In Our Time - Consequences of the Industrial Revolution

Episode Date: December 30, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the far-reaching consequences of the Industrial Revolution. After more than a century of rapid technological change, and the massive growth of its urban centres, Britain was changed forever. Lifestyles changed as workers moved from agricultural settlements to factory towns: health, housing and labour relations were all affected. But the effects were both social and intellectual, as thinkers originated theories to deal with the new realities of urban living, mass production and a consumer society. With:Jane HumphriesProfessor of Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College, University of OxfordEmma GriffinSenior Lecturer in History at the University of East AngliaLawrence GoldmanFellow and Tutor in History at St Peter's College, University of OxfordProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1842, a German businessman sent his 22-year-old son abroad to work in the Manchester Office of the Family Textile firm. This young man, Frederick Engels,

spent much of the next two years exploring the slums and factories of the city. Horrified by the poverty, disease and overcrowding, Hewitness Engels documented his experiences in a book entitled The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Engels recognised that the introduction of steam power and new manufacturing technologies had changed Britain forever. These inventions, he wrote, gave rise to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society,

one the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognised. The consequences of the world. of the Industrial Revolution were certainly profound. The economy, social structures, housing, education and public health were all affected. Many of these effects at a human cost, but in other ways, society was changed for the better. With me to discuss the legacy of the Industrial Revolution

are Jane Humphreys, Professor of Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College Oxford, Emma Griffin, senior lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia, and Lawrence Goldman, fellow and tutoring history at St. Peter's College, Oxford. Jane Humphreys, the Industrial Revolution is sort of taking place between about 1750 and 1830.

Can you give us an overall sense of the transformation it wrought on British society? Well, as the label Industrial Revolution suggests, economic historians used to think that this was an era of seismic change in the economy, reflected in an upwards jump in the growth rate of output, particularly industrial output, and of productivity. So the pioneer quantifiers for Listine and Max Cole thought that the rate of growth of industrial output jumped from about less than half a percent per annum

in the middle of the 18th century to a whacking 3.5% by its closing decades. This vision of the Industrial Revolution was also this upward leaping growth rates was associated with a host of other changes, the application of science to production, mechanisation, use of the inventions that you talked about in the last episode, the movement of labour out of agriculture and into manufacturing and industry, urbanisation,

specialisation, production for markets, sometimes distant markets, sometimes protected markets, and the appearance of new occupational groups and social classes associated with these changes. Now these changes were non-reversible and communities, so that the Industrial Revolution represented a portal through which economies accessed modern economic growth, whereby every generation could confidently expect wars and natural disasters aside to be richer than their parents' generation had been. And some canonical texts offered the British Industrial Revolution,

this first Industrial Revolution, as a template for other countries to follow. Now, today, economic historians would be much more circumspect about their understanding of what the Industrial Revolution was and what it meant. We've toned down those dramatic growth rates that Dean and Cole first estimated. We can see that there are much longer routes

to industrialisation. Those routes go back to right through the 18th century. We've got a much broader geographical perspective and a much less anglo-centric perspective. So I think now there'd be agreement that the Industrial Revolution really has two phases, a first phase of slow, steady growth in the 18th century associated with division of labour and specialisation.

We'd call it Smithian growth after the great Adam Smith. And then a quickening of growth in the early 19th century as some of those technologies, the new technologies come on stream. How did this overall in that, let's call it 100-issue? How do that affect the wealth of the nation? Well, although we've toned down the heroics of the industrial revolution, nonetheless, something very remarkable happened in the 18th and 19th century. If we take the standpoint of 1851, the Great Exhibition,

by then Britain has less than a quarter of its population in the agricultural sector. That's amazingly low by European standards. It's got very high urbanisation rates, many more people than anywhere else in Europe living in towns and cities. Factories dominate the industrial landscape. It's not just the cotton industry that's mechanised. We've got mechanised rail transport, basic metallurgy is mechanised. And Britain dominates world trade in manufactured goods.

And even more astonishing domination of the services from shipping, commerce, in fact, the kind of service infrastructure around that manufacturing. It's a cliche, but it's the workshop of the world. The richest most developed country we've ever known, although not everybody shares equally in those riches, as we'll go on to talk about. Emma Griffin, everything in the past seems inevitable, doesn't it?

But the Industrial Revolution was quite heavily opposed in many ways. Can you give us some notion of what the opposition was, as it moved forward, as it were. We've got it established, on it goes. Jane has given us a wonderful overview and fixed on 1851 as the apotheosis celebration of Industrial Revolution, as it were. Let's take that. So what was it up against?

I think you have to be really careful when you think about that you ask a question like that because you have to remember that those people living in the early 19th century had no idea that they were living in the midst of an industrial revolution. There is no even word, the Industrial Revolution. The word comes significantly later. So they know things are changing, just because the word isn't there, just because there's no phrase, the Industrial Revolution.

They know full well that they are living in a time of change and they know that the world are changing about them. But they do not know that they are on the cusp of a really monumental step change in world history. So we do have people resisting. We do obviously have people resisting new technologies. and there are some very lively flashpoints in Nottingham, for example, in 1811, 1812, 1813. These are the Luddites, effectively, who are basically framework knit, they're knitting stockings on hand looms,

and they are resisting the introduction of new machines that are basically displacing their labour. But I think we have to be rather circumspect. And they're resisting it's because not everybody knows, they're resisting it by going and smashing these. taking their huge mallets and they are going and smashing the machines and they're rioting basically and they are smashing the new machines and of course that's where the idea Luddite that we use nowadays it's a resistance to new technology they are resisting new technology I don't think we can go from that to saying they are resisting the industrial revolution

people have always resisted new inventions and their inventions they don't all emerge in the industrial revolution there's a history of inventing and people are always hostile to the inventions are coming out because potentially it displaces them. So it's not unique to something that's going on at this time. And I think another way of turning your question around is to say, obviously you have these flashpoints, but in some ways what's also interesting is how little opposition there is from working people.

What working people are mostly doing in the 19th century are leaving the land, moving to the cities and taking up new work in the factories. They're mostly working with the new machinery and they're mostly not breaking them. Can you give us some idea? of the size of this movement and where it was concentrated on it. I mean, how the population grew, it's referred to by Jane.

It was a remarkable growth, and compared to other countries as well, as it was in itself remarkable, but comparatively remarkable. Can you just give us some idea of population growth, population movement? The growth of population is one of the very interesting things that's happening in Britain at this time. Firstly, and most simply, we just have very rapid population growth. Over the 18th century, the population nearly doubles from 5 million, it takes back to about 1810 to double,

and then between then and 1870, it doubles again. So this is very rapid growth, a doubling within the timeframe of somebody's lifespan, is rapid growth. I think the other thing that's very interesting is the population had grown before. This is not the first time in British history that the population grows,

but previously when the population grows, it ultimately reaches that Malthusian limit, and there's that crisis, the famine, the dirt, the black death or whatever is, that brings the population back down. And what's happening with the population now is it grows, and it grows, and it grows, and then it grows some more. And it never reaches. And it's continued to grow right up until the present day, we're now 60 million.

And we don't expect to hit that Malthusian crisis. So it's not just that the population is growing at this time. It's behaving in a very different way. Such as? It's basically growing without reaching this Malthusian check and then having the population die back down. So the Malthusian check of famine and plague is gone, is that what you're saying? It's gone, basically. The population is growing.

and there's enough wealth to allow the population to grow up. So it's one of these clues that something really phenomenal is happening, and that's why historians still stick with the idea of an industrial revolution, because clearly something has very profoundly changed within our economy. Lawrence Goldman, from a workers' point of view, how people are moving into the cities, and as we know by the end of the 19th century, there are more people in the cities than on the land

for the first time in human history, and a lot of these big cities are in this country. How were they living? Well, they were living in physically different kinds of spaces and I think space is one thing that one would talk about. You've given up an agricultural community, you've come into a city, and one of the things that memoirs tell us, the voices of the workers themselves

and people who go and visit industrial locations tell us is the constrained nature of life. Space is different. You're in a constrained environment in a factory. These often look like barracks to us, today we might well mistake them for such. And of course people live in very crowded tenements, in courts and alleys very close to their place of work as well. Space itself has kind of imploded and it's a much more constrained

environment. And with that I think also goes a difference in time. Agricultural time is different from industrial time. In an agricultural society you follow the rhythms of the day, of the seasons and the year. And there are are periods when you're not hard at work. There are periods of leisure and so forth. But industrial time in a factory is of course entirely different. We, in many ways today, we still live by industrial time. Whatever the weather, we go to work and we meet, as it were, certain conditions of time in the way we organise our lives. And this was new, and the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution had great trouble in, if you like, disciplining a workforce. Workers

didn't want to work to time, to a new kind of concept of time. And it involved a great deal of kind of training almost to force people to accept a new kind of time discipline. And the third thing about the way they lived, I think, is really about community. I mean, communities broke down in the sense they had left behind face-to-face agricultural communities. In cities, the literature tells us of the sense of isolation, individual workers are isolated, alienated really from their environment. But what's interesting, I think, about the Industrial Revolution going into the mid-19th century

is the growth really of all sorts of different communities to give workers and their families some kind of foundation and basis. Some of these are based upon the workplace, trade unions and so forth. Some are about sociability, friendly societies that gave workers opportunities to meet with other workers, but also provided basic welfare services. And also religion, particularly non-conformist religion. Indeed, very crucial. Non-conformity takes off, of course, in this period.

Workers coming in from the fields would be drawn towards the sociability as well as the religious life of the chapel. By the 1850s non-conformity vies with the established church for the sheer number of people attending. And it gives people a sense of community a reason for being. in the city, and it definitely softens the experience, so much so that one of the great debates that historians of the previous generation had

was whether Methodism inoculated the British during the Industrial Revolution against a political revolution as well. There's an argument that goes on between historians about living standards before and after the Industrial Revolution. I know this is a big argument. I know it has many tones. Is it possible for you to summarise it for us?

Well, okay, this is what I think we can agree on. We know that living standards definitely rise for workers in Britain after the middle of the 19th century, after 1851, let's say, for that half century they rise. The argument really is about living standards between, say, about 1780 and about the 1840s. And the best way to think about it is in terms of optimists and pessimists. There isn't really a resolution of this debate, it still goes on. Optimists think that overall, in terms of the purchasing power of workers, living standards rose and the trend line is going up. Pessimists, on the other hand, looking at the wage and price data that we have, see periods of stasis when living standards stagnate,

and indeed there are clearly periods when living standards fall in the deep depressions of the early 19th century. for example, after the Napoleonic Wars for five or six years after 1815, and then the deepest depression of the whole 19th century really sets in in about 1838. And of course we're living in a world here where there are no welfare services, and when these industrial towns that depend on one commodity find that the market has dried up, everybody is on short time, everybody is unemployed. And in those circumstances, clearly there are these deep falls in living standards, though they rise again in good times when trade recovers.

So the argument really is quantitative there. And it hasn't been resolved because a lot of the data can be interpreted in different ways and the data isn't as good as we'd like. But it's worth adding as well that there's a qualitative aspect to this debate, a debate really about not how much was in the pockets of workers, how much they had to spend on the basics of life, but also about, as it were, the quality of life, ripping people out of an agricultural society

and into an industrial environment, what did that do to their quality of life? But even here, although we have these images, pessimistic images of the awfulness of an urban environment in the 1820s or the 1830s, even here, of course, there are compensations. I mean, Manchester was the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, but it was also a very exciting place.

It was, you know, to go and live in a city is interesting. There are so many more possibilities for recreation, for leisure, for community, and some of the popular literature of the age actually celebrates living in cities. Jane Humphreys, can I come back to you and sort of go in that same direction? But firstly, maybe briefly, was there a sense, please answer back Lawrence when I mean, that Lawrence was somehow being a little too idyllic about what was happening in the countryside, the community, your own time, the opener, the face-to-face, a bit cheery-bee. Well, I think I would agree with you, Melvin,

because actually agricultural labourers wages were one of the groups, well, agricultural labourers are one of the groups who we know their wages stagnated, perhaps even went down. Plus this is a group too where the opportunities for other family members to contribute to family subsistence are drying up too. Field work for women, for instance, is disappearing in the course of the late 18th century.

Because of the industrial revolution? Yes. Because of the agrarian machinery. Yes. So part of that movement into the cities, yes. I mean, an orthodox economic historian would say people still move to the cities, therefore they must have been compensated by the higher pay in the cities for those urban disamenities that Lawrence has pointed to. But you could also argue that people went to the cities because life was desperate

and also there were no opportunities for advancement in the countryside. What effect did it have on the family to take that central unit? Is there an overall effect or is that too general a question? Well, I think there is an overall effect. We know that the English family had long been nuclear comprised parents and children. The population growth that Emma talked about meant that dependency rates in this country were rising dramatically. In 1826, I think, when the population growth peaks, 40% of the population is under 15.

Because population growth is making the population younger and younger, that means many more children in these families. And they were dependent on men's wages that Lawrence has just told us stagnated through the end of the 18th century. So the question was then, could mothers fill that gap in family subsistence? this is where real controversy heats up. I would argue, no, married women, mothers found it very difficult, increasingly difficult to contribute to family incomes. If we take something like hand spinning,

which was in fact widespread right across the country, a source of income for married women, one recent testament says 75% of adult women had some employment from this source, that is the first victim of mechanisation. We often forget this, you know, the Luddites weren't involved here, but that industry which had been of such great value to poor rural families is wiped out. Emma Griffin, how did central government address this,

particularly let's talk about child labour, almost unbelievable, not that long ago. There was a triumphant law passed said you needn't employ anybody before they're eight, as if this was a great advance in civilisation. And I'm mocking the past, which is a silly thing to do, but it does seem very strange happening not a few miles from where we are sitting now. Yeah, I think we have to remember, and I think with all the talk about the Industrial Revolution,

I think we always have to remember, life was not good before the Industrial Revolution. It was not all happy life in cottages and roast beef and all the rest of it. Life was not good. People were very poor. Lawrence mentioned the idea of leisure. Yes, they are not working part of the year.

They're not getting paid for not working, so they are miserably poor. And that's the lot of the vast bulk of the population when you have unindustrialised economies. So it's not that good before. And one consequence of this, of course, was that people were sending their children out to work. We have always sent children out to work.

Poor societies always send their children out to work as soon as there's something for them to do and as soon as they can be useful. And that Britain is exactly the same. And what happens with the Industrial Revolution, I think for me, part of what's happening is there is more work available and there is more work available, particularly for children.

children had certainly been working before. But once you've moved to the city and once the factories are there, there is much more work available and you can have your children working very long hours and you can have them working week in, week out, regardless of the seasons. So there is this rise in the intensity that children are being asked to work. And governments does start to become involved. I think the content of children's work changes though with industrialisation and that's a very significant shift.

And the supply side of this story is important too. because the rise in the dependency rate and the pressure of numbers of children in families and the inability of mothers to contribute sets the scene for the booming child labour too. So that's a key part of the British Industrial Revolution. And the booming child labour is part of the growth in medicine and the number of children still living. Arkwright was a 13th child and so on so forth. Now for the first time we have the government starting to become really concerned about this.

Governments had never cared in the slightest that poor people sent their children to work and now it's visible, it's in the cities, children are working much more intensively so at the very start of the 19th century we start to get new laws that are attempting to address this. Laura's, what were the implications for health of the cervagreide in the cities? I mentioned the Engels book which is a sacred text of this particular, I'm 1844, Manchester, condition of the working place. Although it wasn't that well known in the 19th century, of course, because it wasn't translated. But yes, well, I suppose one way to answer that is just to say, you know, we see pictures today of chante towns in third world and developing countries.

And one can imagine just having that image in one's mind the problems today of providing clean water and sanitation and so forth and decent health services for poor people in developing countries. But the problem, I suppose, 200 years ago in the Industrial Revolution is different again. not only are those physical problems of providing those services there, but you're doing it in a world which doesn't have the knowledge, and great debates go on over what causes disease. So knowledge about sewering. That's right.

I mean, there are debates between engineers and doctors over the kind of sewers that should be built. There are debates over what causes disease in the mid-19th century, and we don't really know disease causation, the so-called germ theory of disease, until the 1880s. All of this, as it were, slows the development of, effective health policies. Now it must be said that the British state does respond to the problems of the slums and of the industrial cities from the 1830s and the 1840s. Colourer is no respect to

persons. It takes rich and poor and so there is a real need and desire to address problems of physical health. But in fact, for all the efforts that are made and there are Public Health Act starting in 1848, boards of health and so forth, at a central level, and at a local level, the growth of a health bureaucracy as well, and heroic efforts by doctors and civil servants, quite remarkable attempts are made to deal with problems of disease and squalor. Nonetheless, death rates do not begin to go down until the late 19th century, and that's often for other reasons, reasons not connected with policy itself.

What are they quickly? Well, better housing, better nutrition, and people living in spaces which aren't so confined. Jane, Jane Humphrey. Well, I think the interesting thing about public health is that this is one of the areas, the few areas, where rich and poor are in it together. And as Lauren said, cholera is no respecter of the person. So when Chadwick in 1842 publishes his report on the sanitary condition of the laboring population, he actually, one of the bits of that that has most impact is when he points out the different life chances of individuals in different circumstances.

So that an agricultural labourer in Rotland has a life expectancy of 38, but a middle-class colleague, neighbour, might have a life expectancy of 52. But in Manchester, an agricultural labourer could expect to live only to the age of 17. And a middle-class Manchunian could only expect to be lived to be 38. So the cities, although these diseases, cholera and typhus, started in poor overcrowded areas, they spread their grisly fingers out and captured the rich too. This is in several Dickens novels, I think.

Can I, Emma, which countries after Britain were the first to industrialised? Were they facing the same problems? Which were the first to industrialise? On the European continent, you have Belgium, really, is the first country that starts doing what we're doing. Do they come and look at what we've got and get on with it? Or does it happen in that country without reference? It doesn't happen without reference.

I mean, certainly, as we move into the 19th century, people in Europe are becoming very aware that Britain is doing something slightly different, that it's looking much wealthier nation, it's a much richer nation than they are, and that there's all these cities, these factories, these machines, that people are very much aware that things are different,

and they do send people over. I mean, industrialists do come over and try and figure out what it is that Britain is doing, but it's not always something that can be picked up and translated back to the homeland, partly because industrialisation is a very complex process. And it's not just the technologies. One technology here may not work elsewhere. Belgium follows us very quickly in much the same pattern, but it has a very similar resource base.

It has a lot of coal. And then Germany, after about 1850, also starts doing what we've done. Lots of heavy industry. They've got lots of coal as well. But France doesn't have any coal. And what's happening in France is starting to look very different. it's not economical for them to build steam engines and use them instead of just using lots and lots of workers because the coal is so expensive

it's much cheaper for them to just use lots and lots of workers. Was there a sense of Britain having a status then, Jane? I trade very on broken glass on this one because we know that. So that it was recognised to be the first in the field, although all sorts of other people were doing all sorts of other things. But as a block, as a cluster, as a dynamic force, it was the first in the field. It was already became the richest country in the world.

It did have the great exhibition. Interesting enough, built by your artisans. Yes. And not overseen by the establishment. And of course that. Glass brought down from the north. Yes. But British economic success is of course matched by British political and military success.

I mean, we have an empire as well, which is of course crucial background factor to all of these developments. But if you're asking me when that leadership starts to fend, Yes. And, well, we can contrast the great exhibition of 1851 with the Paris exhibition only 15 years later. And cultural historians, historians of technology have suggested that there's a loss of confidence even over that short time period,

that people are looking at the Paris exhibition and beginning to think that British technology has lost its cutting edge. At the same time, moving on into the 19th century, by 1870, there's a depression in the agricultural sense, sector. There's growth rates are beginning to, again we're focusing here on aggregate growth rates. Growth rates are beginning to slow down.

By the very end of the century, total factor productivity growth, which is our measure of organizational and technological change, that's, according to the very latest high-powered estimates, that's actually become negative. So this era, the late 19th century, is often

viewed and and cast into sharp contrast with the heroics of the Industrial Revolution, it's viewed as relative failure. The late Victorian and Edwardian economy is one of stagnation and of relative decline. And the massive advantage of the United States in steel production, for instance? Well, there are rivals on the horizon, yes, the United States, which has a signal advantage in mass production methods, which would only have been available to Britain had we protected our domestic market.

But that protection was anathema given that people thought the prosperity that Britain enjoyed had been based on free trade. So the idea of protecting your market so you can set up production that requires a mass market, that really wasn't on the cards. And of course, Germany is also emerging. Very much. as an important economy in technologically advanced industries like chemicals and electricity. Can Lawrence Goldman, can we talk about how the intellectuals and the artists, how they reacted to the Industrial Revolution?

Was it, you tell me. Well, it depends who and when. I suppose many of the most notable Victorian figures that we can think of would be thought to have been critical. in one way or another. We're talking about. Well, a whole range. There are those who are critical

precisely because they admire the rhythms of an agricultural society, someone like William Cobbett, not perhaps an intellectual, but famous in the 1820s for his rural rights, trying to document the life of rural Britain as it changes. But a good example, perhaps of a highly critical intellectual, would be Thomas Carlyle, Scottish coming down to London

diagnosing in a famous essay in 1829 the signs of the times the fact that in a way the iron had got into the soul that men had become, he says, mechanical in heart as well as head, as well as hand and as it were we had taken on almost the industrial way of thinking and doing in our everyday lives

and deeply critical of not just industrialism but industrial capitalism of the market and a market morality and a decline of traditional ethics in society. Another example of a critical intellectual, slightly later, would be someone like John Ruskin, an art critic who becomes a social critic from the 1850s and the 1860s,

again with an ethical attack really on industrial capitalism. But also in Ruskin's case, it's also an aesthetic argument with industrialism for what it has done to our sense of take, and indeed our landscapes and our environment. There's an environmentalism there as well. From an artistic perspective, as it were, industrialism has destroyed rather than given.

Thank you. Emma Griffin, I began the programme by quoting, or a little bit from Engels. He was one of the most violent opponents, and we know about what Dickens had to say about it, and Blake and George Elliott, and on it goes, as Lawrence has indicated, Could you give us some idea of the place that that opposition had in the public consciousness, in the public debate? Was it a few people on the outside?

Was it just that lot complaining again? Or what was going on? By the 1830s, the 1840s, intellectuals are publicly debating. I mean, these aren't random sources that you have to now scurry to the deep recesses of the British Library to try and find the things that people were saying. I mean, there was a fairly robust public debate about the changes that were going on at this point. people have very different influences. I mean, Engels, for example,

doesn't really have very much of an influence during this period. He writes in the 1840s at the height of the debate, but his work only appears in German, it's not until the 1890s that it's read here in English, translated and read in England. But I think in many ways, he has his interpretation nonetheless stands out as a very significant,

very significant with very long-term consequences because throughout the 20th century, by the time his work is translated, he's very widely read by historians and his work casts a very long shadow over the way in which historians in the 20th century have interpreted the Industrial Revolution, the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

And if we just think about how Lawrence began, he said, well, first of all, there's the material side and then also there's this qualitative side. And that is that dichotomy that Engels above all provided with us very, very clearly. He said, look, these workers are, earning less, but it's much more, he's saying. It's not just that they're earning much less. It's also that their lifestyle has changed. Their personal and social existence is different

when they're working in the cities to the way it was in the countryside. So I think he stands out as a figure with a very, very, very influential interpretation of the Industrial Revolution that echoes right up to the present day, much more so than some of the other names that people, Lorids mentioned, who were debating amongst themselves and who the period were much more important. Can I just slip back almost a few sentences to come back to you, Jane, for a moment. Why was it that we've started to lag so much, that Germany and the United States, their educational systems, their larger education, passed by ours so effortlessly in the second half of the 19th century, and they got down to it and did it and saw the connections? Was there something

in our class system? I hate to use the word class system, but that it is said. Was there something in our system? Or were we just too well off by? skinning our colonies, why were we not paying attention to that? Well, part of this relative declineist paradigm about the late 19th century, part of that would indict the educational system, would suggest, for instance, that Germany had developed more scientific education and more openness to formal scientific activities. So that although, in other words, that kind of tinkering, that applied

education that was perhaps one of the reasons why we could industrialise earlier in the phase of Smithian growth, that that was not suited to the opportunities of the late 19th century. And the German educational system, although it did have apprenticeship built into it too, it was a much more formal scientific education that was being offered. And of course this also relates to the entrepreneurs. who I said earlier, have been blamed for this relative decline too because the argument is that the education that was offered to the sons and daughters, well, sons of what's important here,

the sons of that first generation of capitalists who built on businesses, that the education that was offered to them was singularly unsuited to taking their businesses forward. So that would be... Exactly. I didn't want to say anything rude about my classics colleagues here, but definitely that would be one of the things that would be the old universities and the dead hand of the past on the educational system. But there were Lawrence Goldman, and I've read in your notes and so on,

enthusiasts for the Industrial Revolution. It wasn't an on-block artistic intellectual opposition, was it? Absolutely, and I think that in a sense we are the children, of pessimists. We tend to look back on it as an appalling experience for everyone, but there are lots of enthusiasts. I mean, there are lots of visitors from abroad who find industrial citizens and towns

absolutely fascinating, who are awed by the site of a new civilization being developed in front of them and go and visit and write in that kind of a way. And of course there are also celebratory works as well. We think of someone called

Samuel Smiles as the apostle of laissez-faire individualism, He wrote a book in the 1850s called Self-Help, which sort of sums that approach up. But in fact, Smiles was really a biographer of the great industrialists and entrepreneurs of the industrial age. And he celebrated really their acts of remarkable innovation and heroism in drawing together the factors of production. He wrote biographies of what and biographies of Matthew Bolton and biographies of Stevenson and so forth. And for smiles, this was a heroic phase of history, something to be celebrated. And, you know, his work was consumed and widely read by the Victorians

who admired the Industrial Revolution for what had said about human innovation. And indeed, also, it has to be said for what it said about Britain. I mean, there is a nationalistic element in the way it's received in the mid-19th century. Yeah, Lawrence, if we can just add to that. I mean, we tend to view, you know, we're very wedded, I think, partly because of this Engels heritage that we're all born and bred with. We tend to view the cities as a very dark place, and of course it was much nicer to be out in the...

We didn't necessarily get clean water or a decent house in the countryside. But I think more than that, you were mentioning that they are physically closed spaces and the cities are physically closed, but in some ways culturally they're very much more open than living in the countryside. Living in the countryside is actually can be very stifling. Your employer is just down the road.

They know when you're at the ale house. They know why you're not at work. They know what you're doing. and that has a very repressive force on the way that you live your life. You move to the city. You may have physically less space, but your employer has no idea what you do out of hours or what kind of social or personal life you lead

or how long you spend at the alehouse. And there's a whole world of culture, of adult education. So in some ways, cultural horizons can open, can be thrown wide open when you move into the city, which we tend to view as a very bleak, dismal place and all you did was die young and get cholera. Well, that's partly true, but there's another aspect to city life, and I think that's another aspect of the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution

that we tend to gloss over very quickly because we're so busy just counting the dead bodies and the children in the factories. I mean, slightly, well, to be rather crude about it, Jane, are, as it were, some of the many of the poets and novelists of the time and the thinkers and the painters and writers saying, this is a horrible place we don't really want to have anything to do with it. Look, it's destroying our beautiful landscape. It's our aesthetic sense is being disturbed

and doesn't smell very nice. Is that going on? Is that, and how do you, is it going on? And if so, how do you weigh that factor? Well, the Angles heritage is built into our literature, isn't it? I didn't mean directly there, but certainly we can find this north-south. I mean, look at Mrs. Gaskill's famous novel titled North and South.

So this is a comparison of one of one of the same. those, the most important urban city with some rural idyll. But I think also that this comparison of north and south misses some of the other important changes in the landscape that also reflect on our literature. If we, in rural areas, particularly if those areas had resources, they could find that the landscape changing very dramatically. Take an area with which I'm very familiar since I grew up there,

the Don Valley in South Yorkshire, that's described in the opening paragraph of Ivanhoe as one of the most pleasant places in Mary England nobody after the South Yorkshire, Coalfield starts to be exploited at the end of the century nobody could describe the Don Valley in those rosy terms who would think Doncaster you know was one of the most pleasant cities pleasant towns in Mary England

so we find those kinds of changes but it's not just that the north is an area of of muck as well as brass. I think this misses another key north-south divide, and that is the home counties mint a coin of a very different kind. The home county's economic base is in commerce, government and finance. And it's inhabited by financiers and bankers who are looking out to the empire to the rest of the world,

not north to the grimy factories of the industrial base. That's a divide that's with us still today. That do nations, Lauren. Yes, I was just going to say, of course, that so much of our literature could be interpreted as a form of escape. If you think about the great themes of romanticism, which are emerging in the 1790s and early 1800s. Curiously in the north.

Absolutely. Curiously, but in the north, it isn't yet being affected by industry. The lake district. Exactly. I mean, if you think of that. And then if you think later of the 1850s and the 1850s in the 1860s and the cult of medievalism and the great influence, for example,

of Arthurian legend over the artists and craftsmen of that period. There is a sense in which many of the great artistic movements in Britain of this period are trying to find themes in the past in nature and they are reacting against or almost blanking out what is going on around them. There is a kind of a disjunction between culture on the one hand and society

and the way it's developing. Thank you all very much. Thank you Emma Griffin. Jane Humphreys and Lawrence Goldman. And next week, the first of the new year, Byron's poem, Charles Harold's Pilgrimage. When it was published, she said, I woke one morning and found myself famous. Happy New Year, thanks for listening.

If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.com.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.