The Victorian age

What does it come immediately to our minds when we listen to the word “revolution”? Is it something good or bad?

“Revolución significa cambios rápidos y profundos. Antes de la Revolución Industrial, por ejemplo, la economía era de tipo familiar y la producción, artesanal; el prestigio social provenía del linaje, es decir, de haber nacido en cuna aristocrática; los artículos de uso diario como el calzado, el vestuario o los muebles los hacía un artesano en su taller”. (Ortega, par 1). In other words, before the revolution era, people didn’t have the opportunity to have more money, so either you were rich or aristocrat or you were poor and had to work harder than the rest in order to succeed. Therefore, the people who didn’t belong to the rich society had to create their own goods and, if they could, they sold them in order to get a bit of money.

The Victorian age, also known as The Industrial revolution was a period in which “fundamental changes occurred in agriculture, textile and metal manufacture, transportation, economic policies and the social structure” (Montagna, par 1)

If we compare a machine and a person, it is clear that a person does not get sick; therefore neither medical licences, remedies nor a nursery is required to get your workers in a good environment. Now, comparing a woman with a machine, a machine doesn’t have babies, so they won’t have any problems when going to work or while they are doing so.

On the other hand, in the fields, now there’s no need to have a person to plough with a wooden tool. Instead, they had machines that could plough and harvest at the same time!

In that moment, when people realized that they were no longer needed, they started to move to industrial towns, where cheap hand labour was needed. In these industries, they tried to hire women and children, because their wages were lower than men’s. They both had to work almost 15 hours a day. “If the conditions in which people lived in these factory towns were considered bad, then the conditions in which they worked can be appropriately characterized as being horrendous. Inside these factories one would find poorly ventilated, noisy, dirty, damp and poorly lighted working areas” (Montagna, par 46)

The consequence of this era was that another social class was being created by the "new citizens", which was called the "ploretarian class". As people wanted to work, they overpoblated big cities, but the only thing that occurred was that people lost their dignity only for a badly-paid job

Bibliography.

Ortega, Rene. "La revolución Industrial", Yahoo Geocites, 23th Sept. 2008. 10th Nov, 2008.

<http://www.geocities.com/profereneortega/REVOLINDUSTRIAL.htm>

Montagna, Joseph. "The Industrial Revolution", Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 2008. 10th Nov, 2008.

<http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1981/2/81.02.06.x.html>