Child slavery: British working children, 18th and 19th centuries

 " Girl number twenty, isn't this a prosperous nation?".....
"I said I didn't know.   I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine."
(Sissy Jupe in  Hard Times, Charles Dickens, 1854)

William Hutton of Birmingham, England, has left an autobiography which gives one of the few detailed accounts of the upbringing of a British working child in the 18th century.  He was born in Derby in 1723 and apprenticed to the local silk mill at the age of seven.  'My parents, through mere necessity, put me to labour before nature had made me able.  Low as the engines were, I was too short to reach then.  In remedy of this defect, a pair of high pattens were fabricated and lashed to my feet, which I dragged after me till time lengthened my stature'.  He did not find work particularly hard, although he had to get up at 5am, but the memory of the severity with which he and the other apprentices were treated remained with him all his long life:  'the severity was intolerable, the marks of which I yet carry, and shall carry to the grave.'  His account has often been quoted of how, on a winter's night, the unnaturally bright moonlight deceived him into thinking he had slept past his time, rose in tears for fear of punishment and ran the the hundred yards to the mill, falling nine times on the icy road, only to find it was not yet two. (Life of William Hutton, written by himself, 1816.)

The Sadler Report of 1832-3 on children's employment in the British textile industry contains a large number of personal accounts of child labour in the mills.  William Cooper entered a flax mill at ten and worked a sixteen hour day in spite of legislation which had already prohibited such hours for children  They were frequently so tired that they fell asleep at their work:  "You say that you were strapped (beaten with a leather strap) when at the mill?"  "When the frames wanted doffing they strapped us to keep us up to it...if we slept or sat down for two or three minutes, they would strap us to it; sometimes we got two or three minutes to sit down, and then we dropped asleep." (Sadler Report from the Committee on the bill to regulate the labour of children in the mills and factories of the United Kingdom, 1832-3, British Parliamentary Papers, Industrial Revolution, Children's Employment, Irish U.P. series 1968 Vol. 2) The mills were hot and humid, to prevent the cotton thread from breaking, and particularly in the carding rooms the air was thick with fluff which got into the stomach and lungs, causing loss of appetite and respiratory diseases.  "Little bits of fluff fly off fro' the cotton when they are carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust.  They say it winds round the lungs, and tightens them up.  Anyhow, there's many a one as works in a carding-room, that falls into a waste, coughing and spitting blood, because they're just poisoned by the fluff." says Bessie in Mrs. Gaskell's North and South.  From working in these conditions the children grew up unhealthy, stunted, or even deformed, and some were crippled from working, inadequately guarded, machinery.

Children were just as much exploited in other industrial trades, and those remained unprotected by the Factory Acts.  Charles Shaw, on whose account if life in the pottery towns Arnold Bennett's novels are based, wrote: 'When the Queen came to the throne (1837) work was scarce and food was dear.  The Corn Laws were bringing into play their most cruel and evil results.  One of these results was that little children had to compete for the decreasing sum of available work.  As no Factory Act applied in the district where I began to work the work of the children could be used as harsh necessity or harder greed determined.' (Charles Shaw, When I was a child, 1903)  He became a mould-runner, stacking moulds in the stove room, hot and exhausting work, at the age of seven.

(From www.thepotteries.org)

Children in the country were in a healthier environment than children in the city slums, and their rude health by comparison with city children was often commented on, but their lives really were equally hard.  Particularly in the East Midlands and East Anglia gangs of women and children were used to clear the fields of stones, sort potatoes, weed and pick crops such as peas, fruit and potatoes which have to be harvested by hand.  In fact such crops are still harvested in this way but not usually by children.  In the 1850s children and women worked generally under a gang master who paid them a flat rate per day but was himself paid by the amount of work they did.  It was therefore in his interest to see that they worked as hard as they could.  Mrs. Burrows who worked in such a gang near Peterborough says in her memoirs: 'On the day that I was eight years of age, I left school and began to work fourteen hours a day in the fields, with forty to fifty children of whom, even at that early age, I was the eldest.  We were followed all day long by an old man carrying a long whip in his hand which he did not forget to use.  A great many of the children were only five years of age.  You will think that I am exaggerating, but I am not....We always left the town, summer and winter, the moment the old Abbey clock struck six...We had to walk a very long way to our work, never much less than two miles each way, and very often five miles each way...I never remembered to have reached home sooner than six and more often seven, even in winter.' (From Raphael Samuel ed. Village life and labour,  History Workshop series Routledge, 1975 p98-112)

During the 18th century legislators and the public began to be seriously concerned not only for the working conditions of pauper and poor children but also for the living conditions of those in the care of parish workhouses; virtually the only recourse of the destitute.  In 1760 Jonas Hanaway alerted a shocked public to the fact that four out of five infants born or taken into the workhouse died in their first year, and attempts were made to remedy the situation,.  However, increased costs constantly thwarted the efforts of reformers, and since the public is quick to forget even the most shocking mortality figures the workhouses constantly fell back into the general mixed type: 'A place in which the young are trained in idleness, ignorance and vice.'(A detailed account of the workhouses is given in Sidney and Beatrice Webb's English Poor Law History, 1927)

Charles Shaw and his family found themselves driven to apply for assistance in 1842 when, as a result of a strike, their father could not find work.  'The very vastness of it chilled us.  Our reception was more chilling still.  Everybody we saw and spoke to looked metallic, as if worked from within by hidden machinery.  Their voices were metallic, and sounded harsh and imperative.  The younger ones huddled more closely to their parents, as if from fear of these stern officials.  Doors were unlocked by keys, belonging to bunches, and the sound of keys and locks and bars, and doors banging, froze the blood within us.'  In the workhouse they were split up and the children did not see their parents again until Sunday:'Sunday afternoon brought an hour of unspeakable joy.  The children who had mothers were permitted to go to the women's room.' ( (Charles Shaw, op.cit, p. 96, p.121)

Niky Rathbone e-mail childhoodblog@gmail.com