Suffer Little Children
The food of the family had to come through the fingers of the family … The consequence was, that as soon as a shilling or two a week could be earned by any of us, we had to do it. My term of toil began when but a few months over six years of age. (Whittaker, p. 36)
THE DOLEFUL IMAGE of the Victorian child forced to work long hours from a very young age is one of the first things that come to mind when we consider Britain’s industrial past. Poets, novelists, essayists and reformers have all played their part in immortalising the plight of the child worker. Children crowd the margins of several of Charles Dickens’ novels, most memorably, perhaps, in the form of Oliver Twist with his narrow escape as the apprentice of Mr Gamfield the chimney-sweep; and in David Copperfield, Dickens’ semi-autobiographical hero, sent to work as a ‘labouring hind’ in the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby at the age of ten.1 A little later in the century, Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies took up the theme of the chimney-sweep once again and, whether intended or not, the novel became part of the last push to outlaw the use of boys as chimney-sweeps in all its guises. And besides the great canon, a host of more ephemeral novels such as Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth’s Helen Fleetwood exposed the suffering of child workers to the middle-class reader. The industrial novels are perhaps not the finest examples of Victorian literature, but it is nonetheless remarkable that privileged writers were so ready to take up their pen for the most powerless members of society.2
Nor was it just the poets and novelists who were offended by the employment of the very young in factories and mines. Many of the period’s most vocal and prolific commentators turned their attention to these voiceless victims – the ‘white slaves’ of England, as they were evocatively and effectively named by the Ten Hours campaigners – those agitating for a limit of ten hours on the length of children’s working day.3 The situation of child workers entered the political heart of the nation when reformers such as John Fielden and Lord Ashley, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, took up their cause in Parliament. The year 1833 witnessed the passage of the nation’s first major Factory Act, prohibiting the employment of children in factories under the age of nine and limiting the hours that older children could work. Legislation in the mining industry followed soon after, and the Acts were consolidated and amended down the century to further restrict and control the use of children in the workplace.4 As part of the process of reform, a series of parliamentary select committees were established to investigate the extent of child labour. Their reports, along with the reformers’ pamphlets and the lively public debate in the newspapers, generated a mountain of documents that none but the most short-sighted of historians could fail to notice. And throughout it all runs a sad tale of exploitation and cruelty, enough to break the spirit of the hard-worked child and the heart of the modern reader.
For all that our image of the emaciated child worker has been distilled from Victorian novels and half-remembered history lessons, it nonetheless contains more than a grain of truth. There may be a little mileage to be gained in claiming that novelists, poets and campaigners were not particularly informed or impartial witnesses: but this line of argument will not go very far in silencing their message. Nor will it do to suggest that children had always worked and that the Victorians at least possessed the humanity and wisdom to ameliorate their lot. They were after all slow to respond to the problem and many a mill owner made good profits from the children’s nimble fingers before anyone was moved to act. That earlier and poorer societies had also connived in the practice must surely have offered no more than the smallest crumb of comfort to those who suffered.5
Even the most superficial trawl through the autobiographies quickly dredges up plenty of evidence to suggest that these bleak assessments of the impact of industrialisation on the children of the poor are not simply the bad dreams of doomsayers and pessimists. Time and again, the autobiog-raphers describe a depressingly familiar story of a childhood brought to a premature end by work that was arduous, unpleasant and often dangerous; by work that started at far too young an age. Here for example is Edward Rymer describing his first foray into farm work at six years old: ‘I was sent to tend the herds of cows and flocks of sheep belonging to Squire Clough … my work being some distance from the village, I sometimes lost my way in a fog, and wandered miles shouting and crying for my mother half-blind and nearly heart-broken.’6 Or Robert Collyer, starting in the factory at the age of eight ‘with many more children of my age or older, standing at the spinning frames – “doffers” they called us – thirteen hours a day, five days of the week, and eleven on the Saturday – rung in at six in the morning and out at eight in the evening, with an hour for dinner and a rest’.7 The former child miners provided some of the most distressing accounts of their early lives, telling of how they felt uncomfortable and frightened, working in rough conditions alongside rough men. The hours were so long that they saw no daylight for days on end during the winter months – little lives of darkness, in every meaning possible.
But we can do more with the autobiographies than pile up examples of writers saying what we already think they ought to be saying. It was a rare autobiographer who did not devote considerable attention to his experiences from early life. Almost all the writers had something to say about their father, mother and family circumstances. Most described their first experience of paid employment and some wrote at length about the family decisions that lay behind their entry to the workforce. In a sample of 350 autobiographies, this amounts to a very rich seam of information, enabling us to put some figures to the incidence of child labour as well as to probe the social context in which it occurred. Our writers not only stand testimony to the dark interpretation, they also enable a much deeper understanding of the complex forces that motivated parents to send their small children out to work.
Let us start by looking at the ages at which the young started work, a crude but very useful way of contrasting the experiences of children during the industrial revolution. Despite the long passage of time that had usually elapsed before our child workers took up the pen, the age at which they started work was clearly remembered and diligently recorded by the majority of writers, a sign no doubt of the significance of this event in any working person’s life. Admittedly some were uncertain about timing. Those, for example, who inform us that they started work at ‘about this time’, ‘now’ or ‘at a proper age’ are not so helpful as they perhaps intended.8 A handful of writers did not specify the date of their birth, which makes piecing together the most rudimentary chronology of their working life impossible. But for the most part, the transition from school or home to the workplace was something that few forgot and most writers had little difficulty pinpointing the moment when this important step towards adulthood occurred.9
When the ages at which children started work are plotted on a graph, they fall neatly into the bell-shaped curve that one would expect. One child started work at the age of four, a few more started at five, and then the number of children in each age group rises steadily until the age of ten, at which point the number starts to fall again. The average age at which the autobiographers started work was also ten years.10 The only slight interruptions to the curve occur around the age of twelve, when the number rises modestly again. This age was a very common time for starting apprenticeships, so the clustering suggests that some writers may not have bothered to note the more casual employments that preceded their apprenticeship. Had they done so, the average age for starting work would be pulled slightly downwards, though as the rise is small the effect would be slight.
So ten years old was the average age for starting work. It is slightly younger than other historians have found, probably because I have been more ruthless in excluding children who did not belong to families that can be accurately labelled ‘poor’ or ‘working class’ (our criteria, it might be remembered, cover those whose only income was derived from manual labour and those whose income was sufficiently scanty for a period of ill health or unemployment to pose serious financial difficulties).11 It is also striking that the average age at which children started work changed very little over the period. All through the eighteenth century and until 1850, ages for starting work fluctuated widely around the age of ten, falling as low as four and rising as high as seventeen. But the average age always hovered about ten.12 Given the relatively small number of autobiographies that have survived before about 1750 we should not place too much weight on the figures for the earlier period. The wide variation in the ages does, however, call out for analysis. What determined the age at which our autobiographers entered the workforce? Why did some start at five or six and others in their mid-teens, or even later? And how can these children’s experiences be fitted more broadly into the social history of the industrial revolution?
Conventional wisdom dictates that the age at which children started work was connected to the poverty of the family, and the autobiographies lend some support to this idea. Amongst those starting work at the youngest ages were to be found some living in the most desperate poverty, and writers often linked their family’s poverty to their own early entry to the workforce. Edward Davis, for example, ‘lacked even the bare necessaries of life’ as a small child owing to his father’s heavy drinking habit and the fact that he ‘disliked work exceedingly’. Edward gave this as the reason he was ‘compelled to join the ranks of the bread-winners of the family’ at the age of six years and eight months.13 At the other end of the distribution the reverse also appears true. Large incomes and small families helped to delay the moment at which a child was cast out to earn his daily bread. Richard Boswell Belcher and his two brothers were raised in relative affluence by their grandfather, following the death of both their parents. He sent them to ‘good schools as boarders, our racket being too much for him’. Richard’s last school was a ‘first class school for tradesmen’s sons’, where he remained studying the three Rs, history and geography until, at the age of thirteen, he was taken away to become a draper’s apprentice.14
But there are also some problems with the commonsense view that variation in the age at which children started work can be explained by the wealth of their families. For there amongst the autobiographies, alongside families like Davis’ and Belcher’s, behaving just as they should, were many others who failed to act in the way that common sense predicts. The experiences of George Mockford and John Taylor illustrate the problem. A fair few of the autobiographers had very little that was good to say about their father, and George Mockford may be counted as one of their number. ‘The great ambition of my father’, he opined, was ‘to save money [and] his children’s little strength and time should be all put to such an account as would be conducive to this end.’15 But even leaving aside the meanness or otherwise of George’s father, it is certain that he was a very poor man – struggling to feed a family of twelve children on the piteously small wages he earned as a shepherd. As a child, George’s diet consisted largely of potatoes with a little bacon fat, and it is doubtful that his father often ate a finer meal than potatoes with the bacon. Not only was George’s family desperately poor, his father had very little care for their welfare. Nevertheless, George did not start full-time work until the age of ten – young to us, but not unusually so for the period.16
On the other hand, John Taylor had nothing but praise for his parents. They were ‘creditable, industrious, managing persons’, he wrote; there were ‘few like them of common working people’. Nor was this simply family conceit, he hastened to add, for it was ‘hardly my place to say’. No, it was the considered opinion of their neighbours in the village, by whom ‘it was often said that they were the best housekeepers in Northowram [particularly] in regard to that principal branch of it, the bringing up of children’.17 His father worked tirelessly to provide for his family’s wants. During the summer he was ‘frequently doing thrice as much work as any man ought to do’, ultimately working himself to an early grave owing to his ‘excessive fondness’ for his wife and children. John’s assessment was clear: his father was a loving and industrious man and his family was nowhere near the bottom of the social heap. Yet these qualities notwithstanding, John and his brother Dan were sent to work many years earlier than George Mockford: the brothers were sent down the local coal mine at the ages of six and four.18 Nor are these isolated cases. The autobiographies allow us a unique insight into the relationship between hardship and the age of starting work and so permit us to explore the connections a little deeper.
With children often only vaguely aware of their parents’ earnings, there is no way of measuring the breadline in the autobiographies, but writers did provide rich contextual detail about their childhood and were usually acutely aware of, and commented upon, the position of their own family relative to their neighbours. Some writers gave a graphic account of their impoverished beginnings, describing their families as ‘poor’, ‘destitute’, ‘desperate’, and their childhood selves as lacking the most basic necessities – food, clothing and shoes. We also know that some kinds of families were likely to be much poorer than others. Mothers had very few options for earning an income outside the home, so the death or departure of a child’s father invariably plunged a family into serious financial straits. The figure of the drunken father regularly appears in the autobiographies, with bruised bodies and empty bellies usually to be found close by. It is probably fair to assume that children raised in large families were more likely to suffer from want. So let us also mark all the children who mention single mothers, drunken fathers or large families as impoverished, regardless of whether they actually specified this. If our child workers are sorted into two groups along these lines, those that showed signs of extreme poverty and those that did not, some rather unexpected patterns emerge.
Let us begin by looking at the children who started working at the youngest ages. Fourteen of the twenty-six children who started work before the age of seven described poverty in their family, but the other twelve gave no indication that the level of need within their family was particularly high. In other words, although a little over half of the children who started work at a young age appear to have done so because of poverty, an almost equal number failed to connect their early entry to the workforce with an unusually acute level of hardship. What is yet more surprising, however, is that the number of children from deeply impoverished families did not fall away as the age at which they began work started to rise. If we use exactly the same qualities to mark out the children who started work at the age of ten as impoverished – reference to acute poverty, large families, and drunken or absent fathers – the level of need appears almost as great as it was amongst children who went to work several years younger. Just over half of the children who started work before the age of seven described impoverished backgrounds, yet amongst those who started work at the age of ten that figure still hovers just below the 50 per cent mark.19
It is only as the children become older that the connection between family circumstances and starting work becomes more clear cut. Amongst children who started work at the age of fourteen or older, none provided evidence of acute hardship within their family, so a higher income does appear to have played an important role in delaying a child’s entry to the workforce. At the younger ages, though, the picture is more complex. Regardless of the actual age at which their working lives began, the level of need was high in many of these families: between 50 and 70 per cent of the children in each year group offered distinct signs of acute hardship and, given the nature of the sources, we can probably assume that the real figure was even higher. Yet parents were responding to this need in different ways, some sending their children to work as young as five or six, others delaying for a number of years. The question inevitably arises: why did not all the parents take advantage of such an obvious way of raising the family’s income?
To make sense of the different choices made by parents in broadly similar material circumstances we need to look at the options that were open to them. As anyone who has spent much time with children would probably testify, putting a child of six or seven to gainful employment is not straightforward. Nor is the unemployability of young children a phenomenon unique to modern society – the consequence of our cosseting of children, lax parenting, the decline of discipline, or anything else that might be indicated. There are far more fundamental developmental impediments that stand in the way of small children earning their own living. A six-year-old lacks the strength, concentration, co-ordination and stamina of an adolescent or young adult, and this places serious limits on the willingness of employers to take such workers on. As one autobiographer recalled, he was ‘only about six years old’ when his father had the good forture to find a chimney-sweep ready to hire him. Yet his new employer found he was ‘really too young for the work, so they made me do odd things about the house, such as lighting the fires and nursing the baby’.20 In other words, neither the needs nor the desires of their family are the only forces controlling a child’s entry to the workforce. Parents had to find employers for their children, and we should not be too quick to assume that in poor, pre-industrial societies these employers were readily to be found.
So let us sort our workers for a second time along a different set of lines. This time we shall place each child worker into one of three groups, according to the kind of employment opportunities that existed in their neighbourhood. In the first group are all those children raised in rural areas with no domestic industry, indeed with very little employment of any kind outside agriculture – villages such as Pagham in Sussex, described by one of its inhabitants as a place where ‘there was literally nothing for young men to go at, only remain upon the land and displace the old, or be a sailor or soldier’.21 The second group comprises those children living in market towns, where trade rather than manufacturing predominated. Towns such as Cheltenham, Banbury, Wellingborough, Cambridge, Chichester, Hull and Chester figure in this group. The third and final group encompasses those who lived close to centres of industry or manufacture. By the nineteenth century, industrialisation took a very wide variety of forms, so this group represents a correspondingly heterogeneous collection of settlements. The mining and factory districts of the Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire, the north-east and the Scottish Lowlands are included here, as are many of these regions’ emerging towns and cities. Areas of cottage industry are also counted in this group, so plenty of villages are to be found in its midst. How do matters look when our child workers are divided into three groups along these lines?
There are no real surprises when we look at the children who lived in agricultural areas: with an average age for starting work of ten and a half years, these children broadly conformed to the national pattern. For those living in towns, paid employment started on average one year later, at almost eleven and a half. The most startling result, however, comes from those children living in the industrial regions. The average age of starting work in this group was just eight and a half years – fully two years younger than the children in agricultural areas, and three years younger than the boys in traditional market towns. Almost all of the very young workers were also found in this group: nearly 70 per cent of the children at work before the age of eight lived in industrial areas.22 Living in an area with industrial employment was therefore closely correlated with entering the workforce at a younger age. But of course, simply demonstrating that industrialisation and young workers were found in the same places is a far cry from proving that the two events were related. We will need to look at what our writers tell us about their entry to the workforce in more detail to understand why work started earlier in the industrial districts than elsewhere.
In agricultural districts there was, inevitably, very little for children to do outside the farm, so almost all the children in this group began work on the land. As a result, their entry into the workforce was heavily determined by the ability of local farmers to provide work for small hands. At the younger ages, boys were employed at a relatively simple level – scaring birds, keeping sheep out of the roads, and herding cows.23 Their work was seasonal and often part-time. With increasing age, the children’s responsibilities and workload increased. From the ages of eight or nine, they started to help in the fields, performing such tasks as helping with harvests, picking potatoes, sowing turnips, ploughing, and looking after horses.24 Some went to live with their employers though most remained at home with their own family. A few more bypassed agriculture altogether and left their village in order to embark on an apprenticeship in a nearby town.25
Yet pervasive difficulties stood in the way of putting children to work on the land, no matter what age they actually started work and no matter how serious the poverty of their family. As David Barr astutely noted, his parents’ search for employment for his childhood self had been a ‘difficult task’, as the family were ‘cut off from the world in a remote hamlet that presented little opportunities for employment beyond agricultural labour’.26 If we look at the stories our writers told about their early childhood and the moment that they started work, it becomes clear that many small children were kept at home because nobody in the neighbourhood had any need for their services.
This was certainly the experience of John Gibbs. John spent the early years of his childhood in the most abject poverty. His mother had died, his father taken to drink, and poor John was left roaming the village with ‘a hungry belly and a ragged back … at times in cold, in hunger, and almost in nakedness’.27 Despite occasional spells helping out at harvest time, John remained out of work for the rest of the year. Employers in the small west Sussex village of Bolney were thin on the ground, however much one might need them. At the age of ten, he made a bid to escape his father’s neglect by travelling to find a relation living nearby and asking her to help him find a position in service, though he entertained no real hope that any such place would be found. ‘To my great surprise,’ however, she ‘informed me that a lad had run away from a small gentleman’s house that morning.’28 Enquiries were made and in no time the hopeful young John was standing in front of the household for inspection. The family looked him over, certain members casting doubt on the ability of the malnourished ten-year-old before them to perform the work of the house – ‘some said, I was much too small, others, that I was altogether unacquainted with the business’. The situation was saved only when one of the daughters of the house spoke up and indicated her approval of the lad.29 Even John realised that their agreeing to employ him was more an act of charity than of economic self-interest.
The utter neglect and deprivation of John Gibb’s early childhood was unusual. Many of our writers suffered poverty, but most had at least one parent with more than a passing concern for their welfare, and many had much more than that. His difficulty in finding full-time employment in a rural area, however, was anything but unusual. In fact on close inspection we see that many of those who appeared to start work at a young age were not actually entering paid employment at all. There is frequently a discrepancy in these accounts between the moment when the writer’s schooling stopped or at which he felt childhood had ended and the moment when wage-earning began, time that was usually filled with some form of unpaid service to parents or more distant family members. Joseph Jewell was kept from school at the age of eight so that he could help his father look after horses. John Bethune started herding cows for his father at the same age. But neither received any payment for their labour for a number of years: Jewell was paid only when he took up a position in service at the age of thirteen and Bethune when he was put to stone-breaking when he was eleven.30 One child in the Scottish Highlands was initially paid in kind rather than in cash: James Hogg’s payment for herding cows at the age of seven came in the form of a ‘ewe lamb and a pair of new shoes’.31 Another, living at home with his widowed mother, was threatened with a parish apprenticeship, ‘to be a drudge in a farm yard, without any remuneration until I had reached the age of twenty-one’. He refused to take up the apprenticeship on these terms, but he did start working for a widower ‘for my food’ rather than for wages.32 The rural autobiographers also convey the impression that there was a limited number of openings and possibilities, with children remaining in school or idle until an opportunity became vacant. John Bennett’s childhood had comprised intervals at school and intervals ‘kept at home to do what I could’ and there is little doubt it would have continued along these lines had his elder brother not died. This was a ‘sad job’ for John, he later recalled, as he was then taken from school ‘to supply his place’.33
As employment was hard to come by, positions were jealously guarded, no matter how unsuitable they subsequently proved to be. Parents living in agricultural districts displayed an unmistakable reluctance to remove their children from a place of work, even in the face of heartbreaking cruelty. This at any rate was the experience of James Bowd, who found himself driving a plough for a horse-keeper who oscillated between leaving him to ‘do as I liked’ and ‘floging’ him mercilessly. James knew there was no point in asking his parents to find him a new position. As he explained in his unpunctuated prose:
My father was very firm with Children working with him he used to tell those that his Children worked with to Yank us if we did not do as they wanted us and so it was no use to go home and tell my father how this man had been serving me and so I had to keep on going with the treatment for one year and then Came Micklamas which was the time for servants Changing their situations and he left and you may be very sure I did not shed many tears after him.34
When Joseph Jewell quit his position in the midst of winter with a carter ‘who used me ill’ he also knew he would not meet with sympathy at home. But with nowhere else to turn, he returned to his father’s house and hid in a barn for a few days. There he lived off scraps of food brought out by his sister; they both knew their ‘father would near kill me if I did not go back to my place’. When his father discovered him he fell ‘in a great passion, shook his stick over me, but I sopose my pittyfull apearance prevented his beating me’. But Joseph’s ‘pittyfull apearance’ did not weaken his father’s resolve to return him to his master. The father’s plan was to tie Joseph to a horse ridden by his brother while he followed behind and whipped him there. It only failed because he learned that another boy had already taken Joseph’s place in the few days that he had been missing.35
The sufferings of James Bowd and Joseph Jewell might be blamed on their fathers, as neither father appears to have had the slightest concern for his son’s welfare. But responsibility for the abuse that some children encountered in the workplace cannot always be placed so neatly at the door of the uncaring, hardened father. Even parents who did care very much about their children’s welfare ultimately reached the same decision, choosing to return their children to their employers, whatever the treatment they received there. Roger Langdon, for example, was nearly killed by the drunken ploughman under whom he worked on the farm, but as ‘every other place in the parish was filled and my parents could not afford to keep me in idleness’, back to work for the brute he went.36 James Hogg was ‘often nearly exhausted with hunger and fatigue’ with one of his masters while he was a shepherd; but once again, there was no question of leaving before his term was out.37 When William Milne ran away from his place in service his mother remonstrated with him and ‘let out at me with a big stick’. She missed, but before William could escape ‘I was seized and laid across my mother’s knee!’ Still unable to effect the blow she desired, she resorted to reason, pointing out that ‘she was not able to provide for herself and me, if I were to be idle on her hands’. Before the day was out, William was back with his employers.38 Time soon taught William what a bad employer really looked like. The rations he received in his next position were so scanty they left him seriously malnourished. Yet he still remained there for the term he had been hired. On returning home at the end of his term and resuming a normal diet, he was taken ill and the family concluded that his ‘organs of digestion had been damaged’ by the recent privations he had had to endure.39
These parents should not be grouped with those guilty of neglect and abuse. Each had made a reasonable decision from the very unpalatable range of options available. Many of these parents were simply unable to feed their growing children adequately. James Nye was one of a family of eleven children raised in rural Sussex in the 1820s and did not start work until the age of twelve. He recalled how ‘the young ones’ in his family went ‘very short of food and clothing’. Despite his mother’s best efforts, he rarely had more than ‘half a bellyful’ at mealtimes, and ate scarcely anything other than bread: ‘I was such a white weakly boy that people used to say I never should come to nothing, and no wonder so hungry I used to be nearly all day’.40 Paid employment gave children the best chance of enough to eat, even though it might have to be bought at the price of harsh words, cruel taunts and violence, and even though employers occasionally failed to provide even that. Clearly, though, the scarcity of employment in most rural areas was a double-edged sword. It certainly delayed children’s entry to the workforce, but did very little for their welfare once they were there.
The situation for families living in market towns was broadly similar. Those raised in towns often recalled how their parents’ plan to put them to work had hit the buffers when nothing suitable could be found. Here for example is Thomas Wallis’ account of his search for work as a boy in Hull in the 1830s. His father’s cabinet-making business had failed and the family were living in extremely straitened circumstances, but although William’s parents removed him from school at the age of nine, they could not find a suitable position for him until he reached eleven. The first job they found for him involved helping his father make bristles for brushes from whalebones. But the work proved ‘too heavy for so young a boy’, so this enterprise was soon abandoned. William next received a little money first for passing tools to a ‘kind old stonemason’ as he needed them and then for travelling to the country to help a coal dealer sell his wares. Neither venture came to anything though, for the family were still looking out for ‘more congenial and continuous employment’ for their son several months later. Their hopes were raised when they learned of a quack doctor seeking a messenger. Dressed in his smartest clothes, William walked with his mother to the doctor’s house to apply for the situation. Unfortunately, the young William ‘failed to find favour in the eyes of the young lady [the doctor’s daughter], who urged that [he] was too young to be entrusted with the duties required from the “Doctor’s” assistant!’41 A permanent position at last came at Ellison and Sons’ Mustard and Blacking Manufactory. William’s job was to walk an ‘old blind horse’ in an endless circle to drive the plant’s machinery. He was paid two shillings a week.42 William stayed here for three months, before finding work as an errand boy, first for a shoemaker, then for a doctor.
William Wallis ended up working where most of his peers in small towns began – as an errand boy. But as his family found, potential employers did not see much value in the service of a young child, and this helped to ensure that very few of the boys raised in towns were at work before they were nine, and many of these were working as unpaid helpers to their parents or employed on an occasional basis by a local farmer.43 The problem of finding work as an errand boy was captured by one autobiographer living in the small Highland port town of Dingwall. His mother had the good fortune to find him a position at the age of eight, but when his master married, one of his new wife’s first acts was to get rid of the errand boy. Our writer continues:
Go home I hardly could; my poor mother was not able to support me. A place I would and must have, but where to get one was a mystery. I could not obtain a place where I could be of such service as to [e]nsure myself even ‘dog’s wages’ – my daily food.44
This was the problem that kept so many of the children living in market towns in school or at home through their early years. When John Hemmingway’s mother was unable to feed her family during the 1802 trade recession in Norwich, she sent John and his elder brother not to work, but to collect nettles – almost certainly a reflection of the reality of the situation rather than a desire to shield her sons from an early entry to the workforce.45 Peter Taylor found work as an errand boy in Paisley at the age of eleven and a half, but only because his elder brother had fallen ill, so he ‘was sent to take his place’.46 And just as in rural areas, once a position had been found, parents and children made sure to hold on to it, no matter how serious the mistreatment a child encountered.47 Most employers found that the expense of feeding and clothing a growing boy younger than ten or eleven outweighed the profit that could be made from his labour. It spelled bad news for family incomes, but helped to protect children from the long hours and exploitation that so often haunted the experience of very young workers.
The industrial areas form a stark contrast to the more traditional parts of the economy. The autobiographies provide considerable evidence that work here was easily found, and this must go some way to explaining why young children in these areas were more often at work. Here as elsewhere, the work that children performed reflected the needs of the local economy, so factories, mines, handloom weaving and other forms of production dominated the working landscape.48 With the growth of these industries, there was lots of work that needed to be done and children were hustled into economic activity at ever younger ages. Factories and mills were the largest source of employment for young children, and with no effective lower age limits before the passage of the Ten Hours Act in 1833, mills routinely hired children from the age of six. Most of these young workers entered the factories as piecers, standing at the spinning machines repairing breaks in the thread. A few started as scavengers, crawling beneath the machinery to clear it of dirt, dust or anything else that might disturb the mechanism.49 From piecing they progressed to ‘doffers’ or ‘fillers’, their task being to remove the full bobbins from the spinning machines and replace them with empty ones.50 As they grew older, they moved into jobs of greater responsibility.
No less importantly, the children were supervised by a system of ’overlookers’ – older, male workers who patrolled the inside of the factory monitoring their work. As one factory child recalled, ‘a rope with a knot at one end was hung over the steam pipe, and a very trifling effort indeed brought the rope from its resting-place to be laid on the shoulders of the poor little piecer’.51 Inside the factories, therefore, a combination of simple tasks and overlookers ensured that even very young children could perform work that was of some value to their employer.
In the coal-mining districts, a similar framework was in place, with boys starting out on light tasks befitting their abilities, under the eye of a more experienced worker.52 As Emanuel Lovekin remarked on being sent to the mine at the age of seven, ‘it was little I could be exspected to doo except open a door for wagons to pass through’.53 Several of the child miners started out like Emanuel as ‘trappers’, minding the trapdoors in the tunnels underground.54 Others began by picking over the coals at the pit mouth, carrying picks for the miners, or pushing coal-laden trolleys along underground.55 Their tasks were simple, required relatively little strength, and were usually carried out under some supervision by the more experienced miners. As the boys’ strength increased, new opportunities unfolded. Emanuel, for example, was soon ‘Promoted to drive a Donkey’, whilst his younger brother, who had now reached the age of seven, took over the work of minding trapdoors.56 Boys progressed to driving wagons, working with the pit ponies, and eventually hewing coal from the coalface, each time moving on to work with greater responsibility and better pay – though none of it, in the understated opinion of one former child miner, ‘could be termed congenial’.57 Most of the boys employed underground worked in the coal industry, but the copper- and tin-mining industry in Cornwall also found early employment for some.
Domestic industry, handloom weaving in particular, was another important source of employment for children in industrial areas. Young family members could be made useful from the ages of six or seven winding the bobbins for their parents.58 And alongside the major employers were a host of small workshops willing and able to put young fingers to work. Amongst the autobiographers were those who had started work in a brickyard, for a button-stamper, at twine-making and thread-bleaching, and at walking horses in circles to turn wheels to drive machines.59 In each case, a similar set of forces were at work. Industrialisation was generally associated with higher levels of employment and this helped to increase the demand for child workers. But industrial employers also had tasks that required little skill or responsibility and the scale of their operations made it possible and economic to establish a network of monitors and supervisors. So it was not just economic growth in itself that increased the use of small children in the workforce in the industrial regions. There was something in the nature of the economic growth that occurred at this time that was peculiarly well adapted to exploit the capacities of small children.
Although industry was the most important source of employment for the children living in industrial areas, a sizeable number also worked in agriculture. In many areas, particularly in centres of cottage industry, manufacturing and agriculture existed side by side, and the demand for industrial workers created a shortage of young people to help till the land. The situation was nicely described by John Struthers, who spent his childhood in East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow. He noted how the rise of handloom weaving in the area had caused men of all professions – the ditcher, the quarryman, even the ploughman – to desert the land, creating ‘a scarcity of boys for agricultural purposes’.60 So of course his parents had no difficulty finding him a position as a live-in farmhand. John was not alone in finding agricultural work in the heart of an industrial district. Other autobiographers started their working lives clearing dung off the turnpike roads, herding, harvesting, and milking cows, clearing out brushwood from ‘a long, wild clough below the canal basin’ and planting potatoes.61 The picture that emerges for the industrial regions is one of plentiful employment. The new industries offered a range of jobs designed to make the best of the capabilities of very young children, but they also reduced the pressure on jobs in agriculture, thereby easing entry to work on the land as well.
There is also something significant in the fact that the children in industrial areas had nothing to say about how their parents had managed to find them a place of work. Whatever the reasons for parents wanting to put their children to work, the outcome was always the same. A trip to the mill, to the mine, or to a small local manufacturer and the matter was resolved. Within days mother was walking her child to work in the morning with a parcel of food for the day. Here, for example, is William Marcroft’s recollection of how his mother went about looking for a situation for her son when she had decided that he ‘must not work in the cotton mill any more’:
A looking out was begun to find another job … Fustian cutting at that time was very busy. Application was made to Jacob Ashton, of Cowbourne Lane, Heywood. Did he want a lad about twelve years of age? He said he did. An agreement was entered into …62
None of the children living close to centres of industry provided any hint that their family’s designs had been frustrated or delayed owing to difficulty in finding a suitable situation. Instead the finding of work was presented in extremely straightforward terms, with families moving into the factory districts and finding work for their children ‘immediately’ or ‘almost immediately’.63 When the young John Hemmingway ran away from his master in Pendleton to Manchester he was just ‘rambling along one of the streets’ when a ‘small Manufacturer from Bolton … accosted me with the words, well, my boy, are you in want of a place’.64 The ease with which parents translated their desire for work for their children into a position of paid employment forms a marked contrast with the obstacles encountered by parents living outside the industrial regions.
The suggestion that work was easily come by in the industrial districts seems to be supported by the ways in which parents reacted if they discovered that their children met with rough usage in the workplace. Parents were quick and emphatic in responding to suspicions that their children were being mistreated at work. John Wood, for example, started at the cotton factory at the age of six and his overlooker lost little time in treating him ‘in a most brutal manner’. Within weeks, his mother had noticed the ‘discoloration of my back as the result of a flogging I had received’: she removed him immediately and returned him to school – where, Wood added with no apparent sense of the contradiction, he was taught to ‘knit stockings’.65 Joseph Hodgson started down the mine at the age of ten, but was ‘severely buffeted, whipt and kicked’ by his supervisors. His mother noticed the mark of a whip-crack along the side of his face, and both parents immediately decided that he ‘should go no more’.66 More unusually, when George Marsh worked with his elder brother for ‘Mr. Willie Jubb’, his brother used him ‘so cruelly, that one day I could not walk home, so I laid in a coke basket beside a fire until midnight when my mother came and found me’. His mother did not let the constable take her older son away and ‘lock him up’ but that was the end of George’s employment with his brother at Mr Willie Jubb’s.67
It did not even need to be a matter of bruises, welts and floggings to persuade parents to reconsider their choice of employment. George Smith was taken away from the flax and hemp mills after a few weeks because the work made him ‘so wet that my parents thought it would injure my health’.68 The child miner Thomas Oliver returned to school because he could not stand the cold.69 And David Whitehead’s mother repeatedly came and took her son back home for matters far less weighty than the violence, overwork and stinted rations that some of the child workers in agriculture had to endure. A false accusation of drinking the new milk, a mistress who suspected him of dishonesty, a quarrel with his master over a piece of bodged weaving – each time his mother agreed to take him home, though not always with quite the degree of sympathy that her son might have wished.70 There was no reason not to when a new position could be easily found, as indeed proved the case over and over for these children. After their move to Manchester, one day at the cotton mill was enough for John Hemmingway’s parents to ‘make up their minds not to send me to that mill again’. Over the following two years, John worked in several of the town’s mills – though he ruefully noted that from his perspective he ‘could very rarely find any difference in their mode of treatment’.71 The ease with which new positions could be found created a very different situation to the non-industrial areas, where low levels of employment meant that parents often sympathised with their children, but rarely removed them from their tormentors. The simple fact that work for young children was so easily come by must go some way to explaining the younger than average age for starting work in industrial districts.
So parents played a complex role in the extension of child labour that occurred in the heartlands of the industrial revolution. We know that most parents took care to monitor their children’s welfare in the workplace. Yet it must also be admitted that many were careful to ensure their children were economically active in the first place. In reality, we cannot fully grasp the history of child labour in industrialising Britain unless we acknowledge the place of children’s work in the cultural horizons of the labouring poor. ‘Child welfare’ was not yet a meaningful concept. Many adults simply believed that children should be sent to work as soon as they were able. William Dodd did not know ‘the predisposing circumstances’ that had induced his parents to send their four children to work in the factories at very young ages. He thought that they went ‘as we could meet with employers’.72 John Hemmingway started work at the age of ten, following his family’s migration from Norwich to Manchester. On their arrival, his father found work as a spinner in a cotton factory, and it is hard to imagine that he earned less than he had as a weaver in Norwich during a period of recession. Yet it was at this moment that John and his siblings entered the workforce: ‘it followed as a matter of course, that his children, such as were able must also be employed to assist … I for one was doomed to become an opperative’.73
The situation was much the same for the child miners. One anonymous writer recalled that he had started work at the age of six. His mother and father, he noted, had ‘passed me off as seven years and a half; so they got my wages’.74 Joshua Dodgson went down the mine at the age of nine for no other reason than that his widowed mother had become acquainted with a coal miner who was well placed to find work for her sons. Joshua wrote that ‘as he was a miner, he soon had my oldest brother and myself’ in the pit.75 What emerges a number of times is that parents put their children to work not simply because they had to, but because they could.76
Something more of parental attitudes was captured by Henry Hughes, who was sent down the mine to mind a trapdoor for his father at the age of nine. His stepmother ‘did not see much value in education’, he wrote: ‘learn to work and work should be the proper object and business of children and young people’. Young people ‘should break coal or dig peat or other manual labour and then they would never lack bread. Therefore to the work underground, I was sent early in life.’77 Nor was this simply a case of a wicked stepmother who could not get rid of her husband’s children quick enough. After all, it was Henry’s father who actually found him his first job and Henry was fond of his stepmother – they later emigrated to America together.
His parents were not alone in the value they placed on honest, hard work. John Harris’ father took a dim view of his son’s love of books. He ‘appeared to dislike it, saying he did not think I should ever earn my living’.78 The carpenter, Peter Gabbitass, admitted that his schooldays had been short. His father had had ‘a good business’, but also ‘believed in boys going to work early’.79 In many poor families, child labour was simply part of the natural order. The rights or wrongs of putting small children to work was not too deeply questioned. This was just the way things were. As John Clifford ruefully remembered, his father did ‘not seem to have thought it any hardship that I should have to get up at four o’clock when I started work in the factory. He used to do it as a boy, therefore there should be no reason why I should not rise at that time.’80
How far these views were typical is impossible to establish. Alongside the fathers who liked to see their sons at work and did not think it ‘any hardship’ if they had to rise early to get there, were many mothers who were sorely troubled that their children were compelled to go to work so young.81 Whether the stern fathers outweighed the soft mothers is anyone’s guess. Part of the difficulty is that for many writers a lot had changed between the time they started work and the time they wrote their autobiography. Within the space of a few decades, child labour had became a political issue. The employment of very young children in factories and mines became first morally repugnant and then illegal. The shift in values that had occurred between our writers’ childhoods and the moment at which they wrote about it clearly posed difficulties for some adult writers. Men found themselves bound to explain something that in reality had called for no special explanation at the time.
The problems are compounded by the fact that all the discussion of parental motivations comes from children second-guessing, excusing, or simply seeking to understand their parents’ choices rather than from the parents themselves. The tendency of autobiographers to write at length about their childhood but to say little about parenthood or their own children is widely recognised, and this is certainly true of the working-class writers looked at here. Despite the crystal-clear memory that many writers had of the age at which their own working life had begun, they were almost uniformly silent about the ages at which their children entered the workforce. And though our writers were far better placed to explain why they had put their children to work than to comment on their parents’ reasons, almost all of them had absolutely nothing to say under this head.
One exception comes from the ‘Family Records’ written by Benjamin Shaw, which range over his own life and the lives of other members of his extended family. He declared it was written ‘Partly for his own use & Partly for his Children’ and he wrote at length about each of his eight children, even little Mary who had died of measles when less than a year old. The family grew up in Preston in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and all started work in one of the town’s many factories before they were adults. Shaw’s ‘Family Records’ promise to shed a little light on one of the darkest corners of Britain’s industrial history.
Benjamin Shaw did not know that factory children would later become a historical oddity that subsequent generations would seek to understand, so he did not worry too much about explaining the place of the factory in the life of his own young family. Of his first son, Joseph, Shaw wrote simply that ‘he went to the factory to work young, was mostly in the Card room’. His second son, William, was also ‘Sent to the factory young, & wrought in the yard at Horrocks in the Card room’. His first daughter, Isabella, was a ‘fine, Strong & healthy child, & good Humoured’: she also ‘went to the factory young’. On the other hand, his second daughter, Hannah, being ‘a Small and Puny child’, remained at home ‘employed in the House with her mother’ until the age of about fourteen, only then joining her brothers and sisters in the factory. Thomas, their next child, also suffered from ill health. He was ‘a troublesom Child from his Birth, Cross, & Peevish … with a Bad Stomach, & every way full of trouble’. Perhaps this was the reason why he was ‘Sent to the School when young’, when his older siblings had been sent to the factory. But Thomas followed them when he was nine, so ‘young’ for the elder children presumably meant starting work at age eight or younger. There, ‘still he continued to be full of trouble to us, for he came home nearly every day, with his fingers or hands or cloaths torn &c …’ Shaw’s youngest two daughters, Mary and Agnes, he described as ‘mostly’ healthy. Mary started in the card room when ‘about 9 years old’ and Agnes went to school ‘when little’ and to the card room ‘when young’.82
How can we interpret the evidence Benjamin provides? He did not even state exactly how old his children were when they entered the factory, still less leave clues as to why they entered when they did. It is tempting to suggest that the Shaws sent their young children to the factory because poverty left them no other choice; but poverty provides only a partial explanation. The family certainly suffered from downturns in trade in some years. His second-youngest daughter, Mary, for example, was ‘brought up rather hardly, for Bread was deer’. But such hardship was not constant and at other times Benjamin ‘had good work and wages’. In some years ‘things seemed to prosper’.83 The family did not perceive themselves to be in great need. His wife, Betty, refused to mend the children’s clothes and always bought new ones. She told her husband she did not like ‘to see them in mended clothes … she did not like to be poor & seem so’.84 Why patch clothes? Why not just buy new ones? Benjamin did not expatiate on the whys and wherefores of his children’s entry to the factory because there was simply nothing to explain. His children went to work at young ages because the work was there. That was the way things were done in poor families like his. That was how the family were dressed in decent clothes rather than rags.
In fact it is not necessary to pass judgement on the parents who sent their children to work at unusually young ages, for this line of thinking implies that the labouring poor were uniquely responsible for the use of small children in the workplace. A tacit acceptance of child labour ran through this society like a fault-line from top to bottom. If the poor were ready to send their children out to work, their social superiors were no less ready to take them in. Aristocratic mine owners, middle-class factory owners, farmers great and small, doctors, clergymen and other professionals, small businessmen and women, skilled craftsmen and unskilled labourers, all played their part in the exploitation of very young children. Men and women from all walks of life emerge in the autobiographies offering employment, tendering food, lodging and a few pennies in exchange for long hours of work from the small and vulnerable. And in the absence of parents, children were taken in by the parish, housed and fed until the age of seven or so, and then discharged to earn their own living. Most of the autobiographers raised by the parish were at work by the age of seven – considerably younger than the average for children raised by their parents. Before the emergence of agitation in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the desirability of work for poor children had almost universal acceptance.
We see this yet more clearly when we look at the choices made by earlier generations. After all, there was nothing new in sending small children to work. Families before the industrial revolution had done just the same when they could find willing employers, which usually meant if they lived somewhere that offered industrial opportunities. The boys who started work at young ages earlier in the eighteenth century were all employed in some branch of industry. Those starting work before they were ten assisted parents in domestic weaving, worked in silk mills, or down coal and copper mines.85 As Samuel Sholl, whose parents were both weavers, explained: ’as I could assist early in my parents’ business, they took me home [from school]’. He was probably about five at the time.86 In other words, young child workers were to be found wherever there was work for young children.
Just like Benjamin Shaw, these writers did not indicate that they came from especially large or impoverished families. Nor do they hint that there was anything unusual, or even unpleasant, in entering the workforce when they did.87 This is not, of course, to deny the unpleasantness of their experiences: it is highly doubtful that they were any better than those of later generations. The point simply is that it was not something they thought to write about. Decades before the emergence of campaigns to restrict the use of children in the workplace, the earlier autobiographers saw their task simply as recording the moment when their working life began, rather than reflecting upon why their parents had put them to work so young, the treatment they met with while there, or the morality of employing small children. They provided the same kind of unreflective and impenetrable account of childhood labour as Shaw’s. And their silence suggests a weary resignation as regards the place of child labour in the lives of the poor.
The pattern amongst those who went to work at older ages also mirrors what happened later. Some of the better-off families kept their children at home because they had the resources to do so.88 Other poor families also kept their children at home, but only because they could find nothing for them to do. In many rural areas, the chronic shortage of employment meant that gainful employment for poor children was a hopeless chimera. Edward Barlow, for example, described his parents as ‘but poor people’ working the land. As soon as he and his brothers and sisters were able, they had to ‘provide for ourselves or else want our bread’.89 Yet Edward was not at work full-time until the age of twelve or thirteen, almost certainly because of the lack of work in his Lancashire village. James Ferguson’s father had to support a large family with nothing but ‘his daily labour’. As he ‘could not afford to maintain me’, James was put to minding sheep, but it was not until he was ten that he was thus employed.90 In terms of wealth, status or attitude there is little between those families who sent their children to work in mills and mines at the ages of six, seven or eight, and these families who kept their children in school or at home for many years longer. The only real difference was that in some areas the work was available, whereas in others it was not.91
Poor families had always made the most of whatever employment opportunities existed for their children, and those living through the industrial revolution did no differently when presented with the same choice. Yet assuming an unchanging cultural fabric risks painting this period in false hues of comforting continuity. Benjamin and Betty Shaw may have acted in the same way as their grandparents, but they were no longer living in the same world. With industrialisation came lots of jobs, many of them suitable for the small hands and fallible concentration of very young children. So putting the old logic to work in a new world did not lead to the same outcomes. Framed in this way, the industrial revolution had serious and significant welfare implications for children.
In the first place, the persistence of old patterns of behaviour meant that far more children were at work. This may seem a rather elementary point, but I think it deserves emphasis. Throughout the pre-industrial era, the sluggishness of the economy had placed a cap on the extent to which children were used in the workplace. Centres of industry were relatively undeveloped. A few parents could find work for their offspring at a loom or underground, but the vast majority could not. This meant that most children were shielded from the rigours of the workplace. When the industrial revolution began to take off, this cap was prised off and many more very young children found themselves earning their bread.
It is also doubtful that this change brought many welfare benefits to the children concerned. It is likely that parents grasped at the chance to send their children to work because they saw in it the opportunity to feed and clothe their children decently. Most mothers probably did spend the pennies and shillings that their children brought home on more and better-quality food, both for the children who had earned then and for other, younger family members still at home. Indeed, there is even the occasional child worker who made favourable comparisons between the family’s living standards before and after they started work. One writer, for example, contrasted the poverty of his home life when his father spent a year away at sea and failed to send any money home with the prosperity they all enjoyed when he got work at a flax-spinning mill a couple of years later. Jobs for all five children were found in the same factory, and their ‘joint earnings amounted to a handsome sum weekly, which kept us all very comfortable’.92
But comments of this nature were made extremely infrequently. Though many writers anticipated the transition from schoolboy to wage-earner with some excitement, most soon discovered that the reality fell very far short of their childish hopes. With hindsight, our writers conceded the importance of the hard-earned contribution their labour had made to their family. As Thomas Wood observed, ‘small as it was, it was a sensible and much needed [addition] to the family store’.93 Yet very few writers interpreted their entry to the workforce as having enhanced their lives. Time and again, the autobiographers’ memories centred upon the long hours, tiredness, distress and harsh treatment that had characterised the early years of their working life. Joseph Townend described his seven-year-old self at the mill as ‘sorrowful and dejected in spirit’.94 Richard Weaver’s early years down the coal mine had been ‘a life of dreadful suffering’.95 If the transition from child to child worker had also been accompanied by a little more bread and butter, any memory of this had long been lost in the mists of time.
No less important than the overall rise in the extent of child labour is the change in its nature. Work in factories and mines was dangerous. Whilst we should not overlook the risks associated with more traditional forms of work – in agriculture, children were vulnerable to accidents from livestock, and outdoor work in all seasons could damage health – factory work stands out as particularly injurious to children’s welfare. Long hours spent in unnatural postures damaged growing bones. Machines were unfenced and tore off small fingers, hands, and sometimes worse, at an alarming rate. Accidents were notorious and crop up regularly in the autobiographical writing. Benjamin Shaw’s family had not escaped. His ‘little Brother Joseph, got catched in the wheels in the factory, and got his hand ill crushed, & cut, one finger taken off, & the other Broken & Sadly mangled’.96 Benjamin also noted that one of his daughters was ‘rather deaf’ which might, he speculated, have been caused by the ‘noise of the factory’.97
Added to this were the long hours. One of the most depressing themes that runs through the autobiographies is the very long hours worked by many of the young children in industrial areas. Before the introduction of the Ten Hours Bill, children in factories and mines usually worked a twelve- or thirteen-hour day and almost all of the autobiographers who entered such work before the legislation paused to comment on the crushing effects of working such long hours at so young an age.98 Many recalled feeling very, very tired. Who can fail to be struck, for example, by the image of Moses Heap, who was so tired and so young when he began at the factory that he was carried back and forth upon his father’s back?99 Or here is Robert Lowery, picking the brasses out of the coals at the mouth of the Tyneshire coal mines at the age of ten:
I had to rise at 4 a.m. every morning and walk nearly two miles to work, which continued from 5 a.m until 6 p.m. and well I remember how I longed for the ‘day of rest’, when the voice of the ‘caller’ no longer broke in on the sound slumbers of the morning.100
Through many months of the year, the hours of daylight placed a limit on the number of hours that children could drive ploughs, pick potatoes, sow turnips and perform the sundry other tasks required to till the land. In industrial employment these kinds of limits did not exist, and their absence increased the burden of work for the very young.
For the children of the industrial revolution, it was not just long days that ratcheted up their hours at work. When children went to work in factories or mines they were entering a world that offered steady employment throughout the year. Rural districts had their fair share of children starting work before the age of ten, but those who did so were rarely embarking on full-time work. As one Suffolk farm boy explained, he ‘partly left school’ at the age of ten to scare birds off the seedcorn, but as ‘this kind of work lasted only a few months in the year … I still had some time for school’. In this case, full-time employment was delayed until the writer was twelve.101 And the difference between the age of first starting work and the age at which full-time work began could be quite considerable. Take, for instance, Adam Todd and Thomas Irving. Both started farm work when aged nine, but as their employment was seasonal they continued to return to school in the winter. They both carried on in this vein until they were fourteen.102 This had the effect of allowing them a far more gradual entry to the workforce.
We have already noted that ten and a half was the average age at which children in rural areas started their working years. But if we substitute the age at which children first started work with the age at which they began full-time work, the average increases by a full year, raising their starting age to eleven and half. This takes it to the average age at which children in towns started working, and is more than three years above the average for the children in industrial districts. At the root of the rural child’s experience of work was the ongoing difficulty of finding full-time, year-round work. This helped to soften the transition from home or school to work, and meant that there was a very real difference between the child who started work in the fields at the age of six and the one who began in one of Manchester’s mills, working twelve hours a day, six days a week, week in and week out, year in, year out.
There were also tangible differences in the nature of the work expected of young children in different parts of the economy. In agriculture, a boy’s early jobs were often light and although the hours could be long during the summer, the line between work and leisure was far less clearly drawn. When Joseph Robinson started work at the age of six, for example, he was set to bird-scaring and ‘similar light work that a little boy could do’.103 And when William Lea was put to work scaring birds from the newly sown or ripening corn at the age of seven he found that ‘the work was light and recreative to me, for I amused myself by building small sheds under the hedges … I found some pleasure ideally in the midst of my employment.’104 The possibility of play while at work was something that other writers remarked upon. During his first year at work for the local farmers, Joseph Arch ‘found a good deal to do, what with bird-nesting, trespassing, and other boyish tricks and diversions’.105 Herding cows, Alexander Somerville ‘made water-mills and wind-mills, built houses large enough to creep into’.106 Out in the fields, the youngest children were often left largely unsupervised and this created a very different experience to that of the mill-hands and child miners whose work was closely watched by a man carrying a large strap. One writer even confessed that he had not thought it ‘much hardship’ when his parents’ poverty had him exchanging schooling for bird-scaring at ‘an early age’. ‘At the time,’ he pointed out, he had been ‘fonder of an open-air life.’107
We should not be too quick to romanticise the lot of the farm lad. The stubborn truth is that most of the boys who started work young disliked their labour, and that was no less true in agriculture than it was in any other sector of the economy. Even in agriculture long hours, lonely work, bad weather or cruel co-workers could make the experience miserable in the extreme. So it should not be imagined that industrialisation marked the passing of the good old days, the substitution of easy and wholesome labour in the open air with the unrelenting and unnatural patterns of the factory. All child workers were vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. The point rather is that agriculture was very poor at extracting sustained and valuable work from small children. With little work available suited to their capacities and no mechanisms for monitoring the labour of inherently unreliable workers, most farmers looked elsewhere when they needed a job done.
It is time to draw this chapter to a close. Enough has been said to suggest that a new interpretation of the rise in child labour during the industrial revolution may be in order. For the most part poor families have been presented as passive players, sending their children to work through lack of choice, ground down by mechanisation, immiserated by capitalism, victims of the great impersonal economic forces that were taking shape around them.108 It is all true to an extent. But painting the poor as the faceless victims of sinister economic forces does not take us far in understanding why so many small children were being thrust into the workplace at ever younger ages.
So here is an alternative way of understanding the rise in child labour which occurred at this time. Child labour had a very long taproot in Britain. Society had always viewed putting poor children to work as an answer to the miserable poverty in which their families lived. The trouble was that the pre-industrial economy was ill equipped to give most families any hope of earning income from their children’s labour, no matter how much they might need it. This situation changed rapidly and dramatically with the onset of industrialisation in the early nineteenth century. Early industrial Britain was a booming economy with an insatiable appetite for strong backs and nimble fingers. We saw in the last chapter the many advantages this brought to adult men. We can now see the disaster it heralded for children.
Industrialisation unleashed a wave of economic growth, and when faced with the prospect of gainful employment for their children families responded in the way they had always done. Industrial Britain offered more (and more intensive) employment for young children, and many working parents, who remembered the gnawing hunger of their own childhood only too well, grasped eagerly at these opportunities. The outcome? Children were thrust into the workforce at ever younger ages. Above all, the British experience reminds us that different members of society experienced industrialisation in very different ways. Rapid, unregulated growth opened up welcome opportunities for adult men, but the gains for the smallest and weakest were very questionable indeed.