SOURCE: "The Industrial Revolution and the Common Man," in Ideas in Context, edited by Joseph Satin, Houghton Mifflin, 1958, pp. 7-14.

In the following essay first published in 1951, Hawkes outlines various causes and effects of the Industrial Revolution, emphasizing the destruction of eighteenth-century rural culture and the predominance of scientific thought..

The pattern of settlement was no longer to be decided by the character of the soil, the surface features of the land and the climate, but by the distribution of the deposits which time had left far below the surface. Huge numbers left farms and villages and swarmed to the places where coal and metal ores lay hidden; once there they showed an extraordinary fecundity. The population doubled and doubled again. By the middle of the nineteenth century half the people of Britain were living in towns, a situation new in the history of great nations.

Those town...