Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution Paperback – August 26, 2014

Don't be put off by this book's subtitle. It's not left-wing propaganda; in fact, I can't guess the author's political orientation. But it is a remarkable effort to capture the world of poor, uneducated men reacting to the threats and opportunities of 19th Century industrial innovation. A fine book.

This is a reasonable analysis of a particular set of documents, mainly autobiographical writings by people with a “working class” background. However the criteria for selecting the sample is too narrow to draw any general conclusions about the class of people thought to be represented by the writers.Emma Griffin concludes that the Industrial Revolution was not nearly as hard on the working class as has been supposed with many of her sample saying that they had benefitted from it rather than lost by it. This seems a reasonable conclusion and is certainly supported on an anecdotal level. For many working class people it was a good time to live through. Of course accounts of hardship that did not have a happy ending and are reported elsewhere cannot be discounted either.But the matter is more complex than Griffin explains from her sample of cases. What about the Stephensons, father and son (railway), who emerged out of the working class but rose to the peak of the capitalist class? They were on both sides of the issue. What about the 3 generation span where the original working class family produced somewhat more educated children but the real success came to the grandchildren? In other words the results of the industrial revolution have sometimes to be measured over more than one lifetime. Some of her autobiographers’ were prompted to write by curious children whose interest itself is suggestive of a changed world.One fault in Griffins work is her failure to acknowledge that the working class she is describing is a new phenomenon that did not exist before. She says that previous to the time she speaks of the working class did not write autobiographies, but actually that is because they did not exist before not because they could not write. In fact people at the bottom of the social scale did write before although not about industrial experiences. Approximately 100 years before the period she is discussing for example there was a lot of writing from the bottom of the social classes such as by Bunyan and the Quakers and many others.A completely different type of experience is that of Dickens. He was very critical of some aspects of industrialization. Yet he was himself an example that people who were at least in danger of falling to the bottom of the social heap could lift themselves up by their own efforts. And though Dickens has some works about industrialization most of his settings are in parts of society that are not effected directly by industrialization. Instead his emphasis is on people’s character as a determining factor in their progress. This was a common view at the time popularized by people like Samuel Smiles.This view, that happiness resulted from people seizing the opportunities created by industrialization, is not considered sufficiently by Griffin as a determining factor in prosperity or otherwise. It is not authentic for a later generation to completely negate without sufficient discussion views that were widely held at the time.

Exactly as described but not the most interesting read

She analyzes around 350 autobiographies by almost literal nobodies: the poor who wrote for their families or out of a sense of duty, but not for publication.Unfortunately, she slices and dices these autobiographies a dozen times for a dozen categories, paraphrasing, summarizing, and cherry picking quotes. I do not doubt her general thesis, that the Industrial Revolution was beneficial to the vast majority of poor people, who otherwise would have been subsistence farmers barely eking out a living. But you end up with quotes and summaries, and almost no sense of the people themselves in their own words. I would much prefer having the autobiographies themselves, intact and complete, with discussions after each.As it is, the slicing and dicing makes it all too easy to think she chose the quotes to back up her thesis, rather than the thesis being formed by reading the autobiographies. There are far too many people who think the pre-Industrial Revolution life of apprentices and guilds and subsistence farming was some idyllic life, who will be only too eager to pick up on this, and that's a real shame.As for the style ... well, I found myself skimming a lot, trying to skip her summaries and read just the quotes, but they are too fragmented and brief to be much good.Come for the quotes, do your best to ignore most of the rest. Some is useful, as in saying how many autobiographies were similar in various ways. A lot is not.

Gave up on reading this book after slogging through 20% of it. Poorly organized, so much repetition that it felt like I was reading the same material over and over again.

Blake's "dark satanic mills" have long dominated the way we think about the industrial revolution. Dickens' novels echoed a belief that capitalists enslaved the working classes in the greedy pursuit of wealth. The images of young children working shifts of 12 hours or even more confirm our belief in the wickedness of the times. During the 19th century, romantics like William Morris sought to recapture the virtues of pre-industrial times, which were almost likened to a lost Eden.However, serious historians have known for some time that the rural economy of 17th and 18th century England offered very little to the lowest classes, the cottars who depended almost entirely on cash wages. It offered even less to squatters--those who had no legal right of residence in any parish--those who lacked even an acre or two to graze a cow, and a hovel to call their own. Even though most English peasants had secure tenancies and were very well-to-do in comparison to their continental counterparts, the lowest classes suffered greatly when times were hard.Emma Griffin takes this further--she has studied 350 autobiographical accounts written by labourers and poor artisans who grew up in the early days of industrialisation. And she makes a convincing case that the lowest classes not only enjoyed unprecedented prosperity in our industrial towns, but they were liberated from the class structures which oppressed them. Work was extremely scarce in rural areas, and time and time again children were forced to go back to tyrannical employers because their parents couldn't even afford to feed them. Often the children were not paid and barely fed, yet there was no alternative--except to move to an industrial town.Once there, there was so much work available that employers had to compete by offering better wages--and they had to treat their employees decently, or they'd simply go to another mill. This is not to say that life wasn't still very hard, but at least everyone had enough to eat and a chance to get ahead. And many of them did. Education was highly prized, and workers even formed self-help groups to supplement the day schools, Sunday schools, and Mechanics' Institutes that were spreading basic skills to the very lowest ranks of society.Ms Griffin explores these biographies from all angles, and concludes that the industrial revolution was in fact 'Liberty's Dawn'. This view has long been unfashionable on both the right and the left. Some conservatives like to think that things were better when everyone knew their place in rural England, and left-wingers need to demonise the capitalists. Even more people have a romantic view of our 'green and pleasant land' the pre-dated the mills.This book goes a long ways towards reviving the Whig view of history--Britain did indeed lead the world into the modern age. Whatever horrors we see from our comfortable 21st century armchairs look entirely different when recounted by those who actually lived through this remarkable era.

Well researched and well written, Griffin seeks to rebalance the view of the British industrial revolution as a disaster for the working person by referring to the writings of those who lived through it - working people. This is an admirable aim and her writing is generally convincing.She is not starry eyed about working conditions- by modern standards they were terrible - but she claims they were at least generally better than what came before.A few niggles. The chapter contents are somewhat repetitive and I wish we actually could read more of the original writings. This is primarily an analysis of those writings, quotes from them are limited. I was expecting more “in their own words” and less what an academic historian had determined after reading hundreds of autobiographies from the period.Nevertheless a good and interesting read and an impressive feat of research.

Great book. A take on the origins of the industrial revolution​ that is both informative nd enjoyable.

If you are going to present a different perspective then it ought to be interesting and Emma Griffin's book is certainly that. Surprisingly it is quite exciting too written with a passion and a pace that makes it, in part, read more like a novel. She has achieved this by using the autobiographies of those who have previously only been written about; here Emma Griffin allows the authors to speak for themselves. In doing so she gives a life and a clarity to her subject not to be found in other accounts of this most important period of English history.

History is usually written by the winners.This book gives a voice to some of the victims and losers, but were they really victims.Research on a neglected area which gives a fresh slant on history. A voice which history has been unaware of and ignored in an important area of our society.Similar to the current computer age which is giving many thousand a voice which should not be ignored