Was the industrial revolution a calamity for the workers? Not when you consider what came before

‘HELL UPON EARTH’? 

THE TRUE NATURE 

OF THE VICTORIAN CITY 

The Victorian city is often painted as a place of squalor and misery for the working class, where hordes of downtrodden workers were crammed together in dehumanising conditions, lacking the proper freedoms that modern people have come to expect from metropolitan living. Emma Griffin, author of Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, published by Yale University Press, investigates the reality of Engels’ assertion that working class life in a newly industrialised Victorian city was ‘Hell Upon Earth’. By contrasting the common experience of urban life to the reality of the rural struggle that migrants left behind, Griffin discovers that the city offered its inhabitants a host of opportunities, securities and freedoms that the countryside simply couldn’t.

Victorian cities have received a very bad press. Take Dickens’ famous creation, Coketown in Hard Times – a mill-town set in the north of England and probably inspired by a visit to Preston. Coketown was depicted as a miserable place filled with identical and uninspired brick buildings, all covered with soot, thanks to the coal burned in its many factories. Engels’ account of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester was even more uncompromising: a place of dirt, squalid over-crowding, and exploitation. The historic heart of Manchester he described as a place of ‘filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness’, adding that it was hard to describe ‘the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation and health … which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants… If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air – and such air! – he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither’. It was, quite simply, ‘Hell upon Earth’.

Yet in their haste to describe the drawbacks of urban living, historians have arguably overlooked the advantages that living in the city offered, even to those who lived in the slums. A remarkable collection of autobiographies written by working men and women in the nineteenth century provides a very different slant on city life to that offered by such iconic writers as Dickens and Engels. These writers do not mention ugly buildings or soot. Nor do they describe their cities as ‘hell upon earth’. They present them as places of social and intellectual freedom. It may jar with what we think they ought to be saying, but it is a verdict that we ought at least to consider.

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Read more: yalebooksblog.co.uk

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

by Amanda Vickery

The dominant montage of 19th-century Britain on film and TV is one of opposites: industrial exploitation and proletarian despair contrasted with a rural idyll of wholesome work and lingering in frothy meadows beyond the reach of the railway. The dark satanic mill versus Lark Rise to Candleford.

Frederich Engels drew on two years' observation of living conditions in Manchester in the early 1840s to produce The Condition of the Working Class in England, a paradigm-setting account of the material and spiritual losses that accompanied a sudden transition to industrial society. This fable of proletarian immiseration underscored left-leaning historythereafter. Arnold Toynbee, who coined the term "industrial revolution" in the 1880s saw it as a "disastrous and terrible event" creating vast wealth for a few through the degradation of the many. The argument was reiterated by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, and fleshed out by the pioneering popular historians John and Barbara Hammond.

The pessimist school did not hold the field unchallenged, however. Victorian writers such as Harriet Martineau, Edward Baines and Andrew Ure saw industrial work lifting a generation from grinding rural poverty. Meanwhile economic historians such as John H Clapham in the 1920s drew on the new science of statistics to make clear that wages had "risen markedly". The standard of living debate polarised the postwar history profession, and was still live in academic journals when EP Thompson published in 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, a bible of labour history.

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Read more: www.theguardian.com