Industrialization and the Social and Economic Structure of Europe 429the stench of uncollected refuse in the streets and the
foul dampness in typhus-infected cellar bedrooms. Both
viewpoints contain an important historical truth, and
the debate is not resolved. The optimistic version rests
chiefly on tables of economic data, and the pessimistic
version stresses the testimony of people who lived
through industrialization.
The early critics of industrialization were numer-
ous. They ranged from England’s greatest romantic
poet, William Wordsworth, who wrote in 1814, “I
grieve, when on the darker side of this great change I
look,” to the cofounder of Marxist socialism, Friedrich
Engels. Engels, the son of a rich German industrialist,
lived in Manchester and studied manufacturing there in
- His conclusion was brutal: “I charge the English
middle class with mass murder.” The contemporary
British historian who coined the name industrial revolution
also reached a shocking conclusion; he called industri-
alization “a period as terrible as any through which a
nation ever passed.”
The anger of such critics has derived chiefly from
the conditions in the new factories and factory towns.
Life in that world had an undeniably grim side. Condi-
tions in textile factories were so bad that another poet,
William Blake, named them “dark Satanic mills.” These
unregulated workplaces had terrible safety standards;
with no guards on the new machinery, mutilating acci-
dents were common. Factories were unbearably hot, so
men, women, and children often worked stripped to
the waist. But the environment was hardly erotic: Ma-
chines filled the air with a deafening roar, the nose with
overheating grease, and the eyes and lungs with cotton
dust. This combination gave Manchester the world’s
highest rate of bronchial ailments, a life expectancy
sharply below the national average, and a horrifying in-
fant mortality rate of 50 percent.
Jobs in these dreadful conditions also required
workers to adapt to a new discipline (see document
22.2). Most workers came from the countryside,
where they were accustomed to agricultural work de-
fined by the rhythms of nature—the seasons, day-
light, weather—or to such self-disciplined labor as
spinning or weaving at home. Factory work was a
regime of rules enforced by an overseer, regimentation
by the clock or the pace of a machine. Typical indus-
trial work rules forbade talking or singing. Fines for
misbehavior were deducted from wages. The first
large spinning factory in England fired an average of
twenty workers per week and averaged a 100-percent
turnover within one year. One of the most famous
novels of the nineteenth century, Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary,ends with the thought that life in the
dark, Satanic mills was appropriate punishment for
sin. The protagonist of the novel, Emma Bovary, com-
mits adultery and then suicide. Her relatives refuse to
accept the care of Emma’s orphaned daughter; the
child is punished for the shame of Emma’s behavior by
being sent to earn her living in a cotton mill.
Other contemporaries defended the conditions of
industrialization. Frederick Eden began the optimistic
tradition with his defense of agricultural enclosures in
The State of the Poor(1797). Eden acknowledged that
the consolidation of farms might hurt small farmers
and farm laborers, but he argued that the difficultChildren as a percentage of that Percentage of all child labor
Industry Children employed industry’s labor force employed in that industry
Cotton 44,828 18.3 31.2
Woolen 26,800 18.6 18.7
Cotton blend 11,038 23.9 7.7
Silk 9,326 5.6 6.5
Hemp and flax 7,232 12.8 5.0
Wool and silk 4,765 12.5 3.3
Textile total 103,989 —— 72.4
Source: Lee S. Weissbach, Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth Century France(Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 19. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the publisher.TABLE 22.6Child Labor in the French Textile Industry, 1845