Teaching the Industrial Revolution:
What kinds of stories should we tell about it?

Some years ago I was given a copy of Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution written by Professor Emma Griffin of the University of East Anglia.

I confess it wasn’t a book I’d have read on my own initiative, especially as I had a riveting book on medieval public health on the go. However I repaid the generosity of the gift by reading the book and found myself increasingly enjoying it and thinking about its implications for teaching about the Industrial Revolution at Key Stage 3. What follows therefore juggles a report on the book’s conclusions and reflections on teaching the Industrial Revolution at KS3, especially the messages students get from that teaching about this most significant of events.

Dr Griffin sets out to investigate the question ‘what was the impact of the world’s first industrial revolution on the ordinary men, women and children who lived through it?’ If that sounds unremarkable her sources are not – over 350 autobiographies, memoirs and sets of notes written by those ordinary men and (all too rarely) women. Some were published at or near the time, many were not. Dr Griffin uses these accounts to survey the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the autobiographers’ working lives, on their experiences of love and sex, on their education and involvements with religious organizations and finally with their connections with political movements.

At first glance my impression was that the book was structured around a fairly random set of topics and would prove to be yet another compilation of ‘interesting’ quotations. That initial impression was quite wrong. Far from being a simple miscellany of quotations, the book has a strong and convincing developmental argument, building a picture of how members of the working classes came to have the skills and confidence to emerge as leaders. Men such as the shoemaker Thomas Hardy (founder of the London Corresponding Society), breeches-maker Francis Place and weaver Samuel Bamford did not emerge suddenly as fully-fledged leaders. They had built their experience and confidence from opportunities created by the changing world of the Industrial Revolution. This makes sense of the book’s title - ‘Liberty’s Dawn’ grew out of working people’s experiences in the Industrial Revolution, not just because they were driven by squalor and hardship to improve their housing and working conditions but because industrialization changed people’s mentalities, creating the environment in which they could gain the skills and confidence to enable them to campaign for a role in government. Therefore one consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of what later periods would call a ‘Can Do’ mentality amongst some members of the working classes.

Dr Griffin therefore challenges interpretations (and by implication teaching) which offer only a gloom-laden picture of the impact of the Industrial Revolution, suggesting instead a more rounded and complex picture of how people responded to the Industrial Revolution. The starting point for her argument lies in the enthusiasm of the working class autobiographers for the many new working opportunities created by industrialization.

Before the Industrial Revolution there had been widespread under-employment, unsurprising given the slow but steady rise in population since around 1500. Many male agricultural workers did not have year-round work and it was especially hard for women and children to find work. The result was significant poverty. Then came the Industrial Revolution, creating many more jobs and a much wider range of work, especially jobs that the unskilled could learn quickly. Working men therefore had regular work and, as importantly, the confidence that there were other opportunities available. This confidence led to many doing something that few people had dared do in pre-industrial society – they walked out of jobs to seek better wages, shorter hours or because employers maltreated or did not respect individuals. Thus for working men the Industrial Revolution brought opportunity, optimism and confidence because they now had regular work and were better paid than their forefathers who’d been patchily employed in agriculture. [On a personal note I’ve often wondered why my 3x great-grandfather, an agricultural labourer, moved his family from the Furness peninsula to Liverpool and now I have a better hypothesis – not just the attraction of work but also perhaps putting irregular work behind him in favour of the prospect of easily-learned jobs].

If the ‘Industrial Revolution was undoubtedly a time of economic opportunity … the weight of existing social structures and cultural expectations kept women firmly shut out’. The only female beneficiaries were single women in factory towns who earned more and worked more regularly than their mothers had done. This was however a transitory benefit as most women gave up full-time work once they had children although many tried to earn a little more by working from home, taking in laundry, making and selling food, shoes, anything to bring in a few more pennies. If women did go back to work it was because of a crisis such as the death, illness or desertion of a husband. Even then work for most meant poorly-paid dressmaking, charring or laundry-work, never enough to keep a family without help from the parish or from money brought in by working children.

And while on families, it’s clear that another effect of the Industrial Revolution was that people married younger because young workers had more money and men were confident of employment. Earlier marriage meant larger families especially as many couples began enjoying, in the words of one autobiographer, ‘naughty tricks on the bed’, when marriage was promised rather than after the wedding ceremony. A large number of brides were pregnant at their wedding ceremonies, something else to explore in my family tree though not to add into a KS3 scheme of work!

If the Industrial Revolution did not give women more opportunities, it provided children with far too many. The result was a ‘disaster’ for many children who found themselves working for long hours at an earlier age than previous generations and amidst the dangers of industrial conditions. They started work at an earlier age, not because parents had become more heartless but because working opportunities now existed on a large scale for the first time. Children had always been expected to work because the few pence they earned contributed to staving off a family’s poverty. However children in the countryside had had the advantage of a gradual introduction to work, starting at a slightly older age (because there were fewer jobs) and doing far more seasonal work. In contrast industrialisation meant an earlier start to work and a more abrupt, continuous one because they did not have the relief of seasonal unemployment. The one benefit in industrial towns was that the availability of jobs meant that some parents could and did take children away from factories if they were mistreated and found them better employment. This was not a luxury that had been available to rural children who, if they did find work, were often trapped with cruel employers because there were no other working options.

Later chapters are just as engrossing, moving beyond work into the experiences of the autobiographers as participants in evangelical churches and in self-education. If this sounds worthy and ever so slightly boring – it isn’t. As Dr Griffin’s argument developed it actually became quite exciting to see how involvement in churches and education created experiences that fed into Chartism and other working class reform movements.

Dr Griffin’s autobiographers record a variety of educational opportunities – night schools, Mechanics’ Institutes, mutual improvement societies, Sunday schools – that offered free or cheap education to adults. The Industrial Revolution that had deprived children of schooling therefore also created the environment in which adults had more educational opportunities than before. These opportunities were clearly cherished by the individual autobiographers but, more widely ‘helped to create a workforce with the capacity for collective action’.
What was even more interesting was the way that evangelical churches opened up opportunities in industrial towns from the 1790s onwards by allowing the illiterate and the poor to be active and questioning participants, a cast of mind impossible in the established church which preferred its members to be passive recipients thinking obedient thoughts. As a result the poor and uneducated took their first steps in speaking in public in their local chapels, finding their voices as individuals.

To sum up, industrialization gave men more working opportunities and more income and therefore more choice over where they worked. These opportunities increased individuals’ sense of independence and self-confidence which in turn prompted some to educate themselves which engendered even more confidence. Evangelical churches also played an important part in helping individuals to discover and develop skills of oratory and organization. All this fed into working class political movements – from the London Corresponding Society of the 1790s to the growth of Chartism and its many local societies in the 1830s and 1840s. Many Chartist leaders were the product of such background experiences, having been in effect trained for leadership through their self-education and in local chapels. Working class political movements did not therefore appear simply as a response to the appalling working and living conditions created by the Industrial Revolution but because of the opportunities created by that same revolution.

THIS PAGE

Introduction

Teaching Implications

Further Details

MORE …

on teaching the Industrial Revolution

HERE …