In Liberty's Dawn Griffin takes up the question “what was the impact of the world's first industrial revolution on the ordinary men, women, and children who lived through it?” (p. 4). This is an old question, but Griffin brings a new perspective to the debate. Griffin shifts the emphasis away from the material standard of living and focuses instead on non-material aspects of life such as whether people were empowered to make decisions about their own lives. E. P. Thompson (Making of the English Working Class, 1963) also argued for focusing less on wages and more on human experience, but he reached a pessimistic conclusion. Griffin's conclusion is decidedly optimistic: “these writers viewed themselves not a downtrodden losers but as men and women in control of their destiny; … the industrial revolution heralded the advent not of a yet ‘darker period’, but of the dawn of liberty” (p. 20).

The sources Griffin uses, which provide the evidence for her optimistic conclusion, are autobiographies of working-class people, where the working class is defined as those who earned their living and includes skilled tradesmen as well as unskilled workers. The autobiographies are supplemented by parish records, particularly in the section on marriage. The text is surprisingly free of references to the secondary literature. Outside of the introduction, which discusses the classic texts from Toynbee to Thompson, references to the secondary literature are generally confined to footnotes. This may result from the desire to write a less academic book which appeals to a wider audience, or from a desire to let the people of the Industrial Revolution speak for themselves. As an academic reader, I sometimes found myself wanting to know more about how Griffin's conclusions compared to the conclusions of other historians.

Griffin also makes a point of avoiding quantitative analysis. In the introduction she claims “if we listen rather than count, we shall start to see the industrial revolution in a very different light” (p. 16). Of course, counting is useful, and she does report averages. For example, the average age at starting work was ten (p. 60). Numbers are also used to establish trends and relationships. Before 1820 only 5 percent of autobiographers were politically active, while after 1820 20 percent were (p. 222). Eighty percent of mothers with only one child worked, while only 50 percent of mothers of three or four children worked (p. 101). So the book does not entirely avoid numbers, but it is distinctly less quantitative than Jane Humphries's Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010), which is also based on working-class autobiographies. Griffin does a good job of listening, but occasionally goes too far in making the effort to not count. In the chapter on child labor Griffin describes a graph that is not included in the book (p. 60, “When the ages at which children started work are plotted on a graph …”). I think seeing the graph would have helped, not hindered, my understanding of child labor.

In any case the book is successful in supporting its thesis, that people who lived through the Industrial Revolution experienced better lives as a result. The book covers improvements in three broad categories: work opportunities, freedom of choice in marriage and family, and political empowerment. Many men found increased opportunities to work in skilled trades as apprenticeship restrictions declined. While cottage industry declined and farm workers did not fare very well, many trades saw an increased demand for labor, which brought with it increased power for the worker. Industrialization also provided more opportunities for children to work; given the values of people at the time this was a good thing.

Working people also had greater power over their family lives. Young people had more choice in when to have sex and whom to marry, and some women gained enough economic independence that they could choose not to marry. One woman in particular, Ellen Johnston, could support her mother and her illegitimate daughter by working in the cotton factories. Griffin finds that Ellen celebrated this life: “In Ellen's eyes Dundee offered her a life of freedom. Industrial Britain allowed her sex without marriage, motherhood without a husband, paid work rather than the drudgery of unpaid housekeeping” (p. 161).

Workers also found themselves empowered to speak out publicly. Working people organized and benefited from mutual improvement societies and Sunday Schools. Non-conformist churches cared less about social rank and welcomed the working class as leaders. For some the experience gained in these institutions was used to promote political causes such as Chartism. As industrialization progressed working people found more opportunities to act on the public stage.

The one area where Griffin is pessimistic is women's work. She concludes that women's opportunities for work outside the home did not expand during the Industrial Revolution and that women, unlike men, did not benefit from the decline of apprenticeship. For married women, industrialization “did little to change the kind of work they did” (p. 96). This conclusion seems to be at odds with the freedom celebrated by Ellen Johnston, but we must remember that single and married women could have very different experiences. Since few autobiographies were written by women, the source gives us little information about single women. It also means that we are not hearing from the women themselves what they thought about their work opportunities. Griffin reports that mothers living in areas of the greatest economic growth were less likely to work (p. 96), but we do not know whether these women experienced that as constraint or freedom.

Liberty's Dawn is enjoyable to read, and provides us with a strongly optimistic picture of the Industrial Revolution. Whatever faults historian have found with the period, the people who lived through it and wrote about it thought that their lives were improved.