Industrialism

It is just amazing to think that the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s would have, and continues to have, such a vast impact on my life today. Something as simple as the invention of a steam-powered loom and the railway system has paved the way for every single invention that has come since and every invention that has yet to be made.

Fanny Kemble's "Record of a Girlhood" allows for fantastic insight into the wonders that the railway brought and how people reacted to it. I thought it was cute how Kemble compared the train to a person in some aspects and a creature in others. The fact that she described it by saying such things as "She goes upon two wheels, which are her feet, and are moved by bright steel legs called pistons" (pg. 490) really helps those reading her journal/excerpt on her first experience on the train get a sense of what the experience is really like. People in thode days more than likely wouldn't know what a piston was and the fact that she compared it to something that was quite relatable to the common person I think made transitioning into the Industrial Age that much easier. Even with all the leaps and bounds and grand things that the Industrial Revolution brought it didn't come without it's negatives as well.

Charles Dickens and his "Dombey and Son" tell of the negative and not so glorious side of the Industrial Revolution. He let it be known that the countryside was suffering in multiple ways due to the building of the railway and it wasn't wanted by everyone, "Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wilderness of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing" (pg. 496). Even though the Industrial Revolution brought so many great things, and even more and better things to come to society it didn't do so without destroying a few things along the way and I'm glad that both sides of the spectrum were expressed via a slew of extremely talented writers.