From the beginning, the British Industrial Revolution had its critics. Among the first were the romantic poets, including William Blake (1757–1827) and William Wordsworth (1770–1850). Some handicraft workers — notably the Luddites, who attacked factories in northern England in 1811 and later — smashed the new machines, which they believed were putting them out of work. Doctors and reformers wrote of problems in the factories and new towns, while Malthus and Ricardo concluded that workers would earn only enough to stay alive.

This pessimistic view was accepted and reinforced by Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the future revolutionary and colleague of Karl Marx (see Chapter 24). After studying conditions in northern England, this young son of a wealthy Prussian cotton manufacturer published in 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in England, a blistering indictment of the capitalist classes. Engels’s extremely influential account of capitalist exploitation and increasing worker poverty was embellished by Marx and later socialists (see Chapter 24).

Analysis of industrial capitalism, often combined with reflections on the French Revolution, led to the development of a new overarching interpretation — a new paradigm — regarding social relationships. Briefly, this paradigm argued that individuals were members of separate classes based on their relationship to the means of production, that is, the machines and factories that dominated the new economy. As owners of expensive industrial machinery and as dependent laborers in their factories, the two main groups of society had separate and conflicting interests. Accordingly, the comfortable, well-educated “public” of the eighteenth century came increasingly to be defined as the middle class and the “people” gradually began to perceive themselves as composing a modern working class. And while the new class interpretation was open to criticism, it appealed to many because it seemed to explain what was happening. Therefore, conflicting classes existed, in part, because many individuals came to believe they existed and developed an awareness that they belonged to a particular social class — what Karl Marx called class-consciousness.