Michaela Seaton Romero
Poverty played a major part in Industrial Revolution in British life, as many of the people were poor. Poverty affected many different aspects of their lives, social, medical, and intellectually. Being such a hard time to live in, there were people who were inspired by the poverty as it affected their lives.
In Victorian England, 80% of the people were considered working class, at least 25% living below the poverty line. To become middle class, you had to have at least one servant. Very few were upper class, and they were also the most literate. Most everyone was affected by poverty in some way or another. Factories were the bane of the poor folk.
By the 1800s, factories were the main employer of the poor. Factory life was appalling. Often, children worked in such places, and they suffered for it. Children’s growth was stunted by being forced to stand in one place for hours on end, deprived of sunlight and exercise. In 1833, P. Gaskell wrote The Manufacturing Population of England. He described the horrible conditions the workers suffered from as a result of their jobs, like bowed legs, flat feet, curved spines, muscle loss, and other such deformities.
In the 1800s about 53% of the population was literate, a drastic increase from the 1500s when only 6% was literate. In a large part, the Gutenberg press helped this happen. By being able to produce literature much more quickly than before, more people learned to read. Even still, the poor people had the lowest reading percentage.
Most of the literate people were in the middle or upper class, as the poor people did not have time to go to school, instead working between 48- and 70-hour weeks. If a person was poor, but literate, he was very unusual. Usually, the literate person was a male and had been to only some school, going in and out as life allowed. They probably could not write much, perhaps just their name. There just wasn’t incentive to learn to read; there was incentive to work and stay out of debtor’s prison.
Until 1870, Britain did not take care of the people’s education; that was the job of the churches and families themselves. Parents had to pay fees for their children to go to school, and often poor families simply couldn’t pay it. To the middle or upper class, the fees were minimal, but oftentimes the poorest family couldn’t even put food on the table, so paying for schooling was out of the question, as was buying literature.
Even though literacy was low among the poor, literature still affected their lives through music. Music and songs were often sung by poor people at any event; even if only a street organ was being played, a whole flock of people might be seen dancing about him. Poor people had very little free time, working from dawn to dusk, but plays were a popular pastime. It was cheap, and for a little bit you could squeeze into a gallery seat to see a play. Seating in the gallery was loud, bad smelling, and crowded, but it still exposed people to literature of the period.
Not only did literature affect poor people, poverty affected literature. One major author who shows this is Charles Dickens. He himself worked in a boot blacking factory, and his father had been thrown into debtor’s prison. He also saw others being horribly treated in workhouses. Those horrors still haunted him, and his books showed this, such as in Oliver Twist. Oliver Twist was born into a workhouse, unwanted and unloved.
Literature in the written form was not very common among the poor. The middle and upper classes were the most literate. Even still, literature was in people’s lives, through songs and the theatre. It cannot be said literature never impacted the poor people, nor can it be said poverty never affected literature. Poverty and literature both fed off each other.
Bibliography
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Redeeming Pandora 