Children had been used as cheap labour for centuries without remark. One interesting thing about this passage from Disraeli's Sybil, 1845, is that it was written at all:
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| (Title page from Wikipedia) |
The Commissioners and Disraeli were particularly upset by the conditions in which small children were found working, and by their extreme youth:'Infants of four and five years of age work as trappers in the dark, opening and closing the air doors to the galleries for the coal wagons.' The children were down there in the pitch dark for hours at a time. One of the Commissioners was particularly upset by Margaret Leveston, six years old, coal-bearer. He tells her story in her own words: 'Been down at coal-carrying six weeks; makes 10 to 14 rakes a-day; carries full 56lb of coal in a wooden bachit. "The work s no guid: it is so very sair. I work with sister Jesse and mother; dinna ken the time we gant (to work in the morning) it is gair dark." A most interesting child, and perfectly beautiful.'
From the mid 19th century onwards a number of British writers went to investigate the condition of the poor for themselves. Henry Mayhew includes such accounts in his work on the poor in London. Boys would sweep street crossings, hoping for a few pennies from passers-by. Mayhew says:
'He was a good looking lad, with a pair of large mild eyes, which he took good care to turn up with an expression of supplication as he moaned for a halfpenny.
A cap, or more properly, a stuff bag, covered a crop of hair which had matted itself into the form of so many paint-brushes, while his face, from its roundness of feature and the complexion of dirt, has an almost Indian look about it....
He ran before me, treading cautiously with his naked feet, until I reached a convenient spot to take down his statement, which was as follows:
"I've got no mother or father; mother has been dead for two years, and father's gone for more than that...(He lived with his sister till she got married, then he and his brother in law did not get on) One day he hit me and I said I wouldn't be hit about by him, and then at that night sister gave me three shillings, and told me I must go and get my own living. So I cleaned boots, and I done pretty well with them, till my box was stole from me... (He is fifyteen and has swept crossings for two years) After the Opera we go into the Haymarket, where all the women are who walk the streets all night. They don't give us no money, but they tell the gentlemen to..." (Henry Mayhew, Mayhew's London, selections from London Labour and the London Poor, 1851, ed. Peter Quennell, Spring Books, 1969 pp.399-402)
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| Boy crossing sweepers. London Labour and the London Poor, 1865 (British Library) |
'At about seven years of age the girls first go into the streets to sell. A shallow-basket is given to them, with about two shillings for stock-money, and they hawk, according to the tome of year, either oranges, apples, or violets; some begin their street education with the sale of water-cresses. The money earned by this means is strictly given to the parents. Sometimes - though rarely - a girl who has been unfortunate during the day will not dare return home at night, and then she will sleep under some dry arch or about some market, until the morrow's gains shall ensure her a safe reception and shelter in her father's room. (Mayhew, p. 91)
In the hands of a writer such as Hans Andersen this dry description becomes a story to wring the heart,
the story of one little match-girl, afraid to go home on a cold winter's night:
'In the dawn of morning there lay the poor little one with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, leaning against the wall; she had been frozen to death on the last evening of the year; and the New-year's sun rose and shone upon a little corpse! The child still sat, in the stiffness of death, holding the matches in her hand, one bundle of which was burnt. "She tried to warm herself," said some!' (Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, A new translation by Mrs. Paull...1867. Hans Andersen is a Danish writer; translations of his work quickly became very popular in Britain)
Other British writers followed Mayhew in making their own investigations in the slums and producing accounts of what it was actually like for the teeming poor of Britain's big cities, maintaining themselves just above subsistence and coming into contact with the classes above them mainly when they failed to do so. Writers were particularly concerned by the working and living conditions of children, in such pitiable contrast to the sheltered childhood most middle class Victorian children were enjoying. Hidden away in the back kitchens of squalid courts and tenements, mothers and children too young to be sent out to factories or service did long hours of piecework, paid pitifully small sums for what they produced:
'In a kitchen, in a house of Jennens Row (Birmingham)...late one evening, I found three little children, busy at work at a table on which were heaped up piles of cards, and a vast mass of tangled hooks and eyes. The eldest girl was eleven, the next was nine, and a little boy of five completed the conmpanionship. They were all working as fast as their little fingers could work. The girls sewed, the baby hooked...'The average earnings for a woman and her children at this work was about 8d a day, when a furnished room cost about 5s3d a week, starvation wages. Other popular piecework trades were putting pins, buttons and safety pins onto card for sale and varnishing pen-holders. 'Three-halfpence may be earned at home by varnishing 144 penholders. Each penholder must first be rubbed with sandpaper and then varnished, five coats of the varnish being applied with a sponge. It is dirty and unpleasant work, and you may imagine the comfort of a slum-kitchen full of children in which three pennyworth of sticky penholders - 288 to wit - are lying about in the process of drying. 'One penny a day can be gained by a child bending the tin clasp round safety pins. The nimble fingers of children are apt at this work. Worst of all must have been sewing soldiers' and firemen's leather chinstraps: 'Where firemens's chinstraps have to be made, the needle has to be pushed through four thicknesses of leather. It is hard work for little hands.' In many of these trades the workers had to supply their own needles and thread, the expense of which must be deducted from their pitiful earnings.
(The quotations above are from Robert Sherard The White Slaves of England, 1887)
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| Internet Archive Bookreader, University of Toronto copy) |
'I never saw such little arms and her hands were made to cradle dolls. She was making links for chain-harrows, and as she worked the heavy Oliver she sang a song. And I saw her owner approach with a clenched fist, and heard him say: "I'll give you some golden hair hanging down her back! Why don't you get on with your work?"' Robert Sherard is describing the chain-makers of Cradley Heath in the Black Country near Birmingham, some of the worst paid workers in the country. 'Elsewhere I saw single bellows worked - at 3d a day to the worker and 6d to the employer - by very old men and women or by little boys and girls. A particular and pitiful sight was that of a sweet lass - such as Sir John Millais would have liked to paint - dancing on a pair of bellows...As she danced her golden hair flew out, and the fiery sparks which showered upon her head reminded me of fireflies....' (Robert Sherard)
In George Sim's descriptions of London life in the 1880s the same emotional language and contrast between two ways of life is used, and he chose to concentrate on the misery of one child:
'The attic is almost bare; in a broken fireplace are some smouldering embers...There is a broken chair trying to steady itself against a wall black with the dirt of ages. In one corner, on a shelf, is a battered saucepan and a piece of dry bread. On the scrap of a mantel still remaining embedded in the wall is a rag; on a bit of cord hung across the room are more rags - garments of Heaven knows what - it is a dirty, filthy sack, greasy and black and evil-looking. I could not guess what was in it if I tried, but what was on it was a little child, - a neglected, ragged, grimed, and bare-legged little baby girl of four. There she sat, in the bare, squalid room, perched on the sack, erect, motionless, expressionless, on duty. She was a 'little sentinel', left to guard a baby that lay asleep on the bare boards behind her, its head on its arm, the ragged remains of what had been a shawl flung over its legs. ...I should like some of the little ones whose every wish is gratified, who have but to whimper to have, and who live surrounded by loving, smiling faces, and tended by gentle hands, to see the child in the bare garret sitting sentinel over the sleeping baby on the floor and budging never an inch throughout the weary day from the place that her mother had bid her stay in.
(George Sims, How the Poor Live, 1889)
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| Internet Archive Bookreader, University of Carolina copy) |
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