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"The most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world"—this is how the historian Eric Hobsbawm describes the Industrial Revolution. In economic terms, the arrival of the "Machine Age" was a huge success: thanks to its technological preeminence, Britain's wealth and prosperity increased enormously. This increase, coupled with pride in the improvements themselves, created a sense of excitement, of living in stirring times, and bolstered the optimistic conviction that further progress was certain. But the rapidity with which industrialization took place was also profoundly disorienting. Overnight, it seemed, the world had been transformed. The first wave of the Industrial Revolution took place in the cotton industry. During the eighteenth century, new inventions had changed the technique of spinning and speeded up production of thread. This in turn had created a demand for more weavers. But with the development of steam-powered looms in the 1820s, weaving began to be done in factories rather than at home, and handloom weavers became obsolete. Large numbers of people found themselves without a job. Rural workers flocked to the cities to find work, and the population burgeoned in northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Glasgow. Britain grew richer, but it was not the poor who benefited from this revolution. In the early decades of the century, before legislation was passed to address some of the worst evils of the factory system, workers—including children—toiled for up to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, under inhuman conditions: deafening noise, poor ventilation, dangerous machinery, demanding overseers, and no insurance or benefits to protect them in the event of an accident or illness. Periodic economic depressions resulted in massive unemployment: being "in work" was bad enough, but being out of work could mean actual starvation. The factory system disrupted not only traditional patterns of work but also family life. As more and more women and children were employed in factories, mills, and mines, there was an inevitable loss of paternal authority. Women had always worked, but never before had their labor been so visible. The "factory girl" became a focus for fears about promiscuity and the undermining of the family structure. The overcrowded conditions in the cities created urban slums of unimaginable wretchedness. Whole families—sometimes several families—might live in a single room. Tens of thousands of people lived in damp cellars. Because of the lack of sanitation, raw sewage overflowed everywhere, and fresh water was often impossible to obtain. When typhoid and cholera broke out, epidemics spread rampantly among the inhabitants of these foul dens; contagion was impossible to avoid. Industrial pollution was another byproduct of the machine age. Factories spewed smoke into the air, and cities dumped sewage directly into the rivers. The outlying areas of Birmingham came to be known as "The Black Country." In Contrasts (1836) A. W. N. Pugin vividly depicted the sheer ugliness of a landscape dominated by smokestacks. In The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) John Ruskin denounced the devastation wrought by industrialism: "Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man." The second phase of the Industrial Revolution was brought about by the railway boom of the 1840s. The spreading network of rails linked the cities, and allowed the iron and coal industries to flourish. The railroad transfigured the landscape in ways that were terribly disruptive but also immensely thrilling. More than any other technological innovation, it symbolized the dizzying speed with which Britain was changing. Psychologically, it was hard to assimilate such a rapidly altering environment. Many people felt that the world of their childhood had been obliterated. In 1860 the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray voiced this sense of bewilderment: It was only yesterday; but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth—all these belong to the old period. . . . But your railroad starts the new era. . . . We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark. Writers throughout the nineteenth century shared Thackeray's wistful longing for a romanticized past. Pugin, Carlyle, Tennyson, Morris, and many others used their vision of an idealized medieval England, aesthetically pleasing and socially harmonious, as a device to castigate the evils of industrialization. This harking back to the past was not mere nostalgia: it reflected the trauma of the experience of industrialization. The transformation from a rural agrarian economy to a machine-dominated system of factories, mines, and railroads meant a very real shift in ancient patterns of life. The clock rather than the natural rhythms of the seasons now dictated working-class existence, and the laissez-faire pursuit of profit changed the relations between masters and men. Despite the huge accumulation of national wealth, the gulf between rich and poor had never been wider. In 1844 Friedrich Engels observed that "class warfare is so open and shameless that it has to be seen to be believed." Hunger, misery, and hopelessness found expression in strikes and trade union activity. The Chartist movement, in which the workers hoped for some relief from their distress by presenting a list of demands to Parliament, fizzled. Far from gaining middle-class compassion, it aroused hostility, and even fears of a revolution in Britain. Among the key literary responses to the "condition of England" question were Carlyle's Past and Present (1843), Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), and Dickens's Hard Times (1854). Their writing helped to focus attention on the human costs of the Industrial Revolution. In an effort to prick the consciences of their readers, they dramatized the sufferings of factory workers, and tried to put a human face on the inflammatory figure of the Chartist; they warned of the dangers of selfish individualism, and urged sympathy, communication, and benevolent leadership as remedies for class alienation.
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