Industrial Revolution DBQ
During the Industrial Revolution, many higher class citizens of Britain believed that factory workers had a fair pay and decent working conditions, but factory labourers actually lived in deplorable conditions with high fatality rate because of such things as dangerous machinery and cramped housing. According to the middle and upper classes, labourers lived and worked in tolerable conditions. According to Document 2, factory villages were in good condition and its inhabitants looked healthy and happy. While the document shows how the workers were treated well, the point of view comes from an author writing about the conditions of the poor and is likely part of the upper middle class who doesn’t actually go work any
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According to Document 4, the slums in towns and cities are filthy due to the lack of a drainage system and have unstable buildings. The river going through the slums are also pitch black due to a factory’s waste. This shows how the neighborhood that many factory workers lived in had deplorable living conditions where there was overpopulation and possibly many disease outbreaks to to the filth being piled in the slums. Because the point of view comes from a German socialist, it shows that the person has traveled and probably seen enough slums in cities to say that most are filthy and cramped. Document 5 shows a testimony given by a factory worker about how numerous people died at two separate mills because of dangerous working conditions including hazardous materials in the air to dangerous machinery. The worker who testified was also said to die within the year of the testimony due to poor lung health because of the dust in the mills and malnutrition. This document shows how many workers from different factories all have dangerous working conditions and that it is due to the lack of safety precautions and caring about the well-being of the workers, and because the point of view is coming from a worker it also shows what the factories from someone who is basically living in them instead of simply being an observer like the many other documents. The