From Fields to Railways

The Industrial Revolution was not experienced only in factories and great cities. For thousands of families, it was a journey from the countryside into a new world of wages, railways and industrial communities.

From Fields to Railways follows the Jenkins family as successive generations moved from agricultural communities into the expanding railway towns of nineteenth-century Britain.

Using family history as a means of exploring wider social change, Antony David Davies examines agricultural labour, migration, railway employment, family formation and the development of working-class identity.

The movement from field to railway represented much more than a change of occupation. It altered where families lived, how they earned their living, the communities to which they belonged and the prospects available to their children.

Combining genealogy with social history, this book places the experiences of an ordinary family within one of the greatest transformations in modern British history.

For readers interested in family history, railway history, Victorian society and the lives of Britain's working people.