Industry, Science, and Women in Victorian England

Industry, Science, and Women in Victorian England

In The Stone Book: The Mosaic Record of Creation, Thomas Cooper expressed the opinion of many Victorians, claiming that our brave and revered forefathers, who, if they could rise from their ashes and look about them in this their native England, as it is at present, would feel sorrow, instead of joy, mingled with their surprise (Cooper).

Although such sentiments are not confined to any single generation, the desire to return to simpler, bygone times is particularly understandable in regard to Victorian England. After all, England was undergoing an unprecedented period of rapid changes: farms were giving way to factories; science and technology were revolutionizing how people viewed their world; and, for the first time in over a century, a woman reigned Britain. Practically nothing was left untouched, resulting in a conflict between progress and traditional norms.

Recent discoveries of gold in India and Australia, plus the agricultural success of Canada, spurred a fevered amount of growth throughout England (Harrison 25). Railroads, canals, bridges, factories, warehouses, government buildings, and suburban neighborhoods flourished, as did England’s overall prosperity (25). Indeed, between 1850-1883, the national income doubled and exports increased 229 percent (24-25). New technology, such as hydraulic presses, reapers, and locomotives began to appear, as did telegraphs – the first of which connected Edinburgh and Manchester (260). With the proliferation of railways, traveling became faster and more convenient, causing people to describe the distance between two locations in terms of the length of a train ride (Sussman 252). Similarly, state-of-the-art innovations, such as the jacquard loom, which produced elaborate textiles by following patterns punched into paper cards, “blurr[ed]… the boundary” between human and mechanical intelligence (255).

However, although such advancements proved to be an economic boon, industrialization was by no means universally beneficial. As Fredrich Engles described in The Condition of the working class in England, entire neighborhoods were blighted by the choking smoke of nearby factories (Harrison 21). In northeastern Manchester alone, Engles found that 4,000 people were crammed into 400 coal-black, stagnant…”disgusting” ramshackle cottages, surrounded by “heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth” (21). Impoverished workers, which comprised 70 percent of the population, “swarm[ed] abut the streets… just as dirty as the pigs which wallow[ed]” in adjacent pens (21). In addition to their squalid housing, Engles noted that workers labored under dangerous conditions and were prone to hunger, occupational diseases, and unscrupulous employers (21).