Industry, Science, and Women in Victorian England :: Free Essays Online

Industry, Science, and Women in Victorian EnglandIn The Stone Book The Mosaic Record of Creation, Thomas Cooper show the opinion of many Victorians, claiming that our brave and revered forefathers, who, if they could rise from their ashes and look to the highest degree them in this their native England, as it is at present, would feel sorrow, instead of joy, mingled with their awe (Cooper).Although such sentiments are not confined to any single generation, the liking to return to simpler, bygone times is particularly understandable in calculate to Victorian England. After all, England was undergoing an unprecedented period of rapid changes farms were giving manner 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(a) untouched, resulting in a conflict between progress and traditional norms. new-fashioned discoveries of gold in India and Austral ia, plus the agricultural success of Canada, spurred a excited amount of growth throughout England (Harrison 25). Railroads, canals, bridges, factories, warehouses, government buildings, and suburban neighborhoods flourished, as did Englands overall prosperity (25). Indeed, between 1850-1883, the national income doubled and exports increased 229 per centum (24-25). New technology, such as hydraulic presses, reapers, and locomotives began to appear, as did telegraphs the first of which attached Edinburgh and Manchester (260). With the proliferation of railways, traveling became faster and more convenient, causing people to describe the place between two locations in terms of the length of a select ride (Sussman 252). Similarly, state-of-the-art innovations, such as the jacquard loom, which produced elaborate textiles by avocation patterns punched into paper cards, blurred the boundary between human and mechanical intelligence (255). However, although such advancements proved t o be an economic boon, industrialization was by no mode universally beneficial. As Fredrich Engles described in The Condition of the working consort in England, entire neighborhoods were blighted by the choking smoke of near factories (Harrison 21). In northeastern Manchester alone, Engles found that 4,000 people were crammed into 400 coal-black, stagnant revolt ramshackle cottages, surrounded by heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth (21). wiped out(p) workers, which comprised 70 percent of the population, swarmed abut the streets just as dirty as the pigs which wallowed in adjacent pens (21). In addition to their squalid housing, Engles noted that workers hard under dangerous conditions and were prone to hunger, occupational diseases, and unscrupulous employers (21).