In Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution, Emma Griffin uses 350 published and unpublished autobiographies written by working people between 1760 and 1900 to better understand the effects of the industrial revolution on the lives of the men and women who lived through that transformative period. Griffin argues that economic growth resulting from the industrial revolution created greater opportunities and freedom for the working poor (especially adult males) than they had previously enjoyed. The fascinating firsthand accounts and Griffin's great talent as a writer make this book a very engaging and enjoyable read. However, Griffin makes a number of sweeping conclusions based upon a small quantity of evidence, and in some instances this evidence is not subjected to sufficient critical analysis.

While working-class autobiographies have the potential to offer great rewards to the historian, they are sources that need to be evaluated with great skill and care. Griffin, in her introduction, spends a scant four pages addressing the methodological issues related to their use. She acknowledges some of the challenges but dismisses them very quickly and with little consideration. For example, a reader might ask about the representative nature of her sample. Is there something self-selecting about a working-class man or woman who would choose to write an autobiography? Griffin addresses this question in two paragraphs, asserting that literacy was not rare among laborers and that her sample of autobiographies represents a wide range of experiences from the working class. Yet the fact that so many of the names of her autobiographers are immediately recognizable to the reader (Samuel Bamford, William Lovett, Robert Lowery, Thomas Burt) is a strong hint that these writers might have been unique in ambition, ability, or self-confidence and led less typical lives. Griffin often extrapolates experiences from a slender portion of her already small number of autobiographies to make conclusions about much larger groups of working people. For example, in chapter 6, Griffin argues that the expectation that couples should not be able to marry until they had obtained the means to establish an independent household was unraveling due to the opportunities made available by industrialization, citing as evidence that 10 percent of the marriages described in her group of autobiographies written between 1790 and 1860 show newlywed couples residing with one set of parents after the wedding. This conclusion might very well be correct, but she bases it on a very small sample that may or may not be representative of the larger industrial work force. Nor does Griffin spend a great deal of time considering the motives of the writers, and she only briefly explores how the expectations of audiences might have shaped such works. Griffin fails to consider working-class autobiographies as a type of literature with its own forms, conventions, patterns, and tropes, and at times she comes dangerously close to taking them uncritically at face value.

She divides her book is divided into three parts: “Earning a Living,” “Love,” and “Culture.” In part 1 she discusses the ways in which the greater availability of work, made possible by industrialization, increased opportunities and freedom for working men. She argues that the repeal of the apprenticeship clauses of the Statute of Artificers in 1814, usually portrayed as undermining skilled workers' standards of life, opened up the world of skilled work in many trades to a far greater number of workers than ever before. For her subjects, economic growth meant that in urban industrial areas there was abundant, good-paying, and regular work. Griffin provides a few examples of male workers casually leaving their work for better opportunities or because of disagreements with their employers, suggesting that industrialization “changed the balance of power in the master-servant relationship” (34) giving workers more freedom in the workplace. In my own studies of the application of the master and servant acts and the thousands of workers who went to prison for attempting to leave their employment, I have seen contrary evidence that suggests that the law shaped labor markets that continued to be quite favorable to employers, the experiences of four autobiographers notwithstanding. Griffin qualifies her optimistic portrayal of the industrial revolution to concede that men received a greater share of the benefits than women and children. After acknowledging the hardships of child labor, Griffin argues that the industrial revolution did not change children's work by introducing the assumption that the young should work, which had been widely held for some time, but rather by making more regular work available for children. The chapter on female labor is almost exclusively about the experiences of married women, again, a consequence of the limitation of source material. Griffin finds that married women without children usually continued in waged work after marriage, while the larger a married woman's family, the less likely she was to continue in paid employment outside the home due to the challenges of childcare and cultural expectations.

In part 2, the chapter on the changes in working-class sexuality, “Naughty Tricks of the Bed,” is fascinating but flimsy. The chapter is based almost entirely upon the accounts of male autobiographers, a conundrum that Griffin wrestles with for a paragraph before plowing ahead. Although she does a skillful job of reading these sources against the grain, it is clear that a more direct female perspective might complicate her discussion of the negotiations between men and women during a period of increased sexual activity outside of marriage.

The last part of the book is the strongest. Here the autobiographies provide insight into the proliferation of educational opportunities through Sunday schools, mechanic institutes, reading groups, and book clubs. These institutions provided not only education but also the opportunity for workers to exercise agency and leadership. This combined with active participation in nonconformist churches to provide many of the autobiographers with the training and experience necessary to move into a range of political activities. Griffin finds a significant increase in the participation of her subjects in political activity in the period after 1820. However, Griffin again outruns her evidence when she claims that this political activity “was not a symptom of the workforce's growing discontent, but of new levels of freedom, confidence and autonomy” (236). Working people in a range of political activities articulated discontent with the social, political, and economic status quo with great force, clarity, and regularity.

Griffin's book is an engaging and well-written work that should be read by students both for its virtues and its flaws. The work provides valuable firsthand insights into the period that demonstrate the wide range and complexity of experiences in the Industrial Revolution, and Griffin puts forward a number of provocative arguments that certainly merit further exploration and debate. The book would also be a useful to assignment students to give them an opportunity to discuss methodology and the use of sources, for, ultimately, Griffin's evidentiary base cannot hold up some of her more sweeping conclusions.