Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Human Labor, and New Modes of Critique in Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, and George Eliot's Felix Holt
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Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Huma ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
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power was advanced during this era. Inventions like the steam turbine altered the process by which power was generated and enabled the automation of factory labor, with dire consequences of unemployment and disenfranchisement for the assimilated and instrumentalized working class.

The integration of technology and manual labor during the Victorian age satisfied the demands of a primitive but growing economy that no longer required sufficient numbers of highly skilled workers to operate automated machines. As Victorian social theorist John Burnett suggests in his seminal work, The Annals of Labour, prior to the Industrial Revolution, workers were classified as either skilled craftsmen, “who had learnt a specialized craft or ‘mystery’ by apprenticeship,” or unskilled laborers, “who had only muscular strength to sell” (56). However, the automation of production and the development of the “factory system”

vastly complicated this traditional distinction by virtually creating a new category of manual worker—the machine-minder, or factory operative who, though intimately familiar with the particular, sub-divided operation of his machine, was able to exercise only limited judgement or discretion over its performance. For him—or for her, since a high proportion of such workers, especially in the textile factories, were female—a short period of training rather than a long apprenticeship was generally all that was necessary. (57)

Automated labor multiplied productivity by diminishing the time and resources needed to cultivate skilled craftsmen. Poorly educated workers were taught to adapt themselves to sequencing tasks that were sufficiently mimicked through repetition of technical processes. Carrying out technical processes required less individual thought and responsiveness and instead required