Calling it The Age of Change doesn't half make it sound important but I suppose there's no underestimating the influence of this period on this country's history. It was the transformation of Britain from an agricultural society to an industrial one and it's this transformation that forms much of the focus in William Cobbett's book, Rural Rides.
The 19th century wasn't just about industrial change though. It was also a move from the enlightenment of the 17th/18th century (a clockwork and mechanistic paradigm), to the paradigm of change and organism, so for example Darwin and evolution. Subjects like geology, (melting rocks would have been unimaginable to Newton); Biology, Organic Chemistry where chemical change is very much different to mechanical change. The people of the time were also exposed to Eastern civilization and in particular non-Ibrahimic religions which gave new concepts of the earth and the universe (especially Hinduism). You can observe the impact of Hinduism and Buddhism as an ultimately profound thing on the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - it was a pathway to modernism. As I said before though it did cause industrial change, it moved science to mass production in the factory system. First it caused the destruction of the peasantry in Great Britain as in the Highland Clearances, this brings you to the the impoverished of Ireland and rural England whom Cobbett wrote so much about (Jonathan Swift also, thinking back to earlier blogs); finally we have the migration to the cities and migration to the colonies which another great writer of the time, Charles Dickens, wrote about in great detail. Dickens wrote about these subjects and as such, laws like the new poor law of 1844 and the rise of the workhouses affected him greatly in his writings and novels i.e. Oliver Twist. He also wrote about subjects like illegitimacy and inheritance of the upper classes in novels like Bleak House.
The conditions of the English working class were pretty abysmal at this point but people of the time, as now, looked at the issues through very different eyes. Thomas Malthus, the British scholar and theorist of political economy looked at it with, unsurprisingly, an economist's eyes and his An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine and disease. Using our knowledge of Hegel from previous blogs he saw it as teleological historicism; what's that you say? Well essentially it means the idea that history unfolds inexorably (I'm really going for these big words today) according to universal laws. Anyway, this led on to him seeing the battle of nations as a force in history and in this case, possibly what was happening to the British working class is much closer to the battle of the classes that Marx enjoys banging on about so much. You can in turn contrast the static mechanism of the empiricists with the dynamism of Hegel creating a pathway to relativity. Using the metaphor of evolution in liberal society policy, you see population growth, Victorian social reform, liberal democracy and imperialism, socialism and social reform, and origins of the modern industrial estate (especially in Germany where Max Weber and his sociology is so influential).
Charles Darwin (no introduction needed I think) followed the tradition of empiricism and scientific method as evident in his theory of evolution as he collected species and observed what would become one of the biggest discoveries of the age. He saw the effect of evolution by natural selection and the descent of man from common ancestors, survival of the fittest and all that, but that's also a key concept of cumulative causation e.g. in economics which you can contrast to Adam Smith and his hidden hand of the market.
There were also impacts in this century on religion, the biblical criticism movement in particular in Germany from the 1830s onwards (Fuerbach et al)
Wow this blog has been pretty disjointed, I put that partly down to the fact it was written in short and confusing bursts over four weeks but excuses are just that. Hope you enjoy deciphering what points I was trying to get across and that you've had a very Happy Easter.
Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.
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