Chapter 18 Industrial Revolution in the West: 1700-1914

Section 4 The New Industrial Society

Over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, standards of living improved for the vast majority of people in industrial societies.  Developments in science also changed people's lives and changed traditional outlooks. Art and literature at first rejected, and then embraced, the industrial age. 

The New Consumer Society

By the end of the 1800s, larger numbers of Europeans shared in the benefits of industrial life.  Industry supplied the needs and wants of a mass market, not just the tastes of an aristocratic elite. The first department store, Bon Marché, opened in Paris with everything from furniture to clothing located in one building. Businesses began advertising to convince consumers to buy their products.

            Families with enough new wealth often joined the aristocracy or adopted its way of life.  Wealthy Americans built mansions in the style of European castles and manor houses and many intermarried with titled British families.  Houses with servants became a sign of status for the well-to-do. Women's fashions also reflected this trend. Restrictive corsets and tight shoes made stylish women and girls immobile and unable to work, thus turning them into symbols of the prosperity enjoyed by their husbands and fathers. 

Public entertainment. Toward the end of the 1800s, working people began to enjoy increasing leisure.[47]  Theater and opera were available, while less sophisticated forms of entertainment could be found in pleasure gardens, most notably in London.  At most of these gardens could be found a music hall, a gambling club, a restaurant, and a fun-fair, all of which could be enjoyed for a small entrance fee.[48]

            Toward the end of the 1800s, variety shows and music halls grew more popular. Their low admission prices attracted large crowds, and its stars became national figures in both Britain and the United States. Plays by dramatists such as George Bernard Shaw satirized the conventional values of the times.[49]  In the early 1900s the newly invented cinema grew popular with silent films accompanied by piano; the adding of soundtracks to films after 1927 began the age of modern movies. 

Sports. Another important change in leisure activity was the rise of organized sports. After people moved from rural areas to the cities, they no longer participated in folk festivals, which had included traditional games and dances. They also lost their sense of identity with a particular place.  One of the ways they filled free time was with organized team sports. Supporting or playing for a local team gave people a new sense of local identity. Team sports also reinforced some of the ideals of the industrial age. Like industry, organized sports depended on coordinated activity, with each participant fulfilling a specialized task in order to achieve a common goal.

            Many of the most popular team sports originated in the so-called "public schools" of Britain, which were private boarding schools.  In 1863 the Football Association formed to establish the rules for soccer, while in 1871, the Rugby Football Union did the same for rugby.[50]  By 1900 soccer had become the most popular sport in Britain, with nearly 10,000 teams registered with the Football Association.[51] American football and baseball

also developed out of late nineteenth century amateur sports.

Changing Roles for Women

Before the nineteenth century, among the aristocracy, neither men nor women needed to do manual work.  Among the rest of the population who did, the burden of survival required both sexes to work, although mostly at different tasks.

For working people, the Industrial Revolution separated the workplace from the home, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the idea of separate spheres began to grow—that men belonged in the public world of business and government, and that women belonged in the home. At the same time, the concept of ‘home’ gained a new meaning. Because of its separation from the world of business, the home was increasingly seen as a haven from the stresses and harshness of the outside world. Women had the responsibility for creating a beautiful and peaceful environment and for raising a family of healthy, well-behaved children. Women were trained to be pleasant, charming, and supportive of their husbands.  As one historian has written, women were expected to "exercise constant patience and forbearance in spite of narrow means, inconvenient houses, crying children and preoccupied husbands."[52]

But the greater opportunities available to men in the nineteenth century did not go unnoticed by women.

Employment and education. While most women accepted a domestic role, some wanted to be more than wives and mothers. Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, wrote "What am I that their [other women's] life is not good enough for me? ... why...cannot I be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people?"[53]  In the 1800s many women from more prosperous families began to seek outside employment, often in jobs such as nursing or teaching that extended their domestic role beyond the home.[54]

            As these women sought meaningful employment, it became clear that their educations had not prepared them for practical work. In the 1860s the British reformer Jessie Boucherette founded a school in London to give "a solid English education to young girls and teach older women to write a letter grammatically, to calculate rapidly without a slate, and to keep accounts."[55]  Although by the late 1800s most European nations provided free primary education to both girls and boys, advanced education for women was limited and controversial.[56] 

            By the 1890s the demands for entry to higher education were heard across Europe. In 1865 the University of Zurich became the first European university to admit women.[57]   In 1876 Russian universities were opened to women, although women were banned again from 1881 to 1905 because a woman had assassinated Tsar Alexander II.[58] In Britain, the University of London allowed women to earn degrees in 1878; the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, on the other hand, allowed women to attend lectures – but did not begin granting them degrees until after the First World War.[59]

The Growing Importance of Science           

The 1800s were also a period of advance in natural science. New discoveries in the biological and physical sciences dramatically changed how Europeans understood the natural world and their place in it.

Biology.  In France, Louis Pasteur identified microorganisms as the causes of many contagious diseases.  He developed vaccines against anthrax in sheep, cholera in chickens, and rabies in animals and humans.[60]  The Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel discovered how genetic traits passed down from generation to generation.[61]  Societies also discovered the connections between poor sanitation and disease, which led the installation of modern sewer systems and water treatment plants.

            The English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had perhaps the greatest impact. While a student at Cambridge, he sailed around the world on the Beagle, gathering data on the flora, fauna, and geology of the lands he encountered. He then spent the next twenty years of his life studying the natural world, and in 1859 he published a synthesis of his ideas, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection.

            Darwin argued that species (groups of living things with shared traits) were in a perpetual struggle for survival with other species.  Those adapted to the environment in which they found themselves survived to reproduce and pass their adaptation to their offspring.  This process he called natural selection and in the descent of new species from older ones Darwin traced the evolution of living things.

While the idea of evolution had been proposed earlier by the Enlightenment thinkers Montesquieu and Diderot, Darwin was the first to provide scientific evidence of it.[62]  Darwin's theory, which made humans a form of evolved animal, made him instantly famous and controversial, since his evidence implied that human beings were not the special creation of a God.  New findings in geology that proved life on Earth, and the Earth itself, to be much older than scriptural dates deepened the challenge to traditional religious beliefs that Darwin caused.           

Physical sciences. Discoveries in chemistry and physics were no less dramatic. In 1800 John Dalton in England formulated the modern theory of atoms, and by 1869 chemical elements were classified in the periodic table of chemical elements.[63]  Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896,[64] and significant scientific work in radioactivity was conducted afterwards by Marie Curie. 

            [Sidebar: Born in Poland in 1867, Marie Curie (born Manya Sklodowska) moved to Paris at the age of 24 to study physical science at the Sorbonne. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, who shared her dedication to scientific inquiry.[65]  They discovered two new elements, polonium and radium. In 1903, the Curies shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work with radioactivity.[66]  Three years later, Pierre died, and in her later years, she worked on the application of X-rays to medical diagnosis.[67] ]

            The most dramatic discoveries were in the realm of physics.  Between 1861 and 1873, James Clerk Maxwell of Scotland integrated earlier discoveries in electricity and magnetism into a set of four equations.  Then in 1887, experiments failed to detect the "ether," a very fine substance thought to permeate the universe.  Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity explained the universe without ether.  Einstein's work showed that Newton's physics could be contained in a larger theory that explained things Newton's could not.  Max Planck and other physicists discovered that nature at very small scales also behaved in ways that could be understood only approximately.  Einstein's theories and the "quantum theory" pioneered by Planck and those who followed him established a fundamentally new view of physical nature. 

Development of the Social Sciences

As scientists made new discoveries about the natural world, other scholars and researchers tried to bring a more science-like approach to the study of history and contemporary society.

            The German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (shlee-mahn) used his personal fortune to fund excavations in Turkey, where he found what he believed to be Troy in the 1870s.  He also discovered the remains of Mycenae and Tiryns.[68]  Sir Arthur Evans discovered the palace of Knossos on Crete in 1899 and excavated what he called the Minoan civilization.[69] Schliemann and Evans found that legendary cities and cultures had a basis in actual history.  The German historian Leopold von Ranke (ron-kuh) advocated the writing of history from original sources rather than merely recording second-hand legends and tradition.[70]

            The German founder of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt (vuhnt), founded the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879.  He studied how people processed thoughts, emotions, and experiences.[71]  The Russian Ivan Pavlov demonstrated that behavior could be conditioned by outside factors in a famous experiment of the conditioned reflex in dogs.[72]  Sigmund Freud of Austria proposed the more influential idea that human behavior was heavily influenced by unconscious needs and drives. 

            The new findings in biology, physics, and psychology had an unsettling effect on the European world.  Nature and human life now seemed less certain and less possible to reconcile with religious faith.  The new science was often abused to reinforce social prejudices.  Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, promoted the "science" of eugenics, which advocated the use of selective breeding to improve the human species. Supported by biased anthropological studies, eugenics strengthened discriminatory assumptions about the inferiority of the poor and of different racial groups.[73]  Going beyond what Darwin believed, "Social Darwinists" argued that in human life competition between individuals and nations was a necessary part of the natural order and that only the strong deserved to survive.

Trends in Art and Literature

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, artists reacted against the mechanization of the industrial world.  A century later, artists and writers embraced the industrial civilization around them and tried to reflect its reality in their works.  

Romanticism. By the end of the 1700s, artists and writers began to reject the idealized and rigid forms of neoclassicism. They began to see a new virtue in nature and in people who lived close to nature, such as farmers and shepherds.  In the early decades of the nineteenth century, this idealization of nature became a reaction against the urbanization and mechanization of industrial society. This reaction became known as Romanticism.

            Romanticism exalted the individual person, not as a rational thinker or free responsible citizen, but as a being who dared to express "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," as the English poet William Wordsworth proclaimed.[74]  Poets such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire began to break the rules of poetry obeyed for generations. The composer Ludwig van Beethoven changed the structured classical sonata into a vehicle for the expression of powerful emotion.

            During the Romantic period, the novel first became popular as a literary form. The Gothic novel aroused terror for both the reader and the novel's heroine, and often these novels were set in the medieval past. Gothic novels remained popular from the late 1700s until the mid-1800s, when important writers such as Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë incorporated Gothic elements into their novels.

            In art, painters no longer sought inspiration from the standard neoclassical subjects of ancient Greece and Rome. Instead, they chose dramatic and emotional subjects.  Eugène Delacroix represented the clamor and energy of revolution in his 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People. Caspar David Friedrich depicted a solemn and reverential scene in Cloister Graveyard in the Snow (1810), while J.M.W. Turner vividly portrayed the power and fury of a stormy sea in The Slave Ship  (1840).

            Romanticism also expressed itself in architecture nostalgic for the Middle Ages, such as the British Houses of Parliament, built in 1835.  The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, echoed the exotic style of Islamic architecture with its many domes and minarets.[75] 

Realism.  In the last half of the 1800s, though, artists and writers began to accept the modern world in a movement called Realism. While the Realists also objected to the harshness and cruelty of the industrial age, they removed excessive sentimentality from their work and tried to reflect daily lives. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert (floh-behr) satirized the morals and manners of the newly prosperous, while in Russia, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky (dah-stoy-ehf-skee) wrote sprawling novels filled with violence, love, and family crises involving people from all social backgrounds.

            The Realist novel was a useful vehicle for making critical observations about society. Tales of cruel working conditions, incessant poverty, and family breakdowns served as a critique of society. In the novels Dombey and Son and Hard Times, Charles Dickens chronicled the hardships of the poor in nineteenth century England.  Anthony Trollope explored social aspirations of those better-off in mid-Victorian Britain.[76]

Realism extended to painting.  In Burial at Ormans (1849), Gustave Courbet (koor-bay) depicted a funeral in a bleak landscape, attended by a group of ordinary unheroic people.[77]  Jean François Millet (mih-lay) also painted ordinary people, choosing humble French peasants as his subjects. The Gleaners (1857) depicts three female peasants bent over the ground in the backbreaking work of gleaning grains from a harvested field.[78]

            The coming of modern photography reduced the demand for portrait painters.  By the late 1800s, many surviving artists abandoned realism to experiment with new styles.  French Impressionists, such as Claude Monet (mon-AY) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (ren-WAHR), used short brush strokes and a mastery of color to depict late nineteenth century life in paintings dappled with sunlight. While Monet chose outdoor scenes as his subjects, Renoir specialized in the human figure.

            Building changed from traditional stone to dramatic new forms made possible by the materials of the industrial age. Much of the building that accompanied industry and urban growth was efficient and economical but ugly.  The best engineers showed that efficiency, economy, and elegance could instead reinforce each other.  The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City (1883) by John Roebling, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1889) by Gustave Eiffel, became iconic works of modern industrial civilization.   

Section 4 Review

IDENTIFY and explain the significance of the following:

team sports

separate spheres

Charles Darwin

Albert Einstein

Claude Monet

Eiffel Tower

1.      MAIN IDEA  In what ways did the Industrial Revolution give people more leisure?  In what ways did industrial society change the role of women?

2.      MAIN IDEA  How did new science affect traditional notions of the place of human beings in the natural world?

3.      GEOGRAPHY  Why did the first department stores locate in major cities, such as Paris?

4.      WRITING TO CREATE  Imagine that you are Leopold von Ranke. In a letter to your fellow historians, explain why you believe the study of history should rely on sources rather than on legend and tradition.

5.      SYNTHESIZING  Which was the more significant reaction to the industrial age—Romanticism or Realism?  Explain your answer.

Chapter Review

REVIEWING TERMS

From the following list, choose the term that correctly matches the definition 

steam engine

corporation

cartel

crop rotation

natural selection

separate spheres

1.      A combination of businesses designed to limit competition.

2.      An early machine that burned coal to pump water more efficiently than animals.

3.      Darwin's theory that species succeeded by adapting to their environment.

4.      The 19th-century idea that men belong in the world of business and government, while women belong in the home.

5.      The process of growing different crops on the same land in alternate years to preserve the fertility of the soil.[79]  

REVIEWING CHRONOLOGY

List the following events in their correct chronological order: 

1.      The building boom of the Russian railroad system

2.      The building of the Brooklyn Bridge

3.      George Stephenson tests the Rocket

4.      Watt's steam engine 

5.      The invention of the telephone[80]

UNDERSTANDING THE MAIN IDEA

1.      How did deforestation affect the British iron industry?[81]

2.      Where did factories locate before and after the availability of electric power?[82]

3.      What effect did the migration of thousands of people from the countryside to the cities affect urban life?[83]

4.      What effect did Russia's geography have on its delayed industrialization?[84]

5.      How was popular culture shaped by the Industrial Revolution? [85]

THINKING CRITICALLY

1.      EVALUATING  Did the Industrial Revolution improve the quality of life for people in Europe? Explain your answer.[86]

2.      HYPOTHESIZING  Could the British have industrialized without an agricultural revolution?[87]  

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