The subject of the exploitation of women and children in the industrial economy raises one of the most heated debates in modern historical scholarship, a controversy known as the standard of living debate. On one side of this debate, social historians depict the ghastly living and working conditions of workers in the early industrial age; on the other side, economic historians show a steady improvement in the cost of living and the standards of living for the working class. The optimists look back at the new industrial towns and see affordable workers' cafes in the bright illumination of Murdock's gaslights. When the pessimists look back, they smell the stench of uncollected refuse in the streets and the foul dampness in typhus-infected cellar bedrooms. Both viewpoints contain an important historical truth, and the debate is not resolved. The optimistic version rests chiefly on tables of economic data, and the pessimistic version stresses the testimony of people who lived through industrialization.

The early critics of industrialization were numerous. They ranged from England's greatest romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who wrote in 1814, "I grieve, when on the darker side of this great change I look," to the cofounder of Marxist socialism, Friedrich Engels. Engels, the son of a rich German industrialist, lived in Manchester and studied manufacturing there in 1844. His conclusion was brutal: "I charge the English middle class with mass murder." The contemporary British historian who coined the name industrial revolution also reached a shocking conclusion; he called industrialization "a period as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed."

The anger of such critics has derived chiefly from the conditions in the new factories and factory towns. Life in that world had an undeniably grim side. Conditions in textile factories were so bad that another poet, William Blake, named them "dark Satanic mills." These unregulated workplaces had terrible safety standards; with no guards on the new machinery, mutilating accidents were common. Factories were unbearably hot, so men, women, and children often worked stripped to the waist. But the environment was hardly erotic: Machines filled the air with a deafening roar, the nose with overheating grease, and the eyes and lungs with cotton dust. This combination gave Manchester the world's highest rate of bronchial ailments, a life expectancy sharply below the national average, and a horrifying infant mortality rate of 50 percent.

Jobs in these dreadful conditions also required workers to adapt to a new discipline. Most workers came from the countryside, where they were accustomed to agricultural work defined by the rhythms of nature--the seasons, daylight, weather--or to such self-disciplined labor as spinning or weaving at home. Factory work was a regime of rules enforced by an overseer, regimentation by the clock or the pace of a machine. Typical industrial work rules forbade talking or singing. Fines for misbehavior were deducted from wages. The first large spinning factory in England fired an average of twenty workers per week and averaged a 100-percent turnover within one year. One of the most famous novels of the 19th century, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, ends with the thought that life in the dark, Satanic mills was appropriate punishment for sin. The protagonist of the novel, Emma Bovary, commits adultery and then suicide. Her relatives refuse to accept the care of Emma's orphaned daughter; the child is punished for the shame of Emma's behavior by being sent to earn her living in a cotton mill. . .

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