Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Joys Of The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a time of great change in Europe and many capitalists became spectacularly wealthy from factories and new industrial work. However, many in the lower class did not share the joys of the era and instead endured long hours and dangerous work in exchange for barely enough money to buy food for them and their families. Several writers in this time period, such as Browning, felt sickened by the way the factory and coal mining bosses treated the children, and they decided to use their notoriety as poets to change society. Writing in the midst of a transformative time in British history in which factories were ubiquitous and children were often forced to work in deplorable conditions, Elizabeth Barrett Browning utilizes

Her most powerful line comes in the first stanza, in which she says “they are weeping in the playtime of the others, in the country of the free” (Browning 587). England was supposed to be the greatest country on Earth in the Victorian Era. The aristocrats believed they were far superior to any other nation, and some thought it was their duty to imperialize the rest of the world to make it more British, and thus better. Browning points out the irony in this thought by showing how Britain’s own children suffered a living hell every single day, and in fact lived a worse life than “the young lambs…in the meadows” or the “young birds…in the nest” (Browning 587). By using powerful imagery throughout the piece, Browning emotionally appeals to the adults of her day to do something to change the way the children live. She ends her poem with an incredibly insightful line in which she says “the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper than the strong man in his wrath” (Browning 590). The children were robbed of their innocence by industrialism, and despite their small statures, their cries mean more to Browning than any action of an adult ever