New perspectives on the Industrial Revolution ....... Liberty’s Dawn

I have just started rereading  Liberty’s Dawn by Emma Griffin*, which draws on a rich collection of the autobiographies of men and women who lived through the industrial revolution.

That makes it a fascinating read, given that these are the people who have not often voiced their feelings and experiences.

According to the publishers, "it is a remarkable book [which] 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."

Early 19th century agricultural workers

Now as you would expect I am only on chapter one but already the story of John Lincoln has drawn me into a life lived out on the edge of poverty written in the closing decades of the 18th and opening years of 19th century.

The eighty pages of his notebook were written in the 1830s and “are filled with the untidy hand of a self taught writer.  The closely written, margin-less pages remind us that Lincoln lived at a time when paper was a precious commodity.  They comprised what he called his ‘simple Narative’, a detailed account of his life from his earliest childhood recollections to the present.”**

Mid 19th century cotton mill worker with boy assistant

It describes how he was constantly shifting from one employer to the next and  and finishes with his period at Woolwich working at the Royal Arsenal and the struggle to find employment following the downscaling of  operations after the long wars with France and his religious conversion.

It is the first of the kind of record which Ms Girffin  promises will “unlock the meaning of working class life.”


And along the way comes up with a pretty neat description of the Industrial Revolution.

“At some point, the nation stopped trying to make all its good by hand, and started to burn fossil fuels to drive machinery to do the work instead. In the process large numbers of families gave up working the land, and moved to towns and cities to take up employment in factories, mills and mines.  As each decade of the early nineteenth century passed it became increasingly obvious that Britain had left its pre-industrial past and was travelling on an entirely new trajectory.”

Pictures; cover of Liberty’s Dawn

* Liberty’s Dawn by Emma Griffin, 2013, Yale University Press, £25
**Liberty’s Dawn, page1-2