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  • Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin
  • Pamela Sharpe
Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. By Emma Griffin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. x plus 303 pp. $35.00).

Can we be surprised that a protracted cataclysmic event such as the British Industrial Revolution continues to inspire such interest—from the opening ceremony of the British Olympics to the central subject matter of university courses in economic history? Yet books about the Industrial Revolution only rarely reach the shelves of the bookstores of Hobart, Tasmania where I am based. Emma Griffin’s Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution did that in both hardback and paperback probably because it appears to be aimed at a popular audience.

Professional historians might be surprised when areas of major controversy are treated in a superficial manner in the book but the reader is certainly engaged by the lively, almost jaunty style. Griffin uses autobiographies to uncover the experiences of working class people. This source has recently been used [End Page 474] systematically to understand child employment by Jane Humphries. Griffin does not attempt to provide a similar quantitative analysis but believes that “For all their shortcomings, the autobiographies offer the best way—indeed the only way—to examine the lives of working people during a critical epoch in world history” (10). Statistical results often fail to adequately describe or explain “immiseration” or improvement as the standard of living debate has endlessly demonstrated.

Griffin is no stranger to the debates as she previously wrote A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (Palgrave, 2010) so what is new about her approach here? As the titles suggests, her view is predominantly upbeat—industrialization might be welcomed with guarded optimism perhaps. Of course, her major source tends in this direction. Those who die penniless, socially isolated and in worse or similar circumstances to those into which they were born are much less likely to have the ability and motivation to write their memoirs than those who have derived some benefits from the industrialising, rapidly changing world. Hindsight was only possible for those who lived long enough and had gained sufficient education to be able to pen an autobiography. And the resulting work had to seem important enough for those they left behind to feel it merits preservation.

So—did the Industrial Revolution deliver empowerment and personal freedom, perhaps even humanity and liberty? The author identifies patches of sunlight but these appear to have shone more brightly on men than women or children. For example, while historians have long been aware that industrialization and associated changes must have increased casual work opportunities according to Griffin there appears to have been a major shift to more constant employment for adult males. More manual work was, in this interpretation, at least a means to an end. Quite simply there were more work opportunities than had existed in pre-industrial Britain. By the 1820s, following the repeal of the Stature of Artificers, there were multiple routes to skilled labour and widening horizons. We might infer from this that the Industrial Revolution proved to be the making of the misogynous male but the ensuing increase in inequality is not a track that Griffin follows.

In Griffin’s account courtship and marriage was much more a matter of personal choice and chance than even Steve King has put forward. As Griffin has already argued in Past and Present, she sees a break with the past in the 1790s with the former constraints associated with late marriage becoming unimportant. High male incomes and steady work facilitated early marriage ages in this account.

Griffin draws on a large amount of women’s history information but there are some spectacular omissions. No bibliography of secondary works consulted is provided. As far as I can see, Joyce Burnette’s neo-classical interpretation of work in the Industrial Revolution (Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Britain, Oxford University Press 2008) broadly supports Griffin’s argument yet is not mentioned despite Burnette’s detailed analysis of the issues from other sources and angles. At times there is a...

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