Reactions to economic change are most revealing
when a society first experiences its effects. In Britain, the
development of capital and industry reached a noticeable scale for
the first time in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Most
of the people who recorded their views about the changes that were
taking place were those most closely involved, and, not
surprisingly, they were generally enthusiastic and only rarely
mentioned their misgivings about the negative effects. Scientists
like Joseph Priestley, political economists like Adam Smith and
entrepreneurs like Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood
shared the view that progress was a beneficial process that would
continue indefinitely.
However, such people formed only a very small
part of the middle and upper classes of eighteenth-century Britain,
and their point of view was distinctly radical. There is also
evidence of strong contrary views. Thus Dr Johnson, recognising
that men were no longer savages, acknowledged that progress had
occurred in the past, but believed mankind had already reached its
most advanced state and saw no place for further progress in the
present or the future.
Nevertheless, Dr Johnson, and others who shared
his view, showed much curiosity about the changes taking place
around them, about the new factories and about the men who ran
them. The main industrial districts of the late eighteenth century
-Birmingham, Manchester, the Coalbrookdale iron works and the
Staffordshire potteries - were visited regularly by travellers,
regarded as being among the greatest sights in the land and
frequently depicted by artists.
We are still in the middle of the Industrial
Revolution. It has made our world richer, smaller, and our
world is everybody's world.
From its earliest beginnings, when it was still
dependent on water power, the Industrial Revolution was cruel to
those whose lives and livelihood it overturned. Yet it became in
time a social revolution and established that social equality, the
equality of rights, above all intellectual equality, on which we
depend. The Renaissance established the dignity of man. The
Industrial Revolution established the unity of nature.
That was done by scientists and romantic poets
who saw that the wind and the sea and the stream and the steam and
the coal are all created by the heat of the sun, and that heat
itself is a form of energy, driving human progress. It was
such men who made nature romantic; the Romantic Movement in poetry
came step by step with them. We see it in poets like Goethe (who
was also a scientist) and in musicians like Beethoven. We see it
first of all in Wordsworth: the sight of nature as a new quickening
of the spirit because the unity in it was immediate to the heart
and mind.