Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 246 of Emma Griffin’s excellent 2013 book, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution:

Gains were tenuous; gains were sometimes lost. Life was still extremely hard and many lived perilously close to the edge of a comfortable subsistence. Yet tenuous gains were preferable to the predictable course of a life devoted to hard labour with no prospect of real improvement. Industrialisation brought immediate and tangible results for large sections of the labouring poor. It held out the promise of better wages even to the unskilled and the very poor.