Industrial Revolution in the City Essay -- Essays Papers

Industrial Revolution in the City The Industrial Revolution was a period of great change for the country of England. Products went from being produced in households and by small businesses to being mass-produced by large industries. Products became cheaper and living conditions improved, but not at first for the working class. Terrible working conditions and hard lives sums up the status of the working class during the Industrial Revolution. The working class put in long hours and hard work for little pay and horrific living conditions. They moved from the farmlands and rural areas into cities that were thriving with industry and business. Populations all over England began to shoot up and cities became increasingly crowded until whole families lived in one-room apartments. Each able bodied member of the family worked to make some sort of income in order to survive. Life was tough for the working class in England. The country struggled with understanding how to balance their newfound technologies with nature and therefore the working class became in conflict with nature and horrible living conditions, while undergoing improvements brought along by the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. GRAPH Friederich Engels describes the conditions of an industrial city in England during the Revolution in The Condition of the Working-Class in England. He describes the living quarters of the working class as being very crowded. Some of the passages are so narrow that only one person can walk through it at a time.[i] Rivers of the city smell of terrible stench and are full of disease. Mills, tanneries, and gasworks drain into the river and leave slime and refuse in thic... ...es and Nobles, 1971), 218. [xii] Schultz, 218. [xiii]Schultz, 230. [xiv] Porter, 296. [xv] W.A. Speck, A Concise History of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 95. [xvi] Sidney Low and Lloyd C. Sanders, The History of England: During the Reign of Victoria (1837-1901) (London: Paternoster Row, 1926), 280. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINKS: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook14.html http://www.maoism.org/lenin/F_Engels.htm www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PHchadwick.htm http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/carnegie/ http://pages.yahoo.com/nhrp?o=karachambers&p=ChildLabor.html&pos=1&f=all&h=/cultures___community/issues_and_causes/human_rights/child_labor/