Analytical Essay on Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin PDF

Preview

Summary

The First Industrial Revolution was centralized in Britain due to natural coal deposits and the economic success of the textile industry that motivated entrepreneurs to invest in the building of factories. Spanning from 1760 to roughly 1840, industrialization was characterized by the use of steam po...

Description

Secondary Source Review: Liberty’s Dawn by Emma Griffin

The First Industrial Revolution was centralized in Britain due to natural coal deposits and the economic success of the textile industry that motivated entrepreneurs to invest in the building of factories. Spanning from 1760 to roughly 1840, industrialization was characterized by the use of steam power, a new factory-based workforce, mechanization, and entirely new landscapes across Europe. Liberty’s Dawn focuses on dispelling some of the classically “dark interpretations” of this period and discusses how industrialization changed the world and kick-started the modern, global economy.

Emma Griffin seeks through testimony of auto-biographies to answer her question of how did the Industrial Revolution impact the ordinary lives of men, women, and children who lived and worked through it. Griffin takes a look at the experiences of men, women, and children in the workforce separately and attempts to explain the motivation and culture of each group’s participation. This also means considering societal expectations and economic pressures experienced by the families and single women especially. Liberty’s Dawn analyzes the experiences of the working class in the country and city settings of Europe. Griffin specifies why maintaining gainful employment was difficult for men during this era, the reasoning behind parents’ decision to send their children to the workforce at earlier and earlier ages, and what factors generally kept women from gainful employment. Using research from about three hundred and fifty to four hundred autobiographies of men and women who lived through the Industrial Revolution, Griffin hopes to convey to her readers that the Industrial Era did in fact bring new opportunities for workers to enter into skilled labor. Yet

the caveat seems to be that only men were allowed economic mobility from industrialization, while women and children played less-prosperous and less-profitable means of entering the workforce. Liberty’s Dawn is a three-part narrative of first the experience of various men, then the general experience of children drawn from what adults remembered from their childhoods, and then of women. Part two and three are fuller and more nuanced accounts of individuals living in the “Bleak Age.” Robert Anderson, who ambitiously became a poet and published writer after he was forced to grow up too quickly following the death of his father, the undertaking of his family, and several failed attempts at starting a family of his own. A child laborer named William Dodd was left a “miserable cripple” by the forced unnatural posture of the spinning machines, his life a testament to the lives of many people like him whose station forced them to toil in factories. Griffin triumphantly writes about Dodd’s success in adulthood in his participation in the Factory Reform Movement. Griffin’s retelling of John and Mary’s story shows the precarious position that most women were in, as methods of rudimentary birth control were not commonly used. Mary Rose’s urging for a public proposal of marriage from the upwardly mobilized John, just as the next girl Joanna attempted and failed to do. Mary Rose’s story also allows Griffin to make the essential point that writers of the autobiographies were able to omit sexual encounters, sexual orientation, and change the narratives as they pleased. Griffin uses all forms of life-writing and primary sources she finds reliable to create the nearly complete picture of the Industrial Era that Liberty’s Dawn gives. Griffin mentions throughout the book that relatives of the writers and various printers may also have had a hand in censoring or

shortening the narratives. A particular downfall of this fact is that many accounts of the authors’ wives and mothers were edited out and “replaced with ellipses” for lack of interest. A large part of Griffin’s narrative is devoted to explaining how the decline of apprenticeship “created new opportunities for learning skilled trade” in 1750-1850. But an unfortunate consequence of this opening to skilled labor was that the markets were flooded, and wages were driven down further. This argument was particularly compelling and helped in Griffin’s explanation of the harshly competitive and cheap market for work for men as breadwinners, and even less gainful for women and children who were habitually paid less. Griffin is particularly persuasive in her position on the deep trade depressions of the first half of the nineteenth century that increased commercial failures and strikes. Which impressed upon the reader the reality that most breadwinners faced during this time; one’s family was really only one stroke of bad luck from having to pawn their good furniture to stave off destitution and poverty. The narrative does fall short when addressing the occurrence of single women and single mothers who fell into poverty or for various other reasons turned to prostitution. Griffin iterates the shallow narrative of window-stainer James Zobel’s experience with fallen women, but the reader does not get a sense of the societal and economic pressures that are placed on the woman he meets named Eliza. Eliza is only said to have been a prostitute and to have gotten along romantically, but she ended up married to another man. While the reputation of James is said to be enacted despite his “relationships” with women like Eliza, Liberty’s Dawn falls short in its final chapters in offering insight on the female’s perspective in this line of work. Despite the few shortcomings, Griffin overall delivers an uplifting account of these narratives and the general ambitions of these men and women who lived through the “Bleak Age.” Griffin was able to capture the perseverance and hard-fought successes of working-class

people who lived their absolutely depressing and tragic times. The primary sources that Griffin draws from in her research add human compassion to our understanding of Europe in the late nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, by elaborating on the cultural motivations of a social class that was made to work uniquely hard for survival. Griffin hints at an overarching theme of our course, that the working-class was able to “find their voice” more so than ever due to influences from the Reformation, Enlightenment, and Revolutionary periods that were central to Europe. Industrialization caused a multitude of cultural changes and kick-started Europe on the path of modern capitalism. In using Liberty’s Dawn to teach about the Industrial Revolution, it would be beneficial to take excerpts from this book, especially those dealing with the decline of apprenticeships and accounts of women in the workforce. The study of the European Industrial Revolution will likely be compared and contrasted with the American Industrial Revolution and Charles Morris’s Dawn of Innovation and possibly Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. None of which would be assigned for students to read in their entirety. Lectures would need to focus on the commonalities between American and European industrialization to meet TEKS curriculum standards.

Essentially, Liberty’s Dawn by Emma Griffin is able to combine hundreds of “messy tales” from autobiographies written 1760 and 1900 in order to chronicle the unbreakable human spirit in the face of poverty, corruption, and misery. Griffin determined that the First Industrial Revolution was also characterized by exciting new opportunities for economic mobility and political action. Understanding the circumstances of working-class men, women, and children allows readers to grasp the full consequence and significance of this era of monumental cultural change....