The Industrial Revolution:

"Myths and Realities."

In 1769, a mathematical-instrument maker by the name of James Watt filed a patent for an engine which called for strange things such as condensers and steam jackets. Within a few years, his company, the Soho Engineering Works was manufacturing pump machines run by steam. Thus it is, that the year 1769 may well be used as a mark for the beginning of a period in English history when there was a transition for society from that of agricultural to industrial. This new industrial base was to broaden and strengthen in the ensuing one hundred years.1 This is the year which we may further mark as the beginning point of a period during which great social and economic changes were to take place. The simple explanation is that this transition came about as a result of improved machinery and large-scale production methods; but, as we will see, the story is more complex than that. The Industrial Revolution2 brought about labour saving machines and factory systems; as much as these machines and these systems brought about the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution3 was the integration of a number of factors which acted on one another in a cybernetic fashion. The impulse of the Industrial Revolution, its force, its impetus, acted on the minds of all thinking men of the late 18th and early 19th century. Discoveries fed more discoveries. Ancient class structures broke down. Human labour began to be replaced with human thought. Men, who knew nothing but back breaking labour, mostly in agriculture, increasingly turned their minds to invent devices and contrivances which would give them more for less labour.

There is a great myth about the Industrial Revolution, perpetuated by writers such as Dickens, viz., that it caused unspeakable misery to the people at large. On the contrary, I do not think any student of history can come to any other conclusion than that the average happiness, to take England as an example, in the early nineteenth century was considerably higher than it had been a hundred years earlier. The writers pointed to the Industrial Revolution in its infancy as one which did not assist the labouring poor, indeed, it was asserted it did them harm. To be found in Malthus' Essay on Population (1798), is this: The increasing wealth of the nation [in an obvious reference to Adam Smith's work] has little or no tendency to better the conditions of the labouring poor. They have not, I believe, a greater command of the necessaries and conveniences of life, and a much greater proportion of them than at the period of the Revolution [1688] is employed in manufactures and crowded together in close and unwholesome rooms."4 Certain it is, that little improvement was to be seen in the first years of the Industrial Revolution. It should not have been expected that the benefits of technological developments were to be immediately felt in any far reaching fashion. It is true that a generation beyond that of James Watt was to pass before life was to improve for the poor classes. This was due to the intervening years, long years of war.5 The social reformers of the 19th century, however, were convinced that only the top end of the middle class were lifted up by the Industrial Revolution. One of these was John Stuart Mill, who in 1848 wrote: "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater proportion to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish."6 The writers that have spread the great myth about the Industrial Revolution seem to ignore the advances that were plainly brought about by it. The products of these "vile factories" were, such things as: affordable soap, underwear and cast iron sewer pipe.7 Hand and hand with the Industrial Revolution was an expansion of retailing. "By 1785 the number of shopkeepers had increased ... tea, coffee, loafe sugar, spices printed cottons, calicoes, lawns, fine linens, silks, velvets, silk waistcoat pieces, silk coats, hats, bonnets, shawls, laced caps, and a variety of other things" were to be seen in great numbers on the shelves of the shops and found their way in to the most ordinary of homes.8 To supply the retail demand, as Professor Ashton points out, "subsidiary employments came into being." Further, the diet of the average person changed, now on the family table, instead of bowls of meal supplemented with potatoes, there could be found: fresh meat, bacon, wheat bread, butter, tea, etc. This all came about because of the emergence of an independent, self-respecting class of wage earners. The "Gin Age" had come to an end.9