Books by Emma Griffin

The forgotten story of how ordinary families managed financially in the Victorian era--and struggled to survive despite increasing national prosperity

Listen to author Emma Griffin discussing the British Industrial Revolution on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wr9r7   Why was the British industrial revolution such a pivotal event in world history? This succinct introduction explains what the Industrial Revolution was, when exactly it occurred and why it happened in Britain first. Providing a clear and compelling synthesis of the latest research on industrialization, and illustrated with newspaper articles, photographs and graphs, the book is aimed at students without any prior knowledge. Griffin assesses the best known explanations for the industrial revolution, and argues that industrialization is to be understood chiefly as the switch to a new source of fuel (coal) coupled with the emergence of new technologies. Situating British industrialisation in a global context, she evaluates what benefits, if any, the world's first industrial revolution brought to the ordinary men and women whose labour made it happen.

';Emma Griffin gives a new and powerful voice to the men and women whose blood and sweat greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution' (Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London). This ';provocative study' looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class (The New Yorker). The era didn't just bring about misery and poverty. On the contrary, Emma Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom. This rich personal account focuses on the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, rather than its economic and political histories. In the tradition of bestselling books by Liza Picard, Judith Flanders, and Jerry White, Griffin gets under the skin of the period and creates a cast of colorful characters, including factory workers, miners, shoemakers, carpenters, servants, and farm laborers. ';Through the ';messy tales' of more than 350 working-class lives, Emma Griffin arrives at an upbeat interpretation of the Industrial Revolution most of us would hardly recognize. It is quite enthralling.' The Oldie magazine ';A triumph, achieved in fewer than 250 gracefully written pages. They persuasively purvey Griffin's historical conviction. She is intimate with her audience, wooing it and teasing it along the way.' The Times Literary Supplement ';An admirably intimate and expansive revisionist history.' Publishers Weekly