Children at work - Didier

mentary committee. Sadler announced that this victimisation
meant that he could no longer ask factory
workers to be interviewed. He now concentrated on
interviewing doctors who had experience treating
people who worked in textile factories.
[…] Sadler’s report was published in January 1833.
The information in the report shocked the British
public and Parliament came under increasing pressure
to protect the children working in factories.
British Library of Political and Economic Science,
COLL MISC 0062.
Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885)
At the age of twenty-five he was elected as M.P. for
Woodstock, a pocket borough under the control
of the Shaftesbury family.
[…] In March 1833, he proposed a bill that would
restrict children to a maximum ten hour day. On
18th
July, 1833, Ashley’s bill was defeated in the House of
Commons by 238 votes to 93. Although the government
opposed Ashley’s bill it accepted that children
did need protecting and decided to put forward its
own proposals. The government’s 1833 Factory Act
was passed by Parliament on 29th August.
Under the terms of the new act, it became illegal
for children under nine to work in textile factories,
whereas children aged between nine and thirteen
could not be employed for more than eight hours
a day. The main disappointment of the reformers
was that children over thirteen were allowed to
work for up to twelve hours a day. […]
In 1840 Lord Ashley helped set up the Children’s
Employment Commission. Its first report on mines
and collieries was published in 1842. The report
caused a sensation when it was published. The
majority of people in Britain were unaware that
women and children were employed as miners.
Later that year Lord Ashley piloted the Coal Mines
Act through the House of Commons. As a result of
this legislation women and children were prohibited
from working underground.
Lord Ashley also continued to lead the campaign
for a reduction in the hours that children worked
in factories. […]
He published a report that revealed that children
as young as four and five were still working from
six in the morning to ten at night in some British
factories.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRashley.htm
• Child Labour in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Child labour did not begin with the advent of
the industrial revolution. The young had always
worked alongside their parents in the home, in the
field, and as apprentices in skilled and semi-skilled
trades, but the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries saw a drastic change in the type of
labour children performed. Increasingly employed
in factories and mines, children were thrust into
dangerous and unhealthy situations within the
adult working world, prompting reformers to call
for legislative change and Romantic and Victorian
writers to offer sympathetic representations of
working children in their poetry and fiction.
INTRODUCTION
In the early part of the nineteenth century thousands
of children in England were employed in
textile factories, workshops, and mines, usually
working long hours for very low wages. Although
the Factory Act of 1833 set at nine the minimum
age for children working in factories, it was rarely
enforced. Parents who depended on the wages
of their offspring could easily obtain certificates
testifying that their children met the required
age. Mining was not regulated until much later
when the Report of the Children’s Employment
Commission in 1842 exposed the dangerous and
unhealthy conditions under which children as
young as four and five labored underground. The
smallest workers were most commonly employed
as “trappers,” sitting alone in the dark shafts and
opening the trap doors for approaching coal carts.
Older children, six and up, worked in the mines
as human beasts of burden, dragging loaded
coal carts.
Older children, six and up, worked in the mines
as human beasts of burden, dragging loaded coal
carts through narrow passages. Other industries,
such as the manufacture of glass, lace, pottery,
paper, and tobacco, were subject to no regulations
at all until well past the mid-century mark.
An almost exclusively British practice was the
tradition of using small boys, and sometimes
girls, to climb narrow chimneys as apprentices
to adult chimney-sweeps. George Phillips reports
that elsewhere in the world chimneys were most
often cleaned with a weighted rope operated by
two men and later by machinery invented for the
purpose, but it was an English tradition to use
climbing boys. “Once he had started to employ
climbing-boys, the Englishman did not wish to
change his habit; and the custom of sending
small children… up chimneys continued in a
country noted for its tenacity in maintaining its
traditions,” writes Phillips. Children as young as
four, the smaller the better, were apprenticed by
their poverty-stricken parents or by unscrupulous
overseers of workhouses. […]
Project 1 - Children at work
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