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 leave people without gainful employment. It would leave them with nothing to do. And it was to be feared.”

This fear was not unfounded. The Luddites – skilled textile workers who destroyed machinery in protest – are shorthand for anti-technology sentiment. (You can find out more about them on our podcast here.) But Griffin urges us to look beyond the myth and examine the broader picture. While some people did lose out, the overall impact of industrialisation was not mass unemployment, but rather a reorganisation of labour.

“In the industrial revolution, some people did lose their employment, but there was always other employment that emerged in its place,” she says. “At the same time as having all of these labour-saving devices that make things like spinning so much quicker and so much easier, you also have a greatly increased demand for cotton goods and for woven goods.”

In other words, machines changed the nature of work, and moved tasks from one area to another, but they didn’t eliminate it.

False advertising

The term ‘labour-saving device’ may be misleading. Just because a machine can do something faster or more efficiently doesn’t mean it reduces the total amount of work in our lives.

“Labour-saving devices are part of technology. They’re part of progress. They are here to stay. They’re not going to go anywhere,” Griffin says. “But if we take a long view and look back from the 21st century, what they don’t seem to have done is turned us all into idle people who are all unemployed and who all have nothing to do.”

That point is well illustrated by a piece in the New Scientist magazine from 1989. Its author, Sue Birchmore, penned a splendidly vituperative article about the impact of technology on her life. She bemoaned the stock of ill-used kitchen appliances that she had amassed, and threw some heavy shade on her vacuum cleaner too. But she also made this point:

“Labour-saving devices don’t seem to have actually reduced the burden of housework; in fact, if all these findings of modern research are to be believed, the time western women spend on housework has gone up over the years, not down. It’s partly that standards have got tougher; a house that was tolerable in 1918 rates as a tip in 1989.”

Birchmore was on the money there. Technology raises the bar, and I don’t just mean about cleaning floors. This is bigger than vacuum cleaners – it’s about the way we live and interact with technology at home, at work and in life generally. It might save time on the one hand, but it’ll likely make more work on the other. That’s annoying if you’re looking to save time on the household chores, but pretty important if you’re thinking about the future of employment, and humanity generally.

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The AI revolution

The arrival of artificial intelligence – particularly large language models like ChatGPT – has sparked similar fears to those during the industrial revolution. Will these tools make our jobs obsolete? Will they devalue human creativity and skill? These are the questions we all want answers to. Does history provide them? No, but it gives some context.

“It was really interesting, I think it was in 2023, when I heard about ChatGPT for the first time. It was suddenly all over the news and I didn’t know what it was,” recalls Griffin. “You’re getting a lot of commentators saying, well, this is really bad news for workers because their jobs are going to be made obsolete.”

But, just as with the spinning jenny, she believes the reality will be more complex. Jobs will change. Some will disappear. But new roles and needs will emerge too.

“I think in some ways it’s just the wrong framing. It tends to mean that we work differently. Some jobs that had been done by human hands or human ingenuity will obviously now be done through computing,” she says. “Most businesses – and this is exactly what you see with the spinning jenny – they’ll be like, great, we can make more, and we can sell more.”

Making more and selling more ought to mean more work for individuals, and that is what happened in the industrial revolution. You might question whether the little people really benefited much from this, or were just thrust into lives of endless drudgery to the benefit of the mill owners. Griffin’s take is that it’s important not to look back to the past with rosy romanticism.

“The idea that before industrialisation, before the factory, before the city, before the machines, people lived quite nice, happy, wholesome lives. They lived out in the countryside; they did a little bit of gardening; they did a little bit of weaving; they lived in stable family units – and life was nice. And then of course, the factory and the machine come along and decimate all of that. I don’t subscribe to that view because you can only sustain that if you take a really romantic view of what life before the industrial revolution was like.”

Searching for a better life

Emma Griffin’s research into working-class autobiographies from the 19th century (which she discusses in this HistoryExtra interview) reveals a perhaps surprising pattern: many people embraced the move from rural to urban life. They found greater freedom, more varied employment and better wages in the cities.

“Many of the working-class autobiographers I’ve looked at make that journey. They’re born into rural poverty. They grow up and move to the city. And in the city they find all sorts of really appealing things,” she explains. “There’s a vast array of different jobs that people can do in an urban setting. If you live in the village, there is only one job. So, whether you like growing turnips or not, everybody has to join in the work of growing a turnip.”

As technology reshapes the job market, the ability to pivot, to retrain and to find new roles will be more important than ever.

“There will be certain areas and certain things people do that we just won’t be able to continue doing in exactly the same way,” Griffin says. “But I suspect what we’ll find is there’ll be a huge shifting around and reorganisation of the way we do things. And new opportunities will emerge from that.”

That said, she is clear-eyed about the risks. Not everyone will be able to adapt easily. Some skill sets may become obsolete without clear pathways to new employment. The transition will be bumpy for some.

“There will be some tasks, some skill sets from which people will find it difficult to pivot to something else,” she notes. “Those opportunities that open up elsewhere may or may not be ones that they can grasp.”

I think it’s important to look at the whole picture here. Technological changes are not just about jobs and work productivity, or about labour-saving devices at home. They cause shifts in the fabric of society itself. The model of the breadwinner was born out of the move to factory production in the industrial revolution, and that radically changed the dynamics of family life, and the opportunities for men and women, and children, at the time.

In an article that Griffin wrote for HistoryExtra a little while ago (available here), she outlined what that meant for people:

“The outcomes of the industrial revolution were, clearly, mixed. Healthy adult men stood to gain the most, enjoying more work, higher wages and opportunities for cultural and political expression. Women were almost wholly bypassed by these developments and, though children were affected by the great demand for labour, for them the results were far from beneficial”.

The changing world of work

There were winners and losers in the industrial revolution. There are going to be winners and losers in the AI revolution. How do you make sure you’re winning more than you’re losing?

Frankly, I’m not sure. But the lesson from history is that flexibility and an open-minded approach are key. Embrace the benefits of new technology, but just be quizzical about the big promises that are made for it.

“I think the big takeaway for me is that, since industrialisation, we’ve lived in a very rapidly changing world, a very fast-moving world,” observes Griffin. “For millennia, people lived pretty much the same kind of life as the life that their parents had lived and their grandparents had lived. Everything was fundamentally fairly similar. And that’s just not the case for us today.”

That pace of change can be disorienting, unmooring and anxiety-inducing. But it’s the world we live in – and it’s not going away. Whether we are well adapted to this flood of novelty is going to become clear over the coming years I suppose. Looking back to the industrial revolution, we can perhaps take solace that people did cope. If you look at their autobiographies, as Griffin has done, you might take a broadly positive view of how it went for people then. She sums it up in that HistoryExtra piece I mentioned earlier:

“This much is clear: we would do well to discard the darker interpretations of this era. The industrial revolution ushered in revolutionary social change, and working people certainly shared in the benefits.”

So is there a bright and cheery message from the past? I’m not sure – artificial intelligence feels like an altogether different prospect to the spinning jenny to me. But maybe I’d have felt similarly anxious about the latter if I’d been alive in the 18th century. And those people who lived through the age of the jenny and the power loom coped and adapted. Undeniably, there was massive social change, and we’re still working through the consequences of that now. But at the time, some people prospered, and found great benefits in the new world. Like them, we should expect, and we’re going to have to accept, ever more change. Griffin’s view – informed by her knowledge of how people fared in the past – is that it’s better to work with change than fight it, and I share that sentiment.

I’ve used AI to help me write this article – I asked it to select some killer quotes from an automatically generated transcript of my interview with Professor Griffin. I asked for quotes that illustrated specific points I wanted to make, and obviously I checked them to make sure they were good and accurate. That’s saved me half an hour of the task, which I’m going to use to go for a run with my dog, to bolster my health and mental wellbeing, and to keep just a few of those labrador hairs on the trails outside, rather than inside that pesky vacuum cleaner. That’s my way of making the machines work for me.

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 been sceptical about using them to study working-class life. After all, this was a period of relatively high illiteracy, so (it has been argued) there was something exceptional about the working man or woman with the ability to record their personal history.

Yet this line of argument assumes that literacy was more unusual among the working class than was really the case. In the 19th century a range of very cheap avenues for developing literacy – dame schools, Sunday schools, night schools and mutual improvement societies – were available to both children and adults, so writing a memoir was within the grasp of even the very poor.

Among autobiographers of the time were men such as John Hemmingway, who was put to work in a Manchester cotton mill at the age of eight and raised in poverty by his mother following the desertion of the family by his father. As an adult he turned his hand to various occupations – weaving, shop-keeping, driving a horse and cart, joining the army – but never rose above the station to which he had been born. In old age he and his wife were forced to sell their furniture and wedding rings, move into a miserable cellar dwelling and live off a small dole from the parish. So, though some of the autobiographers were exceptional in one way or another, that was far from true of all.

Of course, the use of these accounts is not without its problems. One major frailty is the paucity of autobiographies written by women. Also, these writers were haunted by failures of memory, inevitably producing subjective accounts of their lives.

But nearly 400 autobiographies written during the period of industrialisation provide a rich and hitherto untapped seam of evidence that we cannot afford to ignore.

Furthermore, in contrast to the other sources consulted by historians interested in the lives of ordinary workers – the poor law, the census, the criminal courts – these records were freely created by the men and women we wish to study. In this sense they are unique, and an excellent resource for the study of working-class experiences of the British industrial revolution.

What, then, do these personal histories tell us about how the advent of industrialisation changed workers’ lives? More than anything, the autobiographers indicate that industrialisation, and the urban growth that accompanied it, increased the amount of work available.

These sources make it possible to compare descriptions of earning a living written by people in pre-industrial areas with those set in rural and industrial districts. They reveal that, in the absence of industry, most workers were not fully employed – and, as a result, lived in a state of chronic poverty.

The low wages and patchy employment of agricultural workers meant that even skilled artisans in pre-industrial Britain – shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters and so forth – were rarely able to make a good living from their trade, because few of their neighbours had the means to pay for their services. As a result, many skilled workers turned to agriculture to try to make ends meet – and the resulting growth in the number of people trying to eke out a livelihood from the land helped ensure that living standards remained low. This situation, more than anything else, changed with the emergence of industrialisation. The industrial revolution increased the amount of work available – for the skilled and the unskilled, for the young and the old. As manufacturing expanded, young men and women poured into cities from the countryside to work in the new factories.

Full employment

But working on the factory floor was just the beginning. Coal was required to run the machines, providing an important stimulus for the mining industry. Factories needed their workers, but they also had to be built, their machines maintained, their warehouses organised – and it all amounted to a steady stream of employment for the men who flocked to the cities.

One autobiographer noted that goods needed to be weighed as well as made, and found a job doing precisely that. Others made a living transporting raw material and finished goods – driving horses and carts, building railways, driving trains. Providing for the needs of a large population also created a mountain of work: the growing urban populace needed houses, furniture, bread, shoes and clothes. This demand for the staples of life provided plenty of business for skilled workers – and what’s more, unlike the rural poor, the urban workforce had the money with which to pay them. The factories’ labour needs meant that many workers were now fully employed throughout the year, which helped to drag families out of the grinding poverty that agricultural workers endured.

Full employment was the single most important way of increasing a family’s prosperity, but it was also significant because it changed the balance of power in the working relationship. As long as workers outnumbered jobs, employers held the upper hand. In the industrial heartlands, though, the demand for workers was insatiable, placing them in a far stronger position to bargain over such matters as working hours and wages.

Included among the autobiographers are men who gave their notice over disputes concerning the length of tea-breaks or the church they attended. One worker gave as a reason for resigning simply that he “got sick of the job”! Such actions were inconceivable in the rural context and help to remind us that full employment not only improved men’s incomes but also enhanced their working conditions and status.

• Read more | Your guide to the Luddite Movement

Yet, though adult men generally stood to gain from industrialisation, we should not assume that these advantages were enjoyed by others in their families. The demand for labour, particularly in the factories and mines, meant that there was ever more work for children too, with the unfortunate result that those in industrial districts were being hustled into the workforce at ever younger ages.

Accounts reveal that children living in rural areas and market towns did not usually enter the workplace until the age of 11 and a half. The contrast with the industrial districts is stark: on average, children in those areas started work aged eight and a half – three years younger than their peers living in areas without industrial employment.

Furthermore, in contrast to young workers in rural areas, who often started part-time and whose hours were limited by the seasons and daylight hours, children in factories and mines entered a world of full employment, working very long days, day in and day out, year after year.

In some respects, then, the evidence suggests that the situation for children mirrored that for adult men: industrial growth significantly improved their prospects of finding full-time employment. But whereas that enhanced living standards for men, it had the opposite effect on children. Working 13-hour days from the age of six or seven took a very serious toll on a child’s health, development and wellbeing, making their overall welfare gains highly questionable.

Mother’s ruin

The outcome of industrial growth for women was different again. Though it increased the likelihood of men and children finding full-time employment, usually at better wages than the agricultural alternatives on offer, it made relatively little difference to women’s experiences in the workplace.

It is true that women living in the industrial heartlands benefited from the growth of factories. But, once they were married with a family, few were able to maintain a position in a factory, and most retreated from the workplace altogether. Betty Leeming, a mill hand in the Lancashire town of Preston, was typical in this respect. Following her marriage to Benjamin Shaw she handed in her notice at the factory. Though she did make a few attempts to earn money from home following her marriage – she took in bobbin-winding and baked oatcakes to sell to her neighbours – she never returned to the factory.

Autobiographies also reveal that family responsibilities were the primary reason for women giving up paid jobs. Indeed, unmarried women and those with no children almost always worked outside the home.

In families with just one or two children, between 70 and 80 per cent of mothers worked. As a woman’s family grew, however, the chances of her being in work rapidly diminished. Of mothers with three or four children, the participation rate hovered around 50 per cent, a figure that steadily declined as families increased in size. Almost no women with eight or nine children did any paid work. In the absence of reliable childcare or effective means to limit family size, mothers had little choice but to stay at home and care for their families – a situation the industrial revolution did little to change.

The most obvious consequence of increased work opportunities was higher family incomes; for those living close to the breadline this was a very welcome development. But the changes were not simply material. A widely recognised feature of industrialisation is the growth of great towns. Historians have often drawn attention to the fact that these could be dark, crowded and unhealthy – but cities were also places of freedom.

In a city one could attend a night school or worship at whichever church one chose. It was possible to join a union or even a political association, and start to shape the society in which one lived. Men who threw themselves into city life did not view themselves as victims. William Aitken described his fellow Manchester Chartists as the “sons of freedom”. His view, shared by many other autobiographers, was that city life was liberating, not oppressive.

The outcomes of the industrial revolution were, clearly, mixed. Healthy adult men stood to gain the most, enjoying more work, higher wages and opportunities for cultural and political expression. Women were almost wholly bypassed by these developments and, though children were affected by the great demand for labour, for them the results were far from beneficial.

Nonetheless, this much is clear: we would do well to discard the darker interpretations of this era. The industrial revolution ushered in revolutionary social change, and working people certainly shared in the benefits.

Emma Griffin is senior lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia. She has written widely on the history of working-class life in Britain

This article first appeared in the March 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine

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 long hours and physical demands of factory labour, the domestic roles traditionally viewed as women’s work continued – unpaid. Tasks such as cooking, cleaning and childcare still needed to be carried out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few employers were understanding. Bentley described a practice known as ‘quartering’: “If we were a quarter of an hour too late, they would take off half an hour; we only got a penny an hour, and they would take a halfpenny more.”

Another common role was in the mines of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where women laboured underground alongside men in physically demanding roles until the mid-19th century.

Isabel Wilson, a 38-year-old coal putter (someone who pushed tubs of coal from the coal face to the pit eye) was interviewed as part of Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842. She told how the dual roles of having children and producing for a family came with immense hardship. “When women have children thick [fast] they are compelled to take them down early. I have been married 19 years and have had 10 bairns; seven are in life,” she said.

One job carrying coals “caused me to miscarry five times from the strains, and was gai ill after each. Putting is no so oppressive; last child was born on Saturday morning, and I was at work on the Friday night.”

But jarringly, it was not such testimony in Lord Ashley’s report that caused the most public outcry. Pushing carts underground was hot work, and both young men and women would strip to the trousers in efforts to keep cool. One small detail in the report noted
that some women were working topless alongside men. Outrage in the press fuelled a belief that mining girls were being corrupted by their surroundings, and making bad wives and mothers. It was of no matter that the investigators found just one pit where females worked without tops (the Hopwood pit at Barnsley, which was labelled “a nursery for juvenile vice”). It wasn’t long before the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 had banned women from underground work to protect their health and morals.

• How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?

But ultimately, as legislation forced more women away from the workplace for better or worse, ideas of gender evolved to match this new dynamic; men who went out to work were seen as breadwinners and providers, and by the mid-19th century the female ideal had become that of mother, moral guardian and homemaker.

This article was first published in BBC History Revealed

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.”

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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-century Britain, we see a growth in the institutional provision of healthcare that simply hadn't been seen before. For the first time, working people who could never have afforded healthcare previously could now access it in a new way. We can also see something similar in the workhouse infirmaries of the Old Poor Law at this time.”

• Read more | John Hunter and the horrors of 18th-century surgery

It is this preventative rather than reactive approach to healthcare that remains a legacy of 18th-century medicine, Professor Fissell continues. “I see this as part of an enlightened turn towards the belief that things could be made better. It was a realisation that it was possible to prevent people from dying of disease and illness, and that's really radical.”

One of the deadly diseases that was rife in the early 18th century was smallpox, characterised by its distinctive, progressive skin rash; outbreaks killed millions of people all over the globe. In 1715, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – one of the most celebrated aristocratic women of the time – caught smallpox but survived, although the disease left her scarred. Her brother William had died from the disease in 1713, aged just 20. The following year, Lady Mary and her husband, Britain's new ambassador to the Ottoman empire, moved to Constantinople.

• On the podcast | Gareth Williams explores efforts to combat lethal diseases, from smallpox to polio

There, she discovered the widespread use of variolation (inoculation): individuals were deliberately infected with smallpox (often by blowing dried smallpox scabs into the nose) after which they contracted a mild form of the disease. After recovering, the individual would usually be immune to smallpox – some estimates state that 1–2 per cent of those inoculated died, compared to 30 per cent who died after contracting the disease naturally.

Lady Mary's children were inoculated and once back in England, in 1721, she publicised the benefits, facing resistance and scepticism. Undaunted, she convinced Caroline, then Princess of Wales, of the value of inoculation and it was tested on prisoners, all of whom survived. Physicians began to inoculate their patients, but devised elaborate and costly procedures to make sure the body was prepared, ensuring that only the well-to-do were protected. By the late 18th century, mass inoculations with no preparation were on offer, and ultimately Lady Mary's efforts paved the way for the work of Edward Jenner.

This article was first published in the February 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed

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 century so unusual? As you can imagine, there were several reasons. The industrial revolution obviously led to the worsening of the living conditions of the poor. At the same time it had an impact on the wealthy, too, enriching them to an unprecedented degree. The result was a greater variance in living standards than probably ever before or since. As the American ambassador to Great Britain, John Quincy Adams, put it in his diary while in London in 1816: “The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in this country than in any other I ever saw.” 

Anyone who has even so much as glanced at a gentleman’s country house built before 1830 will be aware that the wealthy were surrounded by uplifting, refined architecture and design, in which comfort was combined with a fabulous sense of style. In the grandest houses of all, such as the Prince Regent’s Carlton House on Pall Mall, the internal fittings were a wealth of silk damask and gold. The decorative features were covered in gold leaf, as was the furniture; the huge glass chandeliers were trimmed with gold; golden clocks and ornaments were exhibited on gold-leaf-covered plinths; the paintings were framed in gold. The prince spent vast sums on the place – by 1795 he was £630,000 in debt – and in 1826, as king (George IV), he could afford to have it demolished. 

Even an ordinary gentleman with an income of about £2,000 per year from his country estate could afford a London house as well as a country seat stuffed with mahogany furniture designed by the likes of Hepplewhite and Sheraton, and decorated with art by Reynolds, Gainsborough and many more great British artists of the time. By the 1820s most gentlemen’s residences had water closets and provisions for washing. Some even had dedicated bathrooms with hot and cold running water. 

In marked contrast, the workmen who physically built the houses of the gentry could consider themselves well paid in the 1820s if they received 15 shillings a week. Factory workers and labourers would receive less than this, and servants less still. Hundreds of thousands of men and women lacked regular employment altogether. Their accommodation was truly appalling, especially in the rapidly growing industrial towns. In the parish of St Giles in London, a surveyor visited a slum terrace and found the yard “covered with night soil from the overflowing of the privy, to the depth of nearly six inches, and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dry shod”. 

Inspectors frequently reported similar conditions in the northern towns. In parts of Liverpool, people were crammed into court houses at a density of more than 1,000 people per acre. Liquid from cesspits and the foetid rubbish strewn across the ground outside oozed through the cellar walls where many were forced to sleep. The communal cesspits in the courts had no doors as the landlords claimed they would have been used for firewood. 

Those without homes had to cram together in boarding houses, often on the floors, or find a place in a communal barn at 2 pence per night, where every imaginable disease spread quickly among the unwashed bodies, including such killers as smallpox, tuberculosis and, from the 1830s, cholera.

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Life-threatening labour

While the poorest Britons lived in squalor, the upper classes managed their estates and indulged themselves in their enthusiasms. Most didn’t work. Younger sons and those who opted for employment chose a well-paid and dignified patriotic service, such as a commission in the army or navy, an ambassadorial role, parliament or the church. The middle classes similarly selected how they wanted to make a living. 

The working classes, who made up more than 70 per cent of the population, had no such choice. Those who were lucky enough to work as agricultural labourers could expect to live for 36 years – approximately twice as long as their cousins in the industrial towns. But agricultural opportunities were on the decline as more machines were employed, more arable land was given over to sheep farming, and more food was imported. For the remainder, the options were to go into service or to work in a factory or mill. 

Robert Blincoe’s career is illuminating in this respect. He was born in London in 1792, orphaned at the age of four, and placed in a workhouse. From there he was sold at the age of seven to the owner of a mill near Nottingham. For the next 14 years he was required to work without pay for 14 hours a day, six days a week, on the spinning frames, in dusty conditions. His clothing was minimal; he was not given soap to wash nor was he fed properly. He started stealing doughballs from the mill’s pigsties but the pigs soon became wise to his pilfering and threw them in the mud when they saw him coming. He suffered from constant diarrhoea, was regularly beaten, and like all his young colleagues, he lost parts of limbs in the unguarded machines. One day he watched in horror as a girl his age was dragged into a spinning machine by her skirts. He heard her bones all snapped by the whirling mechanism and then her blood “thrown around like water twirled from a mop”. Later, he tried to run away from the mill but was quickly caught and returned, with a reward being paid to the man who found him. 

Those who had such a start in life, with no education and nothing else to offer, were generally doomed to a short existence of hard labour. Blincoe left the mill as soon as he was old enough but many stayed there for their whole lives, and died either from the dust or their injuries.

Huge numbers of men, women, boys and girls worked as labourers in the mines. In 1813 in Cumberland, 630ft underground, the author Richard Ayton raised his lantern to see lines of wagons driven by young girls in the pitch-black tunnels. He described all the people down there as being “distinguished by an extraordinary wretchedness. Immoderate labour and a noxious atmosphere had marked their countenances with the signs of disease and decay; they were mostly half-naked, blackened all over with dirt, and altogether so miserably disfigured and abused that they looked like a race fallen from the common rank of men and doomed, as in a kind of purgatory, to wear away their lives in these dismal shades.”

Whatever the industrial process, it was likely to contribute to the workers’ ill health and premature deaths. Painters and glaze dippers developed lead poisoning. Tailors developed chronic heart and stomach problems. Chimney-cleaning boys developed scrotal cancer. Arguably the worst working conditions of all were those to be found in the grinding industries, especially in Sheffield. The work was carried out in poorly ventilated cellars and generated a lot of dust. Most fork-grinders in Sheffield were dead by the age of 28. Ninety per cent did not make it to 40. 

For the rich, the Regency period was one of haute cuisine and epicurean variety. As the poet Robert Southey wrote in 1807: “All parts of the world are ransacked for an Englishman’s table. Turtle are brought alive from the West Indies… India supplies sauces and curry powder… hams [are imported] from Portugal and Westphalia; reindeers’ tongues from Lapland; caviar from Russia; sausages from Bologna; macaroni from Naples; oil from Florence; olives from France, Italy or Spain; cheese from Parma and Switzerland.” 

Over-indulgence was common. Several ‘ordinaries’ or standard menus in the finest London hotels at this time cost 3 guineas (£3 3s) per head, with an extra guinea for a bottle of fine wine. The earliest restaurants in London were established at this time; there was even an Indian curry house in the 1810s catering to returning nabobs.

• Escaping the workhouse: the Victorian war on child poverty

Tea-stained water

The poorest sectors of society found themselves eating as their medieval ancestors had done, with very little protein in their diet. Many examples were quoted by the Revd David Davies in his examination of the living standards of agricultural labourers in the 1790s. A typical case was that of a Berkshire couple and their five children, who bought 7½ gallons of flour each week for their daily bread, plus 1lb of bacon. They also purchased a little tea, salt, sugar and butter. And that was it. No fish, no cheese and no vegetables other than what they grew for themselves. No beer, even. Of their total income of 8s 6d per week, 8s 3d went on food. Most meals were simply bread and butter. So when the price of flour in Berkshire trebled, as it did in 1800, their lives became wretched. 

As for tea, people talked about it being a great leveller, but there was a world of difference between the fine teas drunk by the wealthy and the water stained with a few re-used tea leaves consumed by the poor. 

An agricultural labourer’s family could at least use the garden that probably went with their cottage. It was precisely for this reason that the growing of potatoes spread across the whole of the British Isles over the course of the 18th century. In short, gardens saved lives. Those living in the over-populated urban slums had no such opportunities to grow their own. For them, it was not so much a matter of having a balanced diet as obtaining anything to eat. 

Among the lower classes, the difficulties faced by mothers and newborn babies were particularly challenging. For a start, the mothers were malnourished. The children of those transported to Australia grew about 2 inches taller than their parents, due to food shortages having stunted their parents’ growth in England. 

When it came to the birth, well-heeled families could afford their own accoucheurs, midwives and doctors, equipped with forceps and good medical knowledge. Some private doctors saw maternal mortality rates of just 0.2 per cent over the course of their careers. 

The poor had only limited access to professional medical help and hence their women and babies died more frequently in childbirth. If both survived, the malnourishment of the mother was then passed on to the child. Hence one of the key reasons why life expectancy was so low: many more working-class babies did not live. In Liverpool, 53 per cent of babies died before they were five; in Preston, 57 per cent did. These figures are almost exactly the same as those of slaves in the West Indies. 

These infant deaths must have sapped many mothers’ will to live. But the position was so dire that some deaths were welcomed, on account of there being fewer mouths to feed. In the 18th century, the philanthropist Jonas Hanway estimated that an infant under the age of four had a life expectancy of just one month after entering a London workhouse. As he put it: “Parish officers never intend that parish infants should live”. 

Even more shocking was the desperate strategy of families living off the deaths of their own children. Hard-pressed couples would enrol a baby in one or more burial clubs and then, when the child fell sick, they would let him or her die so they could claim on the insurance. This is why rent collectors were sometimes asked to wait a few days until a child had died. 

On one occasion, a wealthy Lancashire gentlewoman heard that her wet nurse’s child was ill, so she kindly offered to send her own physician to help. But the mother replied: “Oh, never mind, Ma’am, it’s in two burial clubs.” A government inspector reported that “It is not an unfrequent circumstance to find a child enrolled in three or more burial clubs, so that the parents may receive at its death from £16 to £20. That, in certain instances, this has been productive of infanticide is proved beyond all doubt by the well-known trials for infanticide at Bolton and Stockport.” And, he adds, “an analysis of returns from Preston, where, in three societies alone there are upwards of 23,000 members, has distinctly shown that there is a greater rate of mortality among children entered in burial clubs than in those not belonging to them”. 

Shockingly, babies under the age of six months whose parents entered them in a burial club were 35 per cent more likely to die than those who were not in such a club. 

Turning to prostitution

Extreme poverty was, almost inevitably, accompanied by high levels of crime. If a couple with a family were denied poor relief and did not wish to go into a workhouse,
they had no choice but to resort to more desperate measures. Huge numbers of women turned to prostitution: it was estimated at the time that one in five women in London lived off immoral earnings. 

Large numbers of men and women took to crime. More than 90 per cent of all cases in the county courts in the early 19th century were for theft. (For comparison, in the modern world, less than a quarter of arrests involve stolen property.) Until 1823, the Bloody Code was still in force, meaning that the penalty was death for more than 200 crimes, including stealing goods worth more than 12d. If the principal breadwinner was hanged or transported to Australia, then a family was left in a worse position than before. 

Another strategy was to obtain food on credit. However, most shopkeepers only advanced credit facilities to those they believed could pay. Moreover, if a poor family failed to pay, then the father could be sent to prison at the shopkeeper’s request for non-payment of his bills. This meant extra costs (gaolers’ fees) and prevented him from earning while inside. Some people spent decades in prison for failing to repay a few pounds; many died behind bars. Again, the family was even worse off as a result. 

Given these circumstances, it is easy to see why there was so much discontent, especially in the industrial north of England. Fashionable ladies in London could spend £4 on a single tall feather to wear in their hair at a ball – a sum that would have fed a labourer’s family for 10 weeks. 

• Was Victorian life really so grim? 5 reasons why the Victorians were 'happy'

From rags to riches 

It really was both the best and the worst of times (to paraphrase Dickens), depending on how much money you had. Yet this age offered men and women more opportunities than perhaps ever before to start life at one end of the social spectrum and end it at the other. James Morrison was the orphaned son of an innkeeper. He gained a job in a London haberdashery business, married the daughter of the senior partner, and made himself rich through overseas investments: by the time he died in 1857 he was worth more than £6m. 

Harriot Mellon was the illegitimaate daughter of a poor Irish woman who looked after the wardrobe of a troupe of travelling actors. She learned from them how to act and came to London to star on the stage. There she caught the eye of the banker Thomas Coutts, who eventually married her. When he died, he left her his 50 per cent share in his bank, which she then controlled, enhancing its value and becoming the richest woman in England. Then she married the much younger Duke of St Albans and ended up both a multi-millionaire and a duchess. 

But for every James Morrison and Harriot Mellon, there were millions who failed to bridge the chasm between rich and poor in early 19th-century Britain, and who were condemned to live and die in the poverty in which they were born. So what changed? The answer is that such poor living conditions gradually gave rise to public outrage – at both ends of the social spectrum. Workers’ protests made the grievances increasingly clear; the religiously inspired social consciences of upper and middle-class social reformers did the rest. 

Following the Great Reform Act in 1832 (which extended the franchise) and the abolition of slavery the following year, there was a greater political will to take responsibility for the welfare of people in Britain. Within two decades there were profound changes in urban sanitation, poor relief and working conditions in factories and mines. Gradually the difference in life expectancy between the poor and the rich declined – in fact, it constantly diminished between the 1870s and the 2010s. 

But anyone who thinks of the early 19th century as a glorious age, when Britain was riding high on the profits of the industrial revolution and victory over France, should be aware: such wealth and glory had long, dark shadows.

Ian Mortimer is a historian and author. His latest book, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain (Bodley Head, 2020) is out now

This article was first published in the December 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine

Explore more content from week one of our Regency course: Introduction to the Regency, with Dr Lizzie Rogers - watching time 10 mins Regency timeline: the key dates you need to know - reading time 3 mins The Regency era: everything you wanted to know - listening time 54 mins The two sides of George IV: is his wretched reputation deserved? - reading time 13 mins The illness and decline of George III - reading time 10 mins

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.

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 the power of her paramour’s personality, but she was shrewd enough to see that he was more than an extraordinary individual. He represented a whole milieu, one that showed little interest in the trappings of the elite and was fired by a fierce commitment to social activism.

“He is supported by the powerful clan to which he belongs,” observed Potter. “They stand far above the town society in social position, wealth and culture; and yet they spend their lives, as great citizens, taking an active and leading part in the municipal, political and educational life of their town… There is one eternal refrain: Birmingham society is superior in earnestness, sincerity and natural intelligence to any society in the United Kingdom!”

The Chamberlains: shaping British politics

The object of Potter’s affections was Joseph Chamberlain – a former industrialist and Liberal politician who, from 1873–76, had been mayor of the city where he’d made his fortune and his reputation. Chamberlain arguably had a greater impact on the evolution of Birmingham than any other politician. He came to the city in the early 1850s at the age of 18, to make his fortune in industry; having done so (in the family’s screw-manufacturing business), he threw himself into public life.

He purchased the gas companies on behalf of the council, improved the city’s water supply, was a driving force behind the construction of Birmingham’s main shopping thoroughfare, Corporation Street, and was responsible for a large number of civic buildings. In short, while mayor, Chamberlain pioneered a new level of activism in municipal government that caused an American journalist to describe Birmingham as the “best governed city in the world”.

Joseph entered parliament, first as a Liberal and then – after his opposition to home rule for Ireland caused him to break with prime minister William Gladstone in 1886 – as an ally of the Conservative party. Though the most senior office that he held was that of colonial secretary, he transformed British politics – partly because he developed a model of rightwing populism that continues to shape politics today.

Joseph’s eldest son, Austen, served as foreign secretary in the 1920s. His younger son, Neville, became prime minister and is remembered best – or worst – for the Munich Agreement with Hitler of 1938.

The Cadburys: a model dynasty

The Cadburys had been in Birmingham since the late 18th century. They were less politically active than the Chamberlains, though two served as mayor. Their reputation sprang from their success as chocolate manufacturers. In the interwar period, the Cadburys reckoned that 90 per cent of the entire British population ate chocolate – a fact that made the family brand enormously profitable.

The Cadburys also became famous for philanthropy. The model village they had constructed in the south-west Birmingham suburb of Bournville was not only designed to accommodate the workers at their factory, but to offer them access to open spaces and community services. Replete with a lake, parks, a bowling green and a lido, it became a blueprint for model villages across Britain.

• Read more | Chocolate and empire: from the land where cocoa grows

Neighbouring families

These two great Birmingham families had much in common. They were, for a time, neighbours. When Joseph Chamberlain built the house he named “Highbury” in Moseley in the south of the city, Richard Cadbury – the second son of John Cadbury, founder of the chocolate business – moved next door. (Neville Chamberlain, already displaying the snobbery that would often mark his attitude to his native city, referred to the Cadbury house as “the cocoa palace”.)

Both families were closely associated with the suburb of Edgbaston, because it is here that they lived for much of the 19th century. Edgbaston was owned by Lord Calthorpe but, strangely, aristocratic ownership sat along side bourgeois power: the area became the great centre for Birmingham industrialists, who found in it a place where they could enjoy semi-rural tranquillity while remaining, as one of the Cadbury family recalled, “within smelling distance” of the factory.

Birmingham had no real native aristocracy, and its dominant families – unlike industrialists in other parts of the country – felt no deference to noble families and, most importantly, showed no desire to emulate aristocratic lifestyles by purchasing country estates.

When the Cadbury family acquired large swathes of land around the Lickey Hills south-west of the city centre, rather than seeking to establish themselves as country gentlemen, they simply gave it to the city of Birmingham.

Importance of religion

The position of the Chamberlains and the Cadburys was also underpinned by religion. The former were Unitarians (Protestant dissenters who believe in the unity of God rather than the holy trinity); the latter Quakers (who hold that each human contains something of God). Both of these denominations were small but wielded an influence that reached beyond their numbers.

Their followers were often prosperous and imbued with an extraordinary intellectual and cultural self-confidence. Though the two faiths between them amounted to less than one in 20 of Birmingham’s population, they accounted for more than half of the town councillors on whom Joseph Chamberlain could depend for support.

Exclusion from the English religious establishment went hand-in-hand with distance from the establishment in a more general sense. Unitarianism had, at least in theory, been illegal before the early 19th century and, until later that century, nonconformists were effectively excluded from ancient universities and English public schools.

But the institutions that counted for the British ruling class meant little to the Birmingham notables. Joseph allied with Conservative aristocrats when it suited him but never regarded them as his superiors. And he laughed at the idea that he might accept an aristocratic title for himself.

The families' political radicalism

Both the Cadburys and the Chamberlains took positions that were – by the standards of their time, and sometimes even by the standards of ours – extraordinarily radical. Though he eventually allied with Conservatives who regarded the defence of church and crown as the key to their politics, Joseph had been an open republican in the 1860s, and seems to have become an atheist after the death of his second wife, Florence, in 1875. As for the Cadburys, their sympathy for pacifists survived the climate of hysterical militarism that swept Britain in 1914.

Political radicalism, though, eventually took the two families in different directions. Despite Joseph’s earlier liberalism, by the end of the First World War, the Chamberlains were, to all intents and purposes, Conservatives. They took Birmingham with them. Between 1931 and 1945, every single one of the city’s 12 MPs was from that party.

The Cadburys did not follow Joseph when he broke with the Gladstonian Liberals. Cadburys and Chamberlains then maintained a wary stand-off – disagreeing with each other but avoiding direct confrontation. In 1921, William Cadbury (then lord mayor of Birmingham) told the government that his Quaker principles prevented him from helping to organise ex-soldiers to protect strike breakers. The cabinet, chaired by Austen Chamberlain in the absence of the prime minister, merely passed this duty to the mayor’s deputy.

The politics of the Cadbury family were more discreet than those of the Chamberlains. Often, they operated a division of labour. Women of the family were active in public life while their husbands and brothers occupied themselves with the more mundane business of making money. Dame Elizabeth, the great matriarch of the family, was particularly important. In 1923, she even dared challenge the motor manufacturer and Conservative MP Herbert Austin in his own King’s Norton constituency.

• Read more | Women's rights in the 20th century: what happened after the vote was won?

As the Chamberlains moved to the right, some members of the Cadbury family drifted to the left and joined Labour. This was particularly important, because the Cadburys came to provide a refuge for leftwingers in the Chamberlainite citadel. The Cadbury factory tolerated trade unionists at a time when almost every other factory in Birmingham was looking for excuses to sack union activists.

When Dame Elizabeth’s stepson George Cadbury sat as a Labour councillor in the 1920s, six of his colleagues were employees of his family company. Bournville, which accounted for less than one in 30 of Birmingham’s population, contained a quarter of its Labour councillors.

The fall of the Chamberlains

The political system associated with the great Birmingham families came crashing down in 1940. The name of Chamberlain, which had counted for so much in the city’s politics, became a liability because of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s association with appeasing Hitler following the Munich Agreement. Labour, which had not won a single parliamentary seat in the city since 1929, gained most of them in 1945.

The trade unions could suddenly call the shots in the full employment of the war economy. The Chamberlain family almost evaporated. Its members moved to London and, with surprising frequency, to the political left. The two best-known descendants of Joseph – Harriet Harman and Lady Antonia Fraser – are both quintessentially metropolitan figures.

There are two general lessons that we might draw from the stories of the Chamberlain and Cadbury families. The first relates to the frequently advanced suggestion that Britain suffered from the absence of a “bourgeois revolution” – that its middle class was weak, deferential and desperate to assimilate into the landed aristocracy. The Chamberlains and the Cadburys would have laughed at such an interpretation.

Between the 1860s and the 1940s, Birmingham – more than anywhere else in Britain – illustrated the power of an autonomous middle class. It is no accident that some of the city’s grandest public buildings were modelled on those of Venice, because Birmingham really did sometimes seem like an Italian city state – a place in which a merchant class ran their own affairs with little regard for monarchy or nobility.

Family differences: individual ambition

Another interpretation, though, might contrast the two families. The Chamberlains rose and fell quickly – the period between Joseph’s first election as mayor and his son Neville’s deposition as prime minister lasted less than 70 years. Joseph was a volcano of a man: aggressive, mercurial and prone to take extraordinary risks. He often talked of both commerce and politics as if he were describing a military campaign in which his opponents were to be broken. His sons were always painfully conscious that they lived in their father’s shadow. Neville compared himself to Hamlet being haunted by his father’s ghost.

The Cadbury family produced no comparable great figure. Sir Adrian Cadbury, George’s grandson, was behind a 1992 report on corporate governance that suggested that no single person should exercise too much power in a company. The overall ethos was that individual ambition should be subordinate to the interests of the family and the business.

The Cadburys stayed in Birmingham for decades after the Second World War, modernising the company through flotation on the stock exchange and a succession of mergers. Yet their political influence waned. Politics and business were now becoming full-time occupations, and the Cadburys increasingly focused on the latter. Despite that, they retained a nostalgia for their family’s radical roots. Sir Adrian occasionally took time off from his duties with the Confederation of British Industry to write letters to the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who had taught him at university.

• Read more | The Georgian origins of our obsession with chocolate

Eventually, Cadbury family control of the company ended when it was sold to an American buyer, though the Bournville works remain. Now that Dunlop tyres and the Longbridge car factory have both closed, it is almost the last vestige of Birmingham’s industrial past. You can still find Chamberlain Square in the city centre – but the chocolate factory is the real monument to the great Birmingham families.

This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

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 brief history of surgery

Can you tell us a little about Robert Knox, the surgeon who bought the bodies?

He doesn’t come out of it well, but there is one sense in which he’s been treated a little unfairly. He is often portrayed as a brilliant surgeon, though it’s important to realise that he wasn’t actually a surgeon in the modern sense. Rather, he was a brilliant anatomist. He should have been more suspicious, though. He lost an eye to small pox during childhood, and the journalists of the day loved the fact that he literally turned a blind eye.

This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

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 someone saying a comment along the lines of “You might enjoy this similar work by one Eunice Foote”, to no avail. Instead, Tyndall is the name celebrated as a great-grandfather of modern climate science – a major, multi-university climate research centre is named after him.

Meanwhile, Foote’s work was completely lost until 2010 when retired geologist Ray Sorenson spotted it in journal archives. Then, the story of a female scientist who spoke of a warming climate back in the 1850s (and was largely ignored) hit a nerve.

• Read more | A brief history of climate change warnings

Today, it is tempting to see Foote as a great visionary, whose potentially invaluable findings were hidden by the sexism of history. There is some truth to this, but it’s important to remember that neither Foote nor Tyndall had our modern understanding of an emerging climate crisis. They weren’t worried by what they found, nor did they link the Industrial Revolution happening around them to their studies of heat and gases. It would be several decades before scientists realised that burning fossil fuels might add enough carbon dioxide to the air to cause climate change; then several decades more before it was established that this wasn’t just an abstract worry for the future, but already happening.

With the advantages of modern science, we now know that by the 1850s the combination of culling trees to clear land for agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels meant climate change was underway in the 19th century. The Earth was already warming under Foote’s feet. People at the time had no idea. Tyndall had started his scientific career working on the railways, writing movingly about the huge shifts to the landscape due to industrialisation, and yet still the idea that humans could do something as huge as change the Earth’s climate was out of reach to him.

For most people, it would have seemed quite ludicrous.

Fear of falling

Only at the end of that century did scientists connect the ever-increasing quantities of coal being burned with the possibility of global warming. A Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius – who, incidentally, is a distant relative of the young climate activist Greta Thunberg – had been arguing over the causes of ice ages at the Stockholm Physics Society and picked up Fourier and Tyndall’s works to see if he had something to add to the conversation.

But like many of his contemporaries, Arrhenius was actually more worried that temperatures would fall rather than rise, so he started by studying the impact of halving the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. It would, he found, cool the world by as much as 5°C, enough to bring on another ice age. A colleague suggested he might consider it the other way around, too: what if carbon dioxide was added? He ran the maths again and calculated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would raise the Earth’s temperature by 5°C or even 6°C.

Arrhenius presented a paper at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at the end of 1895, and the following spring it was translated into English in the Philosophical Magazine, which meant his findings made their way to Britain and the United States. Right at the end of the century, in 1899, another colleague pointed out that if people kept burning coal at current rates, there might be a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide sometime soon, at least in a few centuries. Arrhenius included this observation in his 1908 popular science book Worlds in the Making, noting that “The slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.”

• Read more | Frozen: Britain's Little Ice Age

Still, he wasn’t too worried. If anything, the notion of a warmer Earth seemed quite pleasant. The obvious joke to crack here is that he was Swedish, after all. More to the point, access to warmth would have been much more scarce than today, even in rich countries. Heat was a literal life saver (as it continues to be, despite our greater awareness of how its power can hurt, destroy and kill).

Plus, no one had run the research to unpick how a warming climate could mess with ecosystems or increase the likelihood of extreme weather. When Popular Mechanics magazine picked up Arrhenius’ findings in 1912 it mused that future generations would look back on the rise of coal and thank their ancestors for “milder breezes” and the chance to “live under sunnier skies”. It’s awkward, if not slightly painful, to read such attitudes now, but at the time it made sense.

Sceptics and deniers

From then on, a few scientists picked up the idea, while other lab work seemed to refute the research, allowing other scientists to argue convincingly that the oceans would soak up the carbon, or that volcanic dust was the main problem, or that clouds would reflect the sunlight back into space. Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, an American geologist who had initially been excited by this area of research, would go on to repeat how sorry he was for ever being taken in by the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. He was not alone, as most scientists turned their back on it.

Yet the idea just wouldn’t go away. In 1938, a steam engineer who enjoyed a bit of weather mathematics on the side, Guy Callendar, took a paper entitled ‘The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature’ to the Royal Meteorological Society in London. He had calculated that since the end of the 19th century, humans had added 150,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, causing about a third of a degree of warming.

Modern climate scientists reckon he was pretty much spot on. In 1938, he was laughed out of the room – politely and in a posh British scientist way, but the upshot was that the idea was dismissed once again.

Like those before him, Callendar was not too worried about it. His day job was in fossil fuels and he appreciated their power, seeing coal and its various warming powers as largely for the good. From his point of view, it would save the world from an ice age; what’s more, all that carbon dioxide might be good for plants.

The inescapable problem for those who dismissed carbon dioxide’s role in warming the planet was that the weather did keep getting hotter. There had been some media coverage of Arrenhius’s work in 1912 after a heatwave had provoked a journalist to dig into the weather records, where he realised that, yes, it really was unusually hot, and not just a matter of old men complaining that winters weren’t like they used to be.

Scientists measuring the ice caps established they were shrinking at a surprising rate and as the US and Soviet Union circled around the Cold War, the Arctic became freshly important as a possible battleground. Such military concerns presented opportunities for scientists, as did talk of weaponising the weather. There were new techniques and equipment, like computers and carbon dating, and money to try them out.

In 1957, just over a century after Eunice Newton Foote’s important findings, a global project was agreed - the International Geophysical Year - to use science and work together to study our home planet. This included exciting research possibilities, like satellite launches. The American oceanographer Roger Revelle was also asked to testify in Congress and mentioned, almost in passing, the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that were being emitted via the burning of fossil fuels.

By warning that this amounted to a giant “geophysical experiment” on the Earth, one that should be studied, he successfully lobbied for funding for a new project in Hawaii. Run by Charles Keeling, it would track atmospheric carbon dioxide, and within a decade Revelle, Keeling and their teams were establishing the concern over carbon emissions into US science policy.

Soon, the first international conference on the topic had been called, engaging ecologists who added a new layer of caution to the debate. Modern climate science had finally begun.

Dr Alice Bell is a climate policy specialist based in London and the author of Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2021)

This article was first published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

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

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 Indonesian island of Sumbawa, is now recognised to have affected the climate across the world over several seasons, wrecking harvests in the northern hemisphere. As a result, food and particularly bread had become expensive – landowners’ incomes were protected by the newly enacted Corn Laws, keeping wheat prices high – and in short supply.

To maintain morale and keep out of the rain, the men – who had been gathered mainly from villages around Pentrich, South Wingfield and Ripley – stopped at pubs, demanding beer, bread and cheese. Brandreth led them to local farmhouses, where they coerced the residents into giving them money and firearms, and pressed workers to join the uprising.

At the home of a widow named Mary Hepworth, they smashed the window shutters when the occupants refused to open up, and Brandreth fired his musket into the kitchen, fatally hitting a servant called Robert Walters in the neck.

• Read more | The Corn Law crisis: the bitter political war that threatened thousands with starvation

The next target was the Butterley iron works. The company had recently sacked several men for attending a political meeting – some of them had joined the march – and the manager, George Goodwin, had set his remaining workers to guard the gates. When the crowd approached, he confronted them and said they should go home or risk being hanged.

One young man, Isaac Ludlum, trembling violently, retorted: “I am as bad as I can be. I must go on – I cannot go back.” Others were not so sure; many peeled off and vanished into the night, pursued by threats from Brandreth.

The depleted mob approached Nottingham on the morning of 10 June, only to be met by a detachment of the 15th Hussars. The authorities had been expecting them. The men turned on their heels and fled back across the fields, into the arms of waiting magistrates.

An uprising against the government had been brewing for some time. While many people had joined Hampden Clubs (named after a 17th-century parliamentarian) across the country to discuss political reform, others vented their frustration more aggressively. Demonstrations in London’s Spa Fields in December 1816 had ended in violence as followers of the radical bookseller Thomas Spence campaigned for the abolition of private land and universal suffrage.

• Read more | Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain

Fearing a repeat of the French Revolution, which he’d witnessed first hand as a student visiting Paris, prime minister Lord Liverpool hurriedly introduced repressive legislation, including the suspension of habeas corpus (which requires a person under arrest to be brought before a court). And when a delegation of 5,000 unemployed Lancashire weavers attempted to march from Manchester to London in March 1817 to plead for food, they were dispersed by troops before getting beyond Stockport.

In the absence of a police force, home secretary Lord Sidmouth relied on spies to keep the government informed of what was going on. One of these was a man named William Richards, a carpenter and surveyor who had been an associate of radicals before being imprisoned for debt. On his release in March 1817, he went to see Sidmouth to offer his services, and was sent north as an undercover agent.

He adopted the name William Oliver, and would become known as ‘Oliver the Spy’. Accompanied by his friend Joseph Mitchell, a genuine radical, Richards infiltrated meetings and reported back. Mitchell was arrested soon after, but Oliver escaped capture by showing authorities a secret letter from Sidmouth – “He is an intelligent man and deserving of your confidence” – and was allowed to slip back to London.

• Read more | A brief history of Chartism

Oliver returned to the Midlands and Yorkshire in May, and continued to attend meetings. Known as “the London delegate”, he told the organisers that thousands across the country were ready to join an uprising. To what extent he actively provoked potential rebels remains unknown, but he certainly did not discourage the desperate talk at meetings in Huddersfield and Nottingham. One veteran radical, Tommy Bacon – described by the authorities as “a pertinacious old man” – returned home to Pentrich telling locals of a “coming blow”.

Brandreth was another regular at the meetings, and in June he left his wife and three young children in Sutton-in-Ashfield, and moved to Pentrich, ready for the imminent uprising. He missed a meeting at the Punchbowl Inn in Nottingham, where increasingly suspicious plotters interrogated Oliver about his background. One told him: “They were not so fond of being hung for nothing at Nottingham as they were in Lancashire.” Lucky to escape with his life, the spy hurriedly departed for London.

In the days following the rebels’ dispersal, authorities arrested 47 of the men. They were charged as false traitors, for “not having the fear of God in their hearts, not weighing the duty of their allegiance but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil”. Among the 47 was Brandreth, who had tried to escape to America, but returned penniless to Nottinghamshire.

• Listen | Stephen Bates examines a failed attempt to murder the entire British cabinet in February 1820. He also explores the background and aftermath of this violent plot 

By the time of the trial before the Lord Chief Justice at Derby in October 1817, Oliver had been unmasked by the Leeds Mercury – he had been spotted outside a pub in Wakefield talking to a servant of local military commander General John Byng – and the authorities were worried about using him as a witness. Oliver was spirited to a nearby hotel, but his name was never mentioned at the 10-day trial – incitement was no excuse for treason.

Traditionally, charges of treason had been reserved for aristocratic rebels. Indeed, Tommy Bacon, who had lain low during the uprising but been arrested nonetheless, was quoted as saying: “[It’s been] never known in England before that labouring men were tried for high treason… men who can scarce tell a letter in the alphabet.”

With a jury dominated by local landowners, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. In the dock, Brandreth cut a fearsome figure – the stuff of respectable nightmares – as his black beard had not been trimmed in prison. He had killed a man during the march and expected no mercy.

His lieutenants, Isaac Ludlum the Elder, William Turner and George Weightman, were also sentenced to death, though Weightman’s sentence was later remitted on account of his youth and good character. Of the remaining men, 23 – including Bacon – were sentenced to transportation (none of them ever returned to Derbyshire) and 21 were acquitted. The Duke of Devonshire, owner of Pentrich, had the cottages of the rebels demolished.

The punishment for traitors was still barbaric, and included beheading and quartering, though the Prince Regent remitted the last detail. Brandreth, who was literate, left his pregnant wife Ann all his worldly possessions, which amounted pathetically to “one work bag, two balls of worsted and one of cotton, a handkerchief, an old pair of stockings, a shirt and a letter I received from my beloved sister”.

On the scaffold, a furious William Turner shouted to the crowd: “This is all Oliver and the government.”

• Read more | Peterloo: the English uprising

But to what extent did the government deliberately provoke the uprising against them? The journalist William Cobbett was in no doubt. In his Political Register newspaper, he wrote: “The employers of Oliver might, in an hour, have put a total stop to those preparations and blown them to air. They wished not to prevent but to produce those acts.”

However, Lord Sidmouth was having none of it. He wrote to the Yorkshire magnate Earl Fitzwilliam, insisting that such claims were incredible: “It was directly at variance with the instructions given to Oliver and with his communications… to myself.”

The Pentrich Rising turned out to be the last attempt to overthrow a government by a general uprising, and not just because of the severe punishments meted out. In the ensuing years, prosperity returned to the country as harvests improved and the economy recovered. Eventually – gradually and reluctantly – parliamentary reform would be conceded. Soon, there would be local police forces (Derbyshire being the last to acquire one); governments would become more pervasive and responsive; and harassed ministers would grow more wary of employing untrained spies.

Stephen Bates is a journalist and author. His books include 1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo (Head of Zeus, 2015)

This article was first published in the June 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine