 communications and power. A new main road system came into being, then the railway system.
Steam power was harnessed to industrial processes. Gas-lighting gave way to electricity; electricity led the way to the telegraph, telephone and radio. The names that ring down the years from the 1800s are those of engineers, builders and inventors: Watt, Stephenson, Faraday, Edison, Bell, Morse, Marconi.
This changed both the look of the land, and the lives of ordinary people more, and more quickly, than in the whole of man’s previous history. Instead of being born, living and dying in the same village, even the poorest began to move.
In their thousands they moved from the countryside into the rapidly-growing towns, to man scores of new factories. The Industrial Revolution actually began long before Victoria came to the throne, but increased in speed and force as the 19th-century progressed. In 1773 fewer than 14,000 people lived in Manchester. Before the century ended there were 70,000. By 1900 the population had shot up to over half a million. A French critic and historian described it in the 1860s as “a Babel built of brick.”
The simple peasants who left their insanitary country hovels and back-breaking slavery on the land, or the “cottage industries” killed off by new production methods, believed they were moving into a world of bright lights and easy jobs “minding the machines.” They could not have been more wrong. They were merely exchanging one kind of slavery for another, in even worse circumstances.
As the factory-owners moved out of the city centres to the pleasant suburbs, their houses were replaced by towering factories and rows of tiny terraced houses, or tenements, into which the workers were crammed; often several families to one house. Sometimes whole families lived in one small, damp, cellar under the shadow of the soot-blackened factory walls where they spent anything up to sixteen hours every day, working for a pittance. Occasionally they brought the family pigs and hens from the country to share, and increase, their squalor.
It was not just the men who worked. Their wives and children, too, spent most of their waking hours toiling in miserable, often dangerous, conditions; dying of new industrial diseases as well as exhaustion and lack of good food.
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Posted in Arts and Crafts, Historical articles, History, Industry on Friday, 14 February 2014
This edited article about Josiah Wedgwood first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 552 published on 12 August 1972.
When Josiah Wedgwood was born at Burslem in Staffordshire in 1730, the thirteenth child of Thomas and Mary Wedgwood, his family had been potters in the town for well over a century. His years at school were very few for when he was 9 years old his father died and it became necessary for him to earn his own living. He went to work for his eldest brother, Thomas, and when he was 14 became one of his apprentices. Josiah became skilful as a “thrower,” which meant that it was his job to shape the clay on a turn-table which he kept spinning with a foot treadle. An attack of smallpox left him with a weak right knee which gave him trouble for many years until the leg was eventually amputated in 1768. He might have remained a thrower but for his disability which made it impossible for him to continue this work. He therefore set about widening his knowledge and skill in the pottery trade.
Josiah’s great enthusiasm for improving his craft was not shared by his brother Thomas who considered his experiments to make clay resemble various natural stones such as onyx and agate an unprofitable waste of time and materials. Neither was he interested in Josiah’s efforts to improve the quality of the everyday ware produced by the pottery. In 1749 when his apprenticeship was at an end Josiah was turned down by Thomas when he requested a partnership.
After a brief, unsuccessful partnership in a business near Stoke, Josiah entered into partnership with a master potter named Whieldon. This man loved experimenting as much as Wedgwood and both men w