All of these words were newly coined or used in their modern sense (in the english language) between the years 1789 and 1848. All of these words were used by people in England to describe or give a name to things they saw were happening around them.

What was happening in England in these sixty years? The Industrial Revolution. A new way of using natural resources. Historians say the Industrial Revolution transformed England for ever after. They say this revolution has transformed, and continues to transform, the entire world. As it transforms the world, so we use the same words to imagine, write, and talk about what's happening around us.

Words like 'nationality', 'engineer', 'scientist', and 'journalism'. Words like 'strike', 'proletariat' and (economic) 'crisis'. Words like 'statistics' and 'sociology', 'liberal' and 'conservative'.

Words like 'pauperism'. It is the year 1814. The war with Napoleon Bonaparte is over. Since the 1780s, the steam engine has been perfected, and textile manufacturers have begun to use them in factories; in this year, George Stevenson begins to work on a prototype of the steam locomotive engine. In England, the Industrial Revolution is in full swing.

Come to the city of Manchester in Lancashire, England. Walk about.

You see hundreds of factories five or six storeys high. At the side of each factory is a great chimney that belches black smoke and indicates the presence of steam engines. The smoke from chimneys forms a great cloud seen for miles around the town. The houses have become black on account of the smoke.

You see many, many spinning mills. You enter a mill in which cotton is being spun. Inside, huge looms stand in rows like an army regiment. Mule jennies have been built to run the looms efficiently. An adult or two children can operate 600 spindles at a time. Suddenly, above the din of a thousand shuttles going clackety-clack, you hear a song:

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), a prolific novelist, worked as a child in a blacking factory. He has been called a ‘condition-of-England’ novelist; his stories focus on how English society was changing under the Industrial revolution. He is not only observant, but also manages to pack a satiric punch in his writing. Hard Times, bits of which are given below, was published in 1854.

Coketown was a triumph of fact. It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye. It had vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets and many small streets all like each other inhabited by people who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound, upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were inseparable from the work by which it was sustained. Against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made people fine, people who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. All the public places in the town were painted alike, in severe black and white. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere. The school was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact. Everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest.

In the hardest working part of Coketown where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts shouldering and trampling, and pressing one another to death — in this part lived the multitude of Coketown, generically called "the Hands". And among them lived Stephen Blackpool. He was 40 years of age, but looked older. He had had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; in Stephen’s case, somebody else had his roses, and he had the same somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own. He was a good power-loom worker, and a man of perfect integrity.

The lights in the great factories made them look like Fairy palaces. The Fairy palaces burst into illumination before morning in Coketown. A clattering of clogs upon the pavements; a rapid ringing of bells; and all the mad elephants, polished and oiled, were at their heavy exercise again.

So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power. Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady. A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he laboured.

Edited from Hard Times by Charles Dickens,
Penguin Classics, ch. IX, X, XII.  On loan

Moneylenders binding peasants in eternal debt? Didn’t this kind of thing disappear with nineteenth century Bengali literature? Or with Premchand’s Godan? Travelling in India’s poorest districts from 1993 to 1995, P Sainath found otherwise

"Jaiswal saab (the local moneylender) asked my husband to put his thumbprint on a document, saying he would fetch rations for us from town," says Suhaso. On the strength of that thumbprint, Jaiswal saab took a loan of Rs 7,700 in her husband’s name from a scheme meant only for adivasis. Using their names, he got a pumpset and had a well dug on his land. Land Suhaso’s