Industrialism: An Age of Woe

While the world would never have been the same, the Industrial Revolution was not a time of happiness or wealth for the masses. The separation of wealth between the classes was so bad in fact, those who just visited England even noticed. Friedrich Engels, of Germany, claimed that “the slums of English towns have much in common—the worst houses in a town being found in the worst districts” (503).

He goes on to describe the slums of St. Giles in detail; Engels saw the slums as “confused conglomeration of tall houses of three or four stories” with “the narrowness of the roads…accentuated by the presence of streetmarkets in which baskets of rotting and virtually uneatable vegetables and fruit are exposed for sale” (503). The houses are described as dwellings with “hardly an unbroken windowpane to be seen, the walls are crumbling, the door posts and window frames are loose and rotten” and “piles of refuse and ashes lie all over the place and the slops thrown out into the street collect in pools which emit a foul stench” (503).

Engels then goes on to describe Manchester, where the “working-class districts and the middle-class districts are quite distinct” (504). The “upper classes enjoy healthy country air and live in luxurious and comfortable dwellings” while those in lower classes live in houses that “have been packed together in disorderly confusion in impudent defiance of all reasonable principles of town planning” (505).