Child Labor in Nineteenth-Century Britain

CHILD LABOR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

What was the condition of working children in the 19th century in the United Kingdom?

OUTLINE

Children's Working Conditions

An Introduction to Working Children

Introduction

Toward the End of Child Labor

Conclusion

References

INTRODUCTION

The Industrial Revolution in Britain started around 1750. This revolution deeply affected the country, so much so that, in 1850, it became known as the "workshop of the world." Vast stores of coal and iron, reliable streams and a period of relative peace allowed Britain to develop quickly, hence many technical improvements such as the cotton spinning-machine, turnpike trusts and railways. Moreover, the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century was a period of population boom, which increased the number of British inhabitants and thus of British workers. More workforce was available. Conversely, it also led to a larger market. In the case of the United Kingdom, it was complemented by rural exodus (enclosures), which provided the industry with more labor force.

This labor force was much needed: indeed, there were more and more factories and the demand grew higher and higher. However, this period also had its drawbacks. Indeed, people from the countryside flocked to the cities and the new factories to get work and regular salaries. Reality appeared to be very different from what they expected. On the one hand, the increase in the number of urban dwellers led to housing problems, filthy and crowded streets, and eventually to the apparition of slums. On the other hand, the first phases of the industrial revolution were characterized by a very high unemployment rate and violence. People who worked were exploited, working long hours for low wages in harsh conditions. Many of those people were children. As a matter of fact, child labor had been existing long before the onset of the industrial revolution in Britain. Many children lived in the countryside with their parents and helped them in the fields or at home. They began to hunt, to thresh or to plow as soon as they were able to do so. However, with the revolution, many moved to the cities with their parents and discovered at a very young age what the reality of industrial work looked like.

AN INTRODUCTION TO WORKING CHILDREN

Who were they? Why did they work?

In the 19th century, the working class was the main social class. It represented 80% of the population. This social class consisted of poor laborers who worked in harsh and unsanitary conditions. They sold their physical strength for a salary. They earned so little money that they often could neither afford food nor proper housing nor education for their children. While much of the working class lived in the country in the 18th century, this changed over the course of the next century. Indeed, working-class people sought higher and regular wages, which the uncertainty of harvest in the country could not provide them with. As a result, they moved to towns and cities which grew from small villages to big industrial cities. For instance, from 1815 to 1820, the city of London added ¼ million to its population, to reach 1 274 000 inhabitants.

Free Labor Children

Parish Apprentices

Nonetheless, even though wages were regular, they were extremely low and did not enable the survival of a whole family. This is one of the main reasons why children were compelled to work: poor families did not see the point in educating their children, and rather saw them as a way to bring money home and feed the family. Moreover, the little education system which existed had to be paid for; children did not have access to education then. Children started to work at a very young age, sometimes as young as four years old. Those children who worked but still lived with their families were called "free labor children."

Working children also came from orphanages or from workhouses which were built in every parish and themselves provided the work. These children - called "parish apprentices" or "pauper apprentices" - were orphans, victims of violent parents or had a member of their families in the debtor's prison. This was the case of Charles Dickens who lived in a workhouse when he was young after his father had been imprisoned in the debtor's prison. According to the analyses of Oxford's Professor Jane Humphries , by the early 19th century, up to 18 percent of families were being abandoned by fathers. Children then had to work to help their mothers and the rest of their siblings survive.

AND

Working children, girls as well as boys, were thus poor children whose sole hope of survival resided in hard work and the renouncement to a happy childhood, without hopes and dreams.

CHILDREN'S WORKING CONDITIONS

Where did the working children work? What were their working conditions?

During the industrial revolution, mills, factories and mines developed significantly. As the production of machines flourished, the need for skilled laborers decreased. Indeed, machines could work longer and quicker than humans. As a result, factory owners used cheap, unskilled laborers to lower the cost of production. Child labor was the cheapest of them all: they were paid 1/10 of what men were paid; hence their growing presence in those companies. Not only was child labor cheap, but it was also a mean for employers to avoid workers' rebellions. Indeed, children had no bargaining power and did not try to join trade unions or to go on strike. They were malleable laborers. Moreover, young children were useful for maintenance tasks that could not be performed by adults, such as squeezing into tight spaces.

Girl pulling a coal tub in mine. From offical report of the parliamentary commission.

SOME STATISTICS

Proportions (%) occupied by sex and age-groups: London and England and Wales, 1851.

49%

In 1821, approximately 49% of the British workforce was under 20.

Source: Census 1851. PP 1852-53, LXXXVIII, Pt.I, England and Wales Summary Tables, xxv, xxvi, pp. ccxxii-ccxxvii; Population Tables II, London Tables, pp. 10-15.

They were deprived of their childhood and their creativity since they executed repetitive and grueling tasks. Not only children worked in unsanitary conditions, but they also earned very little money. The hours of labor were very long (often from ten to twelve hours a day). On top of that, their employers often beat them when they made mistakes, complained or were not quick enough. Young girls were raped. Cruelty and immorality were rife, hence the high death rate of the working-class children. Moreover, accidents were common and children were often injured. The case of Martha Appleton illustrates this.

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Percentage of working children aged 10-14 by occupation group, Census 1851.

PARITY IN CHILD LABOR

Girls worked as well as boys, even though they mostly worked indoors, according to the beliefs of a woman's place at the time. This was described by the British journalist Henry Mayhew in the early 1850s when he observed that ‘the boy is far more the child of the streets than is the girl’. Girls between the ages of nine and 15 were frequently called upon to care for young children. Gender differences are clearly reflected in this table.

In London, 45 percent of employed males aged 10-14 were errand-runners, messengers or porters compared with less than one percent of females.

45%

59 percent of London girls aged 10-14 were in some form of domestic service compared with only 5 percent of males.

59%

Source: Census 1851. PP 1852-53, LXXXVIII, Pt.I, England and Wales Summary Tables, xxv, xxvi, pp. ccxxii-ccxxvii; Population Tables II, London Tables, pp. 10-15.

CHILDREN'S OCCUPATIONS

In the streets

In the factories

Domestic servants

In the mines

A. In the Factories

Factories existed in Britain before the start of the industrial revolution. One of the earliest factories was John Lombe's water-powered silk mill at Derby, operational by 1721. However, they were small and not much productive. Factories spread in the country around the time cotton spinning was mechanized. Richard Arkwright, a British inventor, is said to be the main contributor to the massive development of factories in Britain during the industrial revolution. In 1769, he patterned the first spinning frame, powered by a water-wheel. In 1771, he established the world's first water-powered cotton spinning mill, in Cromford, Derbyshire, England.

Quickly, factories mushroomed across the country. The development of machines increased productivity, but also reduced skilled workers to commodities, which one could replace at will. Arkwright's factory was the first successful cotton-spinning factory in the world; it showed the way ahead for the industry and was widely copied. Nevertheless, Arkwright's system rested upon child labor. Indeed, in 1789, in his new spinning factory, two-thirds of 1,150 factory workers were children. So, in a way, he contributed to the launch of the exploitation of children in factories.

As the new factories required workers for the execution of simple tasks: child labor was the solution. Most of the children who worked in cotton mills were piecers: they repaired breaks in the thread. As they were small and nimble, they could also be scavengers, that is they had to crawl under the machines to clean them or to see if something was interfering with the production. Children also worked in factories that produced matchboxes, hats, nails, or needles.

B. In the Mines

With the industrial revolution came technical advances, such as the use of coal as a source of power for steam engines, such as trains and steamers. The demand for this resource increased, and so did the extraction of it from the British mines. Coal was very abundant in Britain, especially in Northern England, South Wales and Scotland. With the industrial revolution, the extraction of coal moved from surface extraction to deep shaft mining. The miners had to go deeper and deeper, circulating in small and narrow tunnels. Many children worked in mines during the nineteenth century. As they were small, they were fit for the job. Indeed, they could go in narrow spaces that were hard to reach for adults. According to the Report of the Children's Employment Commission, "children were chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half-naked - crawling upon their hands and feet, and dragging their heavy loads behind them - they [presented] an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural."

In the mines, children could be trappers, hurriers, thrusters, hewers, or getters.

Trappers

Hurriers and Thrusters

Hewers and Getters

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The working conditions were very harsh. Children were treated as if they had been slaves. Moreover, they often worked more than twelve hours a day, six days a week. They barely saw daylight and worked mainly in the dark because the only workers allowed to have a candle were the hewers, to enable them to see what they were doing. Children's health was greatly affected because of the constant damp and the presence of dust. They worked in very small areas, so they were always hunched. Because of the heat, workers were half or even entirely naked, hence the regular sexual harassment of young girls. Furthermore, accidents occurred every day: roofs collapsed, there were explosions due to the use of candles whose flames went into contact with methane found when coal exploded, and children were run over by carts.

Illustration of Children Working in a Narrow Underground Tunnel.

Morning Post, 5 February 1840.

1842 Commission Text on Causes of Death in Coal Mining Accidents.

Children's Testimonies

"I went to sleep because my lamp had gone out for want of oil. I was frightened for someone had stolen my bread and cheese. I think it was the rats." Mary Davis, 6 years old, Plymouth Mines.

"When I put on the girdle the blisters would break and the girdle would stick, and next day they would fill again! When I drew by the girdle and chain the skin was broken, and the blood ran down. I durst now say anything. If we said anything, they, the butty, and the reeve who works under him, would take a sticks and beat us!" Unknown

"I have been below six or eight months and I don't like it much. I come here at six in the morning and leave at six at night. When my lamp goes out, or I am hungry, I run home. I haven't been hurt yet." Susan Reece, 6 years old, Plymouth Mines.

C. In the Streets

Children who worked in the streets were mainly beggars and did small jobs to survive. Many also lived by stealing, and to the respectable Victorians, they must have seemed a real threat to society. Not only lived they in the streets, but they also lived there. Sanitation facilities were overcrowded and filthy. There were barely drinkable water and sewage. Thousands of people had to sleep under bridges or railway arches, and they were not allowed to sleep at night since the police shooed them. Street children at this time were mainly orphans or children from numerous families whose parents could not afford one more mouth to feed, because they did not work or because their wages in factories were too low.

Chimney Sweeps

Crossing Sweepers

Trade

Prostitution

1/ Chimney Sweeps

During the industrial revolution, the urban population increased significantly. Thus, houses and large buildings mushroomed. More and more houses meant more and more chimneys which required to be swept. As they were very narrow, only small people could get in. That is why most of the chimney-sweeps were children. Boys - and most rarely girls - as young as four climbed hot flues. It was a very dangerous work since they could get jammed, suffocate or burn to death. These children were apprentices under the direction of a "master sweep" who was too large to fit into a chimney because he was an adult. Master sweeps were paid by the parish to teach young children the craft of chimney sweeping during a seven-year-long apprenticeship. Indeed, the Poor Relief Act of 1601 imposed an obligation on every parish to take care of its poor, though this had much less to do with compassion than with the need to preserve order and stability. To sweep a chimney, a child would shimmy up the flue using his back, elbows, and knees. He would use a brush overhead to knock soot loose; the soot would fall over him. Once the child reached the top, he would slide down and collect the soot pile for his master, who would sell it. The children received no wages.

The 1601 POOR RELIEF ACT

It obliged each parish to collect taxes to support people who could not work. The main goal was to help people who could not work through no fault of their own . This act provided work for the unemployed and "outdoor relief" for the impotent.

2/ Crossing Sweepers

A crossing sweeper was a child who would sweep a path ahead of people crossing dirty urban streets in exchange for a tip. In the 19th century, roads were crowded, dirty and muddy. This was reinforced by the predominance of horse-drawn vehicles. There was dirt, dust and horse dung. In order for the members of the upper classes not to be covered in mud and manure, crossing sweepers cleared their paths before them, through the debris. In those days, the roads were so poorly maintained that the sweepers had to dig trenches to allow carriages and pedestrians to pass through them. There were nomadic sweepers and those who had an allocated area, which was in theory reserved to them. In his London Labour and the London Poor (published in 1851), English journalist Henry Mayhew referred to mid-19th-century crossing-sweeping as "one of those occupations which are resorted to as an excuse for begging..." Those who worked as sweepers were able to ask for money from rich passersby without necessarily being viewed solely as beggars.

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3/ Trade

Children also were in charge of selling services and/or carrying goods. Here are some examples of these services.

SHOPBOYS

A child polishing the shoes of a man in the street.

ERRANDBOYS

FLOWERGIRLS

BAKERBOYS

A child selling macthes in the street.

4/ Prostitution

As a matter of fact, many poor girls resorted to prostitution in the nineteenth century, even at a very young age. In 1848, it was claimed that almost 2,700 girls in London between the ages of 11 and 16 were hospitalized because of sexually transmitted diseases, many as a result of prostitution. Nonetheless, children who became prostitutes often got caught in a vicious circle and fell in the hands of cruel and vicious pimps. Indeed, the sexual exploitation of children during Victorian times was widespread. London brothels traded in virgin girls who were sometimes sold to these illegal organizations by the parents themselves. Some prostitute children fell pregnant at a very young age. This was the case of a young girl named Mary Simpson. She was photographed in 1871 when she was four-month pregnant while she was only 10 years old.

Read more: The Testimony of a Pimp ("a man who controls prostitutes, especially by finding customers for them, and takes some of the money that they earn," Cambridge Dictionary.)

The state did nothing to protect these children. Indeed, until 1885, the age of consent was only 12.

D. Domestic Servants

Domestic servants were mainly girls. In the 1850s one in nine girls over the age of 10 worked as domestic servants for wealthy homes. They worked for families of the middle and upper classes as charwomen, washerwomen, manglers, nurses or housemaids. Domestic service was popular among young girls because it offered accommodation and a sufficient wage. However, domestic servants were under constant scrutiny which left very little place for intimacy and private life. Up to 1860, it was legal to beat one's servants without any redress.

TOWARD THE END OF CHILD LABOR

How did the British government improve the lives of the working children?

Not only were working children the most directly vulnerable in society, but they were also the only poor people who could not be held accountable for their poor situation. Indeed, at the time, Victorians saw poverty as a sin, the result of idleness. According to them, poor people had to work hard if they wanted to overcome their difficulties, no matter how young they were. However, this idea was refuted by some contemporaries who denounced child labor, giving the Victorian society a new plague to tackle.

A. Raising Consciousness

1/ Charities

Some Victorian people helped the poor deal with poverty. These charitable acts aimed at preventing social disorder, reforming morality through material conditions, spreading middle-class values in the working class, and they were also a way of control. Many of them believed in the importance of education for young people as an opportunity to live better lives and to improve their conditions. Thus, several charities were created during the 19th century. For instance, in 1884, Thomas Agnew founded the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (LSPCC). It soon expanded to other cities, to such an extent that it became a nation-wide organization, called the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). In 1895, the NSPCC was granted its Royal Charter by Queen Victoria who became its first Royal Patron. It raised awareness of the child protection issue and stood up for more protection for children from the government.

A group of children pictured outside the LSPCC offices. (Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries)

2/ Literature

A number of writers also denounced child labor in their works. One of the best-known examples is Charles Dickens. He denounced child labor in books such as A Christmas Carol or the well-known Oliver Twist. The latter - subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress - depicts the impact of poverty and the harsh and cruel treatment of people in the workhouses through the eponymous character of Oliver Twist. After the death of his mother, the young boy enters a workhouse. In there, he toils with very little food. One day, he dares to ask for another portion of food. This immoral act causes him to be sent to Mr. Gamfield, a cruel chimney sweep, who makes Oliver his apprentice. Backed into a corner, Oliver decides to flee and to go to London. In the capital, he becomes part of a pickpocket gang, controlled by the manipulative Fagin. That way, Dickens also denounced the overwhelming presence of children in the streets, the latter often falling in the trap of criminality.

Likewise, some Members of Parliament expressed their rejection of child labor. For instance, in 1842, Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper, along with William Dodd published "The Factory System: Illustrated" in which he denounced the working conditions of children in textile factories. In 1851, Henry Mayhew published his London Labour and the London Poor, which gathered thousands of interviews of poor people living in the streets of London. Firstly published separately in the newspaper The Morning Chronicle, the accounts provided Victorian society with overwhelming evidence that the system had to be reformed. At the time, literature was only accessible to the member of the upper-middle class and the aristocracy, since they were the only ones who had access to education. Even though they had no idea of how labor could be hard, these works raised their awareness of the horrible treatment of poor young children.

B. Chronology

1/ Regulating Children's Working Conditions

1802 |

1819 |

1833 |

1834 |

1840 |

1831 |

- 1842

| 1850

| 1847

| 1844

| 1864

| 1867

| 1878

2/ Children's Education and Welfare

As the years passed by, a great emphasis was put on the importance of education for children. According to many Victorians, it would free children from their ignorance and de facto reduce the problems of society such as poverty, disease, crime and disorder. The Reform Acts (1832, 1867 and 1884) both sped up and paved the way for compulsory schooling. Indeed, they enfranchised sizable parts of the population, even to the formerly-rejected working class, which meant that these people needed to receive an education so that they could use their right to vote properly.

1848

1859

1869

1870

1876

1891

1902

1844

CONCLUSION

Child labor greatly contributed to the development of the United Kingdom as a leading industrial power during the nineteenth century. Nowadays, many historians even insist upon the fact that children were the driving force behind this development. Nonetheless, over the course of the 19th century, child labor started to fade away. Indeed, it was also a century of change, during which people became more and more aware of the brutal and abusive treatment of poor children. Acts improved their living and working condition, even though they came late and were progressive, with various unsuccessful attempts. By the end of Victoria's reign, almost all children were in school up to the age of 12. This helped to ensure that a real improvement in child welfare occurred between the beginning and end of Victoria's reign. Although child labor has disappeared in Britain, it is still a societal scourge in many developing countries.

REFERENCES

Websites

Books

Student: Chevalier Justine - TD1 - L2LLCER AnglaisSubject: Nineteenth-Century Britain: Economy, Society and PoliticsTheme: Child Labor in Nineteenth-Century BritainTeacher: Mrs. DOR Year: L2S4 - 2020