INDUSTRIALISM

Define Industrialism:

I. Power
Thomas Newcomen (1702)
James Watt (1763)

Steel

Britain: 1.3 million tons in 1840
6.7 million tons in 1870
10.4 million tons in 1913
Germany :
.19 million tons in 1840
1.56 million tons in 1870
19.3 million tons in 1913

II. The Factory System
A. Discipline: Adam Smith
Division of Labor
(Industrialism specializes)
B. New Government Responses
Welfare State Origins
Sadler Committee
Representation of the
People Act of 1832
(aka Reform Bill)
Poor Law Amendment Act

C. New Class System
The Middle Class:

"The poor and the vicious classes have been and will always be the most productive breeding ground of evildoers of all sorts; it is they whom we shall designate as the dangerous classes. For even when vice is not accompanied by perversity, by the very fact that it allies itself with poverty in the same person, he is a object of fear to society, he is dangerous." --Honore-Antoine Fregier (Paris, 1840)

Frank Forrest, The Life of a Dundee Factory Boy (1850)

In reality there were no regular hours, masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks in the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night.


Lord Ashley, speech in House of Commons,
9th May, 1836

Dr. Loudon reports, "I am of the opinion no child under fourteen years of age should work in a factory of any description more than eight hours a day." Dr. Hawkins reports, "I am compelled to declare my deliberate opinion, that no child should be employed in factory labour below the age of ten; that no individual, under the age of eighteen, should be engaged in it longer than ten hours daily."




WHAT IS THE MIDDLE CLASS?

Economic Factors are Imprecise

Reign of Queen Victoria: 1837-1901

“The widest definition of the middle classes or those who aspired to imitate them was that of keeping domestic servants.”
Eric Hobsbawm

Middle Class Attitudes:

--Thrift
--Moderation
--“proper” manners
--hard work (with the mind)
--limited leisure time
--separate spheres


“It is in the observation of little things ... that one shows clearly one’s breeding or lack or it.”


"The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind" - Dr. William Acton