The memoirs of John Hemmingway, a soldier from Norwich, Norfolk (Norfolk Record Office MC 766/1)

Contrary to the view that the industrial revolution brought only misery and poverty, Dr Emma Griffin at the University of East Anglia shows for the first time how it raised incomes, improved literacy and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For some it was also an era of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom.

Dr Griffin, a senior lecturer in history, looked at more than 350 autobiographies and records written between 1760 and 1900, many of them previously unpublished and stored in county record offices and library collections, to offer a first-hand account of how the industrial revolution was experienced by those who lived through it - from factory workers, miners and carpenters to servants, shoemakers and farm labourers.

In Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution, published by Yale University Press, Dr Griffin provides an alternative account of labour and the industrial revolution, arguing that it is time to reconsider the often repeated claims that it bought little but misery to those who did most to produce it.

"Despite on-going interest in how the industrial revolution was experienced by the poor, no one has opened the pages of the books and notebooks where the poor wrote about just that,” said Dr Griffin. “Historians have measured wages and working hours with meticulous care, yet none has sought to listen to, or make sense of, the messy tales that the workers left behind. If we listen rather than count, we shall start to see the industrial revolution in a very different light.

"It is too often assumed that workers like these left little mark on the historical record and must forever remain voiceless. But as these autobiographies show, the workers in Britain's fields and factories were not always as silent as had generally been supposed. They capture a broad swath of the working-class and their life experiences.

“For all their shortcomings, these accounts offer the best way – indeed the only way – to examine the lives of working people during one of the most momentous transitions in world history. These writers bequeathed an extraordinary collection of historical sources and hundreds of evocative tales of everyday life. My aim has been to tell their story, an unexpected tale of working people carving out for themselves new levels of wealth, freedom and autonomy."

Most of the autobiographies Dr Griffin studied were written by men, who were to gain most from industrialisation. The period brought more work, but this also meant more work for children who were often forced into the workplace at an increasingly young age. The factory districts offered more employment opportunities for women, which provided younger working females with greater freedoms, but motherhood often took those away and left women in even the most economically vibrant areas living lives that differed little from those of their grandmothers.

However, while poverty continued to be a way of life for many, Dr Griffin suggests that industrialisation brought unexpected benefits for some sections of the labouring poor.

“Critics will argue that the material gains for most families were small. Men, women and children felt the advent of industrialisation in very different ways and men certainly benefitted more than women and children. However, economic exploitation and political oppression could live side by side with newfound and much valued personal freedoms. These writers viewed themselves not as downtrodden losers but as men and women in control of their destiny; that the industrial revolution heralded the advent not of a yet 'darker period', but the dawn of liberty.”

Liberty's Dawn examines the experiences of men and women at work, the rise in child labour and attitudes to marriage and sex, as well as the role of culture, education and religion, and the growth in opportunities for political activism.

Dr Griffin said: “Attention has been focused for so long upon the way change destroyed older and valued ways of life that historians have largely failed to notice the gains that many working men wrought for themselves out of the turmoil. Industrial growth provided the labouring poor with a degree of personal freedom that the poor in the 18th century had rarely enjoyed.”

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (ISBN: 9780300151800) is published by Yale University Press. Dr Griffin is the author of three previous books, including A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (2010) and Blood Sport: A History of Hunting in Britain (2007).