Industrial Revolution in Literature

5 Key excerpts on "Industrial Revolution in Literature"

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  The Industrial Revolution in World History

  • Peter N. Stearns(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The two central features of industrialization—revolutions in technology and in the organization of work—yielded one clear result: a great increase in the total output of goods and in individual worker output. Per capita productivity went up, in some cases massively. A spinning worker in 1820 France or Britain using steam-driven spindles instead of a manual spinning wheel could produce literally a hundred times the thread of a preindustrial counterpart. This productivity gain was unusual in weaving—early mechanical looms simply doubled output, but this alone had huge impacts. Increased output could and often would be used in various ways: to increase inequality in the standard of living, to support higher tax revenues, to provide for rapidly growing populations, or to change and possibly improve material conditions for the masses. These varied results and the balance among them form vital topics to explore in dealing with the impact of industrialization on individuals and societies.

  The risk in analyzing the industrial revolution is oversimplification, because its essential features seem simple. Exploring the history of industrialization involves multiple tasks: tracing why certain parts of the world were open to new technologies and new organizational forms; analyzing why different industrial societies established somewhat different policies (for example, varying the role of government in triggering and guiding the industrialization process); and understanding the host of different human reactions that emerged, even in a single industrial society, as people adjusted to innovations like steam-driven machines and factories. The full history of the industrial revolution, in other words, involves variety and complexity. Nevertheless, even as we probe these richer human meanings, the barebones definition must not be forgotten; in any industrialization process, the technological and organizational substratum inevitably looms large.

  Issues in Interpretation

  The industrial revolution raises all sorts of interpretive issues, including what caused it in the first place. We will encounter key issues in virtually every section of this book. A few issues apply even to the basic definition, since historians continue to discuss how to come to terms with this watershed in the human experience.

  The industrial revolution involved certain general processes. Participants in industrialization had to deal with work systems, with the rise of new kinds of stores, with new habits of time. These changes involved hosts of individual events: a manufacturer deciding on his factory rules, a peddler realizing that the growing quantity of goods required a village shop instead of itinerant hawking, a manufacturing worker learning to listen for the clock-based factory whistle. These events, multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of individuals involved, constituted the new work processes, the rise of new kinds of commerce, the sense of a new urgency in work time.

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  The Conduct of War, 1789-1961

  A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and its Conduct

  • Maj.-Gen J. F. C. Fuller(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Arcole Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER V — The Influences of the Industrial Revolution

  1. Impact of the Revolution on Civilization

  Man’s mind and emotions shape his culture—his religion, his ideals and his arts; his bodily activities fashion his civilization—his mode of living. Except for remnants of ancient hunting and pastoral societies hidden away in far-off lands, up to the eighteenth century of the Christian era world civilization had for millennia been based on agriculture. The bulk of mankind lived in villages, and the inhabitants of the towns and cities—the centres of culture—lived off the field lands which surrounded them; hence political and social power and status derived from those lands, their lords and lordlings ruled, their peasants and serfs toiled, and together with the townsfolk they formed a functional, organic society.

  Then, suddenly, in the second half of the eighteenth century, like an unheralded typhoon, came steam-driven machinery, each single horse-power of which—so it has been estimated—could do the work of fifteen men. Thus the Industrial Revolution was born, and man emerged from his caterpillar stage, from his life on the surface of the soil, to rise, like a mechanized dragon, into a hitherto undreamt of industrial empyrean—a way of life so suddenly thrust on him that it could not fail to have cataclysmic impacts on peace and war.

  It transcended all previous revolutions, including those of the great religious teachers, whose influence, however far-reaching, was limited in radius, and before the nineteenth century had run its course, the legions of the Industrial Revolution lorded the entire world, and claimed tribute from all its non-industrialized peoples. ‘Mechanics’, writes Lewis Mumford, ‘became the new religion, and gave the world a new Messiah: the machine;’ or, at least, ‘a new Moses that was to lead a barbarous humanity into the promised land.’{149}

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  Design and Culture

  A Transdisciplinary History

  • Maurice Barnwell(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Purdue University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 1750–1870 Steam, Iron, and Glass FROM FIELD TO FACTORY Agriculture was the prime economic force in Britain for centuries — its dominance began to wane with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 1 Thomas Carlyle, a young, unknown Scottish writer, composed “Signs of the Times,” which was published in the Edinburgh Review in June 1829. The phrase found popular support among prominent novelists of the day. “A lengthy era of rural, agronomic civilization was chang-ing precipitously. Opinions and beliefs that had seemed fixed certainties and were almost univer-sally shared became broadly challenged. Profound changes in science and technology fostered and fueled stunningly swift changes in the ways in which multitudes of people gained their living, organized their lives, and conducted their expe-rience.” 2 Carlyle’s concerns were repeated in his later works Chartism (1839) and Past and Pres-ent (1843). Carlyle was not alone. Three other distin-guished writers, Friedrich Engels, William Cob-bett, and Benjamin Disraeli, as well as novelists Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gas-kell, and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), were also critics of the times. All foresaw the dra-matic and fundamental changes that would be created by industrial capitalism and that “its im-pact was not only economic, but also cultural, bringing the nation to the very brink of a preci-pice.” 3 Here is but one representative quote from Thomas Carlyle: Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devo-tional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapt-ing means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calcu-lated contrivance.

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  Events That Changed Great Britain Since 1689

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The Industrial Revolution should be seen not only as involving techno- logical advance but also as involving change to a variety of institutional and social relationships. One prominent development that points to this complexity is the rise of the factory. The spread of the factory was an evi- dent but dramatic physical change in the overall landscapes of both city and countryside in Britain, as the factory could be located in either setting. Elizabeth Gaskell provides the following description of the arrival of the Hale family in the fictional northern manufacturing town of Milton from a southern rural village in her novel North and South: For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of the wintry sky... Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke; perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage than any positive taste or smell. Quick they were whirled over long, straight, hopeless Industrial Revolution 11 streets of regularly built houses, all small and of brick. Here and there a great oblong many windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black, 'unparliamentary' smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Marga- ret had taken to foretell rain. Increasingly, production in key manufacturing industries occurred in factories. The factory has been defined in both technological and institu- tional/organizational terms. The defining technological feature of the fac- tory was its use of a central energy source to power machinery, most typically in this period water as well as steam. At the beginning of the nine- teenth century, steam engines were still predominantly associated with mine drainage. By 1850 use of steam had become widespread in textile fac- tories. In 1850,86 percent of cotton textile factories made use of steam.

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  Ages of Archaeology and Technology

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Orange Apple

    (Publisher)

  One of the main arguments for capitalism, presented for example in the book The Improving State of the World , is that industrialisation increases wealth for all, as evidenced by raised life expectancy, reduced working hours, and no work for children and the elderly. Socialism Socialism emerged as a critique of capitalism. Marxism began essentially as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. According to Karl Marx, industrialisation polarised society into the bourgeoisie (those who own the means of production, the factories and the land) and the much larger proletariat (the working class who actually perform the labour necessary to extract something valuable from the means of production). He saw the industrialisation process as the logical dialectical progression of feudal economic modes, necessary for the full development of capitalism, which he saw as in itself a necessary precursor to the development of socialism and eventually communism. Romanticism During the Industrial Revolution an intellectual and artistic hostility towards the new industrialisation developed. This was known as the Romantic movement. Its major exponents in English included the artist and poet William Blake and poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The movement stressed the importance of nature in art and language, in ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ contrast to monstrous machines and factories; the Dark satanic mills of Blake's poem And did those feet in ancient time. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein reflected concerns that scientific progress might be two-edged. Causes Regional GDP per capita changed very little for most of human history before the Industrial Revolution.

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