The Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was a turning point for British society. By inagurating free trade in foreign commerce, Britain was no longer an agricultural country, but an industrial one. By supplying the working class with its most urgent need (eg cheap food) it bowed to the alliance of the middle and working classes against the landed classes. After 1870 the workers tended increasingly to take their own way politically against the employers.

The early experiments in trade unionism in 1830s and the movement of the thirties and forties known as Chartism (movement that demanded reform to attain more influence of the working class in political life), were frustrated by inexperience in organization, and by the strength of the interests which the workers shared with the employers. By 1850 the middle classes became more powerful in politics but this didn’t mean that the aristocracy were excluded or lost prestige. The aristocratic political families were still prominent in Parliament and in the bureaucracy. One reason of this continuance of aristocratic prestige is the willingness of the British aristocracy to adapt themselves to change.

The working classes had been oppressed by the rapidity of the earlier Industrial Revolution. They possessed resources of their own which not only save them from total brutalization but trained the best of them in self-help and organization. From such resources the trade union grew up and achieved national unification by the establishment of the Trades Union Congress in 1868.

Disraeli gave the urban workers the right to vote in elections and to sit in Parliament in 1867. Liberals gave it to the agricoltural workers in 1884 and in 1870 universal primary education was established.

Between the rich middle classes and the workers, a very large lower middle class existed. Social discrimination were costantly changing in 19th century; more and more kind of work rose so economic organization became increasingly elaborate.

Radical demand for parliamentary reform had been met in the early decades of the 19th century. Many of the repressive laws were repealed in 1820s and in 1832 the Great Reform Bill was passed, giving the new manifacturing towns their representatives in Parliament. The Reform Act put in practice the utilitarian principles of Jeremy Bentham who argued that the business of government is to provide for the gratest happiness of the gratest number rather than of a small part of population.

The factory system was now well established and it combined with the development of canals and railways to stimulate an enormous increase in production. To drive the steam engines (the power for the factories), coal was needed and the mining industry expanded rapidly. Britain was responsible for two third of the world’s total coal production, as well as half the world’s iron.

Industrial Revolution created immense wealth. Appalling conditions in factories and mines, child labour, and high unemployment in period of economic recession often gave the impression that the vast wealth generated by industry had done nothing for the poor but increase their misery. The thirties and the fourties in particolar were years of great hardship caused by bad harvests and the Corn Laws (which kept bread prices high by taxing imported grain). These were the years of the Chartist movement, a popular protest which called for universal suffrage, shorter working hours and reduced food prices. One effect of Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy was to discourage state intervention on behalf of poor. The most influential argument in this sense was advanced by Thomas Maltus. He had a devastating effect on the lives of the poor. For Maltus population would always expand faster than the productive capacity of the nation unless it was restrained by war, starvation or disease. Charity to the poor was a dangerous encouragement to them to riproduce and to increase the surplus population of unemployed. In the workhouses men and women, adult and children, were rigorously segregated; families were slit up and meals were eaten in silence. In Oliver Twist, Dickens satirizes the cruelties of this system and shows how the poor prefer to die of starvation rather than to undergo the humiliations of the workhouse.

Dickens hated the cold rationalism of utilitarian theory. He opposed Malthus with an appeal to sentiment. Mrs Gaskell suggests that a more humane attitude on the part of the employers is needed to alleviate the misery of the workers. The employers answered this kind of criticism saying that an employer who increased the wages or improved the conditions of his workers would increase his production costs until he was unable to compete with his rivals.

Thanks to the efforts of men like Chadwick, the 1830s and ‘40s saw the beginning of attemps to limit the most harmful aspects of industrialization. In 1842 it became illegal to employ children under ten years old in the miners and in 1844 the working day for children under thirteen was limited to six and a half hours, and for women to twelve. Attemps were also made to improve the appalling living conditions of the industrial poor, who crowded into the new towns in the hope of finding work in the factories, and lived in jerry-built slum houses, without adeguate water supplies or sewerage. All these reforms met with bitter opposition from factory owners and conservatives. Chadwick became the most hated man in England.

Dickens in Hard Times attacks the reformers.

He comes to the conclusion that the misery of the industrial workers lives in a result of utilitarian ideas which he sees as a cold economic calculus concerned only with what a man can produce, and not at all with his immaginative life. Dickens argues that utilitiarism deprived them of their dignity by making them into parts of a machine. The greatest happiness of the greatest number was to save half the nation from misery.

The nineteenth century was the great age of the English novel because of the increase of the reading public caused by the growth of lending libraries and the developing of publishing in the modern sense. The novel was the vehicle best equipped to present a picture of life. Novel reader wanted to be entertained with a minimum of literary convention. He wanted to be close to what he was reading about, he wanted to pretend that literature was journalism, that fiction was history. The great majority of borrowers from the lending libraries wanted to read about life as they thought they knew it, they wanted to deal with people like themselves with whom they could identify themselves.