Middle Class During The Industrial Revolution

With the industrial revolution came many advances in technology, such as the steam engine. Along with these revolutionary ideas and inventions were consequences some very severe. There are two main negative consequences of the industrial revolution, the conditions in which people lived and worked in and the treatment of women and children. There are also two main positive consequences, urbanisation and the middle class. All of these will be discussed in more detail later.

The conditions in which people lived and worked in were horrible. The working class was the majority of Britain and they had little or no bargaining power. With the population in Britain increasing, landowners were blocking off villages and people that lived in the countryside fled to work in the factories. Because there were so many people trying to get work there was an enormous unemployment rate. Due to many people being unemployed and many of them being unskilled, factory owners would just create jobs that were under any terms that they wanted and people would have jobs. Because they were so desperate for work they had no bargaining power to get higher wages and due to the textiles industry was so new to …show more content…
The previous two classes were the aristocrats that were born into wealth and luxury and there were the low-income earners that were called the working class. The introduction of the middle class was due to the requirement of “white-collar” jobs. These people were business men, shopkeepers, bank clerks, merchants, accountants, insurance agents, doctors, lawyers, teachers and managers. These people had monthly and weekly wages instead of the then common hourly wages. Evidence of the slowly emerging middle class was the introduction of more and more retail shops in England, an increase of over two-thousand shops in fifteen years. The middle class were able to afford servants to tend to the house hold