Changed lives In these years, therefore, it was possible for individuals with talent to bring about revolutionary changes. Similarly, there were rich individuals who took risks and invested money in industries in the hope that profits could be made, and that their money would ‘multiply’. In most cases this money – capital – did multiply. Wealth, in the form of goods, incomes, services, knowledge and productive efficiency, did increase dramatically.
There was, at the same time, a massive negative human cost. This was evident in broken families, new addresses, degraded cities and appalling working conditions in factories. The number of cities in England with a population of over , grew from two in to in . This pace of growth was not matched with the provision of adequate housing, sanitation or clean water for the rapidly growing urban population.
Newcomers were forced to live in overcrowded slums in the congested central areas of towns near factories, while the rich inhabitants escaped, by shifting to homes in the suburbs where the air was cleaner and the water safe to drink. Far Left: Coalbrookdale , Carpenters’ Row, cottages built by the company for workers in . Left: The houses of the Darbys; painting by William Westwood, . *The gates of Hell T HE I NDUSTRIAL R EVOLUTION Edward Carpenter eloquently described such cities in about , in his poem ‘In a Manufacturing Town’ ‘As I walked restless and despondent through the gloomy city, And saw the eager unresting to and fro – as of ghosts in some sulphurous Hades* – And saw the crowds of tall chimneys going up, and the pall of smoke covering the sun, covering the earth, lying heavy against the very ground – And saw the huge-refuse heaps writhing with children picking them over, And the ghastly half-roofless smoke-blackened houses, and the black river flowing below, – As I saw these, and as I saw again faraway the Capitalist quarter, With its villa residences and its high-walled gardens and its well-appointed carriages, and its face turned away from the wriggling poverty which made it rich, … I shuddered.