HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-07-07T08:50:51.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes
items: What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
items: From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution
items: "An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain
items: Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain
items: Chamberlain and Cadbury of Birmingham: the first families in Britain’s second city
items: Burke and Hare: Lisa Rosner on the pair's crime spree
items: Out of the cold: the slow beginnings of climate change science
items: Why do we say ‘get the sack’?
items: The Pentrich Rising: England's forgotten armed revolution

Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes
type: item
date: 2025-07-07T08:45:07.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: From spinning jennies to ChatGPT, the advent of new technology often sparks widespread anxiety, Professor Emma Griffin tells Dr David Musgrove. But the industrial revolution shows we can adapt
encoded: I hate my vacuum cleaner with a passion that sometimes surprises me. I was sucked into buying an expensive model a few years ago. When it’s working, it’s great, no doubt about it. But it’s often not working, as it gets clogged up very easily. So I spend a lot of time taking it apart and removing the blockages. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is a substantial element of user error at play here, and there is definitely a surfeit of dog hair that I’m asking it to deal with. But, for a labour-saving device, I spend a lot more time labouring on it than it does labouring for me. Quite often, I revert to a broom instead. One of the most pressing questions for our modern age is how to navigate the rapid advance of technology. From artificial intelligence to automation, we’re told that machines will make our lives easier. But will they? Or are we simply shifting the labour elsewhere? Are we creating more work for ourselves, or creating machines that do all our work and make us obsolete? And how do we cope with it all? To shed light on this, I spoke to Professor Emma Griffin, a historian of the industrial revolution and author of Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (Yale University Press, 2020). Can we take any lessons from her research into working-class life in 19th-century Britain, a period when the white heat of technology was really smoking? The age of machines The industrial revolution, which began in Britain in the late 18th century, transformed everything. Machines began to replace manual labour on a mass scale. Factories powered by steam engines and filled with spinning jennies and power looms revolutionised the production of textiles. Coal mining, iron smelting and transport infrastructure all expanded dramatically. It was an age of innovation, but also of anxiety. “There was always a lot of fear that new technology and new machinery would throw people out of employment,” Griffin explains, “[That] they would de-skill jobs. It would lea…

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What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
type: item
date: 2024-12-05T00:00:00.000Z
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Emma Griffin explains how 19th-century working-class autobiographies could revise our understanding of the industrial revolution
encoded: The British industrial revolution stands out as a pivotal moment in human history. But when we think about the men, women and children who, with their strong backs and nimble fingers, did the most to power it, we tend to feel that there is less to celebrate. All of the great Victorian commentators – Engels, Dickens, Blake – painted those industrial times in a very dark hue: they lamented the introduction of new working patterns that compelled men to work at the relentless pace of the machines; children forced into factories and down mines at ever-younger ages; families squeezed into dark, disease-ridden cities; and no future but the workhouse for those who slipped through the net. Listen on the podcast | The Industrial Revolution: everything you wanted to know Their dismal litany echoed through the 20th century as a succession of pioneering social historians – Barbara and John Hammond, Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, to name a few – turned their attention to the devastating impact of the industrial revolution on the working poor. Workers’ words Yet, despite the frequency with which various versions of these bleak perspectives have been retold, their central claim – that this period was worse than anything that has gone before – has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In particular, it is remarkable that so little effort has been made to listen to what working people themselves had to say about their life and times. Of course, it is usually countered that such an effort would be futile because such people did not leave behind much in the way of written sources. But though it is certainly true that they wrote far less than their social superiors, it is not the case that they wrote nothing at all. Their legacy is a little-known but remarkable collection of autobiographies written by working people. If we listen to these, we hear a story very different from the one that we are used to. Historians have long been aware of the existence of such memoirs, but most have bee…

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From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution
type: item
date: 2024-12-02T09:00:51.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Period
description: The Industrial Revolution saw thousands of women enter the workplace alongside men – but it was far from emancipatory, writes Elinor Evans
encoded: The Industrial Revolution caused a dramatic shift in women’s roles in society. Before industrialisation, the household would have been the centre of production, and women’s work largely confined to the domestic sphere, but no less physical for it. Tasks such as fetching water, and tending livestock would have kept women as busy as clothing and feeding a family, while many also took other work into their home such as hand-spinning or weaving. Cottage industry, as it was called, didn’t entirely end with the arrival of large- scale manufacturing, but the advent of machinery had an irreversible impact on women’s lives. As machines replaced individual labour and burgeoning industries needed coal, women became part of the growing working classes that laboured in mines and mills. In the late 18th century, many families would seek employment together, with husband, wife and children all working at the same factory or pit, while for many single women, taking a job outside the home offered the chance of greater independence. LEARN MORE: Women's lives during different historical periods But women were seen as less physically strong and skilled than men and were paid less. Many employers were quick to exploit this cheaper option, and soon, tasks such as printing and working at spinning machines that didn’t require as much strength and were easy to learn, became seen as ‘women’s labour’. Work-life-imbalance Despite the disparity in pay, the conditions in many factories were no less dangerous for women. They could work as many as 80 hours in a week, were offered few breaks, and often served inedible food. In 1832, 23-year- old Elizabeth Bentley was interviewed by a parliamentary investigation into conditions for textile workers. She described working in the card room of a flax mill near Leeds. “It was so dusty, the dust got up my lungs, and the work was so hard... I got so bad in health, that when I pulled the baskets down, I pulled my bones out of their places." As well as the l…

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"An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain
type: item
date: 2024-11-25T09:00:41.000Z
creator: Emma Slattery Williams
subject: Georgian
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: With industrialisation making living conditions worse in the cities, the improvements to hospital provision, surgery and the care of the poor needed to gain apace. Emma Slattery Williams explores how healthcare in 18th-century Britain changed, and the pioneering preventative treatments that helped combat a killer disease
encoded: By the late 18th century, Britain was seeing the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, a process that eventually led to a huge migration of people to industrial cities, with widespread overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions. Drinking water was often contaminated with raw sewage, rubbish rotted in the streets, and crowded living conditions meant disease could easily spread. As many as one in five children died before their second birthday. There was, however, growing institutional provision for curing the sick and the number of hospitals grew in Britain – some of these were run by local parishes, while others were founded by philanthropists wishing to help the poor and perhaps improve their own social position in the process. In return for an annual contribution, a benefactor could recommend a sick person for admission to hospital. “The notion was that you could intervene and save working class people who might otherwise die for lack of healthcare,” explains Mary Fissell, professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. “It was part of a larger, almost mercantilist, view of the health of the population being a significant variable for government.” Read more | The history of vaccination: from Edward Jenner to anti-vaxxers The 18th century also saw improvements in surgery. Surgeons such as William Cheselden, Percival Pott, and John Hunter delved into anatomical studies, diagnosing new diseases, and inventing new procedures. In 1745, the Company of Barber Surgeons was divided into two separate bodies by an act of Parliament, thus forming the Company of Surgeons, a body that formalised the training and licensing of surgeons and which today is known as the Royal College of Surgeons. Dispensaries began to be established – these provided what we might today class as outpatient medical treatment and advice, solely for the poor and free of charge. By 1800, about 40 dispensaries had been founded across Britain. Professor Fissell explains: “In 18th-ce…

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Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain
type: item
date: 2024-01-08T09:00:48.000Z
creator: Dr Ian Mortimer
subject: Georgian
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HEx Academy Regency Course
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: Money
description: Never was the chasm between rich and poor more stark than in the Regency era. Ian Mortimer chronicles a period in which the wealthiest gorged themselves on the fruits of Britain’s industrial might, while the working classes endured lives that were often nasty, brutish and short
encoded: Listen to this article: Every historical age sees extraordinary inequalities of wealth. Whether we are talking about ancient Rome or 20th-century Britain, the pattern is commonly described as a pyramid, with a small number of exceedingly rich individuals at the apex and a large number of poor people at the base. As we all know, the differences between the top and the bottom are extreme – to the extent that some of the super-wealthy have incomes more than a thousand times greater than the national average. But what about the variance in their basic standards of living? Aside from the glitz and the glamour, are the lifestyles of the rich and poor always poles apart? You might assume that the only possible answer to that question is yes. Peasants and slaves never live like lords and kings. But consider it in terms of life expectancy. In the Middle Ages, a lord’s sons and daughters could expect to live into their mid-thirties and the peasantry about five years less, so the poor lived around 85 per cent as long as the rich. The modern world is only a little more equal: children growing up today in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect to live between 85 per cent and 90 per cent as long as those in the least-deprived areas. It looks as if that proportion is more or less a constant. But one period stands out as different: the early 19th century. In the 1830s, middle-class Londoners could expect to live to 44 but working-class ones only 22, just 50 per cent as long. Working-class people in towns like Liverpool, Preston and Manchester were lucky if they reached 19, at a time when average life expectancy from birth in the UK was more than 40. In the unsewered streets of Ashton-under-Lyne, artisans’ life expectancy at birth was just 13, less than a third of that of their more prosperous fellow citizens. Listen | Historian Ian Mortimer discusses how a vast chasm between rich and poor marked society in the early 19th century Extremes of opulence Why was the early 19th ce…

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Chamberlain and Cadbury of Birmingham: the first families in Britain’s second city
type: item
date: 2023-06-07T07:38:21.000Z
creator: Professor Richard Vinen
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: The story of modern Birmingham is dominated by two clans, whose radical views and fierce commitment to public service forged its distinctive identity. Richard Vinen traces the rise, and fall, of the political powerhouse Chamberlains and the chocolate-making Cadburys
encoded: Workshop of the World. Chocolate Capital. Venice of the North. Just plain “Brum”. Birmingham, now Britain’s second-largest city, has attracted a host of nicknames but one distinctive identity, forged in large part by the actions of two families – the Chamberlains and the Cadburys. These dynasties dominated Birmingham’s industry, politics and society across the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet, guided by faith, philanthropy and public service, they wielded enormous influence at a national and global level, too. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/05/2M96K5Y-34a5021.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="John Cadbury (second right), his wife, Candia (fourth left) and their children. Their commitment to workers’ wellbeing set them apart from other industrialists (Photo by Chronicle / Alamy)" title="John Cadbury (second right), his wife, Candia (fourth left) and their children. Their commitment to workers’ wellbeing set them apart from other industrialists (Photo by Chronicle / Alamy)" /> During the later Middle Ages and Tudor era, Birmingham had grown from a modest market town into a prosperous urban centre known for wool, leather and metalworking. At the start of the 18th century, it was home to around 15,000 people. Over the following decades, Birmingham played a leading role in the industrial revolution, with a corresponding boom in its population, which topped 73,000 by the end of the century. Among those thousands drawn in to this burgeoning Midlands powerhouse were the Chamberlains, who would go on to spawn a British prime minster, and the Cadburys, whose surname became known as a global brand. On the podcast | The Industrial Revolution: everything you wanted to know The impact of these families is revealed vividly in the words of one young woman writing in the 1880s. Twenty-four-year-old Beatrice Potter (later known as an influential sociologist under her married name of Webb) had fallen in love. She had been bowled over by th…

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Burke and Hare: Lisa Rosner on the pair's crime spree
type: item
date: 2023-04-18T12:59:32.000Z
creator: Professor Lisa Rosner
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: For around a year from 1827-28, William Burke and William Hare embarked on a murder spree in order to sell the corpses to an anatomical school. We speak to Professor Lisa Rosner, historical consultant about a new radio series about the notorious pair
encoded: Burke and Hare murdered at least 16 people in 1828. What drove them to commit these crimes? They absolutely did it for the money. Hare’s wife ran a boarding house, in which a man called Donald died of natural causes. What they ought to have done was tell the authorities and give him a Christian burial, but instead they decided to try to sell the body to the “surgeons” at Edinburgh’s university, who were in desperate need of cadavers for medical students to dissect. It worked – and they realised that they could be paid hard cash for bodies. Read more | Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain How did they select their victims? They started by sticking very close to home. One of their first victims, Joseph, was sick – and they helped him along. Sir Walter Scott, who was interested in the case, saw this as a key stage in the progress of their crimes: moving from somebody who was already dead to someone who seemed to be dying, before going full throttle and killing healthy people. The main thing that Burke, in particular, looked for was someone they could befriend and charm, and who would drink. They didn’t want to leave any obvious signs of murder, so they smothered people – which is a very difficult way to kill somebody, especially if the victim is sober and fights back. Your book The Anatomy Murders (2009) focuses largely on those Burke and Hare murdered. How much was there in the records about the victims? Among those studying the history of medicine, there’s now more of an interest in social history, and more of an understanding of where people are likely to turn up in the records. For example, one of the women killed, Mary Paterson, was said to be a very pretty sex worker. I was able to find her details, and learned that she wasn’t a sex worker at all. Rather, Mary was a vulnerable young girl who had been staying in the Magdalene Asylum – a place of refuge – until shortly before her murder. Read more | From bone setting in ancient Egypt to organ transplants: a br…

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Out of the cold: the slow beginnings of climate change science
type: item
date: 2022-11-08T20:37:53.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Climate
description: The climate crisis is among the greatest challenges facing humankind today, but, as Dr Alice Bell reveals, the warning signs in the science have been there since the 19th century...
encoded: It was an American women’s right activist and scientist named Eunice Newton Foote who first put two and two together and realised that an atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide could get really hot indeed. This was 1856. She had been experimenting at home with cylinders filled with different types of air – one moist, one dry, one low pressure, and one filled with carbon dioxide - to see how they reacted to being left in the sunshine. At first, she wasn’t especially surprised by her results, since they confirmed her own experiences of damp, dry or low-pressure environments. But she was struck by how hot the cylinder of carbon dioxide became, and how long it held on to that heat. Remembering theories about the Earth’s temperature sketched out by French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier a few decades before – that the Earth is surrounded by an insulating blanket of gases, what we now understand as the ‘greenhouse effect’ – Foote concluded, almost in passing: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature.” Later that year, her findings were presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and were published in the American Journal of Science and Arts. The work was also cited in a write up of the AAAS meeting by Scientific American, albeit under the dismissive heading ‘Scientific Ladies’, and Foote garnered mentions in the New-York Daily Tribune as well as Canadian, Scottish and German journals. It sparkled for a time, but her work was quickly forgotten. Lost visionary In fact, Foote was so thoroughly forgotten that when Irish physicist John Tyndall made similar points in 1859 based on his own experiments at the Royal Institution, London, he didn’t cite her. As Tyndall’s biographer Roland Jackson points out, it’s perhaps more striking that no one else seems to have thought to send Tyndall a copy of Foote’s work in response. Jackson has pored through Tyndall’s correspondence to find any reference to …

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Why do we say ‘get the sack’?
type: item
date: 2022-10-14T11:00:59.000Z
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Family and parenting
description: Nobody wants to be told that they’ve been sacked, and have to come to terms with the fact they no longer have a job. But, want it or not, the phrase has plagued people for centuries. Where did the phrase come from?
encoded: Before the Industrial Revolution – when men, women and even children flocked to the factories to make a living – it was far more common for workers to travel from job to job. Rather than joining a team, tradesmen, craftsmen and labourers would move around on their own, carrying their own tools and supplies, and find work where they could get it. Read more | How war sparked the industrial revolution The easiest way to lug their tools around was in a sack, which they would then leave with their employer for safe keeping. The origin of the phrase, therefore, starts to become clear. With no job security, contracts or trade unions, workers could be discharged at a moment’s notice. Once their services were no longer required, they were literally given their sack, before being ordered to pack it up and leave. This article was taken from BBC History Revealed

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The Pentrich Rising: England's forgotten armed revolution
type: item
date: 2022-01-28T09:22:41.000Z
creator: Stephen Bates
subject: Georgian
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: In 1817, a working-class uprising was brutally quashed amid accusations that government spies had deliberately incited the rebels. Stephen Bates relates the tragedy of the Pentrich Rising...
encoded: On 9 June 1817, a mob of men marched nervously through darkness and driving rain down the country lanes of Derbyshire. They were on their way – or so they thought – to capture Nottingham, 14 miles away, as part of a national revolt to overthrow the government. They did not know it at the time but the Pentrich revolutionaries, as they came to be called, were taking part in the last armed insurrection in English history – and, according to the late historian EP Thompson, the first entirely working-class political uprising. Armed with pikes and a few muskets, and led by an unemployed stocking weaver called Jeremiah Brandreth – known to them for his Luddite activities as ‘the Nottingham Captain’ – they expected to be joined by thousands of others marching down “like a cloud” from Yorkshire and Lancashire. Read more | Your guide to the Luddite movement They were assured that a further 50,000 men in London could be quickly summoned to seize the government and capture the Bank of England. In reality, they were on their own. Most of the men were unclear as to what the political aim was, beyond cancelling the national debt and shooting ministers. Perhaps a provisional government would be set up, one that would hand out provisions to the starving populace – but, more immediately, the men had been promised money, food, rum and boat rides on the river Trent. As they marched wearily on, Brandreth led the singing: “The time is come, you plainly see/The government opposed must be.” The men on the march were weavers, farm labourers and iron workers. Most were related to each other, and many – including Brandreth – were Primitive Methodists. They blamed the autocratic government and aristocratic ministers for their distress. Many were out of work and without food, the result of the contraction of the economy after the Napoleonic Wars. But they were also victims of a natural phenomenon of which they had no idea. An ash cloud from the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora, on the In…

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