The Industrial Age

Timeline

1811-1813 Luddite Crisis
1815 Corn Laws (Land ownership)
1831 Bankruptcy Act (Officialism)
1832 First Reform Bill (Extended the vote)
1844-48 Railway Mania and Crash
1846 Corn Laws Repealed (Free trade)
1847 Factories Act (Ten Hours Movement)
1848 Public Health Act
1848 Cholera Epidemic
1849 Bankruptcy Act (Classifications)

Historical Contexts

Adam Smith on the Division of Labor

“Among civilized and thriving nations . . ., though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire. . . The causes of this improvement, in the productive powers of labour, and the order, according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks and conditions of men in the society, make the subject of the First Book of this Inquiry.” Wealth of Nations (1776)

“This great increase of the quantity of work, which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one many to do the work of many.” Wealth of Nations (1776)


Thomas Malthus on Population

1. “That food is necessary to the existence of man.”
2. “That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.”

“This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and the great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectability of society… And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families.” An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)


Thomas Carlyle on the Mechanical Character

“Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its prëestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery. Thus we have machines for Education: Lancastrian machines; Hamiltonian machines; monitors, maps and emblems. . . . Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. . . . Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions,–for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.” “Signs of the Times” (1829)


Henry Mayhew on Factory Work and Prostitution

“It is a vulgar error, and a popular delusion, that the life of a prostitute is as revolting to herself, as it appears to the moralist sternly lamenting over the condition of the fallen; but, on the contrary, investigation and sedulous scrutiny lead us to a very different conclusion. Authors gifted with vivid imaginations love to pourtray the misery that is brought upon an innocent and confiding girl by the perfidy and desertion of her seducer. The pulpit too frequently echoes to clerical denunciation and evangelical horror, until those unacquainted with the actual facts tremble at the fate of those whose terrible lot they are taught rather to shudder at than commiserate. Women who in youth have lost their virtue, often contrive to retain their reputation; and even when this is not the case, frequently amalgamate imperceptibly with the purer portion of the population and become excellent members of the community. The love of woman is usually pure and elevated. But when she devotes her affections to a man who realizes her ideal, she does not hesitate to sacrifice all she holds dear, for his gratification, ignoring her own interest and her own inclination. Actuated by a noble abnegation of self, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded, and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric, when, without the slightest pruriency of imagination to urge her on to the consummation, without the remotest vestige of libidinous desire to prompt her to self immolation, without a shadow of meretricious feeling lurking within her, she abandons her person beyond redemption to the idol she has set up in the highest place in her soul.”

“This heroic martyrdom is of the causes, though perhaps not the primary or most frequently occurring, of the stream of immorality that insidiously permeates our social system. The greatest, and equally difficult to combat, is the low rate of wages that the female industrial classes of this great city receive, in return for the most arduous and wearisome labour. Innumerable cases of prostitution through want, solely and absolutely, are constantly occurring, and this will not be wondered at when it is remembered that women in England and Wales are born to every males, which number is further augmented by the dangers to which men are exposed by their avocations, and also in martial service by sea and land. Again, so great are the inducements held out by men of lax morality and loose principles that procuresses find entrapping girls into their abodes a most lucrative and profitable trade. Some are even brought up from their earliest infancy by their pseudoprotectors with the full intention that they shall embark in the infamous traffic as soon as their age will permit them to do so remuneratively.”

Further Reading

Industrial Novels

Frances Trollope, Michael Armstrong (1840)
Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, Or the Two Nations (1845)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)
Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (1849)
Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (1849)
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

Political Economy in the 19th Century

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
Thomas Carlyle, “Chartism,” “Signs of the Times” (1829)
Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34)
Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (1833)
Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (1844)
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the Working Class (1963)