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Industrial Revolution: The Impacts on Social Life and Lifestyles of Humans

Socioeconomic Consequences of Industrialization

Industrialization transformed not only the economy of Britain but also the workplace, family, and daily life. Before the eighteenth century, most people lived on farms, in villages, or in small towns, and most work was done either in the field, in the home, or in small shops.

With the emergence of the factory and urbanization, all of this began to change. Manchester, the quintessential early industrial city, grew tenfold in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the whole of Britain exploded with new, large cities during that period. In 1785, only four cities in England and Scotland had a population of fifty thousand or more; seventy years later, there were thirty-two cities of this size.

These cities were set up for industrial production but were not very pleasant places in which to live. Until 1835, no normal procedures existed in England to incorporate cities, so most of the new factory towns had no municipal government or provisions for taxation. Most of these new cities also had no representation whatsoever in the national parliament. So, there were few financial and administrative resources to provide basic urban services like police protection, water and sewer, or garbage disposal.

One source describes these new cities as follows:

The new urban agglomerations were drab places, blackened with the heavy soot of the early coal age, settling alike on the mills and the workers’ quarters, which were dark at best, for the climate of the Midlands is not sunny.Housing for workers was hastily built, closely packed, and always in short supply, as in all rapidly growing communities. Whole families lived in single rooms, and family life tended to disintegrate. A police officer in Glasgow observed that there were whole blocks of tenements in the city, each swarming with a thousand ragged children who had first names only, usually nicknames-like animals, as he put it.2 Work in the factories was unrelenting and grim.

Factory hands often had to perform the same task over and over again, with few breaks or changes, during workdays up to fourteen hours long. The work was organized to be fast, coordinated, and intense, so there was little opportunity for socializing. The French feminist and socialist Flora Tristan, after visiting England, wrote that “in English factories, there isn’t any singing, chatting or laughter. . . . The master does not want his workers distracted for a minute by any reminders of his life; he demands silence, and a deadly silence there is.”3

The plants were usually fueled by coal, which meant that the factories, inside and out, were often covered in black dust. Wages were typically so low that a man could not support his wife and children. Therefore, children, some of them as young as six years old, often had to work in the factories as well. The brutal conditions of working-class life in England in the nineteenth century were immortalized in the works of Charles Dickens, as in his novels Oliver Twist and Hard Times. Dickens himself was a product of this environment. His father was almost constantly in debt, and when he was thrown into debtor’s prison, Dickens was forced to leave school, at the age of twelve, and go to work in a bootblack factory to help support his family.

The concentration of workers in cities and factories had political consequences as well. The cramped and dirty working environments of the factories created both tension and the opportunity for laborers to gather and discuss these conditions and their common plight.

As workers gained a sense of solidarity and potential power, they organized labor unions, even though these were formally illegal in England before 1825 (and the strike remained illegal for many years after that). Fearing the potential of revolution, Parliament passed an electoral reform act in 1832 that doubled the electorate, but even with that, only one in five adult, male citizens was able to vote. In 1838, a working-class group called the Chartists drew up a people’s charter, which demanded universal suffrage for all adult males and the abolition of property requirements for elected members of Parliament.

Even though over a million people signed a petition to the House of Commons in support of the charter, the Commons rejected it, and it was another thirty years before suffrage was significantly extended in Britain.

This failure of the moderate, parliamentary route to labor reform caused many workers to turn toward more radical solutions, including the ideas of socialism and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the German-born manager of a Manchester cotton business, provided a crucial link between industrialization and socialism. Even though he was on the top of the industrial hierarchy, Engels was shocked by the poverty in the city and wrote an account of his observations that was published as The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844). Shortly afterward, he met and befriended fellow German Karl Marx and brought him to England, where he began subsidizing Marx’s research and writing. He introduced Marx to several leaders of the Chartist movement. In 1848, Marx and Engels collaborated in producing The Communist Manifesto, which ended with the phrase “Workers of all countries unite!” This was one of the first steps in the formation of the communist movement, which would culminate in 1917 with the Russian Revolution.

Communism was just one of the “isms” that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. The period saw a proliferation of doctrines and movements of all kinds. More people were becoming involved in society and in social and political issues, and they began thinking more systematically about societal problems. Thus, the words “liberalism,” “radicalism,” “socialism,” and “nationalism” all appeared for the first time in English usage between 1820 and 1850.

Romanticism was also born in this period, although, unlike the political “isms,” it was a movement in literature and the arts. Romanticism was a reaction both to the Enlightenment and to the two revolutions of the eighteenth century, rejecting both the pure reason of the Enlightenment and seeking respite from the harsh political and social outcomes of the French and Industrial revolutions. Romantics stressed the importance of feelings and emotions as well as reason, and believed that the world could not be understood completely on the basis of reason and scientific evidence.

Romanticism affected artists and writers all over Europe, flowering in the first decades of the nineteenth century with poets and novelists such as the German Johann Goethe (Faust), the Frenchman Victor Hugo (Les Misérables), Alexander Pushkin in Russia, and the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Many of these writers struggled with the ambiguous results of the Industrial Revolution and the tensions between tradition and change. Industry had generated enormous wealth and progress, but it also produced misery and alienation. These were issues and tensions that would confront Europeans for generations to come.