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DAWN OF A NEW CLASS The Industrial Revolution was undoubtedly a time of massive advancement for working people, according toa new book reviewed by Lydia Bevege. Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution By Emma Griffin 2013, Yale University Press, 320 pages
We can thank Charles Dickens for the way the term 'Industrial Revolution brings to mind the image of a grimy-faced Oliver Twist or a hungry David Copperfield roaming the mean, dirty streets of London. In fact, Dickens' portrayal of the miserable life of the poor in Victorian England is now so entrenched that the term 'Dickensian' has become a byword to describe that period of history.
It certainly makes for a good story. The characters of Dickens' novels leap vividly from the pages- wicked industrialists, petty criminals, cold bourgeois women, virtuous labourers and suffering children all trying to get by in times of great social and economic upheaval. There can be little doubt the novelist deserves his place among the great literary masters.
Yet how accurate are Dickens' novels when it comes to reflecting the human experience of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath? If we take Dickens' word for it (and most people seem to these days), the lives of the working poor during this period were miserable indeed, with few redeeming features. As it turns out, however, many people who lived through the Industrial Revolution tell quite a different tale about their experiences, a fact we now know thanks to a controversial new book by Emma Griffin.
Liberty's Dawn examines the autobiographies of nearly 350 working class people who lived the majority of their years between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century in Great Britain.
These works, both published and unpublished, paint a rich and detailed picture of the lives of working people during the Industrial Revolution. It says something about how little attention has been paid to the voices of these ordinary people that many of the autobiographies, before Griffin turned her attention to them, were 'locked away gathering dust in the strongrooms and vaults of local history libraries and country record offices'
What Griffin uncovers in the crumbling, yellowed pages of these varied works is a unheralded fact: the...