My concern in this article is not with the process of industrialization in England or Great Britain, with its causes, or (with one exception) with its supposed consequences. Therefore I will not attempt to comment except in passing on the abundant and still-burgeoning literature devoted to it. Instead, my focus is on the name by which that process (or its putative beginnings) is generally but incorrectly known. As I have argued elsewhere, the term industrial revolution is a misnomer without scientific basis (Cameron 1981, 1982). It was a catchphrase popularized by a youthful, naive social reformer, not a scholar, who wanted to draw attention to the causes of what he regarded as the moral degradation of the British working classes (Toynbee 1884; on his naïveté see Kadish 1986).