The Industrial Revolution and How a Museum Rescued a Nation’s Art
The Industrial Revolution is a saga of unprecedented technological evolution and economic transformation in human history. Equally important is the severe impact industrialization had on the health and welfare of the working class. What is not well known outside of academia, however, were the devastating effects of the Industrial Revolution on the rural population, from which the English countryside has never fully recovered. Nevertheless, there is an amazing story of how industrialization came very close to “killing” the arts in 19th century Britain and how one of the world’s greatest museums was created to rescue Britain’s artistic heritage!
A Brief History: The Industrial Revolution began in England in the mid-1700s and instigated many changes in manufacturing, transportation, communication, commerce, and working conditions. The driving force was steam power — an integral part of the Industrial Age. The prototype for the first steam engine was produced by Thomas Newcomen in the early 18th century. The demand for coal soared, since it was needed not only to power factories but also to transport the goods they produced. Around 1770, a stock exchange was established in England, and about 20 years afterward, the New York Stock Exchange was founded. In 1837, the need for effective communication across increasing distances gave rise to the first widespread telegraphy system, which was patented by Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Industrial Revolution began spreading to other countries, including the United States.
Changes in Industry & Labor: Prior to the Industrial Revolution, everything was made by hand or in small workshops. The Industrial Age introduced the idea of the assembly line, where products moved across a conveyor belt lined with workers. Each worker on the assembly line was responsible for adding a single component. This was far more efficient than the old way of manufacturing and allowed for sharp declines in prices. For workers, though, assembly lines made work incredibly tedious, and since unskilled labor was sufficient for these positions, workers saw a drastic decrease in their labor power. It was not uncommon for women and children to be used as a cheap labor source in Industrial-Age factories. In the following years, low wages and poor working conditions would give rise to the formation of unions and the introduction of child-labor legislation.
Rural-to-Urban Migration & Emigration: However, a question not often asked is where did all these factory workers in Britain come from? From 1800 to 1900, the population of Britain boomed from 9 million to 41 million, partly due to immigration. In the 1840s, many people from Ireland were fleeing a terrible potato famine; and in the 1880s, the Tsar began persecuting Russian Jews and many fled to Britain. However, these population statistics do not tell the whole story: In England, the factory workforce came via internal migration, primarily from the rural areas of England, Scotland, and Wales. The decennial UK censuses record that, from 1841 to 1901, the rural areas of England and Wales lost more than 4 million people from internal migration, 3 million of whom moved to British towns — at a rate of more than half a million people per decade.
By 1851 more than half the population lived in towns, making England the world’s first urban society. Abandonment of homes and sometimes entire villages resulted in a depopulation of the countryside. In the second half of the 19th century, another 15 million people emigrated from Britain to Australia and North America to escape poverty. (As a personal example: three branches of my British family simply “disappeared” after the 1861 UK census because they had emigrated to Australia and New Zealand).
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Originally published at http://drlindaellis.net.
