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Liberalism and
Reform: The Industrial Revolution in England Due to the liberal economic policies
and Enlightenment ideals of eighteenth century England, enough capital became
available in the right intellectual climate for investments in new
technologies to lead to the invention of the steam engine. Mechanization on
the factory floor enabled businesses to produce cheap goods and then
transport them far more quickly to markets all over the world. Attracted by
the demand for factory jobs, poor people moved to new industrial centers
ill-equipped to house them. Factory owners felt no responsibility for
providing safe working or decent living conditions for the workers, and
instead they colluded to keep wages artificially low and maximize their
profits. Radicalized by the dangerous conditions of the factories, long work
hours, and unhealthy living conditions, the workers began to demonstrate for
their fair share of the astronomical profits earned by the owners. Through
street protests and, eventually, strikes, the workers pressured Parliament to
approve reform legislation that would improve working conditions, shorten
hours, eliminate child labor, and grant higher wages. Influenced by images
and stories by liberal writers about poverty, the voting population began to
see the injustice and they chose to vote to make it right. Although the
reform process moved slowly, eventually the workers convinced Parliament to
accede to their demands, and by the end of the 19th century, they had gained
the right to vote. In this way, England avoided a social revolution. With a new age of
enlightened scientific thought combined with a liberal government which
encouraged people to make enough profit to create venture capital, it was
possible for Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries to
develop a sequence of innovative technologies which revolutionized the
industrial economy (The
Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England).
Visionaries of the British Agricultural Revolution such as Jethro Tull
applied Enlightenment science to develop efficient methods of farming which
expanded the field of agricultural technologies. (Jethro Tull) In addition,
with serfdom having been abolished, newly independent farmers looked for new
ways to improve food production, resulting in a rapid expansion of population
(Causes
of the Industrial Revolution). Due to this
population boom, as well as the clearing of British forests for farmland,
England was faced with a paucity of wood supplies and was forced to find a
new source of power in coal (Capital
1700-1750 and the Growth of Wealth). The capital
necessary to invest in such new innovations came from a carefully structured
economy which gradually increased the wealth of Britain (Capital
1700-1750 and the Growth of Wealth). Thus the
government guided the wealthy liberals to invest their steadily increasing
capital in the application of Enlightenment scientific thought. With the
booming population and capital and the government’s aid, Britain was able to
sustain a system of steady economic progress (Essay
on Population 1798). Through inventive tactics and a
desire to improve business and income rates, England developed a series of
innovative solutions to increasing population and demand for power, resulting
in the abrupt inception of the industrial revolution. As a result of England’s respect for
science, culture, and capital, the ideal conditions were created for
entrepreneurs to amass great amounts of wealth that they could invest in
ambitious endeavors. While the population grew exponentially and a shortage
of power obstructed expansion, individuals searched for profitable and
innovative solutions. As wood could no longer satisfy the needs of society,
individuals explored alternative sources of fuel which led to production more
efficient mining techniques. For instance, the coal industry required a
mechanism that would allow owners to extract coal from deeper areas filled
with water, so aspiring engineers required the aid of newly established banks
that made use of the large amounts of venture capital accrued by the rich to
boost their profits. (Employment
of Capital) (Banking)
However, the engineers needed a stronger material that could withstand the
huge force inside of the engine, so the blast furnace was designed to extract
impurities of brittle iron. (Wikipedia-Blast
Furnace) The discovery of coke proved to be an essential
aspect of the industrial revolution because it was able to creat extremely
high temperatures which separated the impurities from molten iron. The creation of the steam-powered
engine in 1710 by Thomas Newcomen provided the basis for development of the
industrial revolution. (Wikipedia,
The Free Encyclopedia) Prior to Newcomen’s invention,
mining depth and efficiency were limited by flooding. However, the engine
made it possible for mining depth to be increased by pumping water more
efficiently. Beginning with James Watt’s steam engine, which increased
efficiency through the addition of a second condensing chamber, people
applied this innovation to numerous areas of industry and increased the
productivity of factories and transportation. For instance, winding gear made it
possible for miners to travel up and down mines on a shaft to transport coal
easily and safely. Also, the spinning mill utilized innovative line shafting
to give power to the spinning looms which greatly advanced the textile
industry by increasing the productivity of the textile factories. (BBC
Homepage) Prior to this industrialization, people in the
textile industry worked from home, cleaning, combing, spinning, dying, and
weaving the raw material slowly and inefficiently. (The Open Door Website) The
new machine-powered spinning looms allowed the workers to produce cotton much
faster, and since factories could produce the same quality of cotton
clothing, much of the general public could afford these luxuries. As the
textile industry and the steam engine evolved, more innovations developed,
specifically in the field of transportation. The steam engine and advancements in
building materials provided the basis for more efficient transportation. The
construction of pioneering railroads, bridges, and means of shipping that
utilized the steam engine largely contributed to the more effective
transportation and expansion of English commerce. (BBC-
Iron Bridge) As a result of the determination and
brilliance of George Stevenson, the mighty engine-powered train was
developed. This new train, which reached speeds of twenty miles an hour,
allowed for the rapid delivery of goods. (BBC-
Rocket British History in Depth) In addition, the
further application of the steam engine to sea travel by Robert Fulton
allowed English goods to be transported to even more remote locations across
the globe. As the demand for English goods increased and global markets
expanded, more and more citizens of the countryside flocked to the new
industrial centers. Without the venture capital of the wealthy and the
establishment of a national bank, no ambitious engineers could have
prevailed. In summary, while the brilliant innovations transformed the
production of goods, they also would alter the political organization of
England. The workers of England, unlike workers
in many other countries, had decided not to revolt and try to get all their
demands at once because they still believed the system could work if they
tried to get their rights gradually. Then within the next hundred years, they
accomplished the transformation of the political landscape in England. Throughout this period of reform, it
must be remembered that the workers had come to the city a life in the
countryside which was little better than serfdom. No matter how unsanitary
and hard their life was in the factory, this was their best chance to get a
better life. Reforms had not been made until this time because the workers
did not know what fair was. Not until they saw the enormous profits that were
being made did they realize how badly they were being treated. Starting in
the 1820’s, the workers began demanding safer workplaces, shorter hours,
better housing, and an end to child labor. (Victorian
Legislation) They did not get all their rights at
once, but persevered and did not revolt and start a civil war. The workers
realized that burning the factories and killing the owners would make their
situation worse. They kept at it and by the 1890’s their children and
grandchildren had their rights. This process of reform took an ultimate trust
in not only the system, but also their own
government. (Spragins.) Working in proximity to rich people
radicalized the workers to stand up for their civil rights. The realization
that the government and the factory owners were working to maximize their own
profits inspired them to protest. The poor people that lived in the city made
money, but just enough money to stay alive. (Lives of the Workers)
They saw that the owners were once like them, common people. However, they
had made millions from their factories. This fact radicalized the workers and
convinced them to advance as far as the factory owners had. (Spragins.)They
wanted the right to vote and the money to buy necessities for their everyday
lives, so they fought for their rights within the political system. The industrialization of cities like
Manchester caused large masses of people to migrate from the countryside to
urban areas. (The
History of Manchester) However, the cities could not
handle the rapid population rise. The cities did not have the ability to
house all the workers properly. Also, the sewage system was non-existent and
there was not nearly enough police to keep order. Families lived with dirty
water in a tiny house. The people within the houses were over-cramped and
diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis spread like wildfire. (Spragins) In the factory, both children and
adults worked full length days. With all living conditions the same and all
wages low, workers were forced to deal with their lot in life. Through these
conditions of industrial cities and the greed for more wealth by the owners,
the poor factory workers became united in the desire for a better life. They
began with the demands for a shorter work day and soon began asking for
limits on a child’s work week. But the issue that galvanized the workers movement
was the price of corn. In the early 19th century,
Parliament passed laws to benefit rich landowners. The newly passed Corn Laws
banned the import of foreign corn until the price of domestic corn had gone
up (The
Corn Laws). Because of the increase in corn
prices, the prices of everything else went up as well. The increase in food
prices caused dismay amongst the working class. The unrest felt by the
workers lead to the creation of the anti-corn law league or ACLL (The
Corn Laws). In 1817, a demonstration was broken
up by government troops in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre (Peterloo
Massacre). It would take another fifteen years of angry
protests, and even riots by various groups including the ACLL before
Parliament began to admit that workers had rights. In the 1832 reform laws, Parliament
finally expanded the right to vote to people who could prove that they owned
at least ten pounds worth of property. This opened the door for the workers
to push through new laws. They began to shorten their work week and limit
hours for children. In 1837, legislation was passed to reduce the number of
poor citizens through the use of workhouses. These workhouses were places
where poor citizens could receive shelter and pay in exchange for labor (anti-
poor laws). Although the poor laws were not as
effective as hoped, they represented the first step towards treating the poor
with dignity and humanity. The next wave of demonstrations took
place in the 1840’s. The Chartists were another group of protestors who
demanded six major changes from parliament: “votes for all men, equal
electoral districts, abolition of the requirement that members of parliament
be property owners, payment for M.P.’s, annual general election, and a secret
ballot” (chartist
movement). Instead of taking a violent
approach, the Chartists took a more civil one. They created three different
petitions and gathered the signatures of workers who supported their
positions. The first petition included two hundred fifty thousand signatures
but was nullified by Parliament (chartist
movement). The second and third petitions both
ended by being denied by parliament even though over 3.5million people signed
them. Although the Chartist movement was a failure, their demands would
eventually be granted within the next twenty years. In 1859, when parliament granted the
workers the right to picket, the factory owners were no longer able to take
action to physically break up protests. These picket lines shut down
factories completely because new workers would not be able to break the
barrier of picketers. Therefore, owners were required to comply with the
desires of the workers, and pass laws to make life in the factories better to
continue production. In 1867, after years of struggle, almost a million more
men were given the right to vote. Between 1872 and 1880 the final reforms
involving safety took shape. First, parliament passed the coalmines
regulating act, which required fan ventilators, strong timber supports, and
better safety lamps, to protect the workers. Later, workers were to be helped
by their factory owners if they were to be injured during work. In 1881,
children were required to go to school and get an education, rather than
working each day in the factories. In the end, the life of a worker in 1890
was exponentially better than a worker in 1820. The workers faith in the
system had finally been vindicated. Over several generations, the
workers gained their rights. Although the protestors such as the Chartists, did not get their demands immediately, they
believed that their descendants had a better life than them. They sacrificed
greatly to get the demands for their children. They were beaten, fired,
starved and some were even killed protesting for these rights. The protestors
could have easily started a revolt and driven England into a bankrupt state.
However, they believed in the system and eventually got their rights. With the invention of mass printing
and the rise of art’s popularity, the public became aware of the social
injustices inherent as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The universal
themes and images penetrated higher culture while the working class’s
troubles were staved off by the factory owners. Liberals channeled this
newfound interest into the push to reform government in the name of the
working class. Even though the owners lost to the
radical liberals in the long run, they were very successful in distracting
the workers in the form of stories of murder and mayhem, team sports that
made people happy and drugs such as opium. For instance, after the
mechanization of the printing press, a new type of entertainment came about
in the form of stories published in mass produced tabloid magazines.
Frequently the topic of these stories was about murder. A perfect example of
this were the Jack the Ripper stories. These were so captivating because they
featured mystery, murder, and sex. For instance, Jack would not only kill his
poor prostitute victims, but he would remove their organs like a surgeon
would as well. The purpose of these stories was to distract the workers, so
that they would talk about the stories all day instead of the money that they
weren’t being paid. (Jack
the Ripper Casebook) Soccer became a professional sport
that would be written up every day in the newspapers in the 1880s. The games
would attract crowds of 10,000 in the early 1880s, and 60,000 in 1897 and by
1913 soccer was attracting crowds of 120,000. This made for a good
distraction from the workers because going to see the games would give them
something to do at the end of the day other than thinking about work and it
would also be in the paper’s the next morning so they could read about it the
next morning. (History
Study Center) Opium was made legally available by
the politicians, and 5 out of 6 working class families used it habitually.
They even gave children opium, just to quiet them. Therefore this usage was
very widespread throughout the town and the country. (Victorian Web)
The owners achieved what they set out to do with these many forms of
entertainment, and distracted the workers from thinking about their best
interests, like possibly going on strike. The workers had allies in radical
liberal reformists, and those people such as Charles Dickens, wrote stories which
tugged at people’s heartstrings and tried to gain sympathy for them. Due to the invention of the printing
press, mass production became a formidable means, especially for radical
liberal authors, of expressing ideas. This led to the rise in popularity of
newspapers and, in turn, novels. Authors realized the immediacy of economic
profit that existed in the serial novel. They would publish a chapter or two
of a book per week and create interest in their work. As readers became
entrenched in the stories, they would purchase the succeeding copy. Authors
included a cliffhanger or suspenseful conclusion to each chapter, further
drawing in the reader and building hype for the next copy. The intended
audience for these serial novels was those who were literate and owned
property. It was this group that had the power to vote. The thought process
was that if they saw heard the message, they would spring to action by way of
reform. The viral marketing technique paid off for authors; not only was
their message spread to the public, but they were making money in the
process. The most prominent example of an author using this technique is
Charles Dickens. Forced to work in a factory as a child while his father was
in debtor’s prison, Dickens dedicated his writings to exposing the injustice
facing the poor by reflecting these troubles in his characters and their
plights. For instance, he detailed the life of the poor with Oliver Twist,
Pip in Great Expectations and the Crachits of A Christmas of Carol among
others as well as by contrasting their lives with those of the rich. He also
satirized the greed that came from those with power over the helpless. The
Dickensian influence penetrated media and popular culture and soon imitators
began making fraudulent sequels in order to gain profit at Dickens’s expense.
While he felt wronged regarding his income, he felt that these impostors were
diluting his message. Artists soon used a similar means to get a, too,
similar message to society. Like the serially produced works of
Dickens, the works of liberal artists were similarly distributed widely among
the public. The advent of engraving, lithography and woodblock printing led
to a similar cultivation of images as mass printing did with newspapers (The
Graphic). The implementation of public museums until the
end of the century allowed a greater number of middle-class citizens to view
artwork that had previously been inaccessible (Landow).
However, in the early to mid-1800’s, the dominant form of art was Realism in
painting (Realism)
These works, especially those by French artists Gustave Courbet, Jean
Francoise Millet and Honore Daumier, sought to capture true reality by using
lifelike painting techniques designed to “fool the eye” (trompe l’oeil) (Realism).
Typical subjects included people at work, gritty nightlife and, most
importantly, the poor (Realism (arts)),
(“Realism.”
The Victorian Web: An Overview). Yet, in the
context of popular culture, these images were restricted to the upper class
and although they are regarded highly in the scope of history, they were not
readily available to the middle class (Landow).
Nonetheless, their photorealistic depictions of poor workers struck a chord
with the public. Illustrated newspapers began growing in number and as demand
increased, entire crews of artists and engravers were responsible for
printing images in pamphlets, posters and books (Landow). Gustave Dore, a famed French engraver
and ink artist who was known for his Illustrated
English Bible and other illustrated literary reproductions, used a
Realism- style approach to producing art (Gustave Doré) In 1869, he journeyed to London and, seeing the
unjust trials of poverty, published a series of 180 engravings depicting the
squalor of lower class London three years later. The book, titled London: A Pilgrimage was a
commercial and financial success (“Gustave
Dore.” Spartacus Educational). Around the same
time, an illustrated magazine called The Graphic intent on affecting public
opinion was created and experienced great financial success (The
Graphic) These can be traced to the fact that, like
Dickens, the works were tailored to appeal to the compassion and stimulate
the empathy of the voting class (Walter Crane, Paul
Gavarni, Gustave Dore) Additionally, Dore and other
similar artists took inspiration from the mass-produced recreations of famous
paintings that were, too, growing in popularity (Landow).
Alas, the efforts of artists such as Dore and writers such as Dickens and
Gaskell, the radical liberal message overcame that of the factory owners and
reform movement gained steam in giving rights to workers. In the end, the workers had gained
their rights and England had happy workers. It started from the invention of
the steam engine and ended with 1881 reform laws that made it mandatory for
children to go to school. Working within the system, the workers had for the
first time in history made its government give them better rights lawfully
and without too much bloodshed. They had seen the system work for the factory
owners and decided it could work for them. They had decided that working in
the factory was better than starving in the countryside. Once radicalized by
corn prices and proximity to the rich, the mass of workers who asked for more
rights was hard to ignore, and gradually Parliament relented on laws. Once
the workers gained the rights to vote, it was even harder to stop them from
making more reforms. The workers, however, did not abuse their power, and the
government, in turn, did not attempt to take away rights that had been fairly
voted on. All in all, the system had worked when both sides had maneuvered
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