The Theme of Industrialization in Carlyle and Dickens

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SEMİHA TOPAL                

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The Theme of Industrialization in Carlyle and Dickens

The invention of the steam engine and the development of the railways brought England a profound change by proliferating the Industrial Revolution, which created deep economic and social changes by the beginning of the Victorian age.

“Hundreds of thousands of workers had migrated to industrial towns, where they lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing and worked very long hours –fourteen a day or even more- at very low wages. Employers often preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less than men.”

Victorians debated the good and mostly bad sides of industrialism due to its great effect on the society and economy. Many philosophers and thinkers suggested a number of solutions for the problems of harsh working conditions, the unemployed poors and child labour. One of the most debated theories on the poor was “Utilitarianism” based on Jeremy Bentham’s idea that

pleasures, in so far as they are pleasures, are capable of being compared with each other as regards their quantity: a calculus of pleasures and pains is possible. The end pursued by morals and legislation is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or . . . the identification of the interest of all with the interest of each. . . .

        He argued that pain and pleasure was universal and they could be calculated as concrete objects. As he preferred the majority’s pleasure to the minority’s, he named the unemployed poor people as “the surplus population” and claimed that they should be sacrificed for the pleasure of the majority, which inspired the idea of building work houses for the able-bodied poor. As the poor people were considered as the surplus population, they were seperated from their families in order to prevent them from multiplying and being burden on the rich people.

        Although Utilitarianism was liked and adopted by the government which collected the poor people in workhouses with so little care, its lack of humanity and spiritual values aroused disapproval and discontent among some thinkers and writers in the Victorian era. Thomas Carlyle, one of the most influential figures of his age, was among these discontent thinkers. He criticizes the general understanding of industrialism and mechanical thinking by attacking the inhuman side of Utilitarianism and industrialization. As a reprisal against the Poor Laws that demanded the building of workhouses, he defends the Laws of Nature, meaning that the behaviours of the utilitarians are unnatural.

Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment; and without love, men cannot endure to be together…The Laws of Nature will have themselves fulfilled. That is a certain thing to me.”

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His emphasis on the inhuman values of industrialism and machinery is seen in his article “The Mechanical Age” from Signs of the Times, where he expresses his discontent with the rise of machines in all aspects of the human life. He states that the old modes of production have changed completely with the invention of machines and human work has been replaced by the “speedier, inanimate one”. 

While appreciating the development in the physical power of mankind and the comfort they achieved through the wealth gained by industrialization, Carlyle warns that this wealth is being gathered in the hands ...

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