Child slavery Part II

'Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen hours a day, hauls and hurries tubs of coal up subterranean roads'. (Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or, The Two Nations, 1845)

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:

(Title page from Wikipedia)

The details of Disraeli's description are taken directly from the recently published Report of the Commissioner for Mines, 1842 ( British Parliamentary Papers.  Industrial Revolution.  Children's Employment, vol. 6) one so shocking that Disraeli has actually toned down his facts.  The Report on conditions in the Lancashire mines breaks for a paragraph out of factual Commissioner's prose: '...any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work...the girls as well as the boys stark naked down to the waist...their sex was only recognisable by their breasts...at least three-fourths of the men for whom they 'hurry' were stark naked.'

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)

Boy crossing sweepers.
London Labour and the London Poor, 
1865 (British Library)

Mayhew's description of the coster girls is interesting to set against fictionalised accounts:
  '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)

Internet Archive Bookreader, University of Toronto copy)

While earlier accounts of the lives of the poor such as Mayhew's are simply factual later ones are full of strongly emotive language.  Robert Sherard and George Sims were both investigating the conditions of the poor in the 1880s and 90s.  They were filled with a passionate sense of injustice at what they saw, and like novelists used exaggeration to capture the sympathies of their audience, using language which would make the reader compare these children with children leading more pleasant lives:

   '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)

Internet Archive Bookreader,
University of Carolina copy)

Niky Rathbone e-mail childhoodblog@gmail.com

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