Birth of Mothern Europe (H Band)

[London's Culture up to the 1830's][Demoralization of London]

[Charles Dickens' view of London's laisee-faire policy]

Definitions:

By: Alberto F. Monegro

Industrial Revolution

The term Industrial Revolution refers to the vast economic and social changes initiated in Great Britain during the last few decades of the eighteenth century and spreading to the Continent and other parts of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It involved a shift from production by individuals alone or in small groups using hand tools powered by muscles, wind, and water to production by organized groups of people in factories using machinery powered by steam. These changes in the methods of production resulted in sustained economic growth. In the process of industrializing, nations experienced rapid population growth and a general shift from a rural society based on agriculture to an urban society based on manufacturing."

Sullivan, E. Richard. "Chapter 40: The Industrial Revolution." (1994) A Short History of Western Civilization. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc., pg. 516

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, at Landport, near Portsmouth, England. He died at Gads Hill, his home in Kent, on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children in a family often plagued by debt, Dickens at ten saw his father arrested and confined in the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison in London, and although a small boy he was placed in a blacking factory where he worked at labeling bottles, visiting John Dickens on Sundays. Charles returned to school on his father's release, taught himself shorthand, and at sixteen became a parliamentary reporter. At twenty-four his career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836), which was followed by Pickwick Papers the next year."

Dickens, Charles. (1997) Charles Dickens: Hard Times. New York, NY: Signet Classic.

Capitalism

An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."

The American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition Version 3.6p (1994) SoftKey International Inc.

Sir Thomas More

SIR THOMAS MORE also SAINT THOMAS MORE, was born in London in 1478. He was a page in the household of Archbishop Morton, who sent him to Oxford, and was called to the bar, whre he was eminently successful. He became an MP and Undersheriff of London, and while envoy to Flanders began writing Utopia in Latin. Finishing it in 1516. He was appointed privy councilor of Henry VIII in 1518 and, recommended by Wolsey, was elected Speaker of the House of Commons in 1525. On the Fall of Wolsey he succeeded against his will as Lord Chancellor of England, the first layman to hold the office. He came into conflict with the king by refusing to acknowledge the sovereign as sole head of the church, and in 1532 he resigned. Charged with high treason, he steadfastly refused to take an oath impugning the pope's authority or upholding Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. During his imprisonment he prepared a Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. He was beheaded in 1535; his canonization occurred four hundred years later"

Radice, Betty., ed. (1965) Utopia New York, New York: Penguin Classics.