Just curious as to how big of a deal the Industrial Revolution was as it happened. It occurred over decades, so I feel like it would be a bit hard to see the progress unless looking in hindsight. Obviously now it is seen as a huge advancement in modern civilizations, but was it seen that way at the time?
If it was noticed, what were opinions like at the time? Was everyone pro-industrial revolution, or were there people who were against it (like how some people are/were against nuclear power.)
Oh yes: that's what the Luddites were all about. They weren't so much anti-technology, as against the idea of people losing their livelihood in the name of productive efficiency. The Industrial Revolution meant that many people were losing their jobs to automation. For example, weaving was a major source of employment. The mechanisation of the textiles industry threatened to destitute many working class people, and it was already happening. The working people could see that these new machines equated to a loss of their livelihood. The Luddites destroyed the new machines so 1) people could keep their jobs, and 2) to dissuade other factory owners from thinking that firing their workers and replacing them with machines would not be a profitable venture.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education ... I'm on my mobile. Hopefully this source is adequate, although I feel like I am referencing a glossary.
It took a while to sink in: in his 1798 Essay Malthus noted the growth of manufacture and income, but famously paid little heed to industry's revolutionary potential, pausing rather to criticise manufacture's "unhealthy occupations" and the tendency of its workers to spend their earnings "in drunkenness and dissipation".
Riello & O'Brien conclude (1) that while British and Continental observers increasingly noted the growth of industry and commerce, even as late as 1815-48
It would be stretching available sources to the limits of credibility for a historian to conclude that very many people among the articulate and informed generation of Britons who lived through three to four decades, that followed the long wars against France, evidently appreciated that their economy and society was passing through a revolution of trans-national significance for the history of civilisation.
Even then, Europeans often pilloried their island neighbours' materialism rather than celebrating industrial growth: the authors suggest that a more positive perception triumphed with Britain's 1840s shift to free trade and the subsequent Victorian boom to 1873.