The Industrial Revolution

Historical and geographical information

Dates are in red.

Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.

Headlines are in brown.

References and citations are in turquoise.

Context and local history are in purple.

This webpage is divided into the following sections:

· The Farndales and the Industrial Revolution

· Textiles

· Life in Victorian Urban Centres

During these Wars many very remarkable discoveries and inventions were made. Most memorable among these was the discovery (made by all the rich men in England at once) that women and children could work for twenty four hours a day in factories without any of them dying or becoming excessively deformed. This was known as the Industrial Revolution and completely changed the faces of the North of England (1066 and all that, Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman, 1930).

At the same time there was an Agricultural Revolution which was caused by the invention of turnips and the discovery that Trespassers could be Prosecuted. This was a Good Thing too, because previously the Land had all been rather common (1066 and all that, Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman, 1930).

The Farndales and the Industrial Revolution

John Farndale’s works.

The Farndales and mining.

Further work to follow.

Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool, Leeds, Bradford

Change a recurrent theme

Change is a constant through Britain’s history. It was not exclusive to the industrial change of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mechanisation and artificial fertilisers have enabled exponential growths in population. But change has influenced history since and before the Middle Ages. There was for instance significant change in the lives of individuals between the Tudor fifteenth century and the Norman eleventh century.

Gains and losses in the lives of individuals

The positive account

Subsistence economy (famine or plague every decade or so) to more choices for individuals and the potential for some surplus cash with which to seek new options and experience.

Poor laws. From fourteenth century a process where elite classes had little option but to recognise individuals and over time even to provide some limited support in poverty. From starvation to some recognition of the need to support the poor.

Literacy in Norman times, tiny proportion of literate people producing relatively limited work to high level of literacy.

Scientific understanding – Enlightenment.

Steady realisation of contra arguments.

The negative account

Authoritarian advantage. Technical advance enabled elite to control and organise society.

Military mechanisation. Machine Guns. Industrial killing power. Warfare has always been brutal – hacking with swords, filling the key with arrows, poor medical care – life as a soldier on the medieval battlefield was brutal. Mechanisation and railway transportation – scale of devastation.

Industrial Change

There was economic change in England back to the Black Death and the improvements in living standards that followed. Populations rose in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the growing demands were met by intensification of agriculture and new diverse economic activities.

The inception of a new era of economic change emerged after the Restoration in 1660.

By the eighteenth century Britain and Holland were the richest nations, even though India and China were the main exporters of manufactured goods.

The term Industrial Revolution was used from the 1820s. Disraeli would call Britain the workshop of the world, while William Blake would highlight the dark, satanic mills.

As change came about, there was a longing in Britain for unspoiled nature and rural scenes, which emerged in art, literature and music. James Thomson’s poetry wrote I hate the clamours of the smoky towns, But must admire the bliss of rural clowns and A sylvan life till then the natives led.

The Industrial Revolution might be seen as a sudden burst and time of rapid change, or change which evolved more slowly over generations.

The Causes of the Industrial Revolution

External factors. There was stimulation from external influences. Success in Britain’s ongoing struggle against France provided a bonus in the dominance of trade.

Overseas Trade. Over 80% of Britain’s tax revenue was spent on war in the eighteenth century. The Royal Navy received 10% of national income. A possible explanation is that England’s new economic success was driven by its predatory nature and/or that it arose from the profits of slavery. That said the profits that arose from the slave trade continuing in the Americas, particularly in sugar plantations, was small. It is difficult to say therefore that slavery was a primary cause of the industrial revolution. That said, slave produced colonial goods, including American cotton and Caribbean sugar were significant factors in economic change.

However, it is difficult to say that victory in war, and foreign and imperial trade, caused the industrial revolution. Holland, Spain and France possessed significant imperial interests, but there was no industrial revolution in trade. So we have to look for what was unique about Britain.

Domestic influences. There was a domestic element. The political and legal system provided a suitable arena for rapid change. That said, the high level of taxes and trade regulations would not today be thought to be conducive to growth.

Profit seekers. It was no doubt given impetus by land owners and capitalist interests.

Aspiration. Industrial change may have gained some impetus from improvements in standards of living.

From the late seventeenth century, there was a new appetite among populations beyond basic needs, but with appetites for comfort, novelty and pleasure. They sought clocks, comfortable furniture, mirrors, earthenware and china. Watches became a fashion item, and by the 1790s there were 800,000 silver and 400,000 gold watches in England.

There was a marked revolution in clothing. New regional styles emerged. Clothing became an important mark of social status, and whilst unwritten rules did not allow dressing to match one’s betters, folk did wear clothes to demonstrate that they were as good as their fellows.

Clothing drove the industrial revolution. Cotton was adopted for its colour and brightness. Folk bought goods for enjoyment and self invention. There was a move away from Protestant thrift and saving to a more romantic work ethic driven by self expression and ambition.

People consumed more – tobacco, sugar, coffee, fresh bread, alcohol and particularly tea.

Spending more required people to work longer hours. More married women took jobs. Working hours reached 65 to 70 hours a week compared to 40 to 50 hours today. It was often the new earnings of young folk and married women which enabled the acquisition of new luxuries.

The Industrial Revolution was driven significantly by domestic demand.

Enlightenment. The industrial revolution can be related to the cultural, political and scientific liberties arising out of the Enlightenment. There was a new interest in science, experiment, literacy and education. Britain had an unusually high level of literacy and education. Working class children often received at least some schooling. The majority of workers were able to sign their names. Two thirds of boys in England took apprenticeships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which required the prospect of high wags to make the cost worthwhile. An Ealing gardener paid 6d a week to educate his two children. Enlightenment science generally had little connection with industrial technology. However industrial invention arose out of the Enlightenment.

New energy sources. It perhaps arose most clearly from new sources of energy, particularly coal.

Change was significantly driven by technological changes:

Abraham Darby I	Iron smelting with coke	1709	Bypassed the need for charcoal
Thomas Newcomen	Steam engine	1712	Allowed the pumping out of deep coal mines
John Kay	The flying shuttle	1733	Sped up weaving
James Hargreaves	The spinning jenny	1765	Multiplied the effectiveness of hand spinning
Richard Arkwright	Water Frame	1769	Used power for spinning with rollers
James Watt	Condenser	1769	Provided economical steam power
Samuel Crompton	Mule	1779	Allowed mass production of high quality yarn
Henry Cort	Rolling Mill	1783	Sped up the production of iron
Edmund Cartwright	Loom	1787	Enabled water and steam power to make cloth
John Smeaton	Engineering	1724 to 1792	The father of modern engineering, founded the Society of Civil Engineers in 1771
Josiah Wedgewood	Pottery

The ten “macro inventors”

These innovative and labour saving technologies thrived because wages were already high. Spinning jennies and other innovations were not taken up in France. Where wages and demand was low, skills were rare, and expensive technology was wasted.

An organic economy evolved primary to harness the energy of coal. This allowed England to overtake its nearest economic rival, Holland. There were significant coal deposits across Britain. Early steam power, such as Newcomen’s atmospheric engine created a vacuum by heating and cooling steam, but it used so much coal, that it was only really viable at the pit head. However there were continual improvements, including Watt’s condenser, which extended the use of steam.

Two centuries later, it would be realised that these new technologies posed a significant environmental threat.

(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 367 to 375).

Positive and Negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution

There was a sudden and unique demographic boom increasing the English population from 5.2M in 1701 to 17.9M in 1851. With increased wages and new job opportunities after the Restoration, people married younger and had more children. Rev Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

In exacerbation of this, there were bad harvest caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in present day Indonesia peaking on 10 April 1815, which disrupted the climate and caused widespread famine.

In the rest of Europe the consequence of this trend of population growth was sharp deterioration, but this didn’t happen in Britain. There was no economic disaster. Living standards were maintained at a relatively high level. Prosperity focused on the growth of urban areas such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool; the growth of new jobs, and support for incomes through the Poor Laws.

From the 1850s there was a second stage of industrialisation, boosted by cheap energy from the new mineral economy.

Proponents of change, such as David Hume and Adam Smith welcomed a new commercial society, and saw a remedy to poverty, and provision of a more stable, peaceful and civilised society, with new economic freedoms. The revolution certainly increased living standards. Wages were already high, and there people had new aspirations and choices.

Opponents of change criticised its moral, social and aesthetic consequences. Skills were devalued and health deteriorated. Infant mortality was high. People’s physical condition deteriorated, and heights fell. The revolution created an impoverished and downtrodden proletariat. Real wages barely rose from their already high levels, about 4% from 1760 to 1820, but food prices rose.

(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 367 to 375).

There is an In Our Time podcast on the Industrial Revolution.

There is an In Our Time podcast on the far-reaching consequences of the Industrial Revolution, which brought widespread social and intellectual change to Britain.

There is an In Our Time podcast on Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Victorian engineer responsible for bridges, tunnels and railways still in use today.

Textiles

Further work to follow.

Life in Victorian Urban Centres

Further work to follow.

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Charles Dickens, Hard Times:

Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. …

Between 1790 and 1850, the sudden industrialisation caused a loss of status for some and sudden wealth and power for others. Many saw insecurity, disorientation, slum living and disease. There was uncertainty as to whether the new era would end in wide prosperity or mass starvation.

The Dark side of the industrial revolution was emphasised in Arnold Toynbee’s Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England and Engels’ denunciation of workers’ suffering and his anticipation of a proletarian revolution. He denounced the degradation marked by the slums of Manchester. There was a bleak interpretation of the industrial revolution trapping the poor in smoke and squalor.

William Blake’s Jerusalem contrasted nostalgia for England’s green and pleasant land with the new industrial landscapes:

And did those feet in ancient time,

Walk upon England’s mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green & pleasant Land.

In reality the famous hymn, written between 1804 to 1820, which became a great patriotic song in the first world war, is difficult to comprehend. It was written in consequence of the Napoleonic Wars and envisaged the ancient English order as God’s chosen people rebuilding Jerusalem, harping back to the long Civil War debate between the new post Norman era harping back to underlying rights held to have existed in Anglo Saxon times. Whilst dark satanic mills has long been associated with the Industrial Revolution, there are interpretations that the phrase was a criticism of the conformity of the established Church of England, and that the phrase referred to the great churches.