Industrial Balladsと産業革命の進展

The purpose of this paper is to trace the process of development of the working-class people\u27s consciousness from the beginning of the industrial revolution. I attempt it here by using very interesting but hitherto rather neglected materials, the industrial ballads. These are the songs written down and sung by working-class people such as weavers, croppers, miners, cutlers, railwaymen, dockers, sailors, calling sellers on the streets, and many other types of worker in then-flourishing industries. Their wives and children were also among those singing communities. Through ballads such as The wark o\u27 the weavers\u27, and \u27The handloom weaver and the factory maid\u27, we can see that the skilled labourers still held the pride in their works while their sons and daughters no longer tarry in ploughing or handloom weaving, but later both of the generations came to realize that the machines and the factories were not so attractive as seen first, but so hateful enough to be crushed and fired down as their enemies as seen in \u27Foster\u27s Mill\u27. After these first confrontations with the industrialization with its steam-engined machines set in the fashionable factories, people came to know that it was their masters and owners that kept them down under the worst conditions of life. The ballads such as \u27Fourpence a day\u27, \u27The coalowner and the pitman\u27s wife\u27 and \u27The blackleg miners\u27 illustrate how they began fighting, timidly first, but later with the firmer convictions, expelling the treacherous ones from among them so as to strengthen their solidarity towards their final successes. They still fought on even to come to reveal in their songs such as The Durham lock-out\u27 and The Gresford disaster\u27 how cruel and greedy, hypocratic and dirty their bosses could be, their only aim being to increase their profits, sacrificing the workers\u27 lives and peace. Lastly they came to versify satirically as in \u27William Brown\u27 in the 20th century that even those greedy bosses themselves had just been driven mad by the blind desire of capital for self-engrossment and so in turn drove their workers to \u27work a little harder\u27, only to lead to overproduction and the market\u27s slump. As we have seen in the above industrial ballads, the British working people have developed their consciousness as the working-class, and documented their feelings and thoughts and fightings in their industrial ballads and handed them down in their singing tradition throughout their own working-class culture