How Did The Industrial Revolution Improve The Life Of People In Great Britain?

During the early and mid 1800’s in Britain, the majority of the population was either poor, or was now classified as the new middle or working class. As innovations in the factory system kept being improved and pushed to their limits, the need for more working class people was evident. Since the working class made up the majority of people in Great Britain it is safe to argue that the Industrial Revolution did not improve the life of people in Britain. The reasons being poor health conditions in factories, long working hours for little pay, and a higher mortality rate due to a larger population in cities . The need for more food for the influx of people working in the cities lead to many problems for the working class people who had little
Edward Chadwick, an english social reformer from England, wrote about the wage conditions in Britain at the time. He writes, “in terms of life itself, it really mattered not how little a labourer’s wage varied between, say, 12s and 15s a week….. If… of safeguarding a normal span of human life, could not be afforded on any income under, say, 30s…”(Doc 5). Hardly being able to support one’s own life, which costed 30s, how could a father support his whole family at a factory? Not to mention the hours of work per day were absolutely ridiculous. Whole families would work twelve to fourteen hours a day just to make money so that they could try to support themselves but they still didn’t make enough money. The excerpt from the Penny Magazine, talking about the Well- Conducted Factory, states that all girls working in this particular factory were quite content with their surrounding and were actually happy to see their employer (Doc 7). While this might have been true, it was certainly not true with the majority of factories. Most of the factories had poor working conditions and made the children work for long hours throughout the day. Also since this article in from a Newspaper it could have been an advertising ruse in order to get more children into the factories by tempting them with the promise of a safe working
People were packed tightly in cities and now there were more than ever since people did not live out on the farms anymore because they worked in the factories which were only located in industrialized cities. The cities were poorly cleaned, they had no sewage systems in many on the poorer ghetto areas, and the poor really stayed poor while outnumbering the rest. Friederich Engles, co-author on the Communist Manifesto, wrote this describing the poor conditions of Industrialized living, “Everywhere heaps of debris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilized to live in such a district.” (Doc 4) Engles described piles of refuse just sitting in the streets. These conditions did not lead to a higher population but instead contributed to the decline of the population after the initial influx of people after the First Industrial Revolution. How could a population evolve and increase within a confined area if refuse and debris were heaped up in the streets? These simple truths in collaboration with the amount of people dying from overworking in the factories or from diseases/conditions caused by said overworking. Another excerpt from Penny Magazine, two years later than the first about the Well-Conducted Factory, gives examples of declining population in Britain throughout the