The Pre Industrial Working Class

In his book, “Class and Community the Industrial Revolution in Lynn”, Alan Dawley carefully examines the structure and culture of Lynn shoemakers. The key issue Dawley wants to address and convey to the reader is that the American Revolution opened the doors for different radical actions and ideology to take place. Overall, the book explores the causes and effects of the 19th century revolution in the shoemaking community of Lynn,

The pre-civil war era included the industrial revolution, the transportation revolution, and the market revolution. The industrial revolution involved a change in the methods of production and manufacturing. The transportation revolution had changes in the way people or things move from one place to another. the market revolution caused a change in the way we give and receive resources. The factors that promoted the pre-civil war industrial revolution in the US were technology like the canal which impacted the entire American economy by expanding the market, internal improvements are improvements in transportation and communication networks which make migration and importing easier, government funded the internal improvements, capital is the money that the government uses to fund the internal improvements, and population because more people equals more consumers which leads to more demand and theres also more workers which means more labor equaling more supply.

Trueman, C N. “The Domestic System.” The History Learning Site. Moocow, 2016. www.historylearningsite.co.uk/britain-1700-to-1900/industrial-revolution/the-domestic-system/. Accessed 17 February 2017.

The first downside to working in a factory in the 1800’s is the outrageous hours that men, women, and children have to work. They can work up to fifteen hours in a day, and many workers fought for a full day of work to be considered ten hours at most. This problem in the industry affected every worker physically, because if a worker got very few hours of sleep, then the next day his work ethic would not be at his full potential. That could then cause their boss to fire them, and hire another man who is stronger and more willing to work. An incident like that happened to Jurgis. He worked so hard to keep his family fed, then he had to take time off of work due to an injury. (Sinclair 116) When he tried to come back to work, they replaced him

Working hard to surive is something we all have to do. In America today, we are very privledged compared to our written history. During the Industrial Revolution, women and children were employed in factories with terrible and unsafe working condtions. These fragile, hardworking people worked around 12 hours per day, 6 days per week. Once these individuals hours were cut down to eight hours a day and their pay was increased, they became more productive and excited about their work.

In the early 1900’s many young children had to work in factories and mills to help provide for their families. These children often died due to exhaustion and malnutrition. I do not feel that children were an acceptable source of labor, but I think I can understand why some kids had to work and why some employers would hire them. Some families may have not been able to afford to send their children to school because the money their kids made from working was important part of their families income. It probably would have been a hard decision for parents to send their children to work because they knew the bad work conditions of factories and mills. Employers would have hired children because they did have to pay them as much as adults at the

During the time frame of the Industrial Revolution there were 3 main social classes: The upper class, the middle class, and the lower class or the working class.

The late nineteenth century in the Unites States was the time of significant urban growth of the country. The number of industrial wageworkers in America almost doubled by the second half of the nineteenth century. More than half of the country’s men, women, and children made up the laboring class that performed manual work for wages in a variety of settings, such as many small workshops run by independent and highly skilled craftsmen or artisans. However, with the rise of large factories and heavy machinery by the 1870s, the use of highly skilled workers, and common laborers declined tremendously. Due to the increase mechanization of the country, products that once required skilled laborers to make were now made by machines in abundance, for much cheaper prices, and with much less effort. Moreover, introduction of machines reduced labor and manufacturing costs.

Friederick Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England describes the inhumane and atrocious living and working conditions for the proletariat in England. He describes life in England before the Industrial revolution and how there was a shift in population from rural farmland to urban cities. Engels describes as factories grew, the demand of labor increased, and the population in cities increased the quality of living for those people in factories deteriorated. The descriptions that Engels uses to describe the smells and the appearance of streets filled with human waste ghastly because it creates these images that it is unimaginable that someone could live that way. There are buildings filled for from “cellar to garret” by Engels but he also gives us the disturbing number of around 50,000 humans looking for housing in the refuges for the houseless. The living conditions and the areas of the cities where these poor living conditions are found lead to diseases among the population of the working class. The breaking apart of families because they are working twelve to thirteen hour days at times more so they do not have time for family. As a result of the exhaustion and stressful low paying work the working class turn to drinking as the only escape for the miserable work they must go through on a daily basis. The book describes the workers as nothing but hands at times, they are seen as interchangeable pieces to

The Industrial revolution started in Britain around 1750 and by 1850 it will make Great Britain the wealthiest country in the world. The revolution also spread to other European countries and the New World. Both Germany and United States will surpass Britain in the next fifty years. What was the effect of The Industrial Revolution on the working class?

The Factory Act, 1833 was an attempt to set up a normal working day in

When the French Third Estate stormed the Bastille in 1789, they envisioned a country in which they were no longer trodden upon by the First and Second Estates. They envisioned a nation where they had a major voice in politics and had a prominent role in the economy. By successfully overthrowing the French government and installing their own, they succeeded; albeit for only a short time. Little did they know that within a few decades, the same social hierarchy would be reinstalled during the Industrial Revolution, except the lower classes would be fighting for sanitation instead of bread. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various arguments emerged of how to improve the lives of European workers during the Industrial Revolution. Arguments

"Two and a half-million pairs of lungs, two hundred and fifty thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to four miles square, consume an enormous amount of oxygen, which is replaced with difficulty," (Engels 1). Engels could be describing the conditions in which we work in the factory, but he is not even going so far. The poor bloke was probably frightened off from our cities to the point where visiting an actual textile mill or coalmine would have killed him. The astute German author is describing not where we work, but where we live. Imagine! My name is Whitley Briggs, and I am an apprentice tailor. My mother works in the same factory as I do, and my father died five years ago from typhus or consumption I forgot which, now.

The ‘Industrial Revolution’ played a significant role in the transformation of the British manufacturing processes from the mid-eighteenth century, to some point between the mid-nineteenth century. The industrial revolution was not only a major player in the transformation of the British manufacturing processes, but also played a key role in the transformation of the British middle class; that later became known as the ‘Middling Sort’. There are many definitions associated with the middling sort, but for the purpose of this piece of writing, I shall define it as: the new Victorian middle class, that was largely associated with the cities and the economy, is a term used from the middle of the eighteenth century to describe people below aristocracy,

The Victorian Era was a time of peace and prosperity. During the Victorian Era the society was divided into various social classes like the working class, middle class. Upper class, Dickens/Victorians. Above all those classes the middle class was the most hard working class with all the various occupations but also they also had quite relaxing life also speaking of which let's get into the middle class.