Horrified

    After reading the passages assigned for tomorrow, I am just horrified. I think I have always heard the more fantasized, glamorized versions of the working-class during this time period. What comes to mind are movies like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and "Mary Poppins". Of course these are fiction, but that is the extent of my knowledge on this subject. These readings were very eye-opening and grossly fascinating.  Specifically the excerpts from "Contexts: Work and Poverty".
     The section from Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844  was so descriptive, I felt like I could actually smell the horrific smells of the filth and destitution. All of the accounts about how awful the lives of these poor people were struck me as even worse when compared to the excerpt from Andrew Ure's, The Philosophy of Manufactures. His observations and accounts made it sound like it was a privilege for the working people to work in the mills and live in "apartments more airy and salubrious than those of the metropolis"(p.574) is just astounding! It strikes me as so sad and horrendous that these people are being overlooked so blatantly. Engels account goes into detail about the placement of the working-classes housing situation and it is anything  but "airy" (Engels makes it very evident that any spare inch of space was built on to accommodate the poor) and "salubrious" (Engels also describes the filth and how there was excrement and disgusting chemicals and substances everywhere.) The fact the Ure could so blatantly lie about conditions like that is inhumane.
     This inhumanity of Ure, and I'm sure he was not the only one to try to convinve the public that the working conditions really weren't all that bad, makes me think of the slave of accounts and Mary Prince's personal account of what it was like being in slavery. This does not make me think very much of people who administered such horrible treatments to fellow people, and especially children! That I cannot wrap my head around and makes no sense how someone has it in them to do that.
    So basically these readings put things into perspective of what life was really like for the working class in England during this time.