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Liberty’s Dawn A People’s
History of the Industrial Revolution
Emma Griffin
New Haven &
London: Yale University Press, 2013 Hardcover. x+303 p. ISBN 978-0300151800. £25
Reviewed by Ian Beattie McGill
University, Montreal
What does it mean for historians to “listen to” their
sources? The history of 19th-century Britain has been marred by a frequent
refusal to listen to a particular set of sources, those that arose from the
“lower orders” or working class(es). Time and again, historians have omitted
working-class voices from their work on the fictive basis that the sources
simply are not there, or, if their existence is acknowledged, are fatally
flawed in some way. In her recent work Liberty’s Dawn, Emma Griffin
takes a hammer to this tendency as it relates to the era’s defining event – the
industrial revolution. The particular hammer she wields is a heavy one: a
collection of archives, supplemented by Griffin’s own research, of over 350
working-class autobiographies. For Griffin, the refusal to listen has been a
maddening abdication of what is, in the end, a thoroughly simple task: just listen
to what they are telling us. As she states in her introduction, “Historians
have measured wages and working hours with meticulous care, yet none has sought
to listen to, or make sense of, the messy tales that the workers left behind.
In the pages that follow, we shall do precisely that” [16]. If this project is
ambitious, it is also long overdue. What Griffin hears is loud and clear. Though historians have
painted an “unremittingly
grim picture” of industrialization, in fact, the process brought new light into
dark, drab lives, providing greater access to employment and the host of forms
of enlightenment and empowerment that go with it. Griffin pauses for a moment –
“I [do not] wish to replace one simple story (things were bad and getting
worse) with another (they never had it so good!)” [19] – but within paragraphs
offers what might be one of the most strident iterations of the “they never had
it so good” view in the scholarship: “the industrial revolution heralded the
advent not of a yet ‘darker period’, but of the dawn of liberty” [20]. Griffin is a polemical writer, and she leaves much to
quibble with here. Her broad strokes can caricature the industrial
revolution’s historiography. Some historians have certainly attempted to give
sufficient attention to the suffering that industrialization caused, as
Griffin, to her credit, does herself. I imagine, however, Griffin would have
trouble finding someone to unreservedly endorse what she depicts as a consensus
view: “the ordinary worker enjoyed a healthier, simpler, and less frenetic life
before the smoke and steam of the industrial revolution” [55]. This treatment
even extends to historians like the Thompsons whose concerns and conclusions
would seem to lie closest to her own – indeed, Griffin’s allegedly
unprecedented bibliography contains at least a certain degree of overlap with
those of The Making of the English Working Class and The Chartists. More
importantly, Griffin’s stark blacks and whites between pre- and post-industrial
cause problematic distortions. The 18th century, in all of its historical
particularity, is turned into a stand-in for all non-industrial societies. Even
rural 19th-century Britain is rendered as pre-industrial, though the industrial
revolution affected the countryside every bit as much as it did the cities. It
is telling that Griffin does not mention the agricultural revolution, which is
commonly treated as a necessary precondition of British industrialization. All this, however, does not necessarily detract from the
value of Griffin’s basic project. Griffin’s insistence on pushing her
autobiographies to the fore of her work, on allowing them to provide its
structure, is as necessary as it is revolutionary. Yet it is during this very
act of listening, I would argue, that the work’s most fundamental problems
arise, problems which are not unique to Griffin alone. It is Griffin’s
motivating assumption that the act of listening is straightforward, requires no
more than patience and open ears that reveals an unresolved issue in the way
working-class sources are treated in British historiography in general. One might begin by noting that Griffin’s project
closely resembles that embarked on by postcolonial historians decades ago.
Against an entrenched and monolithic historiography of powerful westerners and
silent colonial subjects, non-white historians attempted to enter the voice,
experience, and agency of the marginal and oppressed into the historical
cannon. Unlike Griffin, however, these scholars assumed that this task was
defined by its difficulty. It was not enough to simply import hitherto unheard
voices into Western history and charge on as before. Rather, this reevaluation
necessitated a strong and uncompromising critique of the methodologies and
assumptions of history writing itself. The techniques and scholars of other
disciplines entered the historical field; the very prose of the movement often
became dense, complicated. The postcolonial project necessitated a history
interpenetrated with doubt, to the point of questioning the viability of the
project itself – Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was offered as a real
question. In contrast, Griffin’s work relies on an
assumption of what might be termed the transparency of the Western subject. In
making her case for the industrial revolution, she marshals her sources to her
side, going so far as to claim that it is not her making the case, but them;
“It is not possible to frame the autobiographical literature within the
dark interpretation without imposing a willful distortion upon the messages our
writers are seeking to communicate” [16]. We must simply put the quotes on the
page, read them, and we will understand. Interestingly, she describes this
methodology many times over in a vocabulary of “telling” and “listening”: “We
need to listen more carefully to what our first-hand witnesses are trying to
tell us,” [19] “Some writers, it seems, simply refused to tell the story of
wiring lives blighted by the advent of mechanization,” [25] “With so many
first-hand witnesses to this transformative moment in world history we can
surely do no better than listen to their verdict. What did those at the
coalface tell us about their times?” [242]. What Griffin does not wrestle with, however, is the fact
that it is not John Bennett, John Lincoln, or Margaret Davidson writing this
book –
it is Emma Griffin. No matter how many times she attempts the manoeuvre (and
the catalogue above is by no means exhaustive), Griffin cannot abdicate the
role of author. The texts that make up Griffin’s archives are the fraught,
complex, efforts of an extraordinarily diverse set of individuals to compress
the moments of an entire life into a slim stack of written pages. They were
written for myriad reasons – for family interest, to document the Chartist
movement, to repudiate it, to record the process of religious conversion, or
whatever else. By conscripting these texts into staging a blunt
historiographical intervention, Griffin has not unproblematically liberated
them from the indifference with which earlier historians silenced them. On the
other hand, to treat them cautiously, to treat them as representations would
not be, as Griffin implies, to disbelieve them or cast them away. It would be
to take them seriously, to try to understand their techniques, their
valuations, their subtexts. Griffin’s
authorial interventions are at their barest in the chapter about working-class
politics. To fit the proliferation of working-class radical and later Chartist
activism into her frame, she chooses to celebrate workers “finding their voice”,
what she calls “the sheer fact of having engaged in the public sphere” [213].
What these politicians actually said in that sphere, however, is erased from
the page with the comment that “the broad contours of political awareness
amongst the working classes are well known” [ibid.] When her autobiographers come to speak politics, Griffin
abruptly switches off the microphone. Figures like William Lovett, Francis
Place, Thomas Hardy, Robert Lowery – men who spoke often, loudly, and to great
effect about the processes of industrialization – are frequently mentioned and
even quoted by Griffin, but their political utterances are not allowed to
disturb her text. Griffin’s sole description of the politics of Chartism is
that it called for universal male suffrage, “amongst other things” [ibid.] As
non-white historians and historians of the non-white have long since
discovered, however, the act of “listening” to the voices of the marginal and
the oppressed irrevocably politicizes the historian’s work. It forces a set of
questions that cannot necessarily be addressed as a field or as a discipline,
but must often be worked out in a one-to-one relationship between the author and
source – though they are frequently questions that cannot be answered. Am I
this source’s advocate? Am I their guardian, their critic, their enemy? Such
questions linger uncomfortably between the lines of Liberty’s Dawn, with Griffin’s declarations of her advocacy of her
sources jarring with those sources’ own resistance. Griffin’s
assumption of transparency is also only valid in so far as we accept that these
sources are “representative” – if this collection of 350-odd autobiographies,
spread out over more than a century, can be taken as articulating a
generalizable working-class experience. Again, with striking bluntness, Griffin
insists they can. She recognizes that they might be criticized for only
capturing the experiences of the literate, yet she responds that her writers
were by no means uniformly privileged or successful. This leads her to conclude
that “the autobiographies do indeed capture the life experiences of this group”
[6]. Surely, however, the point about having an unrepresentative sample is that
one could not know simply from referring to it in what ways it is unrepresentative.
“Diverse” and “representative” are not synonyms. Indeed, there are two basic
ways in which her sources lack representation; first, in that they were not
dead at the relatively old ages at which they seem to have written, and
secondly, that they do not seem to have been among the millions who emigrated
from Britain for rural life in the colonies and America. Seeking to rectify
either of these absences, of course, would likely temper Griffin’s optimistic portrait
of the industrial era. Perhaps, however, there is something revealing in the way
that Griffin clings with such tenacity to these sources, this archive
as a privileged vessel of 19th-century working-class experience. This doubtless
is in part an effect of the connection one develops to a set of sources over
the course of an extended research project. I would suggest, however, that it
also reveals something of the unexamined 21st-century values that
saturate Griffin’s work. Despite Griffin’s recurrent metaphor of aural and
verbal communication, listening and telling, she actually adheres to these
sources because they are written. To the literate modern-day reader, they seem
transparent, easy, authoritative, while the meandering and edited forms by which
other sources might have lasted to today render them dubious and unverifiable.
Calling her sources “unusual and unique,” Griffin asserts, “Here is a
collection of personal stories freely narrated by the ordinary men and women we
wish to understand… For all their shortcomings, the autobiographies offer the
best way – indeed the only way – to examine the lives of working people during
a critical epoch in world history” [10]. The poor,
however, can “speak” to the historian in other ways, and oftentimes we might
find them saying something quite different than the message Griffin would have
us hear. During Griffin’s period, for example, more than 70,000 of the
industrial poor subscribed to the Chartist land plan, fueled by a fervent
belief in the degradation of industrial living and the superiority of agrarian
life. (1) In omitting such unwritten voices from her work, Griffin does not listen
to what they had to say. Likewise, Griffin
treats the spread of writing itself as an unmitigated good, but in doing so,
positions herself against the vast numbers of working-class Chartists who
offered harsh critiques of the educational systems Griffin celebrates. They
could see Sunday and day schools both providing a valuable good in a
relentlessly competitive job market, but also imposing a system of control,
doing violence to thought, in a way that tainted and complicated their
benefits. They fought for control over their own and their children’s
education, and lost it. They prized an oral, public culture, and lost that as
well, meaning it is lost to Griffin and her readers too. This complex set of
relations, unconfinable to either a “pessimistic” or “optimistic” view of
industrialization, is not allowed to trouble Griffin’s narrative. At times,
however, a greater complexity is allowed into Griffin’s text, and one can
briefly witness the kind of scholarship these sources might receive. When
Griffin seeks to enter female voices into her narrative, she immediately finds
that there are not enough female autobiographies, and she must partially
construct female experiences through the representations of men. Here, she
takes the only defensible route, and distinctly shifts her relationship to the texts.
To reach toward the women she seeks, she reads through, reads against, and
interprets the voices of the men who wrote about them. Likewise, in the book’s
two most sparkling chapters, treating marriage and sex, Griffin finally takes seriously her sources’
difficulty and the presence of “a coded language that can be hard to decipher”
[134]. Her sources’ reticence is something Griffin at once acknowledges,
respects, and tries to explore. Silences
become eloquent. She even embraces context, mining prior scholarship for ways
to access her sources better, as in a compelling integration of her
autobiographies and E.A. Wrigley’s famous statistical analysis of marriage
practices. Yet she justly subordinates the quantitative to the qualitative,
insisting that it is the personal, the immediate that makes up the real
material of history. The results can be funny, moving, and at times disturbing,
as when Griffin sensitively negotiates the absences in her texts around sexual
assault and same-sex desire. Griffin’s approach manages to be at once cautious,
complex, and intimate. So what of Griffin’s central thesis? In fact, her basic
point seems inarguable – thoughtless idealization of an agrarian past is unwise,
and likewise it is indefensible to ignore the vital, diverse ways working
people seized and made use of the dynamism of industrialized society. But I
would argue the question Griffin implicitly poses and answers is the kind of
question that arises from assuming our sources are simply there, transparent –
above all, available. Surely, to truly listen it is necessary to allow the
speaker ambiguity, reticence, and strategy, rather than accepting only clear
yeses or noes to questions determined by the listener. And surely one of the
necessary elements of history is a kind of translation – marking and navigating
the distance between sources’ meanings, perspectives and frameworks of
understanding and the historian’s own. Taken on
Griffin’s terms, this work could lead one to a sense of easy closure, a belief
that listening to these authors is little more than an act of charity or
personal interest – after all, if everything worked out for the best, what need
is there to hear these stories? Griffin certainly does not wish this conclusion
to be reached, but it is the sources themselves that make it impossible. In
their complexity, their contested meanings, they cry out for more, and more
open-ended scholarship as they trace the shift from one deeply unequal,
frequently dehumanizing social system to another – that which we still live in
today. The hundreds of writers in this fantastically rich bibliography sought
to find meaning and joy in their lives and pride in their collective struggles
when faced with circumstances over which they had no control. They left us with
the task of living in and dealing with the Industrial Revolution’s aftermath,
but they did not leave us with easy questions or easy answers. Liberty’s
Dawn makes an invaluable contribution; indeed, more British history books
need to start looking like this. Yet through her problematic act of listening,
Griffin only gestures towards a more meaningful revolution. She points the way,
but she does not lead us there yet. _________________ (1) Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (London: Temple Smith, 1984) : 93.
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