ABSTRACT
How far did the Industrial Revolution benefit the working man? Historians today disagree almost as much as those who lived through the period. Among the earliest economic historians, the socialist Hammonds, following the evidence of such writers as Engels and Marx, saw industrialisation as an almost unmitigated disaster for the mass of British men and women, involving them in complete social disruption without affording them the compensation of higher material standards of living. A later generation of revisionists, notably Sir John Clapham and T. S. Ashton, have cast doubt on the value of generalised contemporary polemics, whether they be those of Engels or Cobbett, as valid evidence for changes in material standards. In the last decade or so, the debate has been renewed with vigour by scholars armed with novel statistical techniques and methods drawn largely from the social sciences.
