I prefer to see these matters as a continuum, gradually unravelling as it goes on, spinning off new threads, and I’m not overly hung up on classification, timelines and defined eras. In a way, we’re still in the same stream of processes that started in eighteenth century Britain as factory workers churned out goods at a rate and a price that was unimaginable under traditional work practices. The fact that the factories are now located in China rather than England would, in that reading, be a continuation of previous trends rather than a new development.
No, as I look at these things, I see an Industrial Revolution that followed close on the heels of an Agrarian Revolution and then spun off a number of related threads that were, in their own way, equally revolutionary and proceeded down their own paths to the point where we now have a world undergoing significant change in a process that’s not going to finish unless some chain of cataclysmic catastrophes brings the whole edifice tumbling down.
There were, at least in my view, equally significant revolutionary developments in the realms of Education, Entertainment and Sport (as expressions of a mass culture that wasn’t possible until the changes wrought by the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions were in place) that weren’t entirely dissociated from the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions but weren’t actually part and parcel of those two theoretical entities either.
Before the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions, for the vast majority of the population work had been a matter of subsistence survival, a six days a week grind that would have extended to seven if church attendance hadn't been such a vital avenue of social control protecting the status quo.
Under that regime, lower class children were given tasks to carry out when they were physically able to carry them out, the idea of sport as mass entertainment was unheard of, the recreational games that later turned into modern sports were largely informal and most people's experience of music came as church music or what later became known as folk music. Interestingly, Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music has those musical forms sidling along in their own bucolic backwaters completely ignored by the emerging middle classes until the likes of William Morris, Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp started to rediscover them in the early part of the twentieth century.
In such an environment education was a hit and miss affair largely (though not exclusively) based on the parents’ socio-economic circumstances. The children of the aristocracy were, as a rule, educated at home by private tutors or governesses, while the sons of the emerging middle classes were largely shunted off to boarding schools. The children of the lower classes in rural areas were enlisted to perform household and other tasks as soon as they were capable of doing something useful, a practice that subsequently carried over into the emerging industrial cities with children as young as three being employed in mines, textile mills and other activities (Charles Kingsley’s chimney sweeps in The Water Babies being a prime, but by no means the only, example).
As the Industrial Revolution took hold, the use of children in dangerous situations as portrayed by Kingsley and Charles Dickens produced, according to the conventional wisdom, a sense of outrage that led, first to a ban on child labour in mines and factories and, second, to the rise of public education as a means of employing the children who were now precluded from joining the workforce. A cynic would suggest that the public outcry that produced the situation was orchestrated by the people most likely to benefit from rising literacy levels, and the cynic may well be right on the money.
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