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Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution
This remarkable book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom. This rich personal account focuses on the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, rather than its economic and political histories. In the tradition of best-selling books by Liza Picard, Judith Flanders, and Jerry White, Griffin gets under the skin of the period and creates a cast of colorful characters, including factory workers, miners, shoemakers, carpenters, servants, and farm laborers.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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September 21, 2022
Here is The New Yorker thumbnail review that alerted me to Liberty's Dawn back in 2013:
But even the end of that thumbnail is disingenuous given that the lives of children during the lead-up to the industrial revolution were no beds of roses either. And maybe the rest of it as well, considering the "double-edged sword" language--all of which goes to prove Emma Griffin's point about the hold the dismal view of the industrial revolution has on us. She attributes that view mainly to Engels' influence, although it was prevalent then among the intelligentsia and really still is. We can't see anything good about long hours, low wages and poor conditions, and our lens is Dickens and so forth.
Griffin's material consists of over 350 autobiographies or "life writings" from the 1700s and 1800s by working men, usually composed to sum up a life and pass their stories on to their families. Some testimonies consist of a page or two of laborious words by the newly literate and some were longer, some handwritten and some printed, from county archives and church records where no one had previously thought to look. Just the fact of their writings bespeaks a change (in a positive direction, we might think), since their literacy itself was a new thing.
She makes it clear she wants to give an alternative account, not replace one overly-simplistic story with another story claiming everything was hunky-dory. What she does say is that the economic expansion and social change of the times afforded new opportunity to the men of the lowest classes in the British Isles, where the industrial revolution began.
And, yes, the main recipients of the new opportunities were men. The economic participation of women was constrained by childbearing, and would be until much more recently. And children suffered from being put to work at very early ages, sometimes as young as six or seven. The trouble with The New Yorker's closing twist is that pre-industrial-revolution children weren't having what we now think of as a childhood, either. They too were put to work early on dreary tasks, paid or unpaid, and also were hungrier. Eventually there were laws to prohibit consignment to the workplace at such early ages. (Yet in The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers, I learned that as WWI approached, working-class children in the area around Manchester were getting only an elementary education, still going to work young, at about thirteen.)
I want my review to include some of the insights the book gave me and also some of my thoughts about the book.
One insight from the book is that the expanding economy broke the dependency on one's master. When work had been so very limited, one was stuck with a bad master no matter how bad the work, the pay, or the treatment at his hands, but as the economy expanded, workers could find alternatives. As the author says, the balance of power between employer and employee changed.
With more people and more work, the rigors of the apprentice system for skilled work gradually broke down (except for the most skilled tasks) which again removed some power from those who had traditionally held it and gave it to the laboring class. Apprenticeships were shorter, and laws against work by those who hadn't completed them fell, for example, for tailors and shoemakers. Even when it was the middle class, not the poor, whose wealth was increasing fastest, more demand for goods was created: for "shoes, clothes, bread, buildings and furniture."
Not everyone is happy about the weakening of such laws. While reading the book, I came across this column on the local current-day impact of Uber and Lyft on taxi certificates: http://www.myajc.com/business/kempner... .
The book is composed largely of relevant quotes and examples from the biographies, accompanied by the author's organization of the material and her conclusions. For example in one case a man had learned carpentry from an informal apprenticeship after his original apprenticeship in a dying field had fallen apart. He was talented and ended up in a high-end London cabinetry shop, whereupon his resentful fellows took the action of interfering with his tools and destroying his work in an attempt to drive him out. This man had the wherewithal to call a meeting and confront them, whereupon they accepted him--unusual, but showing the evolution that could happen as men in the lowest rung of society derived possibilities from the chaos of change. Before 1750, informal apprenticeships were rare; afterwards, more common.
When to regulate and when not, there's the question. Here's a June 2017 column (while I was still reading the book) by conservative columnist George Will suggesting there is only one answer. There is not, but he illustrates a point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...
The author doesn't talk about guilds per se. Mostly she just quotes the autobiographers and recounts what happens. I'm not British, so I had to "ask Google" what a navvy was. Nor had I heard of the Chartist movement. But the whole picture is fairly clear. She does the scholarly trick of repetition from different angles, and her presentation is rather dry. This is a book to read not for sparkly prose but for its ideas.
As the author says, in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, life was hard with few safety nets but was changing, for unskilled workers, too, as factories and mines and towns created all sorts of related occupations.
She has a section on the cottage weaving industry vs. the spread of factories and machines, the romanticized version we know and the realities of the situation.
After chapters on, first, men at work, then children, and finally, women, the author moves on to sections on love and marriage, and culture--the latter encompassing education, religion, and politics.
What struck me most from the love and marriage section is the change of mores in about the 1790s. Before that time, workers put off marriage, bowing to the requirements of their apprenticeships and the expectation and demands of parents. Therefore they didn't marry until their mid-twenties, when they could set up a household, which limited the number of children. Then that changed. People quit apprenticeships to marry or did so without parental permission. Or they went on and got pregnant. The author puts forth the hypothesis that the burgeoning industrial revolution was not only correlated with those changes but played a causal role.
Re education, prior to 1810, learning to read was difficult due to lack of inexpensive books, newspapers, or free libraries. If anyone learned to read it was because of a rich patron or possibly using the printed words to a song one already knew as a Rosetta stone. But after 1810 there began to be small commercial night schools and also "mutual improvement societies" for reading and discussion. Motivation required, considering those efforts took place after a long workday!
As to religion being the "opiate of the masses," that may have been true at the established church, where working people had to kowtow and stick to their place. The Nonconformist churches were another story, provoking thinking and articulation, and their Sunday schools could be real schools for reading and learning as well as discussion.
New types of groups emerged around the late 1700s, for example, coops, trade societies and unions, not necessarily political in intent, but people engaged with each other and thereby learned new skills. In the mutual improvement societies and Sunday schools, a man might have his first experience of articulating his ideas to a group who listened to them. Also, all these sorts of groups required planning and organizing, which readied individuals for social engagement and political activism. In that way, all these groups pointed forward.
For workers writing their stories in the mid-nineteenth century, improvement was obvious. There were remarks to the effect that if their ancestors could revisit the earth, they would be amazed. One man wrote that agricultural workers of an earlier era were merely serfs. And especially I took note of a man who wrote about how the children of the day could be picky about their food. Several decades prior that was not the case as there simply wasn't enough food.
I think the bad reputation of the industrial revolution comes in part from its comparison to an idealized past. I had some mental picture of farmers on their land, or people could be imagining even more elaborate pastoral scenes. The author doesn't say much about that except that it had been a long time since the poor had been on the land. The working poor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not, nor apparently were those in the seventeenth--or sixteenth. They might do farm labor for somebody else, or they might maintain a kitchen garden to make do, but they didn't have their own farms nor were they even sharecroppers. I looked up serfdom for the first time when I was reading War and Peace. Here's a relatively readable entry I found this time: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/e...
But also I think the industrial revolution has a bad reputation because money, trade and consumption often do. Yet those kinds of attitudes by people in more fortunate social circumstances may also go along with keeping people on the lower rungs of society "in their place." People's getting out of their place also has a bad reputation, and economic development has a way of advancing social mobility and discomfiting many people. In that regard, this book has something in common with the conclusions of Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, in which the lowly peddlers of the new world were agents who ushered the dispossessed into the economic system.
Emma Griffin writes about her subjects in a very matter-of-fact way in that she regards them as just people--something I noticed since that is not the case in literature about the times, in which the lower classes aren't exactly people but something lower.
Here's one more review I found earlier on that made me want to read this book: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books...
Griffin counters what she calls “the dark interpretation” of the industrial revolution in a provocative study. Surveying hundreds of autobiographical accounts by people who experienced the changes firsthand, she finds that for much of the British working class “the good wages and regular work that could be found in the factories more than compensated for the clatter of the machines.” Still, the industrial revolution was clearly a double-edged sword. One William Marcroft, born in Lancashire in 1822 and forced to work from the age of six, later caught up on his education at night school and, after retirement, became active in various social and political organizations. “The same forces that had crushed his childhood schooling,” Griffin writes, “helped to create new forms of cheap or free education for adults.” Whether such opportunities were worth a lost childhood remains an open question. ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
But even the end of that thumbnail is disingenuous given that the lives of children during the lead-up to the industrial revolution were no beds of roses either. And maybe the rest of it as well, considering the "double-edged sword" language--all of which goes to prove Emma Griffin's point about the hold the dismal view of the industrial revolution has on us. She attributes that view mainly to Engels' influence, although it was prevalent then among the intelligentsia and really still is. We can't see anything good about long hours, low wages and poor conditions, and our lens is Dickens and so forth.
Griffin's material consists of over 350 autobiographies or "life writings" from the 1700s and 1800s by working men, usually composed to sum up a life and pass their stories on to their families. Some testimonies consist of a page or two of laborious words by the newly literate and some were longer, some handwritten and some printed, from county archives and church records where no one had previously thought to look. Just the fact of their writings bespeaks a change (in a positive direction, we might think), since their literacy itself was a new thing.
She makes it clear she wants to give an alternative account, not replace one overly-simplistic story with another story claiming everything was hunky-dory. What she does say is that the economic expansion and social change of the times afforded new opportunity to the men of the lowest classes in the British Isles, where the industrial revolution began.
Running like a thread through more than a century of historical analysis is the belief that the ordinary worker enjoyed a healthier, simpler, and less frenetic life before the smoke and steam of the industrial revolution.
The trouble is that our autobiographers simply refuse to tell the story we expect to hear. Work was central to any laborer's life and was a theme to which the autobiographers frequently returned. But piecing together their thoughts and observations leaves us in little doubt that many working men saw substantial improvements in their living standards, not in spite of industrialisation, but because of it. Of course, much of the reason for this lay simply in the fact that the pre-industrial economy had been so poor at providing for its workers. In most place, there was just not enough to go around....
And, yes, the main recipients of the new opportunities were men. The economic participation of women was constrained by childbearing, and would be until much more recently. And children suffered from being put to work at very early ages, sometimes as young as six or seven. The trouble with The New Yorker's closing twist is that pre-industrial-revolution children weren't having what we now think of as a childhood, either. They too were put to work early on dreary tasks, paid or unpaid, and also were hungrier. Eventually there were laws to prohibit consignment to the workplace at such early ages. (Yet in The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers, I learned that as WWI approached, working-class children in the area around Manchester were getting only an elementary education, still going to work young, at about thirteen.)
I want my review to include some of the insights the book gave me and also some of my thoughts about the book.
One insight from the book is that the expanding economy broke the dependency on one's master. When work had been so very limited, one was stuck with a bad master no matter how bad the work, the pay, or the treatment at his hands, but as the economy expanded, workers could find alternatives. As the author says, the balance of power between employer and employee changed.
With more people and more work, the rigors of the apprentice system for skilled work gradually broke down (except for the most skilled tasks) which again removed some power from those who had traditionally held it and gave it to the laboring class. Apprenticeships were shorter, and laws against work by those who hadn't completed them fell, for example, for tailors and shoemakers. Even when it was the middle class, not the poor, whose wealth was increasing fastest, more demand for goods was created: for "shoes, clothes, bread, buildings and furniture."
Not everyone is happy about the weakening of such laws. While reading the book, I came across this column on the local current-day impact of Uber and Lyft on taxi certificates: http://www.myajc.com/business/kempner... .
The book is composed largely of relevant quotes and examples from the biographies, accompanied by the author's organization of the material and her conclusions. For example in one case a man had learned carpentry from an informal apprenticeship after his original apprenticeship in a dying field had fallen apart. He was talented and ended up in a high-end London cabinetry shop, whereupon his resentful fellows took the action of interfering with his tools and destroying his work in an attempt to drive him out. This man had the wherewithal to call a meeting and confront them, whereupon they accepted him--unusual, but showing the evolution that could happen as men in the lowest rung of society derived possibilities from the chaos of change. Before 1750, informal apprenticeships were rare; afterwards, more common.
When to regulate and when not, there's the question. Here's a June 2017 column (while I was still reading the book) by conservative columnist George Will suggesting there is only one answer. There is not, but he illustrates a point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...
The author doesn't talk about guilds per se. Mostly she just quotes the autobiographers and recounts what happens. I'm not British, so I had to "ask Google" what a navvy was. Nor had I heard of the Chartist movement. But the whole picture is fairly clear. She does the scholarly trick of repetition from different angles, and her presentation is rather dry. This is a book to read not for sparkly prose but for its ideas.
As the author says, in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, life was hard with few safety nets but was changing, for unskilled workers, too, as factories and mines and towns created all sorts of related occupations.
She has a section on the cottage weaving industry vs. the spread of factories and machines, the romanticized version we know and the realities of the situation.
After chapters on, first, men at work, then children, and finally, women, the author moves on to sections on love and marriage, and culture--the latter encompassing education, religion, and politics.
What struck me most from the love and marriage section is the change of mores in about the 1790s. Before that time, workers put off marriage, bowing to the requirements of their apprenticeships and the expectation and demands of parents. Therefore they didn't marry until their mid-twenties, when they could set up a household, which limited the number of children. Then that changed. People quit apprenticeships to marry or did so without parental permission. Or they went on and got pregnant. The author puts forth the hypothesis that the burgeoning industrial revolution was not only correlated with those changes but played a causal role.
When looking at the ways in which marriages were formed in the eighteenth century and earlier, we can see that not only did most people respect social norms, but they did so for good cause. When men and women delayed marriage in deference to the expectations of family and friends they were behaving in a way that made sense for the world in which they lived. Poverty extracts obedience. Penury was the reason why men like James Ferguson stayed with masters who almost starved them. It was also why adult writers did not complain about the forces that had had them at work at the age of six or seven. Poor people do what they need to do in order to put food on the table. And poor societies do what they need to do in order to make sure there are not too many people sitting around the table. Throughout the eighteenth century, Britain was still a traditional society, with most working people engaged in an unending struggle to earn the money needed to pay for their weekly rent and their next meal. Poverty encased working people and made their culture what it was. It powerfully discouraged young couples from pursuing risky marriage strategies without the support and consent of those around them. Parents and children cleaved to the same customs as their best means of survival.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the economic growth associated with industrialisation began to ripple through society. And as working people stepped away from the harsh struggle for subsistence that had ever characterised their lot, the rationalep for restrictive marriage customs became less compelling. ...
Re education, prior to 1810, learning to read was difficult due to lack of inexpensive books, newspapers, or free libraries. If anyone learned to read it was because of a rich patron or possibly using the printed words to a song one already knew as a Rosetta stone. But after 1810 there began to be small commercial night schools and also "mutual improvement societies" for reading and discussion. Motivation required, considering those efforts took place after a long workday!
As to religion being the "opiate of the masses," that may have been true at the established church, where working people had to kowtow and stick to their place. The Nonconformist churches were another story, provoking thinking and articulation, and their Sunday schools could be real schools for reading and learning as well as discussion.
New types of groups emerged around the late 1700s, for example, coops, trade societies and unions, not necessarily political in intent, but people engaged with each other and thereby learned new skills. In the mutual improvement societies and Sunday schools, a man might have his first experience of articulating his ideas to a group who listened to them. Also, all these sorts of groups required planning and organizing, which readied individuals for social engagement and political activism. In that way, all these groups pointed forward.
For workers writing their stories in the mid-nineteenth century, improvement was obvious. There were remarks to the effect that if their ancestors could revisit the earth, they would be amazed. One man wrote that agricultural workers of an earlier era were merely serfs. And especially I took note of a man who wrote about how the children of the day could be picky about their food. Several decades prior that was not the case as there simply wasn't enough food.
I think the bad reputation of the industrial revolution comes in part from its comparison to an idealized past. I had some mental picture of farmers on their land, or people could be imagining even more elaborate pastoral scenes. The author doesn't say much about that except that it had been a long time since the poor had been on the land. The working poor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not, nor apparently were those in the seventeenth--or sixteenth. They might do farm labor for somebody else, or they might maintain a kitchen garden to make do, but they didn't have their own farms nor were they even sharecroppers. I looked up serfdom for the first time when I was reading War and Peace. Here's a relatively readable entry I found this time: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/e...
But also I think the industrial revolution has a bad reputation because money, trade and consumption often do. Yet those kinds of attitudes by people in more fortunate social circumstances may also go along with keeping people on the lower rungs of society "in their place." People's getting out of their place also has a bad reputation, and economic development has a way of advancing social mobility and discomfiting many people. In that regard, this book has something in common with the conclusions of Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, in which the lowly peddlers of the new world were agents who ushered the dispossessed into the economic system.
Emma Griffin writes about her subjects in a very matter-of-fact way in that she regards them as just people--something I noticed since that is not the case in literature about the times, in which the lower classes aren't exactly people but something lower.
Here's one more review I found earlier on that made me want to read this book: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books...
October 26, 2013
Good, and thought-provoking, but with a couple of holes
A very interesting revisionist look at the lives of the working class in the Industrial Revolution.
Griffin, while acknowledging that some aspects of said people's lives worsened, primarily in the matter of child labor, that, on the whole, on average, it brought betterment even before Victorian-era social reforms.
As part of this, she says that some problems associated with the IR, such as irregular/seasonal unemployment, actually carry over from pre-IR, or maybe proto-IR, times and that the IR itself did not worsen them and may have ameliorated them.
Where does she get these ideas? Diares, some eventually published as pamphlets, booklets or books, from working men, and even a few working women, of this era.
As far as those direct benefits?
Griffin lists:
1. More money;
2. More sexual freedom (primarily for men);
3. More literacy;
4. More religious freedom and empowerment.
More money is obvious.
The sexual freedom connects in part to that, in part to increased geographic mobility and shortening or ending of formal apprentice periods. Result? More premarital sex, even premarital pregnancies. In what would certainly shock the virtue and mythmaking of modern American religious conservatives, by 1800, about 1/3 of British brides were pregnant at their weddings. Add in those who had already given birth to that "ill-conceived" child, illegitimate births that parish registries didn't record, the occasional "founding" that fell between the record-keeping cracks, and the occasional, or bit more than occasional, abortion, and half of 1800-period British women got pregnant before marriage.
More literacy? That came from occasional night schools some women taught at home, reading schools of various sorts founded by congregations in the Methodist movement (and eventual denomination), and guilds and other workingmen's groups forming their own educational support programs. The result? In part, those diaries, booklets, etc., some of which ran to 25,000 or more words when published.
Religious and social freedom? It in part came from the Great Awakening, which hit Europe as well as America, producing Methodism in England and Pietism in Germany. At the same time, Griffin argues that a bit more money for workers in the IR, and a bit more self-awareness, led workers to help fuel the Great Awakening, by being more literate, including on bible study, and challenging Anglican vicars.
It's indeed an interesting read. I'm still not fully convinced. It's true that the working class's lot may have risen compared to its past. But, Griffin dodges a couple of issues.
First, directly related to that, she doesn't address whether or not income inequality rose during the IR, if so, how much, and whether we shouldn't weigh that in the balance against the reported benefits.
Second, per stereotypes of dirty London and its coal-driven smog, she ignores environmental issues related to the IR, and how much more those affected the working class than the upper class. As part of that failure, she doesn't address life expectancy issues. (My bits of Googling tell me that child mortality in Britain declined throughout the 1700s, but adult mortality remained unchanged. I can't find any breakouts by economic class, at least with a brief search.)
The lack of data issue cuts other ways, too. Griffin indicates that the IR seemed to give the working class more money. But, again, we're not given any data. I don't know how much is available, but there has to be some.
Finally, there's a philosophical issue. A logical issue, to be more precise. A logical fallacy issue, to be more precise yet.
The diary-based writing keeps this book at four stars. But, it's not more than that. In fact, it's barely at that, I think.
The lack of data issue cuts other ways, too. Griffin indicates that the IR seemed to give the working class more money. But, again, we're not given any data. I don't know how much is available, but there has to be some.
I started this at four stars, but, the logical fallacy issue was the tipping point to move it back down.
A very interesting revisionist look at the lives of the working class in the Industrial Revolution.
Griffin, while acknowledging that some aspects of said people's lives worsened, primarily in the matter of child labor, that, on the whole, on average, it brought betterment even before Victorian-era social reforms.
As part of this, she says that some problems associated with the IR, such as irregular/seasonal unemployment, actually carry over from pre-IR, or maybe proto-IR, times and that the IR itself did not worsen them and may have ameliorated them.
Where does she get these ideas? Diares, some eventually published as pamphlets, booklets or books, from working men, and even a few working women, of this era.
As far as those direct benefits?
Griffin lists:
1. More money;
2. More sexual freedom (primarily for men);
3. More literacy;
4. More religious freedom and empowerment.
More money is obvious.
The sexual freedom connects in part to that, in part to increased geographic mobility and shortening or ending of formal apprentice periods. Result? More premarital sex, even premarital pregnancies. In what would certainly shock the virtue and mythmaking of modern American religious conservatives, by 1800, about 1/3 of British brides were pregnant at their weddings. Add in those who had already given birth to that "ill-conceived" child, illegitimate births that parish registries didn't record, the occasional "founding" that fell between the record-keeping cracks, and the occasional, or bit more than occasional, abortion, and half of 1800-period British women got pregnant before marriage.
More literacy? That came from occasional night schools some women taught at home, reading schools of various sorts founded by congregations in the Methodist movement (and eventual denomination), and guilds and other workingmen's groups forming their own educational support programs. The result? In part, those diaries, booklets, etc., some of which ran to 25,000 or more words when published.
Religious and social freedom? It in part came from the Great Awakening, which hit Europe as well as America, producing Methodism in England and Pietism in Germany. At the same time, Griffin argues that a bit more money for workers in the IR, and a bit more self-awareness, led workers to help fuel the Great Awakening, by being more literate, including on bible study, and challenging Anglican vicars.
It's indeed an interesting read. I'm still not fully convinced. It's true that the working class's lot may have risen compared to its past. But, Griffin dodges a couple of issues.
First, directly related to that, she doesn't address whether or not income inequality rose during the IR, if so, how much, and whether we shouldn't weigh that in the balance against the reported benefits.
Second, per stereotypes of dirty London and its coal-driven smog, she ignores environmental issues related to the IR, and how much more those affected the working class than the upper class. As part of that failure, she doesn't address life expectancy issues. (My bits of Googling tell me that child mortality in Britain declined throughout the 1700s, but adult mortality remained unchanged. I can't find any breakouts by economic class, at least with a brief search.)
The lack of data issue cuts other ways, too. Griffin indicates that the IR seemed to give the working class more money. But, again, we're not given any data. I don't know how much is available, but there has to be some.
Finally, there's a philosophical issue. A logical issue, to be more precise. A logical fallacy issue, to be more precise yet.
The diary-based writing keeps this book at four stars. But, it's not more than that. In fact, it's barely at that, I think.
The lack of data issue cuts other ways, too. Griffin indicates that the IR seemed to give the working class more money. But, again, we're not given any data. I don't know how much is available, but there has to be some.
I started this at four stars, but, the logical fallacy issue was the tipping point to move it back down.
March 4, 2018
Well researched and well written, Griffin seeks to rebalance the view of the British industrial revolution as a disaster for the working person by referring to the writings of those who lived through it - working people. This is an admirable aim and her writing is generally convincing.
She is not starry eyed about working conditions- by modern standards they were terrible - but she claims they were at least generally better than what came before.
A few niggles. The chapter contents are somewhat repetitive and I wish we actually could read more of the original writings. This is primarily an analysis of those writings, quotes from them are limited. I was expecting more “in their own words” and less what an academic historian had determined after reading hundreds of autobiographies from the period.
Nevertheless a good and interesting read and an impressive feat of research.
She is not starry eyed about working conditions- by modern standards they were terrible - but she claims they were at least generally better than what came before.
A few niggles. The chapter contents are somewhat repetitive and I wish we actually could read more of the original writings. This is primarily an analysis of those writings, quotes from them are limited. I was expecting more “in their own words” and less what an academic historian had determined after reading hundreds of autobiographies from the period.
Nevertheless a good and interesting read and an impressive feat of research.
December 9, 2015
I love the idea of challenging established notions, and the research on diaries of people who seem to have done well at this time has a lot of appeal. But Griffin doesn't know enough of the wider history of the time and makes some very ropey claims and assumptions. She claims that rural labourers were all poor and miserable, but what she is seeing is the result of the enclosures which ruined the lives of many, and drove them to seek work in the cities. She mentions Cobbett,but fails to understand the horrors that he saw happening as a result of ordinary people losing access to natural resources. She talks of women needing work outside the home, but in the past, they were valued for the work they did within the home. Spinning, weaving and sewing clothes brought in no money, but made families financially independent. Some agricultural workers were paid very little but when they lived in they got food and housing and heating for free so needed very little. Children in the countryside helped about the farms, but only what was suited to them, and they were often in the open air, a far cry from long hours in a factory or mine. Farm workers produced food they needed so their work felt important. They had days off, they had festivals, they had communities, families and neighbourhoods. She often cites sources but doesn't cite time, which maters as Britain was in a constant state of change. she makes no mention of charities which helped poor boys get apprenticeships, she is surprised that people were concerned about the poor - they were being good Christians!
June 11, 2013
Continuing my research into the writings of 'ordinary'/working class people in the nineteenth century. This one's a treasure trove of references. It is also one of a growing number of books that suggest that amidst the poverty and suffering of industrial Britain, there were realised layer on layer better lives for individuals and reforms leading through to the 20th century. In a year or so when I have assimilated thing, I'll reflect upon the somewhat suspect ideology that motivates (in the present constructions of history) views such as this which have swung the pendulum way too far in the compensatory direction.
August 10, 2022
Detailed, but wordy
Others, obviously, may find this author's style captivating, but it is not for me. I find the discussion tends to be circular, going back over ground to repeat a point several times. Also, the voice of the author seems to reflect the period, and for me makes for a heavy read. In some ways it's a shame. I barely got 20% in (which did not even get to chapter 3), and some of the questions the author was raising about the traditional negative and brutal view of the industrial revolution could have been fun to follow.
If your tastes lean towards formal, slightly dry aand academic style, you should be OK
Others, obviously, may find this author's style captivating, but it is not for me. I find the discussion tends to be circular, going back over ground to repeat a point several times. Also, the voice of the author seems to reflect the period, and for me makes for a heavy read. In some ways it's a shame. I barely got 20% in (which did not even get to chapter 3), and some of the questions the author was raising about the traditional negative and brutal view of the industrial revolution could have been fun to follow.
If your tastes lean towards formal, slightly dry aand academic style, you should be OK
July 7, 2020
A thought provoking new perspective on the lives of the working classes at the beginning of the industrial age. Based upon the written testimonials of the working class this is very readable.
May 5, 2016
So, two big words: survival bias. Less successful people weren't writing about their lives, people who died early weren't writing about their lives, women largely weren't writing about their lives, and successful working-class men might have a different view on the times than the others.
That being said, there is obviously value in comparing contents of autobiographies that did get written over time or over regions or over the writer's work, and that's a big part of what makes this book worth reading.
There are interesting points - I don't think they're groundbreaking but I haven't read them before - about contribution of non-political causes (various Nonconformist churches having working-class people do low-level organisation, Sunday schools, mutual improvement societies, co-ops, temperance societies) to developing of organisational and public speaking skills that then came in handy in movements like unions or Chartism. The author marks the first generation to have these organisations for working-class men, as well as relatively widespread education for working-class men, as "the coming of modernity" (p. 247).
That being said, there is obviously value in comparing contents of autobiographies that did get written over time or over regions or over the writer's work, and that's a big part of what makes this book worth reading.
There are interesting points - I don't think they're groundbreaking but I haven't read them before - about contribution of non-political causes (various Nonconformist churches having working-class people do low-level organisation, Sunday schools, mutual improvement societies, co-ops, temperance societies) to developing of organisational and public speaking skills that then came in handy in movements like unions or Chartism. The author marks the first generation to have these organisations for working-class men, as well as relatively widespread education for working-class men, as "the coming of modernity" (p. 247).
August 1, 2024
If I hadn’t listened to an interview with the author ahead of time I would not have known the thesis of the book until the very end.
Her main point is that the industrial revolution was a net positive for humanity and that we may have had more leisure time in the past but it was not enjoyable because there was not enough employment, so many people were hungry.
Other critiques here included her not including enough data to back up her anecdotes and that she does not go into how enclosure laws affected people. I concur with both of these criticisms. In addition, I would like to have heard more direct excerpts from the autobiographies.
An interesting take away for me is that as soon woman could support themselves without man, more chose to do so.
Another star removed for there being no mention of slavery. The book stretches between Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade through the time it was outlawed. It is shocking that there is not one mention of the practice.
Her main point is that the industrial revolution was a net positive for humanity and that we may have had more leisure time in the past but it was not enjoyable because there was not enough employment, so many people were hungry.
Other critiques here included her not including enough data to back up her anecdotes and that she does not go into how enclosure laws affected people. I concur with both of these criticisms. In addition, I would like to have heard more direct excerpts from the autobiographies.
An interesting take away for me is that as soon woman could support themselves without man, more chose to do so.
Another star removed for there being no mention of slavery. The book stretches between Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade through the time it was outlawed. It is shocking that there is not one mention of the practice.
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November 15, 2021The book, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution tells the story of several hundred British working people through the use of their autobiographies to paint a varied understanding of the working class through the period of British industrialization. Notably, it primarily includes autobiographies written by the working poor, shedding new light on a group of people commonly neglected in primary source documentation.
The argument in the book is following the pre-industrial period of under- and un-employment by agricultural workers, industrialization proved to be a good source of employment proven by a curated list of autobiographies written by the poor. Employment and regular wages being the primary need of the poor, they considered this a good thing. This argument is argued by various citations of autobiographies showing that they were in good employ for good money in industrial jobs, while when they were younger they or their father would be underemployed in agricultural work. Another way of argument is using parish registers alongside show that people were getting married at younger ages in industrialized or industrializing areas as compared to the non-industrial areas. This is able to be argued because the traditional form of marriage was to have enough income to have both a house, furnishings for the house, and money to pay for the wedding.
The book is organized by going over various arguments as part of the primary argument of the book. The first section is dedicated to explaining how people earn a living in industrial areas and how this is different from the non-industrial areas or directly previous to industrialization in England and Scotland. This first section discusses females, males, and children and their experiences in industrial and agricultural labor. The second section is dedicated to marriage customs, “love”, and sex. The author discusses the notions of marriage, sex, and premarital sex. Discussing premarital sex is especially important due to the willingness to engage in such implies consideration of having the economic future to handle the possible outcomes. The third section is dedicated to discussing groups of culture such as workingmens’ associations, self-improvement societies, and reading clubs. The third section also discusses the connection to such organizations and associations and the chartist movement.
The arguments in the book are almost purely from the evidence provided by the several hundred autobiographies. In light of this, the argument of the book is quite strong. It is, however, to be considered that this is from a highly curated list of autobiographies, inherently anecdotal evidence to what’s going on in society at large. Because of the level of curation, the list does not include those that did not write surviving autobiographies, those too poor to be considered, those that got into too severe trouble with the law to leave surviving legal records of such, or those that rose to too high of a station in life. However, in doing so the book does not include additional information to put the period into better context, such as the rising agricultural yields in the rural countryside leading to a reduction in both malnutrition and famine leading to fewer deaths from famine and also from disease, which might lend itself to why there is an excess of agricultural workers. Was industrialization a return to a previous normal where it was normal for all working-aged persons to find work? Or was industrialization a period where an agricultural population forced into the yoke of overpopulation was able to cast off this yoke thanks to the black smoke of progress? In addition, there is discussion and questions over industrialization on whether or not it resulted in a decline in self-esteem and self-actualization amongst industrial workers as compared to agricultural workers, which autobiographies could help shed light on, which is not particularly discussed. Unless, of course, the writing of an autobiography can count as a form of self-actualization. Another arguable weakness is the vague language used in the chapters describing sex. “You know the kind I mean.” No, I do not; you’ve used vague language and thus assume the reader has an understanding about where desires overcome the power of will.
In considering the book, it must be considered what the autobiographers are writing about. Most of the autobiographers are writing primarily their own lives, with minimal analysis into why things are in a more historical context. "Writers tended to remember their adult years in the mine, mill or forge in a much more positive light"; a more positive time considering the more regular employment when such was desired, fuller bellies where once might be hunger and some degree of independence from particularly tyrannical employers. With such a vibrant labor market, employed men could quit with minimal issues and find desired employment quickly enough to not cause issues in family life or acquisition of necessities.
The book might be easily misunderstood without outside context since this is mostly lacking from the book. The arguments in the book, due to using autobiographies, allow us to increase our understanding of how the poor lived during the industrial revolution. Notable of these understandings is that it is as often the parish as the parents that decide when a child is of age to work.
Thus we have gone over the book’s primary argument, a summary of the book’s sections, some strengths, and weaknesses of the arguments, and have placed the book in a historical context. Overall, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution is a book going over autobiographies, providing reasonable arguments using only autobiographies as evidence, but falls short in providing greater historical context or a wider variety of autobiographies from other social classes.
The argument in the book is following the pre-industrial period of under- and un-employment by agricultural workers, industrialization proved to be a good source of employment proven by a curated list of autobiographies written by the poor. Employment and regular wages being the primary need of the poor, they considered this a good thing. This argument is argued by various citations of autobiographies showing that they were in good employ for good money in industrial jobs, while when they were younger they or their father would be underemployed in agricultural work. Another way of argument is using parish registers alongside show that people were getting married at younger ages in industrialized or industrializing areas as compared to the non-industrial areas. This is able to be argued because the traditional form of marriage was to have enough income to have both a house, furnishings for the house, and money to pay for the wedding.
The book is organized by going over various arguments as part of the primary argument of the book. The first section is dedicated to explaining how people earn a living in industrial areas and how this is different from the non-industrial areas or directly previous to industrialization in England and Scotland. This first section discusses females, males, and children and their experiences in industrial and agricultural labor. The second section is dedicated to marriage customs, “love”, and sex. The author discusses the notions of marriage, sex, and premarital sex. Discussing premarital sex is especially important due to the willingness to engage in such implies consideration of having the economic future to handle the possible outcomes. The third section is dedicated to discussing groups of culture such as workingmens’ associations, self-improvement societies, and reading clubs. The third section also discusses the connection to such organizations and associations and the chartist movement.
The arguments in the book are almost purely from the evidence provided by the several hundred autobiographies. In light of this, the argument of the book is quite strong. It is, however, to be considered that this is from a highly curated list of autobiographies, inherently anecdotal evidence to what’s going on in society at large. Because of the level of curation, the list does not include those that did not write surviving autobiographies, those too poor to be considered, those that got into too severe trouble with the law to leave surviving legal records of such, or those that rose to too high of a station in life. However, in doing so the book does not include additional information to put the period into better context, such as the rising agricultural yields in the rural countryside leading to a reduction in both malnutrition and famine leading to fewer deaths from famine and also from disease, which might lend itself to why there is an excess of agricultural workers. Was industrialization a return to a previous normal where it was normal for all working-aged persons to find work? Or was industrialization a period where an agricultural population forced into the yoke of overpopulation was able to cast off this yoke thanks to the black smoke of progress? In addition, there is discussion and questions over industrialization on whether or not it resulted in a decline in self-esteem and self-actualization amongst industrial workers as compared to agricultural workers, which autobiographies could help shed light on, which is not particularly discussed. Unless, of course, the writing of an autobiography can count as a form of self-actualization. Another arguable weakness is the vague language used in the chapters describing sex. “You know the kind I mean.” No, I do not; you’ve used vague language and thus assume the reader has an understanding about where desires overcome the power of will.
In considering the book, it must be considered what the autobiographers are writing about. Most of the autobiographers are writing primarily their own lives, with minimal analysis into why things are in a more historical context. "Writers tended to remember their adult years in the mine, mill or forge in a much more positive light"; a more positive time considering the more regular employment when such was desired, fuller bellies where once might be hunger and some degree of independence from particularly tyrannical employers. With such a vibrant labor market, employed men could quit with minimal issues and find desired employment quickly enough to not cause issues in family life or acquisition of necessities.
The book might be easily misunderstood without outside context since this is mostly lacking from the book. The arguments in the book, due to using autobiographies, allow us to increase our understanding of how the poor lived during the industrial revolution. Notable of these understandings is that it is as often the parish as the parents that decide when a child is of age to work.
Thus we have gone over the book’s primary argument, a summary of the book’s sections, some strengths, and weaknesses of the arguments, and have placed the book in a historical context. Overall, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution is a book going over autobiographies, providing reasonable arguments using only autobiographies as evidence, but falls short in providing greater historical context or a wider variety of autobiographies from other social classes.
April 6, 2016
An interesting piece of research using working people's autobiographies to provide a different viewpoint on the effects of the industrial revolution on the working class. But,in the end, I'm not sure her final thesis is that different from what has gone before. I found the social changes brought about by the availability of more and better paid work the most interesting part e.g. The effects on courtship and marriage. Overall, it needed more contextualisation as a framework for the personal experiences - perhaps it would be best to read a more formal history of the period alongside this book.
January 27, 2019
Great review in June 2013. Griffin has quite a turn of phrase!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books...
Want to read
June 15, 2014the author wrote a "5 Best" column in the WSJ 6/14/14. I looked up her name and book because of that column.
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November 10, 2025Even though this took me a month to finish, and can lean a bit dry, I really enjoyed it! Griffin relies on autobiographies to navigate us through the lives of the working class during the Industrial Revolution, going topic by topic and linking them together through these autobiographies. Her goal is to understand the industrial revolution is something that changed the culture, economics, and lives of the working class people who lived through it--and often for the better. While I think she sometimes gets repetitive in the slightly different angles she takes on certain topics, she presents her research in a way that makes sense and does not shy away from the simultaneous horrors of the industrial revolution. Yes, motherhood restricted economic freedom for women; yes, higher demand for jobs also meant higher demand for child labor. But the shift from the 1790s to the 1870s in the autonomy working class people in England were able to conduct their lives with cannot be understated.
Notable to me are the parallels to contemporary society and the lessons we can take from a not-so-distant past. Griffin argues that the development of organizational and public speaking skills through the emergence of Nonconformist branches of the church, Sunday schools, and mutual improvement societies paved the way for unions and Chartism, a lesson that speaks to the necessity of community if we wish to do any organizing today. Her description of the supply and demand economics of skilled artisans in the and before the industrial revolution evokes freelancing now--of course if there are more jobs you will go to the ones that treat you better, and of course if there is no work where you are you will move to a more dense workplace environment. Even the way she approaches people's changing relationships to sex as their economic situations changed makes me ponder our current landscape of sexual relationships, and marvel at the way contraception has shaped the modern world.
I think this is a really great primer to life in the industrial revolution that isn't sensationalized. It takes a broad, sociological view and owns its source materials' flaws and oversights, and covers a wide range of topics. Yes you get some repetitive angles and stories--but in a book like this, I take it as a testament to thoroughness. Recommend!
Notable to me are the parallels to contemporary society and the lessons we can take from a not-so-distant past. Griffin argues that the development of organizational and public speaking skills through the emergence of Nonconformist branches of the church, Sunday schools, and mutual improvement societies paved the way for unions and Chartism, a lesson that speaks to the necessity of community if we wish to do any organizing today. Her description of the supply and demand economics of skilled artisans in the and before the industrial revolution evokes freelancing now--of course if there are more jobs you will go to the ones that treat you better, and of course if there is no work where you are you will move to a more dense workplace environment. Even the way she approaches people's changing relationships to sex as their economic situations changed makes me ponder our current landscape of sexual relationships, and marvel at the way contraception has shaped the modern world.
I think this is a really great primer to life in the industrial revolution that isn't sensationalized. It takes a broad, sociological view and owns its source materials' flaws and oversights, and covers a wide range of topics. Yes you get some repetitive angles and stories--but in a book like this, I take it as a testament to thoroughness. Recommend!
January 22, 2021
Really good book! I think it would be accessible to people not very interested in history but provides enough depth for anyone who is to enjoy. Challenged my basic perception of the Industrial Revolution and what it was like to live through it in a balanced way. Provided a much more tangible history than just learning about the machines (which are barely mentioned). Only slight criticism is that some of the autobiographers stories can be a repetitive. This helps the author's argument but can be a bit dull for the reader (Once you've read one autobiographer's reminiscences about Sunday school, you've read them all!)
October 9, 2022
I read this for something in school, this book is very educational and informative. It gives you other perspectives of the revolution other than sickness, and death. There a lot of things written from the people at that time's views and sources and diaries to infer more information from.
All in all, this was a good book😊
All in all, this was a good book😊
January 2, 2025
Despite its afterword...
A fascinating view of the industrial revolution from the perspective of the working men who lived it. Ms. Griffin pays lip-service to a 21st-century perspective in the afterword, but I think that is more reflective of our present-day expectations of government than an understanding of 19th-century limitations.
A fascinating view of the industrial revolution from the perspective of the working men who lived it. Ms. Griffin pays lip-service to a 21st-century perspective in the afterword, but I think that is more reflective of our present-day expectations of government than an understanding of 19th-century limitations.
April 16, 2020
Provided a really interesting perspective on the Industrial Revolution which I had not considered before. As a secondary school History teacher this has definitely inspired me to teach this topic in a new way.
April 22, 2025
An excellent piece of counter history, challenging the male economic historians‘ view of the Industrial Revolution as disastrous for the poor. This is based on a fresh approach: analysing the life writings of about 450 working class writers.
December 23, 2025
Forget your dark satanic mills. This book highlights the many social advances industrialisation brought to the British working class. As described in their own words. A useful corrective to the popular myths about the Industrial Revolution.
March 5, 2020
Excellent
January 28, 2022
An excellent and very readable work of social history.
January 29, 2023
Enlightening - and an object lesson in how a close and thoughtful reading of an old, but under-used, class of sources can yield deep new insights.
June 19, 2024
Covers all the aspects of how the industrial revolution impacted the working class using the working class' own words, and overall is an interesting read.
December 12, 2024
Brilliant book, however didnt really catch my interest
October 27, 2025
Really interesting start but dried up in the back half
February 21, 2017
A very interesting book which gives a new view of the Industrial Revolution. Historians of the revolution have tended to dwell on the downside - poor working conditions, exploitation of child labour etc, but in this book a different picture emerges. Emma griffin draws on the considerable number of autobiographies written by working class people who lived through the Industrial Revolution, to show that all of them considered that their lives had been bettered by industrialisation. Many of them, prior to the revolution, had been farm labourers, with poor wages and long periods of unemployment due to there simply not being enough work for them. The Industrial revoultion provided more jobs, regular work, and better wages. The opinion among the workers who wrote thier autobiographies seems to be unanimous - life was better after the revolution than before. That is not to deny the downside - those who had been child labourers in the factories were in agreement that life for such children was estremely harsh. But all of them felt that their lives improved when they became adults, and could earn more money, improve their skills etc. The revolution also led to an immense increase in working people's organisations - trade unions, reading groups, improvement societies etc. That the Industrial Revolution benefitted, rather than simply exploiting, working class people, is a novel way of looking at this fascinating period in history. This is a very interesting and original book which should appeal to anyone with any interest in the history of working people.
March 31, 2025
the general claim of this book is that (1) you can get a pretty accurate view of the industrial revolution's impact on the working class by just reading autobiographies written by working class people at the time and that (2) the working class generally support the view that the industrial revolution was generally neutral for women/children and positive for empowering working men (economically, spiritually, and politically).
I'm not sure to what extent (1) holds? The author briefly touches on some of the most obvious reporting biases that you might get in this situation, but doesn't spend a lot of time addressing concerns about them (and generally does so by looking at seventeenth and eighteenth-century autobiographies, which are incredibly rare). I don't think the author is misrepresenting anything, but it just seems like a small enough sample size that you might run into these issues, and it would've been nice to deal with that more upfront.
cool read though fs, and definitely learned a lot about life in England at the time. didn't read the middle section though because I was on a plane
I'm not sure to what extent (1) holds? The author briefly touches on some of the most obvious reporting biases that you might get in this situation, but doesn't spend a lot of time addressing concerns about them (and generally does so by looking at seventeenth and eighteenth-century autobiographies, which are incredibly rare). I don't think the author is misrepresenting anything, but it just seems like a small enough sample size that you might run into these issues, and it would've been nice to deal with that more upfront.
cool read though fs, and definitely learned a lot about life in England at the time. didn't read the middle section though because I was on a plane
June 20, 2015
"Autobiographies" is the most frequent noun in this exhaustively researched, fascinatingly human account of the Industrial Revolution. Using 350 self-penned accounts of life, Griffin has fashioned an in-depth look at how the growth of mechanization affected individuals (male, female, young) and by implication the broad spectrum of English working classes. She weaves multiple quotes into her text which while giving authenticity and credibility precludes a sweeping, author-generated feel to the reading of same.
Along the way, she also takes issue with historians whose interpretations of the causes and effects of industrialization are debunked or given a different shading by these autobiographies. Her knowledge of the period is a fertile ground in which those words, written centuries ago, often for families and children, live again.
I found this a dense read but it was rather like listening in rapt attention to a series of fascinating erudite lectures given by a Master.
Along the way, she also takes issue with historians whose interpretations of the causes and effects of industrialization are debunked or given a different shading by these autobiographies. Her knowledge of the period is a fertile ground in which those words, written centuries ago, often for families and children, live again.
I found this a dense read but it was rather like listening in rapt attention to a series of fascinating erudite lectures given by a Master.
December 30, 2013
I picked this up after reading a review who knows where, hoping I'd find some echos of globalization and today's crazy disruptions in Britain's Industrial Revolution. Griffin offers a perspective derived from workers' autobiographies and argues that the Industrial Revolution generally made things better. Pre-industrial Britain didn't have anything close to full employment and workers had few options; in post-industrial Britain they were more mobile, hard bargaining power, and were by their own admission happier. So I'm newly interested in liberal economists who argue that government policies should support full employment. But I still have no idea what happens when drivers, warehouse, and factory workers are replaced by automatons; we'll all have to wait a few years.
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