The Down Side of Industry

During this period, England was an industrial as well as an agricultural land. The Industrial Revolutionand improvements in farming had brought increased prosperity to the middle and upper classes but degrading poverty to the families employed in the factories and mills. Living and working conditions for industrial laborers were generally appalling. Britain operated under the doctrine of laissez faire(French for “allow to do”), which argued that an economy works best without government intervention. No laws were passed to regulate factory safety, workers’ hours, low wages, or child labor. The government also made no effort to control the economy’s boom-and-bust fluctuations, which resulted in worker layoffs during frequent economic downturns.

The Luddite RiotsAt the start of the Regency (the period in which George III’s son ruled England in his father’s place), an economic depression brought the loss of many factory jobs. New equipment in textile mills added to the problem, as fewer workers were needed to perform certain tasks. In the ensuing Luddite riots,unemployed factory workers rioted in several counties, smashing the machinery they blamed for taking their jobs away. The violence was frightening to so many that Parliament passed a law making the breaking of factory machines an offense punishable by death. Yet those who understood the workers’ grievances wondered why the government did nothing to try to solve the problem instead. In his first speech to the House of Lords (in which he was entitled by birth to belong), the poet Lord Byronspoke in sympathy with the Luddite rebels. However, he was only one of three members who voted against the new law.

Postwar ProblemsAfter the Battle of Waterloo, unemployment swelled as war veterans returned home. In addition, to keep cheap foreign grain from glutting the market, the Tory government passed a Corn Law,which taxed imported grain (in Britain, corn refers to any grain). These taxes protected the income of large landowners and small farmers, but they also devastated the poor and unemployed by keeping food prices high.

Given the trying times, factory workers wanted to join together to pool resources and fight for better work conditions. Labor unions were illegal, however, and when workers assembled in defiance of the law, government troops were called in to suppress their meetings. In one incident, 11 people were killed when troops were sent to break up a workers’ gathering in St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester. The incident was called the Peterloo Massacre,a bitter pun on the Battle of Waterloo.

A Changing Language: Late Modern English

The Industrial Revolution and Britain’s overseas involvement added many new words to English—so many, in fact, that scholars call the language after 1800 Late Modern Englishto distinguish it from the modern English of Shakespeare’s day.

Scientific CoinagesMany of the new words were scientific terms coined from Greek or Roman word parts; for instance, when Edward Jenner developed a method of preventing smallpox by injecting people with cowpox, he named that method vaccination by using the Latin root for “cow.” Other scientific coinages were simply old words used in new ways; locomotive, for example, existed as an adjective meaning “self-powered” long before it was applied to the steam-powered engine developed in the early 19^th c.

Foreign BorrowingsBritish interaction with nations and colonies overseas was the second source of vocabulary expansion. From the fight against Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula came guerrilla—originally a Spanish word meaning “little war.” From Britain’s growing colonization of the Indian subcontinent came a number of words, including pajamas, bangle, jungle, and shampoo.

Romanticism and LanguageThe democratic attitudes of the romantic movement helped broaden the concept of “acceptable” English and narrow the gap between the language of scholars and aristocrats and the language of the common people. In their efforts to create literature based on natural speech, romantic writers sometimes employed regional dialects, colloquial language, and even slang. Those trying to capture the flavor of the legendary past also used archaic, or outdated, words and spellings—stoppeth for stop, for example, and rime for rhyme.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 780