The Industrial Revolution began in Britain around 1760, transforming agrarian societies into industrial economies through mechanization, factory production, and urbanization. Innovations like the steam engine, spinning jenny, and power loom revolutionized manufacturing while railroads and canals transformed transportation. This economic transformation created new social classes, altered family structures, and generated unprecedented wealth alongside severe working-class exploitation.

Industrialization provoked Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Blake to celebrate nature and criticize urban degradation and worker exploitation. Blake's 'dark Satanic mills' captured poetry's ambivalence toward industrial progress. The factory system's dehumanization inspired social protest poetry while urbanization created new audiences for popular verse forms. Industrial themes persisted through Victorian poetry addressing poverty, class conflict, and technological change, establishing patterns of literary response to modernization that continued into modernist and contemporary poetry.