Child Labor David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College.
Child "hurriers" working in mines. From official report of the parliamentary commision.
That the shameful practice of child labor should have played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset is not to be wondered at. The displaced working classes, from the seventeenth century on, took it for granted that a family would not be able to support itself if the children were not employed. In Defoe's day he thought it admirable that in the vicinity of Halifax scarcely anybody above the age of 4 was idle. The children of the poor were forced by economic conditions to work, as Dickens, with his family in debtor's prison, worked at age 12 in the Blacking Factory. In 1840 perhaps only twenty percent of the children of London had any schooling, a number which had risen by 1860, when perhaps half of the children between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school, if only a day school (of the sort in which Dickens's Pip finds himself in Great Expectations) or a Sunday school; the others were working. Many of the more fortunate found employment as apprentices to respectable trades (in the building trade workers put in 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in winter) or as general servants — there were over 120,000 domestic servants in London alone at mid-century, who worked 80 hour weeks for one halfpence per hour — but many more were not so lucky. Most prostitutes (and there were thousands in London alone) were between 15 and 22 years of age.
Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819. After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when "Short Time Committees" organized largely by Evangelicals began to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 be permitted to work a maximum of twelve hours per day; children 9-11 were allowed to work 8 hour days; and children under 9 were no longer permitted to work at all (children as young as 3 had been put to work previously). This act applied only to the textile industry, where children were put to work at the age of 5, and not to a host of other industries and occupations. Iron and coal mines (where children, again, both boys and girls, began work at age 5, and generally died before they were 25), gas works, shipyards, construction, match factories, nail factories, and the business of chimney sweeping, for example (which Blake would use as an emblem of the destruction of the innocent), where the exploitation of child labor was more extensive, was to be enforced in all of England by a total of four inspectors. After further radical agitation, another act in 1847 limited both adults and children to ten hours of work daily.
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David Cody
David Cody, who received his Ph. D. in English and American literature from Brown University in 1989, was one of the original team of three postgraduate and postdoctoral assistants who worked with Landow to create materials for Intermedia, the hypertext system that the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) designed and produced between 1986-1988.
Cody wrote many of the general materials and chose many of the original digitized images, most of which have since been replaced when the capacities of equipment have improved so dramatically. In this photograph, he is sitting near the one of the original Apple Macintosh computers on which he wrote many of his essays.
Dr. Cody, winner of a Fulbright Scholarship to Japan, has since taught at the University of California, the University of Oklahoma, and Hartwick College, where is now Professor of English. His dissertation is entitled "Black Conceit: Art And Anxiety In Hawthorne's Fiction" (1989).
Since receiving his degree from Brown, Professor Cody has publishd widely, and according to bis his biographical page at Hartwick,
His articles and essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Adams, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Faulkner, and H. G. Wells have appeared in journals including The New England Quarterly, Modern Language Studies, The Emerson Society Quarterly, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, The Melville Log, The Emily Dickinson Journal, The Journal of Modern Literature, Essex Institute Historical Collections, The Sherlock Holmes Review, and Language and Culture, and in books and annual volumes including Bloom's Modern Critical Views, Literature in the Early American Republic, and Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper. He has contributed essays to The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World.
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The Life of the Industrial Worker in Ninteenth-Century England
Laura Del Col, West Virginia University
The physical deterioration of the manufacturing class in England was still noticeable in the 1930s, more than a century after the height of the Industrial Revolution. A medical observer's description of what the work did to the worker follows.
The Physical Deterioration of the Textile Workers
[P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England. London, 1833, pp.161-162, 202-203.]
Any man who has stood at twelve o'clock at the single narrow door-way, which serves as the place of exit for the hands employed in the great cotton-mills, must acknowledge, that an uglier set of men and women, of boys and girls, taking them in the mass, it would be impossible to congregate in a smaller compass. Their complexion is sallow and pallid--with a peculiar flatness of feature, caused by the want of a proper quantity of adipose substance to cushion out the cheeks. Their stature low--the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches. Their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully. A very general bowing of the legs. Great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures. Nearly all have flat feet, accompanied with a down-tread, differing very widely from the elasticity of action in the foot and ankle, attendant upon perfect formation. Hair thin and straight--many of the men having but little beard, and that in patches of a few hairs, much resembling its growth among the red men of America. A spiritless and dejected air, a sprawling and wide action of the legs, and an appearance, taken as a whole, giving the world but "little assurance of a man," or if so, "most sadly cheated of his fair proportions..."
Factory labour is a species of work, in some respects singularly unfitted for children. Cooped up in a heated atmosphere, debarred the necessary exercise, remaining in one position for a series of hours, one set or system of muscles alone called into activity, it cannot be wondered at--that its effects are injurious to the physical growth of a child. Where the bony system is still imperfect, the vertical position it is compelled to retain, influences its direction; the spinal column bends beneath the weight of the head, bulges out laterally, or is dragged forward by the weight of the parts composing the chest, the pelvis yields beneath the opposing pressure downwards, and the resistance given by the thigh-bones; its capacity is lessened, sometimes more and sometimes less; the legs curve, and the whole body loses height, in consequence of this general yielding and bending of its parts.
John Fielden, although himself a Lancashire factory owner, was one of the staunchest fighters for protective legislation for the cotton worker. His difficulties are such as today in the Southern states of the United States are commonly urged by manufacturers.
A Cotton Manufacturer on Hours of Labor
[John Fielden, M.P., The Curse of the Factory System. London, 1836,pp. 34-35.]
Here, then, is the "curse" of our factory-system; as improvements in machinery have gone on, the "avarice of masters" has prompted many to exact more labour from their hands than they were fitted by nature to perform, and those who have wished for the hours of labour to be less for all ages than the legislature would even yet sanction, have had no alternative but to conform more or less to the prevailing practice, or abandon the trade altogether. This has been the case with regard to myself and my partners. We have never worked more than seventy-one hours a week before Sir JOHN HOBHOUSE'S Act was passed. We then came down to sixty-nine; and since Lord ALTHORP's Act was passed, in 1833, we have reduced the time of adults to sixty-seven and a half hours a week, and that of children under thirteen years of age to forty-eight hours in the week, though to do this latter has, I must admit, subjected us to much inconvenience, but the elder hands to more, inasmuch as the relief given to the child is in some measure imposed on the adult. But the overworking does not apply to children only; the adults are also overworked. The increased speed given to machinery within the last thirty years, has, in very many instances, doubled the labour of both.
Sending boys up chimneys to clean them was a common practice, and a dangerous and cruel one. Lord Ashley became the chief advocate of the use of chimney-sweeping machinery and of legislation to require its use. Even earlier, however, such a law had been proposed, but it met with strong opposition. In a debate on this subject in the House of Lords in 1819 the Earl of Lauderdale well represented a large body of conservative opinion.
Opposition to the Chimney Sweepers' Regulation Bill
[Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, March 8, 1819. New Series, vol. 39, p. 901.]
Their lordships had lately heard complaints of the encouragement given to machinery, in preference to manual industry. Now, though he differed most completely from those who cherished the prejudice he alluded to--though he was convinced that the introduction of machinery had not only had the effect of enriching the proprietor, but also of enabling the workman to live better and cheaper than he otherwise could have done--yet there certainly was some difference to be drawn between their encouraging and enforcing the adoption of machinery, and especially when those persons who best understood its application in the way of trade were against its introduction at all. ...If their lordships were determined to adopt such a course, they must introduce a code of moral legislation unknown to their ancestors, and quite unsuited to their habits and laws. The better way, in his judgment, would be to leave reforms of this kind entirely to the moral feeling of, perhaps, the most moral people, on the whole face of the earth.
When Sadler was defeated for reelection in 1833 by Macaulay, his successor as leader in the campaign for shorter hours was Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury, whose achievements in this field exceeded any other man's. More than a generation later the old Earl of Shaftesbury, speaking for a bill to relieve conditions of textile workers in India, commented on the great gains brought about by similar legislation in England.
The Benefit of the Factory Legislation
[Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Apr. 4, 1879. 3rd Series, vol. CCXLV, pp. 355-356.]
The other is the old, the often-repeated, and as often-refuted, argument that the work is light. Light! Why, no doubt, much of it is light, if measured by the endurance of some three or four minutes. But what say you, my Lords, to a continuity of toil, in a standing posture, in a poisonous atmosphere, during 13 hours, with 15 minutes of rest? Why, the stoutest man in England, were he made, in such a condition of things, to do nothing during the whole of that time but be erect on his feet and stick pins in a pincushion, would sink under the burden. What say you, then, of children--children of the tenderest years? Why, they become stunted, crippled, deformed, useless. I speak what I know--I state what I have seen. When I visited Bradford, in Yorkshire, in 1838, being desirous to see the condition of the children--for I knew that they were employed at very early ages in the worsted business....I asked for a collection of cripples and deformities. In a short time more than 80 were gathered in a large courtyard. They were mere samples of the entire mass. I assert without exaggeration that no power of language could describe the varieties, and I may say, the cruelties, in all these degradations of the human form. They stood or squatted before me in all the shapes of the letters of the alphabet. This was the effect of prolonged toil on the tender frames of children at early ages. When I visited Bradford, under the limitation of hours some years afterwards, I called for a similar exhibition of cripples; but, God be praised! there was not one to be found in that vast city. Yet the work of these poor sufferers had been light, if measured by minutes, but terrific when measured by hours.
[The material above was reprinted in an old history textbook, Readings in European History Since 1814, edited by Jonathan F. Scott and Alexander Baltzly, and was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. in 1930. The original sources of the material are listed in footnotes in the book; I've put them in brackets after each subject heading. The explanatory notes between sections are by Scott and Baltzly; the links were, of course, added by me. --L.D.C.]
Contents
Evidence Given Before the Sadler Committee
Mr. Cobbett's Discovery
The Physical Deterioration of the Textile Workers
A Cotton Manufacturer on Hours of Labor
Opposition to the Chimney Sweepers' Regulation Bill
The Benefit of the Factory Legislation
Testimony Gathered by Ashley's Mines Commission
Chadwick's Report on Sanitary Conditions
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Evangelicalism
David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College
vangelical, a term literally meaning "of or pertaining to the Gospel," was employed from the eighteenth century on to designate the school of theology adhered to by those Protestants who believed that the essence of the Gospel lay in the doctrine of salvation by faith in the death of Christ, which atoned for man's sins (see Evangelical Doctrine.) Evangelicalism stressed the reality of the "inner life," insisted on the total depravity of humanity (a consequence of the Fall) and on the importance of the individual's personal relationship with God and Savior. They put particular emphasis on faith, denying that either good works or the sacraments (which they perceived as being merely symbolic) possessed any salvational efficacy. Evangelicals, too, denied that ordination imparted any supernatural gifts, and upheld the sole authority of the Bible in matters of doctrine. The term came into general use in England at the time of the Methodist revival under Wesley and Whitefield, which had its roots in Calvinism and which, with its emphasis on emotion and mysticism in the spiritual realm, was itself in part a reaction against the "rational" Deism of the earlier eighteenth century. Early in the nineteenth century the terms "Evangelical" and " Methodist" were used indiscriminately by opponents of the movement, who accused its adherents of fanaticism and puritanical disapproval of social pleasures. The Evangelical branch of the Anglican Church coincided very nearly with the "Low Church" party.
[Evangelical Christianity has special importance to Victorian literature because so many major figures began as Evangelicals and retained many attitudes and ideas, including notions of biblical symbolism, even after they abandoned their childhood and young adult beliefs either for another form of Christianity or unbelief. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browining, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. — GPL]
Related Materials
Evangelical Doctrine
The Evangelical Movement in the Church of England
The Olney Hymns
Evangelical Popular Science Publishing
Suggested readings [GPL].
Brown, Ford K. Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961.
Cuningham, Valentine. Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Hilton, Boyd. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Jay, Elizabeth. The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
After one of John Wesley's lay preachers, Thomas Mitchell, had given a Yorkshire congregation his views on sin, a butcher who heard him went home and beat his wife "because he thought she had told me" (wrote Mitchell) "all his sinful ways". The awakening conscience took many forms. When in 1758 another of Wesley's men, John Pawson, persuaded his conventionally Anglican father to hear a few Methodist sermons, the father was soon found in the privacy of his own stables roaring and trembling at the prospect of divine judgement. There was a regular sequence here: you lived unaware of your own wickedness, you became seized of it, you perceived that you could not reform, you feared spending eternity in hell, and you expressed your fear as was most natural to you. But there could also be a further, happier stage: you could accept the New Testament promises of forgiveness as applying directly to you. Do that, and your tears became tears of joy. "I burst out a-crying, and laughing, and dancing, and jumping about the room", wrote one of Charles Wesley's 1741 converts, Joseph Carter. Another, John Walsh, felt his body so light "that I might choose whether to walk or fly". And sooner or later you told other people. — John Whale, "Scab on the Story," Times Literary Supplement (17 February 2006): 32.
Russell, George W. E. A Short History of the Evangelical Movement. London: A. R. Mowbray and Son, 1915
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