Paperback: This remarkable book, first published in 2013, looks at 350 published and unpublished autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate first-hand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class.
The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty.
On the contrary, prize-winning historian Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action.
For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom.
Griffin gets under the skin of the period and creates a cast of colourful characters, including factory workers, miners, shoemakers, carpenters, servants, and farm labourers.
Griffin wrote in her Introduction, "My goal is not to root out some 'patches of sunlight' in the name of historical novelty. Nor do I wish to replace one simple story (things were bad and getting worse) with another (they never had it so good!). The pattern was complex. Just as statistical averages and human experiences can run counter to each other, so too can the experiences of different people. Men, women and children, we will see, felt the advent of industrialisation in very different ways. The patches of sunlight certainly shone more brightly on men than on their wives or children."
"Above all, we need to listen more carefully to what our first-hand witnesses are trying to tell us. In recounting their journeys to adulthood and self-understanding, in the sheer fact of writing an autobiography at all, our writers communicated something about their place in a changing world. It is time to think the unthinkable: that these writers viewed themselves not as downtrodden losers but as men and women in control of their destiny; that the industrial revolution heralded the advent not of a yet 'darker period', but of the dawn of liberty."
About the author: Emma Griffin is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia and an expert on the social and economic history of Britain from 1700 to 1870. She is a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 3's Night Waves and is the author of three previous books, including A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (2010) and Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066 (2007), as well as many articles, essays and reviews in both academic and non-academic publications.
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