InfoBritain - Travel Through History In The UK :
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution
Aberdulais Falls, site of one of the oldest industrial sites in Britain
The Industrial Revolution which occurred in Britain in the nineteenth century can be compared with the Neolithic Revolution which gathered momentum from the end of the last Ice Age. Agriculture and stock rearing slowly took the place of hunter gathering. This is estimated to have raised the maximum human population per square mile in ancient Britain from around four, to about twenty five. A similar change took place in the nineteenth century when agricultural methods improved dramatically. Agricultural equipment improved, and the open field system where peasants farmed scattered strips of land, was replaced by a system of enclosed farms, where a farmer held land in one block. (A small area of open field farm land survives at Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula.) Between 1740 and 1850 the population of England increased by over 150%, and over roughly the same period the proportion of people working in farming fell from about three quarters to one quarter. Now it was feasible to support millions of people living in towns, working in industrial concerns.
The improvement in farming methods explains a lot, but it still does not really get to the bottom of why the Industrial Revolution should have happened first in Britain. I've read some historians who suggest that is simply not possible to say why the great changes of the Industrial Revolution first took place in Britain. Others have had a go. The following suggestions were put forward by Harold Perkin in his book Origins of Modern English Society:
According to Perkin the explanation for industrialisation first taking off in Britain might involve the nature of British society, the crucial characteristics of which were: ownership of land, a wage earning culture, and a relatively mobile society. These factors working together may have created the right environment for an industrial revolution:
People owned their own land, and land could be freely bought, sold and leased. This meant that individuals seeking to enrich themselves through industrial schemes had the land available to do so. In other countries the only authority with enough influence to provide such areas of land was the state, not usually a source of business innovation.
Britain had a long tradition of wage earning. After the ravages of the Black Death, labour was in short supply, and former peasants tied to their lord could become more mobile and sell their services to the highest bidder. For some reason this did not happen to such an extent in other countries, which were equally ravaged by plague.
Royal Opera Shopping Arcade, London, opened 1818
British society tended to be relatively mobile. The main requirement for social prestige was land, and anyone able to afford land could become a gentleman. The famous Spencers of Althorp, for example, were originally peasant farmers, who through their good husbandry began to rise up the social scale. Social mobility such as this bred snobbery, a desire to emulate classes higher in society. This in turn fed the demand for goods which was so vital to the Industrial Revolution. Shopping became increasingly popular. Four fifths of industrial production in the period of the Industrial Revolution went to the home market, driven as it was by the desire to keep up with the Jones's. Some historians claim that society hardened in the nineteenth century so that it became harder for someone with ability but without a prosperous background to make their way. Thomas Hardy wrote a number of novels making this point. Other commentators take a rather different view. Perhaps this disagreement shows that as with much industrial history the actual picture is contradictory. There was a theoretical desire for people to work hard and make the best of themselves, and a practical resistance to them doing so. Certainly the desire for betterment had to be there to drive the demand for goods to show off wealth or social status. Without the desire for social mobility, and some actual social mobility, the Industrial Revolution would have been much slower to happen.
Meanwhile industrial innovation gathered pace. James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1769, and provided a crucial power source for the industrial society of the future. Communications improved with the building of canals and railways. The Bridgewater Canal built in 1761 showed that river transport need not be dependent on rivers. Within a few decades four thousand miles of canals were built serving all the industrial areas. The Railway Trials of 1830, won by George Stephenson's Rocket, launched the Railway Age, the first public railway running between Manchester and Liverpool. Isambard Kingdom Brunel soon followed on with the Great Western Railway, linking Bristol to London by 1841. The railways were the first mass transporation system, and produed a different, more mobile society. Following the Great Exhibition in 1851, which offered discounted rail travel, day tripping became the rage. The biggest collection of items related to railway history is held at the National Railway Museum in York. A reminder of the stations which once served even Britain's smallest communities can be seen at the Old Railway Station in Petworth. This is a hotel housed in the converted buildings of Petworth's railway station, which was closed in 1894. Rooms can be booked through InfoBritain - click on the link. A small part of Britain's steam network is preserved at the Bluebell Railway in Sussex.
Sea travel also became more dependable. The Royal Observatory had been plotting the course of the moon and stars since 1675 in an attempt to enhance navigation at sea. With John Harrison's invention in 1774 of a sea going clock, accurate navigation at sea was finally possible. The adoption of clocks to organise time was in itself a significant development. Life was no longer arranged loosely around the rising and setting sun, and the passage of the seasons. The industrial world was run according to orderly time pieces.
The Wool House, Loose, built around 1850
For some the Industrial Revolution brought riches, and in general wages rose. This general increase in wealth is clearly demonstrated by the huge increase in the interest shown in sports. The 1850s were the time when sport as we know it today really took off in Britain, and that could not have happened without money, and leisure time, to devote to sport. This idea that people lived better lives in the city does not correspond to the popular view of the Industrial Revolution. There is certainly much fanciful nostalgia about the rural life people lived before widespread industrialisation. This is true now, and was perhaps even more true during the Industrial Revolution itself. Villages were idealised - thousands of people would take steamer excursions from the industrial cities of South Wales to the quaint village of Clovelly in north Devon. Nineteenth century painters such as Gainsborough and Constable produced pictures of contented country people spending their time in rural Edens - many of these can be viewed at the Tate Britain. Public parks were created as idealised pockets of the old country landscape in the middle of the new towns and cities. John Nash remodelled Green Park and St James's Park as naturalistic landscapes, with public opening in 1826 and 1827 respectively. Parts of the John Nash designed Regent's Park opened to the public in 1835. The Derby Arboretum followed in 1840, opened by the industrialist Joseph Strutt. People began to value nature generally, and in 1847 London Zoo in Regent's Park opened fully to the public.
But the illusions of nostalgia aside the Industrial Revolution is well known for the sufferings of the new working classes in the towns. This social aspect of industrialisation is still controversial, and political. Some commentators talk of the evils of the laissez faire economy where people had to live or die by their efforts in a ruthlessly competitive society. For some historians this was the time when social class came into being, and struggle between the classes began. But there are other views. Frank Musgrove, Professor of History at Manchester University, points out that the trade union movement was originally a minority movement. He suggests that before the 1890s it was not associated with oppressed or underpaid workers, but with well paid, skilled workers who wanted to protect their advantage. They set about creating closed shops. Musgrove also suggests that nineteenth century labour unrest did not involve the new industrial working class. The people who actually turned to violence were the small scale pre-industrial capitalists who had been left out or were trying to get in to the new order. These people were not "working class." The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 is often held as a crucial event in the struggle between the ruling and working classes. In reality the Peterloo meeting was organised in Manchester mainly by disgruntled hand-loom weavers, independent entrepreneurs who were angered by high taxes, corrupt bankers, and less than honest MPs. They were not interested in the working class, which was ironic when the cotton spinners of Manchester in 1819 were suffering greatly.
Of course this argument turns on who you classify as working class. A detailed study of the Industrial Revolution will show that there was no single "working class." In the Midlands particularly there was often a characteristic arrangement of subcontracting. Independent tradesmen would often work in small workshops, taking on finishing work from manufactures. These people would set their own hours and hire their own teams. Even in large concerns workers often had considerable autonomy. Marie B Rowlands, an expert on Midlands history describes in The West Midlands from AD1000, how the bridgestoker who worked at the top of a furnace in an iron foundary took on his own team, as did the founder who worked at the bottom of the furnace. There was not a working class, but many working classes, with each one finding its own identity.
The first real "working class" organisation as it might be recognised today grew up not in the industrial towns and cities but in the countryside. The end of the 1820s and the beginning of the 1830s saw riots amongst disaffected agricultural workers in southern and eastern England, the so called "Swing" riots. Agricultural workers were earning far less than their counterparts in the towns. Life was certainly hard in the factories, and we can all be thankful that laws were eventually passed making them better places to work in. But in the nineteenth century the people who worked in factories generally did not riot. It was the people excluded from them who did. The famous Tolpuddle Martyrs are often thought of as the first working men to organise themselves to try and better their lot. The Martyrs were agricultural workers in rural Dorset. They were not factory workers.
Other areas of Britain also show how complicated the true picture is, and how inaccurate many of the popular views of this period are. In Wales people within the new industrial society did turn to violent protest. The whole of the Welsh coalfield was at a standstill in 1822, 1830 and 1832. Even here though it is necessary to tread carefully: the idea that people were forced to leave a rural idyll for a bleak life in mines or factories is as false in Wales as it elsewhere in the country. As Philip Jenkins says in his History of Modern Wales: "...even the harsh conditions of Aberdare or Tredegar offered economic and social opportunities far greater than the highly limited world of rural Wales." (P288) When strikes did come in the Welsh industrial areas they were rarely of the type we think of today. Certainly in the early part of the nineteenth century most unrest took the form of food riots in response to crop failures, and the sale of crops outside Wales. A Dowlais strike in 1853 was one of the few to appear in the modern guise of seeking to improve wages and conditions. Sometimes the point of view of the historian dictates the picture you see: a left wing historian will paint a picture of a downtrodden working class slowly organising itself to resist. Those hand loom weavers who some see as independent entrepreneurs will be portrayed as heroic artisans resisting the power of capital. On the other hand a historian such as David Williams, who had an instinctive dislike for industrial radicals, will point out the lack of foresight and organisation amongst the leaders of these early "class struggles."
It wasn't until the 1880s that we begin to see labour disputes as they are known today. One of the first triumphs of organised labour in an industrial concern took place at the Bryant and May match factory in the East End of London. Phosphorous fumes filled the premises, and ventilation was poor. Many workers as a result developed "phossy jaw", a form of skin or bone cancer. In July 1888 a Matchmakers Union was formed, and a three week strike resulted in the company conceding to most of the union's demands. Two years previously around 10 000 people had marched down Pall Mall to a meeting of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square. The unemployed were jeered as they passed the Reform Club, and then again as they passed the Carlton Club in St James's. The club men soon found paving stones and other missiles flying in through the windows of their smart clubs. Sometimes you wonder, given the terrible conditions in some factories, and the callousness often shown by the wealthy towards those less fortunate, why the reaction wasn't even more dramatic, and why full scale revolution did not occur. It could be suggested that revolution did not happen because in the end more people did well out of the Industrial Revolution than not. As A.N Wilson puts it: "...for many, even in the working class, and particularly in the upper working and lower middle classes, the opportunity of self-betterment, self-promotion, even against a cruel atmosphere of risk, was preferable to nihilism and ideas culled from foreigners with funny names." (The Victorians P446)
Loose Village, Kent
Overall then the picture is more complicated than is usually portrayed. Certainly the more I read about the Industrial Revolution the more uncertain I become about simple conclusions. Visiting the village of Loose in Kent the contradictions of this crucial time in history came into focus for me. The village of Loose owes much of its present appearance to the Industrial Revolution, not a period well known for creating beautiful villages. Nevertheless the lovely village of Loose, and the other villages of the Loose Valley, grew up around the mills which harnessed water power from the Medway. Loose seems to hark back to better, simpler times, when in fact it was the dawn of the modern world that brought much of it into being. The same is true of the beautiful town of Lavenham in Suffolk. Lavenham was an industrial town by the fifteenth century, producing textile goods. Rich clothiers hired hundreds of workers, and there was an early form of division of labour as different people specialised in different parts of the manufacturing process. Power was provided by water. Lavenham like Loose was an industrial town, but it looks like all that industrialism took away. History is a strange and winding path, and sometimes brings back what it threatens to destroy. I said earlier that clocks brought a new regularity to life during the Industrial Revolution: the eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope wrote at the beginning of the industrial period that man now claimed to "Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, correct old time,and regulate the sun." But he also wrote "'Tis with our judgements as our watches, none go just alike, just as each believes his own." Clocks for Pope spoke of both the regularity and continuing irregularity of the world.
It is sometimes claimed that the passing of the old village society resulted in a more impersonal society, and in some respects this must be true. Charles Dickens, perhaps the ninteenth century's best known novelist, was a very direct and personal writer, claiming in A Christmas Carol to be in the spirit at his readers elbow. Perhaps a writer of this nature was needed in the new impersonal towns. On the other hand it is quite obvious that new communities replaced the old. Workers in the towns lived in terraced housing, a style of housing which actually became a by-word for community when the time came to pull them down in the twentieth century. Idealistic capitalists such as George Cadbury and William Hesketh Lever tried to recreate communities by building villages at Bournville and Port Sunlight, but perhaps a few isolated attempts to recreate the past are not really relevant, when communities for most of us can only be found in the modern world. The growth of new styles of communities has continued, and the most recent industrial revolution has been in communications. In 1969 the United States Defense Department created the "Arpanet" which made its first international connection in 1973, and then developed into the internet. The internet has fostered its own communities which are now able to grow free of the physical limits of distance. Like minded people, wherever they may be, are more able to come together. Perhaps the internet at its best can be in the spirit at your elbow.
A commentary on the Industrial Revolution cannot really end without mentioning the modern preoccupation with global warming, which it has been suggested has been caused by industrialisation. During the Industrial Revolution itself no one worried about this, since the world was living through the general drop in temperatures known as the Mini Ice Age. Temperatures now seem to increasing in an unusual way, and there is much debate about the possible human role in this change. For a fuller discussion of this subject, see our page A History Of The Weather And Climate Change.