Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England

Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914

Katrina Honeyman, Nigel Goose, Nigel Goose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317167914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XIX secolo

The purpose of this collection is to bring together representative examples of the most recent work that is taking an understanding of children and childhood in new directions. The two key overarching themes are diversity: social, economic, geographical, and cultural; and agency: the need to see children in industrial England as participants - even protagonists - in the process of historical change, not simply as passive recipients or victims. Contributors address such crucial subjects as the varied experience of work; poverty and apprenticeship; institutional care; the political voice of children; child sexual abuse; and children and education. This volume, therefore, includes some of the best, innovative work on the history of children and childhood currently being written by both younger and established scholars.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Nigel Goose and Katrina Honeyman

Early interest in the history of children and child labour in the British industrial era focused on exploitation and victimhood. For much of the twentieth century the historiography was dominated by concern over the exploitation of children in the new factories and mines that were seen to epitomize the economic developments associated with industrialization. This concern was fuelled by the report of the Sadler Committee of 1832, with its heart-rending images of the gross exploitation of children still in their very infancy, a report that – despite its obviously biased testimony and extremely narrow evidential basis – had considerable influence upon contemporaries, as well as upon several generations of historians.1 Of course by no means all contemporaries accepted the Sadler testimony, apologists and champions of the benefits of mechanization such as Andrew Ure representing child factory workers as ‘lively elves’ engaged in their ‘sport’ as they mended broken threads on highly dangerous moving machinery.2 Some historians too came to realize that the Sadler Report was hardly representative of the experience of most child workers, and that the harshest of conditions were probably already in the past by the time it was published. W.H. Chaloner emphasized the political agenda that lay behind the over-emphasis in contemporary agitation on a small number of examples of brutal child exploitation,3 while R.M. Hartwell recognized that the issue was being clouded by moral judgements, made either by middle-class contemporaries or by (usually also) middle-class historians.4 Neil Smelser similarly downplayed the impact of factory employment upon the family, arguing for continuity even in cotton textile factories, where family units would often be retained under the supervision of the male head of household.5 Although this view has since found little support in empirical evidence, it too helped to create a consensus that tempered the previous – probably unduly harsh – interpretations of the role of children in industrial Britain. These more qualified, and apparently ideologically neutral, views very quickly took centre stage, and until the 1960s became the prevailing orthodoxy about the impact of industrialization upon child labour in England. Yet, while the tension between different interpretations of the conditions and location of children’s work was played out if not fully resolved, the potential importance of child workers to industrial expansion failed to be recognized. As Jane Humphries has argued, even in current economic histories of the period children are ‘invisible’ or, at best, marginal players in the industrial revolution.6

Nevertheless, recent research has generated important new insights into child labour as well as other dimensions of childhood in the industrial era. Such progress has both reflected and been informed by wider interest in childhood studies, which has stemmed from a range of disciplinary perspectives, of which sociology and psychology, history, literature and culture, as well as medicine are particularly important.7 The shift of children from liminal to more central positions within academic analyses parallels movements in women’s studies,8 but has also been shaped by current global concerns about children’s welfare.9 The interdisciplinary nature of the understanding of children’s social, economic and cultural position both in the past and in more recent times has served to generate valuable new conceptualizations. Among the most important of these are: the child as a social and historical construct (which includes a gender dimension);10 the complexity and diversity of childhood experiences;11 and the analysis of children as social and economic actors.12 The notion of children as active in the construction of their own lives, and not simply as passive subjects of social structures and processes, while readily accepted in social and political science, has only recently received recognition in historical work.13 It has been argued that while historians have become increasingly sensitive to issues surrounding gender, race and sexual orientation, they have demonstrated relatively little empathy with children.14 However, there are indications that historical scholarship is beginning to engage with this and other perspectives emerging from a number of disciplines.

While mainstream economic history may remain resistant to embracing the importance of children and their employment, other historical methodologies have begun to adopt an empathetic approach. Social historians, for example, have begun to discover the true ‘voices of the poor’ – first through the testimony of working class autobiographies and more latterly through correspondence produced by the operation of the poor law – which has resulted in a greater emphasis upon what the working classes (children as well as adults) themselves thought about child employment, rather than upon what the various J.P.s, gentry and clergymen (the ‘great and the good’) who dominate royal commission reports thought about it. Contemporary working-class opinion was not universally hostile to the employment of children, and in their turn historians have also come to realize that the economic contributions of children, while frequently quite modest when considered on their own, could make a fundamental difference to the household economy as well as to the economy as a whole. The earnings of children were particularly important to families who were relatively poor, either as a result of low wages or parental deprivation;15 and the findings of recent research which exemplify the importance of children’s and women’s contribution to family income at last correct the longstanding analytical emphasis on the real wages of adult males which featured so prominently in that most tortuous and inconclusive of debates – that over the standard of living in the industrial revolution.16

The labour of children was also important to the expansion of the economy as a whole. Until recently historians have been reluctant to recognize this dimension, and while quantitative support for such a proposition remains underdeveloped, the demographic argument at least is unassailable. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children comprised a significant proportion of the English population. Gregory King reckoned this to be 45 per cent in the late seventeenth century.17 In the last decades of the eighteenth century, as the population began to grow rapidly, so the proportion of young people rose. The already high dependency ratio became higher still until the 1840s. In 1821 49 per cent of the population was aged under 20.18 In 1826 there were 1,120 children under the age of 14 for every 1,000 adults aged between 25 and 60.19 In 1831 39 per cent of the population was aged under 14; and 25 per cent of the population was aged between five and 14.20 For a poor or plebeian child not to work within such a regime would be very surprising. As Donald Coleman has remarked, ‘child labour is surely normal’ in an economy containing a high proportion of children.21 Children, the conventional wisdom runs, had always worked, often driven by poverty, and what was distinctive about the industrial era was that the nature of their work changed, as did their relationship to their employers. We will return to this issue below.22

While the early debate over child labour was framed in terms of ‘how bad were conditions for children working in factories’, it only addressed part of the issue. For as understanding of the industrial revolution itself has become more sophisticated, involving appreciation of the fact that its key element was an expansion of demand which impacted upon domestic industry and artisan production as well as upon centralized industry, it became clear that factory work was not typical of child labour, for traditional employments such as agriculture and service continued to engage more children than those employments new to the period of the industrial revolution.23 Such correctives should not, however, deflect attention away from the importance of the factory in children’s employment (as well as the importance of children’s employment to the expansion of the factory) especially in the years between 1780 and 1840. What should be emphasized in this context is the diversity of children’s experience and location of work, a dimension also underlined in Hugh Cunningham’s work, and one that should be borne in mind when considering the significance of studies of child labour from ‘national’ samples of family budgets drawn from disparate areas and over long stretches of time, as conducted recently by Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries.24

More recently still, new insights have been made into the history of parish apprenticeship during the early industrial period. While conventional wisdom suggested that parish apprenticeship was only short-lived and made no more than a marginal contribution to the early factory labour force, Katrina Honeyman has shown that it was extensive and flexible, making an important contribution to business success.25 Furthermore, the system was generally well administered, the apprenticing of very young children was rare, and far from all factory apprentices were sent long distances, although much depended upon the supply and demand for labour in local markets. Parishes did not cast off their youngsters without concern for their future welfare, and the great majority engaged in one or another form of monitoring activity, even if the practical impact of the monitoring and inspection process was sometimes minimal.

In relation to the central issue of child labour, therefore, recent research has brought exciting new approaches, the use of new evidence, fuller exploitation of familiar evidence, and new (and more sophisticated) interpretations.26 But there are many other developments in the field too. Historians are looking afresh at the different perspectives on childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – industrial, literary and medical.27 No longer is the history of education in the industrial era recorded merely as an administrative (and teleological) progression of parliamentary legislation, or through the glass of the proportions of adults who could sign their names in marriage registers. Historians are now looking more closely at the drivers of educational change, their relationship to the family economy and to the possible impact of rural seasonal work patterns and urban poverty.28 The diversity of educational opportunities, as well as the diverse take-up of those opportunities, is also now on the agenda of historians of education, giving new emphasis, for example, to the role of industrial schools. The nature of punishment, both in and out of the workplace, and the incidence of child sexual abuse, are also new to the historical agenda, while more detailed examination of children within specific institutional contexts is enriching our understanding of the diversity of childhood experiences. Children as consumers – of food, clothing or children’s literature – is also the subject of current interest, whilst consideration of children’s political voice is a particularly fascinating development.29

There is, therefore, a new wave of interest in the history of children and childhood in industrial England, which is producing exciting new research. Some of this research makes use of familiar sources, but it does so in new ways, through more intensive, detailed and nuanced exploration. Other research employs new and less familiar source material – both quantitative and qualitative – that has barely been used to date. All of this research offers new insights, perspectives and interpretations of children and childhood in industrial England. It is these new insights, perspectives and ...