole new force for change. The development
of a wealthy industrial middle class presented a challenge to the long-
term hegemony of landed wealth. Though that wealth had been
threatened by the fortunes of commerce, it had never been
overturned. But the new bourgeoisie was more demanding.

Great Britain: The Victorian Age

Like Russia, Britain avoided revolutionary disturbances in 1848, although for
quite different reasons. The Reform Act of 1832 had opened the door to
political representation for the industrial middle class, ushering in a period of
general contentment and stability, and in the 1860s, Britain’s liberal
parliamentary system demonstrated once again its ability to make both social
and political reforms that kept the country stable and prosperous. One of the
reasons for Britain’s stability was its continuing economic growth. After 1850,
middle-class prosperity was at last coupled with some improvements for the
working classes. Real wages for laborers increased more than 25 percent
between 1850 and 1870. The British feeling of national pride was well
reflected in Queen Victoria, whose reign from 1837 to 1901 was the longest in
English history. Victoria had nine children and, when she died at age eighty-
one, thirty-seven great-grandchildren. Her sense of duty and moral
respectability reflected the attitudes of her age, which has ever since been
known as the Victorian Age. Politically, this was an era of somewhat uneasy
stability as the aristocratic and upper-middle-class representatives who
dominated Parliament blurred party lines by their internal strife and shifting
positions. One important issue was the extension of voting rights. The Tory
(Conservative Party) leader in Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli (1804--1881),
became a supporter of voting reform, primarily because he thought he could
win over the newly enfranchised groups to his party. The Reform Act of 1867
was an important step toward the democratization of Britain. By lowering the
monetary requirements for voting (taxes paid or income earned), it
enfranchised many male urban workers. The number of voters increased from
about one million to slightly over two million. Although Disraeli believed that
this would benefit the Conservatives, industrial workers helped produce a
huge Liberal victory in 1868.
REALISM: CHARLES DICKENS AND AN IMAGE OF HELL ON
EARTH
Charles Dickens was one of Britain’s greatest novelists. While he
realistically portrayed the material, social, and psychological milieu of
his time, an element of Romanticism still pervaded his novels. This is
evident in this selection from The Old Curiosity Shop, in which his
description of the English mill town of
Birmingham takes on the imagery of Dante’s Hell.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop
A long suburb of red brick houses,---some with patches of garden
ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking
leaves, and coarse rank flowers; and where the struggling vegetation
sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making
them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than
in the town itself,---a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came by
slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was
seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring;
where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant
pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black roadside.
Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its
dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a
dismal gloom. On every side, and as far as the eye could see into the
heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting
that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror
of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the
light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the
wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house
roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures;
clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to
time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground
tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there
appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others
that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but
yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in
attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fires, begged upon the
road, or scowled halfnaked from the doorless houses. Then came more
of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their
wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning to the right and
left, with the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never
ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate,
shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a
dense dark cloud. But night-time in this dreadful spot!---night, when
the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spurted up its
flame; and places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-
hot, with figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling
to one another with hoarse cries---night, when the noise of every
strange machine was aggravated by the darkness; when the people
near them looked wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed
laborers paraded in the roads, or clustered by torchlight round their
leaders, who told them in stern language of their wrongs, and urged
them on by frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed
with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women
who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror and
destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own---night, when
carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease
and death had been busy with the living crops); or when orphans cried,
and distracted women shrieked and followed in their wake. . . .
Q What image of Birmingham do you get from this selection by
Dickens? Why is it so powerful? What does it reveal about Dickens
himself and the roles European writers took in the reform of
nineteenth-century society?

Realism in Literature
The belief that the world should be viewed realistically, frequently
expressed after 1850, was closely related to the materialistic outlook.
The term Realism was first employed in 1850 to describe a new style of
painting and soon spread to literature. The literary Realists of the mid-
nineteenth century were distinguished by their deliberate rejection of
Romanticism.

The literary Realists wanted to deal with ordinary characters from

actual life rather than Romantic heroes in unusual settings. They also
sought to avoid flowery and sentimental language by using careful
observation and accurate description, an approach that led them to
eschew poetry in favor of prose, primarily in the form of the novel.
Realists often combined their interest in everyday life with a searching
examination of social questions. The leading fiction writer of the 1850s
and 1860s, the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (1821--1880), perfected
the Realist novel. William Thackeray (1811--1863) wrote the
prototypical Realist novel in Britain: Vanity Fair, published in 1848.
Subtitled A Novel Without a Hero, the book deliberately flaunted
Romantic conventions. A novel, Thackeray said, should ‘‘convey as
strongly as possible the sentiment of reality as opposed to a tragedy or
poem, which may be heroical.’’ Perhaps the greatest of the Victorian
novelists was Charles Dickens (1812--1870), whose realistic novels
focusing on the lower and middle classes in Britain’s early industrial
age became extraordinarily popular. His descriptions of the urban poor
and the brutalization of human life were vividly realistic.
The ‘‘Woman Question’’: The Role of Women
The ‘‘woman question’’ was the term used to identify the debate over
the role of women in society. In the nineteenth century, women
remained legally inferior, economically dependent, and largely defined
by family and household roles. Many women still aspired to the ideal of
femininity popularized by writers and poets. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
poem The Princess expressed it well:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
This traditional characterization of the sexes, based on gender-defined
social roles, was elevated to the status of universal male and female
attributes in the nineteenth century, due largely to the impact of the
Industrial Revolution on the family. As the chief family wage earners,
men worked outside the home while women were left with the care of
the family, for which they were paid nothing. Of course, the ideal did
not always match reality, especially for the lower classes, where the
need for supplemental income drove women to do ‘‘sweated’’ work.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, marriage was viewed as
the only honorable and available career for most women. While the
middle classes glorified the ideal of domesticity for most women
marriage was a matter of economic necessity. The lack of meaningful
work and the lower wages paid to women made it difficult for single
women to earn a living. Most women chose to marry, which was
reflected in the increase in marriage rates and a decline in illegitimacy
rates in the course of the nineteenth century.
Birthrates also dropped significantly at this time. A very important
factor in the evolution of the modern family was the decline in the
number of offspring born to the average woman. The change was not
necessarily due to new technological products. Although the invention
of vulcanized rubber in the 1840s made possible the production of
condoms and diaphragms, they were not widely used as contraceptive
devices until the era of WorldWar I. Some historians maintain that the
change in attitude that led parents to deliberately limit the number of
offspring was more important than the method used. While some
historians attribute increased birth control to more widespread use of
coitus interruptus, or male withdrawal before ejaculation, others have
emphasized the ability of women to restrict family size through
abortion and even infanticide or abandonment. That a change in
attitude occurred was apparent in the emergence of a movement to
increase awareness of birth control methods. Europe’s first birth
control clinic, founded by Dr. Aletta Jacob, opened in Amsterdam in
1882. The Middle-Class Family The family was the central institution of
middle-class life. Men provided the family income, while women
focused on household and child care. The use of domestic servants in
many middle-class homes, made possible by an abundant supply of
cheap labor, reduced the amount of time middle-class women had to
spend on household chores. At the same time, by reducing the number
of children in the family, mothers could devote more time to child care
and domestic leisure. The middle-class family fostered an ideal of
togetherness. The Victorians codified the family Christmas, with its yule
log, Christmas tree, songs, and exchange of gifts. The education of
middle-class females in domestic crafts, singing, and piano playing
prepared them for their function of providing a proper environment for
home recreation. The Working-Class Family Women in working-class
families were more accustomed to hard work. Daughters in working-
class families were expected to work until they married; even after
marriage, they often did piecework at home to support the family. For
the children of the working class, childhood was over by the age of nine
or ten when they became apprentices or were employed in odd jobs.
Between 1890 and 1914, however, family patterns among the working
class began to change.