Manchester Dbq - Ap Euro

822 Words4 Pages
During the time of the Industrial Revolution in England, cities grew rapidly. One of these cities was Manchester. The quick growth of these cities caused many issue. In Manchester specifically, growth caused the health standards to decrease, life spans to shorten, and the city itself to become unclean and polluted. People reacted to those issues differently. Some were positive. They either saw the world wide benefits of manufactured goods, or they claimed that conditions were an improvement from the agricultural way of life. Others saw things more from the workers perspective. They focused on a lack of happiness in the workers lives. A decrease in the health of the average industrial laborer is probably the most notable issue raised by the Industrial Revolution. Public health reformer, Edwin Chadwick (Doc 6), wrote that The annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation is greater than loss from &modern wars. Being a reformer, Chadwick may had been inclined to some degree to exaggerate, but because this excerpt was taken from a report it can be assumed that it is factual. If Chadwick did exaggerate and make the conditions sound even worse than they actually were, then his agenda was to persuade the government to change laws in order to improve health standards for factory workers and also to persuade workers to protest and become reformers. Flora Tristan (Doc 7), a French Socialist, wrote about the workers working twelve to fourteen hour days in a room with poor ventilation. A British medical journal (Doc 8) published in 1843 says that in Manchester the average age of a laborer when they died was 17, while laborers in rural districts lived well into their twenties and thirties. People that were not in the laboring class lived much longer on average as well. As the size and population of cities exploded, it was impossible to keep them clean and sufficient for the
Open Document