The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory: The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914-60

摘要

For labor historians, the image of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British factories is indelibly linked to the "dark, satanic mills" of William Blake. The early Industrial Revolution drew people off the land and into the bleak surroundings of factories and workhouses. Charles Dickens's working-class London was a drab, depressing, dangerous world buielt around urban poverty, moral and social degradation, and the factory system where men, women, and children were made to work at machinery from dawn until dusk in the most unhealthful and frightening conditions. By 1845, Frederick Engels would write that industrial capitalism had created a "social disorder" that was akin to disease itself: "The social disorder from which England is suffering is running the same course as a disease which attacks human beings." Out of this "disease," however, would come a resolution, perhaps a revolution, that would leave "the English people ... reborn and rejuvenated." His conclusion was perhaps perversely optimistic: "Consequently we must welcome any circumstances which bring this disease to its climax." (Engels, The Conditions of the English Working Class [1845]. Reprint, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968, p. 139.)