Welcome to echomikeromeo's Essay Corner, where she enjoys showcasing various essays that she has written for school. Just about all of the essays here will be assignments for history or English classes, and anything that is posted here will also have received a grade of B+ (87.5%, by a rather liberal reckoning) or higher. Everything is presented in its original format, including any errors in spelling or word choice, so please don't be offended by certain elements of rough-draft quality.

Class: AP European History
Subject of assignment: Reform in Britain during the Industrial Revolution
Grade on assignment: 35/40 (87.5%)
Teacher's comments:Watch your topic sentences. The first two sound like you are telling a narrative. Make sure you are analysing. You have very good details.

During the period between 1815 - 1848, the Industrial Revolution was at its peak. Factories were being established and people, particularly the working class, were experiencing a radical shift in lifestyle as the centres of production moved from the countryside to the cities. As production continued to speed up and as more people began to fill the urban areas, living and working conditions suffered. The government of the time, which was dominated either by the Tories or the Whigs, attempted to keep the political and social climate stable by introducing certain reforms.

The conservative Tories were in power at the beginning of the 19^th century. They were largely dominated by wealthy landowners and reactionaries who lived in fear of the French Revolution happening to them. It was on this platform, in 1815, that they passed the Corn Law. This piece of legislation imposed severe taxes on imported grains, which were widely used in Britain at the time. This hurt the working class, who now could not afford to buy bread, in addition to the middle-class merchants who now were losing money from their trade businesses. AS such, the law was hugely unpopular and demonstrations in protest were staged. One such gathering at Peterloo in 1819 turned ugly as shots were fired into the crowd, killing 11 people and wounding several others. Termed the "Peterloo Massacre" by the press, the event served to stir up more animosity against the Tories and their Corn Law.

Thus, it may come as no surprise that, by the 1830s, the more liberal Whigs were in power. They were interested in labour reform, passing the Factory Act of 1833, in addition to the subsequent 10 Hours Act & Coal Mine Act. All three laws served to improve the lot of factory workers: the Factory Act limited young children to 10 hours' labour per day and women and older children to 12 hours'; the 10 Hours Act allowed all women and children to work no more than 10 hours a day and the Coal Mine Act prevented them from working in the dangerous mines. While not exactly a perfect solution, it demonstrated that the Whigs were interested in bettering the situation of the working class. The same was true of the 1834 Poor Law, which operated on the supposition that the unemployed were in that situation because they were too lazy to find jobs. The law set up the workhouse system, which, the Whigs thought, would be so horrible to live in that people would want to go find jobs. This was clearly introduced out of a lack of understanding of the situation, though: the problem was that there weren't any jobs, so it was quite impossible to go find one. The recent technological developments meant that fewer people were needed to accopmlish the same task, putting several extraneous people out of a job.

Not all of the Whigs' reform, though, was motivated by a social concern: some of it was about political stability. The Industrial Revolution had caused a shift in where the population was. Large amounts of people left their country villages and moved to cities — some of which hadn't even existed before the 19^th century. The electoral districts — "boroughs" — had not been changed to reflect this, so there were some areas called "rotten boroughs", where there were only three or so people on the electoral roll, in addition to huge cities such as Manchester that didn't have a single MP. In 1842¹, Parliament passed the Reform Act, which fixed the problem by redistricting the entire country, in addition to extending, slightly, the amount of middle-class people who could vote. Thus a certain amount of political stability was maintained.

Parliament could not be counted on to fix all the problems, though — often ordinary people had to agitate for reform. A group called the Anti-Corn Law League came about, who took it as their mission (surprisingly enough!) to lobby Parliament for the repeal of the Corn Law. Parliament was reluctant, though, and it took another group of citizens, the starving Irish who were suffering from the 1845 Potato Famine and couldn't buy bread, before the law was repealed in 1846. Another man, Edwin Chadwick, the secretary of the Poor Law commission, undertook a study into the quality of urban living. He discovered that, in cities like London, open sewers and poor sanitation were a perfect breeding ground for cholera, the disease feared by everyone. It was Chadwick's findings, in part, that helped to pass the Public Health Act in 1848. This provided for a National Board of Health, which would construct underground sewers and otherwise provide better sanitation for the urban working population.

Other citizen-led reform movements, however, were not quite as successful. The Chartists sought to introduce a "People's Charter" that would lay out individual freedoms such as equality before the law and universal manhood suffrage. They presented two petitions to this effect to Parliament, who generally ignored them. The Chartists decided not to press the issue. Another (albeit somewhat more critical movement) were the Luddites. These people, skilled artisans who had been put out of a job by the factory system, took revenge by destroying machinery — perhaps they thought that without the machines, they would get their old jobs back. However, the machines were easily repared and the Luddites are generally considered to have been very naïve in their plan. Another, similarly idealistic movement was that of the Utopian Socialists. Men like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen were in favour of developing industrial communes, termed "phalansteries", where the workers had an equal share in the production and the profit. Owen was very successful in establishing such a community in New Lanark, Scotland, though the proto-Socialist idea did not receive widespread support.

It is hardly surprising that the more radical ideas of the Chartists and the Utopian Socialists were not taken on board by Parliament. The Whigs were left-of-centre, but they, like the Tories, still stood for the Establishment. However, they were perhaps less rooted in the Establishment than other governments of Europe, for it was through the various small reforms such as the Factory Act and the Reform Act that Britain managed to keep its population just settled enough to avoid revolution and turmoil throughout the first half of the 19^th century.