Ambiguity In The Industrial Revolution

This easily replaceable group of labourers ironically gained an identity and came to be called the proletariat. The word ‘proletariat’ indicated the rise of a new class of people with an internal class structure of the factory. The proletariat lived in urban conditions which were unfavourable. The streets of the cities were dirty and dark with open sewers and no municipalities to manage them and as the cities had mills, the atmosphere was constantly coated in smoke; people lived in hovels and makeshift dwellings with paltry outlets for human waste. As much as the production of goods and the booming economy showed a flashy outlook of city life, the reality of life for the proletariat was murky. Further, this period destroyed earlier forms of sociability—the rural world revolved around a sense of community shared in labour but the compartmentalisation of the factory and the rigid timings rid the workers of any possible interaction in their workspace. Moreover, the labourers moved into the cities from all parts of the country in

This ambiguity reflects the dialectical aspect of how time is strangely an abstract as well as a regimented concept in the Industrial Age. The transformation of human life and the structuring of human society during this period were such that there has been no conclusion to it—the structure of the factory is still effecting changes in the rhythm of the life of labourers. The transfiguration of the human into a cog in the machinery of the factory led to deep repercussions in social, mental and physical conditions of the labourer—the proletariat gave up the comfort of their lives to better those of others. In the grand chronology of history, this trope is only renewed by the setting of the city—there is, nevertheless, nothing new in the poor giving up their lives for the comfort of the