1854 Between 1802 and 1961 the British Parliament passed no fewer than fourteen Acts aimed at the well-being of factory workers. By 1844 the fifth of these was still pretty permissive by today’s health and safety standards. Children as young as nine could work up to nine hours per day, so long as they had a lunch break. Machinery had to be fenced in. All accidents had to be reported to a surgeon – but only if fatal.
So why, ten years later, was Dickens able to write, in his article ‘Ground in the Mill’, of ‘a factory girl … immediately seized by the merciless machine that digs its shaft into her pinafore and hoists her up, tears out her left arm at the shoulder joint, breaks her right arm, and beats her on the head’? And of many other horrific accidents – doing for ‘one hundred and six lives, one hundred and forty-two hands or arms … [and] one thousand, three hundred and forty bones’ since the passing of the 1844 Factory Act?
Because deputations of mill-owners had petitioned the government to soften the fencing provisions – limiting them to seven feet high and leaving the overhead horizontal shafts exposed. So a boy tending a shaft belt could ‘be suddenly snapped up by it, whirled around a hundred and twenty times in a minute, and at each revolution knocked against the ceiling till his bones are almost reduced to powder’.
When the owners’ pleas for legislative mercy failed, they fell back on threats. In Hard Times, the owners claimed they were ‘ruined’ when factory inspectors ‘considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery’, and that rather than submit to regulation and inspection (like present-day investment bankers threatening to take their ‘expertise’ elsewhere) they would ‘sooner pitch [their] property into the Atlantic’.
‘However … [they] were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it.’