Economics of the Late Victorian Era

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Economics of the Late Victorian Era With the power of wealth and concentration of industry, the tremendous development in machinery, and power to drive machinery; with the improvement of the tools of labor, so that they are wonderfully tremendous machines, and with these all on the one hand; with labor, the workers, performing a given part of the whole product, probably an infinitesimal part, doing the thing a thousand or thousands of times over and over again in a day-labor divided and subdivided and specialized, so that a working man is but a mere cog in the great industrial modern plant; his individuality lost, alienated from the tools of labor; with concentration of wealth, concentration of industry, I wonder whether any of us can imagine what would be the actual condition of the working people of our country to-day without their organizations to protect them. What would be the condition of the workingmen in our country in our day by acting as individuals with as great a concentrated wealth and industry on every hand? It is horrifying even to permit the imagination full swing to think what would be possible. Slavery! Slavery! Slavery! Demoralized, degraded slavery. Nothing better (Gompers 102). In the 1830s the impudent luxury of the Regency Period was put side by side with the immorality and misery created by the new industrialism. This time was suggested in the "silver fork" novels of the late twenties and thirties; they reflected the high society and glamour of the time. These novels were later replaced in the forties with novels of social protest. Even though there were not many novels of protest, a few made a big impact on society. These novels spoke about how rough the poor lived and worked (Boardman 21). During... ... middle of paper ... ...aucratization, fueled by consumer abundance, promulgated by communications technology, and motivated to hold power without property and to maintain hegemony with education and expertise (Balkin 32). Bibliography: Work Cited Altick, Richard D. Victorian People and ideas. New York: W.W. Norton and company, 1973. Balkin, Richard. Victorian America. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Boardman Jr., Fon W. America and the Progressive Era 1900-1917. New York: Boardman Publishing, 1970. Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Movement 1900-1915. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963. "Victorian Era." Victorian Information. http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/matsuoka/victorian.html (February 12, 2000). Wohl, Anthony S. "Economics." Victorian Website. http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/economics/econov.html (March 2, 2000)

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