ABSTRACT
Historical best-sellers, which both excite the general public and satisfy the professional historian, are rare; so, also, are successful wife-husband writing teams. John Lawrence and Barbara Hammond were remarkable for their co-operation in research and writing. They wrote, between them, seven important books on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, which imprinted on a generation of readers their vivid and tragic interpretation of the social consequences, for the workers, of the industrial revolution. The aim of the Hammonds in writing The Rise of Modern Industry was to explain the modern world as it had developed from the industrial revolution. This book is written, they wrote in the preface, for the general reader and not for the specialist. It is an attempt to put the industrial revolution in its place in history, and to give an idea both of its significance and of the causes that determined the age and society in which it began.
