Robert Owen's Observations On The Effects Of The Manufacturing System

The eighteenth century was a turbulent era in which the industrial revolution drastically changed the lives of the workers living within the urban centres of Victorian England. Issues within the cities included overcrowding, pollution and social issues that drastically shaped the daily lives of city dwellers. Scholars and writers attempted to capture the effects of industrialism on society. Social reformer Robert Owen in his essay, Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System, discusses the shifting changes he saw within the morality of the urban poor. Owen feared that the urban poor’s living and working environment, rather then treatment from upperclass, church or state that was causing the poor to become “morally deprived” (Owen ). This immorality, Owen writes stems from capitalist ideology that taught the urban poor to concentrate on their own individual wealth and prosperity, rather then the betterment of humanity. Owen argues that …show more content…
The religious institutions is referred to as, “every blackening Church appeals” and the state is implied in the form of a blood soaked “palace” (Blake 10, 12). Both institutions are being transformed within industrial scope both physically and metaphorically. The church is blackened because it is coved in the soot and the grime caused by the industrial factories surrounding it. But the blacking and the term appeals also suggests that the church is corrupted spiritually. The bloody palace has a similar corruption representing war, death, and other violence that seems to be allowed by the political institutions. Within the industrial society, previous institutions that were supposed to allow for spiritual enlightenment and peace turned instead represent the opposite within the poem. Blake argues that Humanity previous institutions are being corrupted leaving humanity to look for a different form of structure for their