Essay question for this unit is: Which is a more important goal for a society: economic equality or economic growth?
Biography - Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born in England in 1812 to a poor family. When he was a child, his father was put in debtor’s prison because of unpaid bills and the young Dickens was forced to work in a factory. This experience had a deep and lasting impact on Dickens that he would use in his writings. Dickens went on to work in an office and then as a court reporter in London. It was during this time that he met his wife Catherine, with whom he would have ten children.
Dickens began to write fictional stories based on what he saw in the streets of London. These stories were published in newspapers in monthly installments and made Dickens a popular writer. His readers ranged from the wealthy nobles and industrialists to the poor workers, who would pool their money to buy his stories. His first novel was Oliver Twist, which told the story of an orphan living in the streets and included many points from Dickens’s own childhood. This novel and his other stories, like A Christmas Carol, made him famous in England and the United States. Dickens traveled twice to the United States giving lectures across the country. While in the United States he spoke out against slavery.
Dickens is known as one of the first realist writers because of the way he described the brutality of life in industrial England. This was clear in his novels Bleak House, which deals with the hypocrisy of British society, and Hard Times that described life in an industrial town at the peak of economic expansion. Dickens was very critical of the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and felt that his writing would make society aware of the terrible living conditions of the poor in the industrial cities, especially the children. Dickens spoke out on the need to help the poor and donated money to clean up the slums and build proper housing for the poor.
Source # 1 - Excerpts from Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens
Chapter 5
Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
Chapter 10
In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called ‘the Hands,’—a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs—lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.
Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own. He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble. He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind of rough homage to the fact.
A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of face, and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on which his iron-grey hair lay long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a particularly intelligent man in his condition. Yet he was not. He took no place among those remarkable ‘Hands,’ who, piecing together their broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things. He held no station among the Hands who could make speeches and carry on debates. Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at any time. He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity. What more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for himself.
Source # 2 - Video on the impact of new technology on life - click here
Source # 3 - Graphic on Child Labor
Source # 4 - Chart on Child Labor in Cotton Factories
"Arkwright's machines require so few hands, and those only children, with the assistance of an overlooker. A child can produce as much as would, and did upon an average, employ ten grown up persons. Jennies for spinning with one hundred or two hundred spindles, or more, going all at once, and requiring but one person to manage them. Within the space of ten years, from being a poor man worth £5, Richard Arkwright has purchased an estate of £20,000; while thousands of women, when they can get work, must make a long day to card, spin, and reel 5040 yards of cotton, and for this they have four-pence or five-pence and no more."
Source # 6 - Video on railroads & telegraph connection to British Empire - click here
Source # 7 - Chart showing population growth of British cities
Source # 8 - Graph of Life Expectancy in British Cities
Source # 9 - Graph Showing the Change in Wages from 1850 - 1900
