Industrialism

Historian Eric Hobsbawn described the Industrial Revolution as, “the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world” (487). It is not hard to see why Hobsbawn would say such thing. In what seemed like an overnight transformation Europe and particularly England was launched into the “Machine Age” which set it into an economic whirlwind. This period is known for its great technological advances in industry and machine technology leading to many other changes. This mostly occurred in what is known as the Victorian Period or during the reign of Queen Victoria in England. This period lasts quite a long time, between the 1830’s and the early 1900’s. People in this period saw advances in science, geology, medicine, and other areas with the work of people like Charles Darwin. This period also saw a wider spread of people have a stake in political life, that is political power was more widely distributed with the passing of several reform bills.

The people living during this time were aware of the great changes that were going on around them, and as you might expect the reaction that people had of the times varied greatly. The people who prospered during this time were naturally pleased while the ones that suffered as a result of the changes were not so pleased. I was reading this section I could see the development of the two classes that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had written about in their Communist Manifesto. As they wrote in their work, it did seem like the working class proletarians who worked the assembly lines were being neglected and taken advantage of by the upper class bourgeois who were in charge of the industry. With this said, it is clear to see why there were such large gaps in the feelings of people about the times. Regardless of how one might have felt about the industrial period, no one can deny the long lasting effect that it has had on the world, and the inspiration it gave to writers of the time such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and others