SOURCE: Ferguson, Sheila. “Children at Work.” In Growing Up in Victorian Britain, pp. 54-61. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1977.

[In the following excerpt, Ferguson discusses the various trades in which children were employed in nineteenth-century England and the abuses associated with each particular form of child labor.]

CHILDREN IN INDUSTRY

In the 1830s thousands of children worked in factories, workshops and mines in the most appalling conditions, often for a mere pittance in wages. Their employers, the manufacturers who had successfully carried through a revolution in industry, resisted the demand for factory reform on the grounds that it would increase their costs and that it was an unreasonable interference with private property and individual freedom. It seemed that the prosperity of industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire depended on a few thousand children. William Cobbett made this point in the House of Commons:

… a most surprising discovery has been made, namely, that all our greatness and prosperity, that our superiority over other nations, is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. We have made the notable discovery, that, if these little girls work two hours less in a day than they now do, it would occasion the ruin of the country; that it would enable other nations to compete with us; and thus make an end to our boasted wealth, and bring us to beggary!

But the employment of children was nothing new. Children had worked in the fields and in their homes, carding, spinning and helping in any jobs that they could do. No doubt they had often worked long hours and had sometimes been beaten for slacking, but working for one's parents or a local farmer was a very different proposition from working in a factory or down a mine. Children were exploited as cheap labour. They had to work very long hours in unhealthy and often dangerous conditions for low pay. Discipline was harsh. Parents were often loath to let their children work, but their wages were vital for the family.

FACTORY WORK

In the early years of the revolution in the textile industry, when water was the source of power, the mills were built often in remote places near swift-flowing Pennine streams. Pauper child ‘apprentices’ were employed, who lived at the factories. However when steam power was introduced the textile industry concentrated on the coalfields of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Now the children employed were so-called ‘free labour children’ who lived at home with their parents.

The first effective Factory Act passed in 1833 forbade the employment of children under nine and limited the hours of work in all textile mills for children aged 9 to 13 to 48 hours a week. Four Factory Inspectors were appointed to supervize the carrying out of this Act. Two hours a day education was to be provided for children under 13 working in the cotton, wool, worsted and flax industries but this was found to be very difficult to enforce. Indeed it was hardly practicable to expect a child to be able to work eight hours a day in a factory and also be fit for two hours schooling, so later the government dropped this provision.

CHILDREN IN MINES

In 1842 British public opinion was deeply shocked by the Report of the Children's Employment Commission which, after two years of gathering evidence, revealed barbaric conditions of work for children in coal mines. Children began work as early as four or five years old but usually at eight or nine. They started as ‘trappers’ sitting alone and in the dark for very long hours beside the ventilation trap doors, and opening or closing them as coal carts passed. Sarah Gooder, aged eight, stated:

I'm a trapper in the Gauber Pit. I have to trap without a light and I'm scared. I go at four and sometimes half-past three in the morning, and come out at five and half-past. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then. I don't like being in the pit. I am very sleepy when I go sometimes in the morning.

And Mary Davis ‘a very pretty little girl’ from South Wales said ‘her lamp had gone out for want of oil … and rats or someone had run away with her bread and cheese’.

From about six years of age children began to work, pushing, dragging and carrying the coal from where it was hewn to the bottom of the shaft. Sometimes they were harnessed to the trucks like pit ponies and dragged them through the dark passages on all fours. Some children worked the pumps and had to stand ankle-deep in cold water for as long as 12 hours at a stretch. In East Scotland it was reported that girls carried up to 150 kilograms (three hundredweight) loads of coal in baskets on their backs up and down rickety ladders beside the pit shaft. The children were often bullied and beaten by the miners. James Robinson aged 14 said he had been kicked, had his ears and hair pulled, had coal thrown at him but dared not complain as he believed the miner he worked for would kill him. His brothers aged ten and 13 had been beaten until they could hardly get home but dared not tell for fear of worse usage or in case they and their father lost their work. The excessively hard work in narrow passages often led to stunted growth and crippled or distorted bodies.

DANGER IN THE PIT

There was also the great danger of accidents as many mines had not even the most elementary safety precautions. For instance the ventilation doors, most vital safety-points, were in the sole control of small children. Boys were often in charge of the winding gear whereby people were raised up or lowered down the shaft. Once a boy was distracted by a mouse and three boys travelling in the cage were killed; another time an inspector saw a child of ten hurled 56 metres (60 yards) to the bottom of the pit and dashed to pieces. There was the constant risk of falling coal or cave-ins, of being crushed by coal trucks, of suffocation by firedamp, of explosion and of drowning. In Lancashire and Cheshire it was reported that accidents were ‘a daily occurrence’ in many mines and ‘so common that a record of them is seldom kept’.

The Mines Bill introduced into the House of Commons by Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury) passed without serious disagreement but in the House of Lords, Lord Londonderry and other mine owners criticized and amended the bill. ‘Never have I seen such a display of selfishness, frigidity to every human sentiment’, wrote Ashley in his diary. The Act prohibited the work underground of boys under ten years old and of all women and girls.

REPORTS AND REGULATIONS

The 1833 Factory Act had applied only to textile mills and it was not until 1847 that regulations were made about the hours of work for children in some other industries. Many trades were, however, completely unregulated until well into the second half of the century. A Report of the Children's Employment Commission in 1843 described conditions in the calico-printing, lace, hosiery, metal, pottery, glass, paper and tobacco industries. It told of children as young as three years old working sometimes 18 hours a day, of exploited so-called ‘apprentices’, of deformity, disease and accidents caused by long hours and unhealthy and dangerous conditions. However, there were still plenty of people who saw nothing wrong in child labour. ‘We would rather see boys and girls earning their means of support in the mill than starving by the roadside, shivering on pavements, or conveyed to Bridewell’ (a prison) stated one writer on the factory system. Others commented on the sportive rather than gloomy appearance of the child workers, ‘lively elves’ whose work ‘seemed to resemble a sport, in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity’.

Many occupations for which children were used were much too straining for their immature frames. Brick-making for instance where they carried very heavy loads of clay on their heads for long hours each day was very injurious to their health. A report in the 1860s on child labour in the Potteries revealed that some 11,000 children were working for as long as 16 hours a day for as little as half a crown (12[frac12]p) a week. Heavy moulds were lugged from the potters' wheels to the furnace where the temperature was about 54° C (120° F) by boys between six and ten years old. They were sent on errands from the great heat sometimes to freezing temperatures; it is not surprising that many of them died of tuberculosis and asthma.

CHIMNEY SWEEPS

Even worse tortures were inflicted on the boys sent to sweep chimneys. The poet William Blake wrote:

When my mother died I was very young
And my father sold me while yet my
          tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep, 'weep, 'weep,
          'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I
          sleep.

These ‘climbing boys’ (and sometimes girls) were often bound as apprentices to chimney sweeps and were forced to climb the narrowest and most difficult chimneys in order to sweep the flues. They came back from their work at first ‘with their arms and knees streaming with blood and their knees looking as if the caps had been pulled off’ reported the Children's Employment Commission in 1863. They were driven in sheer terror of their masters up into dark, sooty places where some children got lost, wedged in or suffocated. They were urged up by threats, sticks, pins stuck in their bare feet or even fires lit in the grate beneath them. The climbing children began work at the ‘nice trainable age’ of about six and worked from 12 to 16 hours a day. Charles Kingsley's Water Babies made the plight of chimney sweeps like Tom known and Lord Ashley campaigned tirelessly for legislation to prevent this wicked cruelty, but it was not until 1875 that at last regulations restricting child chimney sweeps were passed.

OTHER WORK

Poor children in towns scratched a bare living from many kinds of jobs in Victorian Britain. Crossing-sweepers, boot-blacks, match-sellers, flower-girls, hawkers of all kinds and mudlarks all tried to earn the price of a night's lodging at a doss house or to have a few coppers to take home to their families. Mudlarks waded in the slime of the Thames in search of coal or anything else of value. Children also worked in many small workshop trades such as pillow-making and card-setting. The work in itself was not harmful but the hours were long. Girls employed in dress-making establishments, as lace-makers or glove-makers, had to work such a long day that it was common for their health to fail and many of them died. In the country children worked in the fields with their parents, especially at harvest and fruit picking times. Young children were employed as bird-scarers; older ones as goose-girls or shepherds, or to weed or to pick up stones from the fields. They might have to walk five or six miles to get to the work in the morning and then all the way home at night. Their wages were very low and the work they did was often hard and exhausting.

DOMESTIC SERVICE

Apart from work in factories, workshops and mines the main other source of employment for girls was domestic service. At the Census of 1851 there were over a million domestic servants in England and Wales, and nearly two-thirds of these came from country homes. When a daughter in a farm labourer's cottage reached the age of 12 or so her family often tried to find her ‘a place’ as a domestic servant. It might be work in the kitchen of a small farmer or in a grand house. Whichever it was it was an exhausting life. She had to rise early and often got to bed late, the work was heavy and hard and the pay perhaps £3 a year. Her employer or the higher servants were supposed to train her but for her early years she was a drudge and many young girls were worn out by such service before they had completed their growth.