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, doubting Thomas Cooper expressed the opinion of m either Victorians, claiming that our brave and revered forefathers, who, if they could beginning from their ashes and look about them in this their native England, as it is at present, would timbre 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 intelligible in regard to Victorian England. After all, England was undergoing an unprecedented period of speedy changes farms were giving way to factories science and technology were revolutionizing how people viewed their world and, for the scratch time in over a century, a woman reigned Britain. much nothing was left untouched, resulting in a conflict between elevate and traditional norms. Recent discoveries of gold in India and Australia, plus the agricultural victor 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 Englands overall prosperity (25). Indeed, between 1850-1883, the national income duple 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 duration of a train ride (Sussman 252). Similarly, state-of-the-art innovations, such as the jacquard loom, which produced fine-tune textiles by following patterns punched into paper cards, blurred the boundary between human and mechanistic intelligence (255). However, although such advancements proved to be an economi c boon, industrialization was by no means universally beneficial. As Fredrich Engles described in The take aim 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 cd coal-black, stagnantdisgusting ramshackle cottages, surrounded by heaps of refuse, offal and sicken filth (21). Impoverished 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 unwell housing, Engles noted that workers labored under dangerous conditions and were prone to hunger, occupational diseases, and unscrupulous employers (21).