Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin (review)

Emma Griffin analyzes the impact of the Industrial Revolution on ordinary lives by exploring an early nineteenth-century boom in working-class life-writing: memoirs, autobiographies, life histories, sketches, recollections, notebooks, and other texts—some published, most not. Griffin freely admits the limitations of this material, which is incomplete in many respects, self-censored (particularly about sexuality), and mostly written by men. Yet one of her book’s great pleasures is the series of accounts it gives of the heartbreaking, yet often hopeful trajectories of these autobiographers: a boy who endured miserable jobs supporting his family after his father’s death, and who then entered crushingly unsatisfactory relationships in adulthood, ending either in abandonment or the deaths of wives and children, before finding solace in religious conversion and a marriage that bore him ten children; the factory boy whose work rendered him a “miserable cripple” by early adulthood though he went on to achieve successes in the factory reform movement; women who experienced varying outcomes to pre-marital pregnancy, depending on whether their partners had promised to marry them, whether the promises were public, and whether their own economic prospects made single parenthood preferable (24). The book is full of such accounts, often complexly detailed, and it thus provides a nuanced sense of the life chances available to those working in industrializing Britain.

Much more uneven are Griffin’s claims, based on these accounts, about the general impact of industrialization on working-class life. Determined not to succumb to “the dark interpretation” of industrialization that she believes unfairly dominated Victorian accounts (including those by Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Engels) as well as those of left-leaning twentieth-century historians, Griffin’s pendulum swings much too far the other way (12). Her perspective is that industrialization brought increased freedom to the lower classes, and that her autobiographers tell “a tale of empowerment” (240). Despite the over-simplification, right off the bat, in assuming we must choose between these two crude characterizations of industrialism, Griffin does mine her materials to illuminate some significant gains it made available—particularly to male workers, less so to women and children. They make it clear in a way statistical tables cannot that industrialization offered male workers more economic opportunity and vocational mobility than agricultural work. They show that the de-skilling of labor, which broke down the old apprenticeship system, created possibilities for acquiring new skills more quickly through “informal apprenticeships” (31). They show that cottage industry enabled workers to combine multiple occupations to enhance incomes. Some recount new avenues for entering the shopkeeping class. One of the most remarkable revelations, perhaps, is how many different occupations a single man might pass through—another feature of industrialization that economic tables alone cannot capture. While these autobiographies tell us less about women, they do show the effect on social customs and birth rates of marriage at earlier ages, as well as the unexpected impoverishment that ensued when child-rearing women had to give up their paying factory jobs.

Griffin’s accounts tend, however, to flatten out regional and vocational differences. She also transparently spins the material to suit her overall narrative. While telling us, for example, that her autobiographers provide an enriched context for understanding parental choices about when and how their children entered the work force, and while stressing how plentiful such work was, she glosses over the fact that earlier initiation into employment was driven by the economic dependence of families on child labor in industrial districts. She’s on flimsy ground, too, when she tells us that evangelicalism facilitated the labor movement because it allowed working people to “find their voice” (195). In some cases, Griffin does not explain the ways in which industrialization caused specific cultural changes, such as “unsupervised” courtship and other shifting features of sexual relationships (112). In others, she seems not to recognize...