essay on child labour in the industrial revolution

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Child Labor

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 24, 2022 | Original: October 27, 2009

Child labor, or the use of children as workers, servants and apprentices, has been practiced throughout most of human history, but reached its zenith during the Industrial Revolution. Miserable working conditions including crowded and unclean factories, a lack of safety codes and long hours were the norm. Children could be paid less and were less likely to organize into unions. Working children were typically unable to attend school, creating a cycle of poverty that was difficult to break. Nineteenth century reformers and labor organizers sought to restrict child labor and improve working conditions to uplift the masses, but it took the Great Depression—a time when Americans were desperate for employment—to shake long-held practices of child labor in the United States.

Child Labor in the United States

The Puritan work ethic of the 13 colonies and their founders valued hard work over idleness, and this ethos applied to children as well. Through the first half of the 1800s, child labor was an essential part of the agricultural and handicraft economy of the United States. Children worked on family farms and as indentured servants for others. To learn a trade, boys often began their apprenticeships between the ages of ten and fourteen.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution saw the rise of factories and mines in need of workers. Children were ideal employees because they could be paid less, were often of smaller size so could attend to tasks in tight spaces and were less likely to organize and strike against their pitiable working conditions.

Before the Civil War , women and children played a critical role in American manufacturing, though it was still a relatively small part of the economy. Advances in manufacturing techniques after the war increased the number of jobs—and therefore increased the number of child laborers.

Did you know? In 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of 16.

Immigration and Child Labor

Immigration to the United States coincidentally peaked during the Industrial Revolution and led to a new source of labor—and child labor. When the Irish Potato Famine struck in the 1840s, Irish immigrants moved to fill lower-level factory jobs.

In the 1880s, groups from southern and eastern Europe arrived, provided a new pool of child workers. The trend continues today, as many immigrant children work in agriculture, which is exempt from certain labor laws.

National Child Labor Committee

Educational reformers of the mid-nineteenth century attempted to convince the public that a primary school education was a necessity if the nation were to advance as a whole. Several states established a minimum wage for labor and requirements for school attendance—though many of these laws were full of loopholes that were readily exploited by employers hungry for cheap labor.

Beginning in 1900, efforts to regulate or eliminate child labor became central to social reform in the United States. The National Child Labor Committee , organized in 1904, and state child labor committees led the charge.

These organizations employed flexible methods in the face of slow progress. They pioneered tactics like investigations by experts; the use of photographs of child laborers to spark outrage at the poor conditions of children at work, and persuasive lobbying efforts. They used written pamphlets, leaflets and mass mailings to reach the public.

From 1902 to 1915, child labor committees emphasized reform through state legislatures. Many laws restricting child labor were passed as part of the Progressive Era reform movement . But many Southern states resisted, leading to the decision to work for a federal child labor law. While Congress passed such laws in 1916 and 1918, the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.

The supporters of child labor laws sought a constitutional amendment authorizing federal child labor legislation and it passed in 1924, though states were not keen to ratify it; the conservative political climate of the 1920s, together with opposition from farm and church organizations fearing increased federal power over children, acted as roadblocks.

Depression-Era Child Labor

The Great Depression left thousands of Americans without jobs and led to sweeping reforms under the New Deal programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt . These focused on increasing federal oversight of the workplace and giving out-of-work adults jobs—thereby creating a powerful motive to remove children from the workforce.

Almost all of the codes developed under the National Industrial Recovery Act served to reduce child labor. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a national minimum wage for the first time, a maximum number of hour for workers in interstate commerce—and placed limitations on child labor. In effect, the employment of children under sixteen years of age was prohibited in manufacturing and mining.

Automatization and Education

Changing attitudes toward work and social reform weren’t the only factors reducing child labor; the invention of improved machinery that mechanized many of the repetitive tasks previously given to children led to a decrease of children in the workforce. Semiskilled adults took their place for more complex tasks.

Education underwent reforms, too. Many states increasing the number of years of schooling required to hold certain jobs, lengthened the school year and began to more strictly enforce truancy laws. In 1949, Congress amended the child labor law to include businesses not covered in 1938 like transportation, communications and public utilities.

Does Child Labor Exist Today?

Although child labor has been significantly stalled in the United States, it lingers in certain areas of the economy like agriculture, where migrant workers are more difficult to regulate. Since 1938, federal laws have excluded child farm workers from labor protections provided to other working children. For example, children 12 and younger can legally work in farm fields, despite the risks posed by exposure to pesticides and farm machinery.

Employers in the garment industry have turned to the children of illegal immigrants in an effort to compete with imports from low-wage nations. Despite laws limiting the number of hours of work for children and teens still attending school, the increasing cost of education means many are working longer hours to make ends meet. State-by-state enforcement of child labor laws varies to this day.

Child Labor in U.S. History. The University of Iowa . History of Child Labor in the United States. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . Children in the Fields. National Farm Worker Ministry .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Children in the Industrial Revolution

Introduction, general overview.

Anthologies
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Pessimists on Child Labor
Optimists on Child Labor
Exploitation of Children
Privileged versus Working Class
Children as Protagonists
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Children in the Industrial Revolution by Carolyn Tuttle LAST REVIEWED: 13 January 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 22 February 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0197

Children aged six to sixteen who had worked on farms, in their homes, or in domestic workshops began to work away from home in textile mills and mines in the late 18th century. The novelty was not that they worked but whether the nature of their work changed and why it became a social problem. There is very little consensus among contemporaries and historians regarding the impact of industrialization on the lives of the working children. Did they benefit or were they harmed? The obvious place to begin is where the first “Industrial Revolution” occurred, Great Britain. Although it wasn’t entirely “industrial” in nature and certainly didn’t occur quickly, scholars concede that it was a time of dramatic change to industry and the economy. Contemporaries and historians disagree, however, on what role children played. Some claim that children constituted a large percentage of the workforce, their tasks were essential to the production process, they were independent wage earners, and their contribution to the family was significant. Other argue that idleness and unemployment was more the problem and that children had been contributing to the family income for decades. The most contentious debate revolves around whether or not children were exploited in the new industries. A few contemporaries were thrilled to see children hard at work while others were horrified and felt it had become a social problem. A group of concerned parliamentarians ordered reports on the conditions in the textile factories and mines, hoping to settle the debate. Factory and mining commissioners surveyed hundreds of working children, parents, and overseers to document the effects of employment on children. The evidence from these reports was used to develop labor legislation that would regulate child labor but not eliminate it. Pessimists used this evidence as well as personal observations to argue that children were exploited and must be protected. Optimists argued the evidence was biased and that factory children suffered no worse than those in domestic industry. As a consequence of the Factory Movement, legislation was passed but its effectiveness is disputable because enforcement proved difficult. Using data from other Parliamentary Papers historians have furthered the debate over children’s welfare by comparing health records of children in industry to others, with conflicting conclusions. There is consensus, however, that a formal education was logistically impossible and not particularly relevant for working-class children. Child labor persisted as other European and North American countries industrialized. History is repeating itself, as research by ethnographers, economists, and historians has documented substantial child labor in developing countries today.

There is considerable debate as to the novelty of child labor during the Industrial Revolution and whether it was dramatically different in the factories and mines than it had been on farms and in homes. Berg 1986 , Pinchbeck 1930 , and Wallace 2010 claim that the nature of child labor did not change by demonstrating that children had been working hard for centuries in the informal economy. Historically, child labor referred to any work children did, whether or not they were paid. This includes a diverse set of activities ranging from running errands to straw plaiting. Other scholars argue industrialization changed the nature of child labor by removing them from their home and parental supervision into factories and mines where they worked long hours in unhealthy conditions and were mistreated. There are a number of scholars who concentrate on child labor in the formal economy in the textile industry. Tuttle 1999 and Pollard 1965 conclude children’s work in textile factories was noticeably worse than in the cottage industry due to the new industrial regime. The textile industry became Britain’s leading industry as the extraordinary demands of the industrialists and their automated machinery placed new burdens on children. The arduous tasks children performed on the new spinning machines are meticulously described by Bolin-Hort 1989 and Chapman 1967 . There are other scholars who focus on children working in the formal economy in the coal and metallurgy mines. In the literature on children working in the mines there is a consensus that this work was dramatically different from work in the cottage industry and that children suffered. Leifchild 1853 and Leifchild 1857 provide extensive details (ages, numbers of children, working conditions) on children working underground in coal mines and above ground in metallurgy mines. Tuttle 1999 augments Leifchild’s data with information from the 1842 Report of the Mines to develop a comprehensive picture of the importance of child labor in coal and metallurgy mines.

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

An in-depth examination of “the other Industrial Revolution” is developed by analyzing the life of artisans, their tools, and their skills to shed light on the variety of production types that co-existed during the Industrial Revolution. The extent and broad coverage of children in various cottage industries (metal, leather, silk, paper, and printing) with accompanying illustrations of the techniques they used fills a void in the literature.

Bolin-Hort, Per. Work, Family and the State: Child Labor and the Organization of Production in the British Cotton Industry . Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1989.

This book offers a different perspective on the reason numerous children were employed in the textile mills. A comparative analysis of the new spinning machinery adopted in British, Scottish, and American textile factories casts doubt on a primarily technology-driven argument. Instead, the use of child labor was also driven by labor relations (subcontracting between the spinner and piecer) and union goals to limit the supply of spinners.

Chapman, Stanley D. Early Factory Masters: The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands Textile Industry . Devon, UK: Newton Abbot, 1967.

The major problem facing industrialists was the recruitment and retention of a productive labor force for the textile mills. The organization of production under one roof and the adoption of machines that required unskilled labor increased the demand for women and children. A thorough examination of the labor requirements of each innovation beginning with the Spinning Jenny provides an explanation for the increased demand for children in the textile industry.

Leifchild, J. R. Our Coal and Our Coal-Pit: The People in Them and the Scenes around Them . London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853.

An extremely detailed description from a contemporary of the workings of a coal mine and the various tasks performed. Sketches of coal seams, methods of excavation, and personal observations below and above ground reveal the unhealthy and dangerous working conditions of trappers and putters. It also includes some statistics on the number of children employed and their wages.

Leifchild, J. R. Cornwall: Its Mines and Miners . London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857.

A contemporary’s detailed description of the workings of tin and copper mines in Cornwall. In contrast to coal mines, children usually worked with their father and did not work underground. The largest number of children, mostly girls, worked as “bal-maidens” dressing the ores. Along with an analysis of the 1842 Report on the Mines, statistics on the number of children and the output of various mines are presented.

Pinchbeck, Ivy. Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1800 . London: George Routledge, 1930.

Pinchbeck offers a broad examination of the role of women and children in the family economy beginning in agricultural gangs, moving to cottage industries (lace makers, straw plaiting, glove making, and button making) and ending in textile factories and mines. She argues that the working conditions and exploitation of children in the cottage industry were far worse than they were in the factories and coal mines.

Pollard, Sidney. The Genesis of Modern Management . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.

This book describes how the labor requirements for factory work were dramatically different from those in the cottage industries. It argues that industrialists hired children because they found it difficult to recruit adult workers to enter the factory system with its rules and discipline. The children because of their obedient nature made especially productive workers in this new industrial regime.

Tuttle, Carolyn. Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution . Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

A detailed economic analysis of child labor in the textile and mining industry. It makes the argument that child labor was driven by the demand for labor due to biased technological change. Considerable empirical data from the British Parliamentary Papers and qualitative data on the new automated machinery and underground tunnels offer support that children were preferred because of their physical, emotional, and psychological characteristics.

Wallace, Eileen. Children of the Labouring Poor: The Working Lives of Children in Nineteenth-Century Hertfordshire . Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010.

Using testimony of children from factory inspectors, school log books, and newspaper accounts of living conditions, this book provides a thorough examination of the lives of working children during 19th-century Hertfordshire. It describes, and often illustrates, children working in agriculture, straw plaiting, brickfields, silk, papermaking, domestic service, textile mills, and chimneys. Wallace concludes that children in brickfields and chimneys suffered the most (not the factory children).

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Child Labor, Social History, and the Industrial Revolution: A Methodological Inquiry

Child labor during the British Industrial Revolution is a phenomenon that has, at times, been neglected by historians. That’s not to say that little ink has been spilled about industrialization and child labor over the past two centuries; quite the opposite. Industrialism’s role in child labor and its intensification of misery and exploitation of children has been a consistent theme since industrialization itself. This essay centers on two more recent, but pivotal texts in the history of child labor during the Industrial Revolution, namely Clark Nardinelli’s Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (1990) and Jane Humphries’s Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010). While each historian had taken an economic approach to the social history of the period, the differences between their approaches, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, are instructive. Interspersed with these two texts on child labor will be E.P. Thompson’s celebrated The Making of the English Working Class (1963), to examine the way historians have went about constructing their social histories of the British Industrial Revolution. We will also touch on the standard of living debate, for this touches on important methodological disputes as well. Finally, this essay will offer a different approach to examining these historical problems, an approach to the social sciences pioneered by economist Ludwig von Mises in his magnum opus on economics, entitled Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949). This approach will not resolve every question of methodology and interpretation advanced by the authors we will be reviewing here, but it will be applied to a few concrete examples to illustrate its usefulness in resolving some of the historical controversy, or at least clarify it.

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The health, well-being and welfare of children are pressing modern issues. Whether the vehicle is ballooning figures linked to childhood obesity, the intractable decline in British educational standards in comparison to the rest of the world, unaccompanied child migration, historic child abuse allegations or (and most prominently) the mental health of the young, it is clear that children and young people occupy a unique place in the public psyche and are never far from the social and media spotlights. We have come to realise, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, that 'Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.' 1 Historians do not agree on when this 'modern' sense of childhood as a distinct phase in the socio-cultural, economic and demographic life cycle emerges, nor about how far parents invested emotional capital into the lives of their children in the past. For some, it was the breaking of the link between work and associated practices such as apprenticeship that led to a definable and discretionary period of childhood. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt suggested that child labour was the byproduct of industrialisation and that youngsters were ubiquitous in the early factory system, even more so than had been the case in agricultural communities before the emergence of widespread proto-industri-alisation. 2 In this sense, children were assets either to aspirational households or those just about managing, compromising any defined age bracket of childhood and certainly any sense of children as innocents. Peter Kirby has extended this view, demonstrating that child workers could be found across industries in the broadest sense, and were most likely found in traditional occupations such as domestic labour, workshop production, messenger work and agricultural labouring. 3 Similarly, Katrina Honeyman has reconsidered the apprenticeship system, demonstrating that they were better organised and managed, and more extensive quantitatively, geographically and chronologically, than had previously been thought. 4 Indeed, it might be argued that apprentice children were central to the developing industrial economy in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth

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Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution . By Jane Humphries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xiii plus 439 pp.)

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Hugh Cunningham, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution . By Jane Humphries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xiii plus 439 pp.), Journal of Social History , Volume 45, Issue 3, Spring 2012, Pages 856–858, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shr096

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This is an important and path-breaking book that will be of interest not only to historians of childhood, but also much more widely. Humphries bases her work on the material that she extracted from 617 working-class autobiographies that she has divided by date of birth into four cohorts, up to 1790, 1791-1820, 1821-50 and 1851-1878. These sources not only give her information on schooling, date of first working, type of work, earnings, whether or not apprenticed, and other matters germane to child labor, but also to the kinds of family children lived in, the household economy, and relationships within the family and with wider kin. Humphries situates her discussions of these matters within a wide context and thus contributes to understanding of British economic growth, the debates around a consumer revolution and an industrious revolution, standards of living, the Poor Law, women's workforce participation, family history and dynamics, and the impact of war. Her conclusions are broadly, in the context of debates on these issues, pessimistic. In line with the latest evidence on standards of living, her middle two cohorts started work earlier than the first and the fourth, suggesting that improvements in living standards came to a halt or went into reverse from 1790, only recovering in the mid-nineteenth century. It was in this period, too, particularly in the early phase of it, that her autobiographers, an astonishing one-third of them, were most likely to lose their fathers, to death, desertion or service in the armed forces. The resulting lone-parent households were highly vulnerable. Humphries' evidence suggests, intriguingly, that the male breadwinner family structure was in place in the eighteenth century, perhaps before that, and that married women were reluctant to enter the labor force. With fathers gone, there was overwhelming pressure on children to contribute to family resources, and, on the basis of the wages that sons could earn in comparison with anything mothers might, it was a rational decision to expect them to enter the labor market.

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1 Introduction

‘Perhaps as I tell you my story, which, with variations, is the story of hundreds of thousands of my East End neighbours and of millions of my brothers all over the country, you will begin to understand’ (Thorne, 1925?, p. 13). Will Thorne was born (1857) into poverty and illiterate until adulthood. He wrote his autobiography, fittingly titled My Life’s Battles , to provide his readers with the background for his views and to explain his lifetime commitment to socialism. Thorne was branded, as he acknowledged, by his bitter experiences as a child worker. Such experiences were far from unique. Thorne’s story, along with more than 600 other working-class autobiographies, constitutes the basis for this study. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of these memoirs provides new insight into the role that child labour played in the British industrial revolution and thereby into the process of industrialization itself.

The child worker was a central if pitiful figure in both contemporary and classic accounts of the British industrial revolution, but in modern economic history, the children who toiled in early mills, mines and manufactories have become invisible. The standard economic history textbook (Floud and Johnson, 2004), contains only five references to child employment, all but one of which derive from the rather peripheral chapter on ‘Household Economy’. As a topic of research, children’s role in industrialization has become passé (Bolin-Hort, 1989). Clark Nardinelli’s (1990) revisionist interpretation provided an exception that shocked traditional historians. Nardinelli argued that since child workers and their families had the option not to work and yet chose employment, it must have been that child labour was preferred, and in this (economist’s) sense was optimal. Although Nardinelli’s version has been disputed (Galbi, 1997; Tuttle, 1998; Humphries, 1999), it retains a powerful position within mainstream economic history.

Recent work (Horrell and Humphries, 1995a; Cunningham and Viazzo, 1996; Tuttle, 1999; Cunningham, 2000; Heywood, 2001; Kirby, 2003; Humphries, 2003b; Honeyman, 2007; Levene, 2009) suggests a revival of interest perhaps derived from the current concern with child labour in Third World countries. However, although this recent work has reaffirmed the importance of child labour in the first industrial revolution, its study remains a minority interest fraught with uncertainties and controversies. Disagreements persist about child labour’s extent and setting, its causes and consequences, and the reasons for its retreat.

Controversy begins with attempts to establish trends in children’s work. There is disagreement about whether children’s labour in the early mills and manufactories of Britain represented a continuation of their involvement in domestic manufacturing and agriculture or a novel feature of the changing economy. The traditional view was that child labour reached its apogee in the early factories, although even in the classic literature some authors emphasized its prevalence in domestic manufacturing (Pinchbeck and Hewitt, 1973). Subsequent research on proto-industrialization, which suggested that child labour was widespread in workshop and home-based industry prior to mechanization (Levine, 1987), reinforced this interpretation. The debate remains unresolved with the evidence leaving the interpretations ‘neatly poised’ (Cunningham, 1996, p. 14). A subsidiary aspect of this debate concerns the intensity of child labour and whether shifts in the pattern and context of children’s work led to changes in pace and hours. In particular, did the transition to the factory system speed up the labour process and lengthen the working day?

The recent studies extend the focus on workshop and small-scale manufacturing to include agriculture and services and unite in seeing child labour entrenched in these traditional sectors. For Kirby ‘[T]he archetypal model of child labour in large factories and mines was never the predominant mode of child labour’ (2003, p. 132). Similarly, Honeyman (2007) and Levene (2009) show that even pauper apprentices, commonly viewed as the vanguard of the factory proletariat, were widely deployed in small-scale and traditional manufacturing enterprises. While agriculture, small-scale manufacture and domestic service rarely receive the attention they deserve as sources of employment for children, the strategic importance of child workers in the early factory labour force surely remains. In the eighteenth century, the sheer size of agriculture, traditional manufacturing and domestic service necessarily meant that they dominated placements of child workers generally and pauper apprentices in particular, but at the same time, the flow of apprentices to early factories, now well documented in Honeyman’s important (2007) contribution, meant that ‘early industrial expansion took place at a rate not otherwise likely’ (Honeyman, 2007, p. 111).

Another tension emerging in the recent literature concerns the prevalence of very young children (under 10 years old) working. Kirby is adamant that this was ‘never widespread’ (2003, p. 131), while Horrell and Humphries argue that the end of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century saw a boom in child labour associated with younger ages at starting work, with factory employment at the forefront of this trend (1995). Since Kirby agrees with other authors (see Humphries, 1998) that child labour at ‘abnormally young ages’ was associated with ‘lone-parent households, orphans and children formally in the care of parish authorities’, its investigation requires attention to the demographic and social context (2003, p. 131). Thus, questions remain about the structure and distribution of children’s employment over the course of the industrial revolution and in comparison with the adult labour force.

A second area of uncertainty concerns the causes of child labour and particularly the relative importance of demand and supply. The investigation of demand requires linking the evidence on child labour’s extent and setting to an understanding of the process of industrialization and how new roles for children might have been replicated in the changing workplaces of early industrial Britain. The exploration of supply requires confronting Nardinelli’s neoclassical interpretation of family decision-making with an older literature on family strategies and asking how child labour fitted into the working-class family economy. Questions concern what role poverty played in the decision to send children to work and whether the age of starting work was flexible or heavily circumscribed by custom.

A third set of questions relates to the consequences of child labour, which for the children themselves were often conditional on the behaviour of other family members. A key issue is whether parents as well as employers exploited children, commandeering the fruits of their labour and using them to support increased adult consumption or more leisure. Alternatively, perhaps children’s contributions to family income increased living standards, and in particular improved diets so compensating them for the disutility of work. In this case, child labour was the best available outcome for everyone, including the children themselves. If so how did such compensation filter through household distribution mechanisms to reach child workers, and in particular did working enhance children’s status and hence their command over household resources?

Decisions whether to send children to work did not take place in a vacuum but both reflected and reverberated back upon adult wages and job opportunities. If children were sent to work in response to falling adult wages, or working children themselves competitively drove down adults’ wages, in the aggregate child labour would be associated with lower adult wage rates and no net benefit to working-class families, a ‘bad’ equilibrium, which no individual family’s actions could unlock. In this scenario, child labour represents a co-ordination failure that challenges Nardinelli’s rosy interpretation (Basu, 1999; Humphries, 1999).

The implications of children’s labour depended on the terms and conditions of employment, and specifically how they affected schooling, health and training. The consequences spilled out beyond the individuals concerned and even beyond the generation in place. Men, who had been subject to premature labour and unable to build up their human capital, would be insufficiently productive to raise their children without condemning them too to the depredations of child labour. Clynes’s ‘shrunken and white-faced’ adult, the result of a childhood ‘ruined by hard labour and little sleep’ was ill-equipped to support dependent children through adolescence (1937, p. 43). One-off adverse conditions could trigger a deleterious cycle with children’s labour having a significant impact not only on their own well-being but also on the well-being of future generations (Basu, 1999; Hazan and Berdugo, 2002). Did something like this miserable cycle emerge in the early industrial economy to lock it into poverty, low productivity and early work? Did the lack of capital markets and difficulties in making inter-generational contracts stick push children into early labour, even if delay would have increased their productivity as adults enough to compensate for the youthful earnings forgone? In short, did missing markets maintain child labour at inefficiently high levels (Baland and Robinson, 2000)?

Whether or not children’s work adversely affects future growth depends on the relationship between early work and skill formation, usually seen as substitutes but in certain circumstances perhaps complements. In broader terms, the question is whether all children’s work is bad or whether some kinds of work may not be adverse, indeed may have beneficial effects for the children themselves and for economic growth. Does the historical evidence suggest a range of work for children with some jobs having deleterious effects and others more positive consequences? Specifically, does child labour crowd out schooling or can work and education go together? Potential complementarities between child labour and not only schooling but also other endowments (nutrition, health and training) lessen the negative feedback from child labour to future growth. The search for evidence of such complementarities in the historical record provides another topic for investigation.

Chief among historical institutions that promised to combine child labour with investment in skills was apprenticeship. Apprenticeship played a vital role in the early modern economy, bridging the gap between the home and the workplace, introducing the child to the world of work and fostering training (Ben Amos, 1994; Lane, 1996). But less suited to the needs of an industrial economy, apprenticeship was thought to have faded away. The rising cost of living discouraged traditional forms of live-in apprenticeship, and the repeal of the Statute of Artificers in 1814 removed the legal requirement for apprenticeship prior to practising a trade (Snell, 1985; Lane, 1996). Yet historians are vague about the timing and pace of apprenticeship’s decline (Snell, 1985; Humphries, 2003). Moreover, little attention has been paid to how the decay of apprenticeship influenced child labour markets. Did it mean that children who would previously have entered a formal contract for training and subsistence in exchange for labour, a contract where the behaviour and conduct of both parties was legally circumscribed, were now thrown unskilled on to the labour market and left to strike their own bargains? Did the fading of apprenticeship adversely affect the supply of skills or did young men obtain training by alternative routes?

The final topic for debate concerns the causes and chronology of children’s retreat from the labour market. If something like the cycle of early work and low productivity characterized the crucible of industrialization, what threw it in reverse, causing child labour to begin to decline? The usual suspects include shifts in technology, the Factory Acts and compulsory schooling. Kirby (2003), for example, gives some credence to changes in the labour process and industrial organization but dismisses state regulation and schooling as irrelevant. Alternatively, the withdrawal of children from the labour force has been seen as the natural corollary of a rise in male wages and a demand for higher ‘quality’ children (Nardinelli, 1990). Did children’s labour decline in stages as they retreated first from mainstream industrial processes and then from more marginal activities often in the interstices of the informal economy, and did different factors promote the retreat in different times and places?

These are important questions, but why search for answers in such a potentially hazardous and time-consuming source as working-class autobiographies? Memoirs fail for a number of reasons. Remembrances of childhood may reflect childish understanding and failures of memory. They may be refracted through the lens of ideology or indeed consciously designed to misinform and mislead. The handful of working people who were willing and able to write down their experiences was by that very act a selected sample; to draw general conclusions from such rarefied evidence might be foolhardy in the extreme.

Autobiographies are indeed a difficult source, and generalizing from an invariably small and selected sample is a hazardous endeavour. It takes care to construct a general picture from these individualized building blocks. At the same time, these writings are worth more respect than is generally accorded them. Many of the alleged weaknesses of memoirs are irrelevant when they are used not as eyewitness accounts of external events but as a source of information about their own author’s experience. Here they are surely invaluable, a rare fenestration of working-class experience. Autobiographies are one of the few ways in which ordinary men and women recorded what happened to them or what they perceived happened to them. For this reason they can uncover aspects of the past that have often been thought irrevocably lost, particularly how working men and women made sense of their lives and responded to the world about them (Vincent, 1981; see also Burnett, 1994; Rose, 2001). Such a standpoint is essential to answer those questions identified above as lying at the heart of the history of children’s work.

There are secrets in childhood experience around which the autobiographers tiptoe, but experiences of work and training are not among them. The vast majority of working-class autobiographers had something to say about their youthful introduction to the labour market and the extent of their preparation. There is a gold mine of information on pressures to work, links between the family and the labour market, the nature of first jobs, remuneration, apprenticeship and schooling. Autobiographies cannot substitute for the household surveys that have enabled the study of child labour in today’s poor countries but they can fill some of the lacunae in our knowledge and contribute to a clearer and more reliable history.

The attractions of autobiography are not the whole story. Children’s work in the past remains poorly understood because there are few good sources of information (Kirby, 2003), and those that exist are concentrated late in the era of industrialization. The earliest reliable British census with a detailed occupational breakdown took place in 1851, the end of the industrial revolution. Without estimates of child labour before mid-century, trends remain hazy. Moreover, census data itself must be viewed cautiously. All Victorian censuses understate child labour, as comparisons of census enumerators’ books with other records show (Gatley, 1996), and understatement may have increased in the later censuses, when employers feared prosecution. The census evidence can get researchers out of the blocks, but cannot alone reveal the history of child labour.

Alternative sources of data are the government inquiries of the early industrial period and surveys by contemporary authorities. These have provided historians of children’s work with much of their raw material to date. Tuttle’s (1999) analysis of such evidence suggests extremely high relative employment levels of children (aged under 13) and young people (aged 13–18) in several industries. Children and young people comprised between one third and two-thirds of all workers in many textile mills in 1833 and regularly over one quarter in many mines in 1842. Government inquiries generally cover only two (albeit important) industries, textiles and mining. Moreover, the index of child labour is invariably the relative employment share in particular establishments and industries, leaving a question mark over the issue of how important children’s work was to the population as a whole. Thus, based on this evidence, interpretations differ. Nardinelli (1990) holds that child labour was only briefly important, whereas Tuttle argues that even by 1850 children were not only found in some factories in the industrial heartlands, but were also commonplace in rural districts (Tuttle, 1999; see also Winstanley, 1995). Moreover, for the first phase of industrialization, even this type of information is not available and historians must rely on patchy and localized sources.

My earlier work (with Sara Horrell: Horrell and Humphries, 1995a) used accounts of working families’ budgets to explore trends in children’s contributions by type of family across the whole period of industrialization. While necessarily limited by the number of budgets that were recovered, this evidence is rare in providing insight into the composition of family incomes in the eighteenth century and in tracking differences not only over time but also by fathers’ occupational group and geographical location. Although this study mobilizes a completely new resource, its overall concern with the exploration of those same patterns and trends will occasion comparison with the child labour outcomes inferred from the family budgets. More generally, this account does not rely on autobiographical materials exclusively but relates the findings from this new source to existing accounts based on materials that are more conventional.

The autobiographies provide unambiguous answers to many of the questions posed. They document astonishing levels of child labour throughout the period of the industrial revolution and throughout the British economy. They show that children’s work was not confined to isolated industries or particular occupations but deeply entrenched and ubiquitous. As children, many autobiographers had much-publicized and specifically juvenile jobs: piecers in textile factories, draw-boys in handloom weaving, trappers, hurriers and thrusters in coal-mines, and crow-scarers, shepherds and stone pickers in agriculture. However, it would be a mistake to think of children’s work as limited to these well-known examples, or as confined to assisting and facilitating the work of an adult principal. For one thing, although children often did work as ancillaries to adults, their help was not ad hoc occasional assistance but built into the labour process. This was true not only of child piecers and of transport workers in mines, but also of ‘barrer boys’ who hauled off new-made bricks and tiles and of ploughboys in agriculture. Will Thorne stood up to long hours on the brickfields working with his uncle, but had to give up when working with another man who was faster because he could not keep up the harder pace and was suffering physically (Thorne, 1925?, p. 19). Joseph Ricketts, a very young agricultural labourer, was ‘frequently knocked down with a large lump of hard dirt’ by the ‘ill-tempered carter’ with whom he worked for not keeping up with the horses without holding on to the traces (Ricketts, 1965, p. 122). Children often served not adult co-workers but early industrial and far from fully automated machinery, and not only in the textile industry. Robert Dollar in describing how aged 12 in 1856 he started work in a machine shop alerts his readers to what he suggests was a common children’s job. Dollar was set on to attend a lathe: ‘In those days there were no self-feeding lathes and small boys were used for that purpose’ (Dollar, 1918, p. 3). Boys also worked with traditional equipment; for example, large numbers worked in various jobs alongside horses and ponies. Moreover, some children’s jobs, while specifically reserved for and understood as ‘children’s work’, required autonomous action and imposed heavy responsibility. More than one miner employed as a child opening and closing ventilation doors recalled the dreadful burden of this task (Rymer, 1976; Watchorn, 1958). In addition, it was common, as Carolyn Tuttle has suggested, for some children to undertake the same work as adults, for example, as spinners, miners and agricultural labourers (Buckley, 1897; Rymer, 1976).

Children’s labour is best thought of as a kind of mastic holding the early industrial economy together. It linked together working adults and linked those adults to machines. It was hugely important in moving raw materials and work-in-progress around the workplace and delivering goods through the distribution network to final consumers. It met seasonal peaks in labour demand in agriculture, industry and services. It was called upon to bridge technologies and to accommodate shifts in the place and organization of work, most famously in the transition from domestic to factory production when no adult workers were available to work in the new large-scale workplaces located far from existing concentrations of population. It was mobilized too in the protracted tussle between hand trades and mechanized production, as the first line of defence by domestic workers whose standard of living was threatened by falling prices was to call up their own wives and children and increase output. The greedy appetite for children’s labour manifested by the industrializing (and bellicose) economy was anthropomorphized in the imagination of Robert Collyer (born 1823), who perceived child labour as directly commandeered by the state. ‘It is told of the Younger Pitt that, in looking around for more earners and still more to meet the demands for more money and still more to carry on the war with Napoleon, the great statesman said, “We must yoke up the children to work in the factories”’ (1908, p. 15). Collyer reflected that he could not vouch for the story but nonetheless he found himself with many children of around seven and eight years old standing at the spinning frames, ‘13 hours a day five days a week and eleven on Saturday’ (Collyer, 1908, p. 15). 1

But the autobiographies do more than provide clear evidence on the extent and distribution of children’s work. They also suggest that children’s work rose and fell over the course of industrialization. The likelihood of children working varied with a number of factors to do with their own family circumstances and local economy. But holding these factors constant, it was in the central period of industrialization, the 1800s to the 1830s, that the age at which children started work was at its lowest and so their participation rates at their highest.

Quantitative evidence on family circumstances and local labour markets permits a formal analysis of the causes of child labour. While the lack of wage information is unfortunate, the evidence suffices to implicate both poverty and family size in children’s entry into paid work, findings which the autobiographers’ discussion of the circumstances that surrounded this memorable transition reinforce and nuance.

The autobiographies also provide insight into the decline of child labour. For example, protective labour legislation is seen to have required some boys who had already started work to withdraw and to have given them as Robert Collyer put it ‘a fine breathing space’ (Collyer, 1908, p. 16). Similarly the often detailed accounts of the nature of the work, how it (and its remuneration) fitted into the family economy, alongside the description of the autobiographer’s subsequent career, cast light on the effects of child labour on health and well-being.

Apprenticeship constituted an important training ground, with a high proportion of boys undertaking formal and informal apprenticeships and most completing their term. Like starting work, apprenticeship was a major step, and the decision as to trade and master weighed heavily on boys and their families. Families worried over the selection of the best trade, the identification of a good master and the negotiation of an advantageous contract. Moreover, apprenticeship did not disappear during the industrial revolution, but continued into the nineteenth century to be viewed both as a gateway to better economic options and as a wise family investment. It did not persist unaltered, but adapted to better fit changing conditions and so survived in the maturing industrial economy. More generally, the autobiographers’ respect for apprenticeship rescues this under-appreciated institution from the condescension of economic historians, and its persistence in shoring up human capital formation through this period has revisionist implications for interpretations of the first industrial revolution as involving green and untrained troops.

Schooling receives perhaps as much attention in the autobiographies as employment. The working-class authors provide rich detail on kinds of schools available, teaching methods, discipline and educational outcomes, much of which can inform the debate about Victorian schooling and the reception of Forster’s Education Act by the working class (Gardner, 1984; Rose, 2001). While very few autobiographers had no schooling at all, for many children attendance was brief and/or discontinuous. The autobiographies reinforce recent research emphasizing the role of Sunday schools, which appear widely attended by working children, as other historians have suggested (Snell, 1999). Schooling and work were packaged together around a set of limited but specific educational objectives, which were desired less for their potential to raise earnings directly than as a platform from which to access other potential opportunities and for their intrinsic value.

Unconscious assumptions about the universality of family structures have often led historians to neglect children who lived outside conventional families. Yet orphans and destitute children were most at risk of exploitation (Humphries, 1998; Horrell, Humphries and Voth, 1999). The prevalence of orphanage or at least the loss of one parent among the autobiographers reflects the high-mortality world in which they lived. Moreover, it is possible that the French wars, the opening of Empire and urbanization inflated orphanage and de facto fatherlessness. Ironically, heightened industriousness may also have contributed to the numbers of children who grew up denuded of parental support, as responsiveness to economic opportunity detached men from their families or left them little time or energy to devote to parenting. It is important to investigate the impact of orphanage on children’s life chances. Other work has suggested that orphans worked at younger ages, had no champion if their situation at work proved oppressive and were routinely supplied to the early factories (Rose, 1989; Robinson, 1996; Horrell, Humphries and Voth, 1998; Humphries, 1998). It may well be that the existence of a swollen supply of particularly desperate children (and Overseers of the Poor) may have provided the shock which relegated the British economy to a bad equilibrium with child labour while at the same time ensuring that it grew at a rate that was otherwise unlikely.

The cruel reality for children during the Industrial Revolution

Child labour in an Industrial Revolution textile factory

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, child labour was common in factories. Young children were often forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions for little or no pay.

This was because factory owners believed that children were cheap and expendable, and that they could get away with paying them less than adults.

In this article, we will explore the issue of child workers in the Industrial Revolution and discuss why it was so prevalent during that time period.

The Industrial Revolution was a time of great change in Britain. New technologies and factories were being developed, and this led to a boom in the manufacturing industry.

Factory owners were looking for workers who could operate the new machines, and they turned to children because they were small and nimble enough to do so.

In addition, children were much cheaper to hire than adults, which made them an attractive option for factory owners.

Many of the children who worked in factories came from poor families who could not afford to support them.

These families often sent their children to work in order to help make ends meet.

Others were orphaned or abandoned and had no one else to care for them.

Factory owners knew that these children were desperate and they exploited them by paying them very low wages.

Children during the Industrial Revolution

Children in factories

Many children who worked in factories suffered from malnutrition and poor health.

They did not have enough money to buy food, and their work left them too exhausted to cook proper meals.

As a result, many children became ill or injured while working in factories.

In some factories, children were responsible for piecing together cloth that had been torn by the machines.

This was a very difficult and dangerous job, as the children had to work quickly, and they were often cut by the machines.

The working conditions in factories were often dangerous and unhealthy. Children worked long hours, sometimes up to 16 hours a day, with few breaks.

They were often exposed to harmful chemicals and fumes, which could lead to serious health problems.

In addition, there was a risk of accidents, as the machines were often poorly maintained.

Children in the mines

While most child labourers worked in factories, some were sent to work in the mines.

This was one of the most dangerous jobs during the Industrial Revolution, as there were constant risks of collapse, poisoning, and fire.

Children who worked in the mines often did not live to see their tenth birthday.

Some children were employed in the mines as 'trappers', which meant that they had to open and close the doorways that allowed air to flow into the tunnels.

Others were 'putters', which meant that they pushed carts of coal along the narrow tunnels.

This was a very difficult job, as the tunnels were often wet and slippery.

Child trapper in the Industrial Revolution

Chimney sweeps

Chimney sweeping was another dangerous job that was often carried out by children.

Sweeps had to climb up the narrow chimneys to clean them, and they were at risk of being crushed if the bricks collapsed.

They also breathed in a lot of soot, which could damage their lungs.

Children were considered the only workers suitable for this job as they were small enough to fit into the chimneys.

They often started working when they were just five or six years old, and many of them died before they reached adulthood.

Health impacts

The use of child workers was a major problem during the Industrial Revolution, as it often led to poor health and even death for the children involved.

Many of them worked long hours in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, which took a toll on their physical and mental health.

In addition, they often did not have enough to eat, which made them susceptible to illness.

Some of the more gruesome injuries that children received while working included lost fingers, severe burns, and crushed limbs.

In the mines, they were also at risk of being killed by falling rocks or being poisoned by gas fumes.

The government did little to protect children from the dangers of child labour.

Factory owners and mine operators were not required to provide safety equipment or make sure that their premises were safe.

As a result, many children were injured or killed while working.

Despite the risks, many families continued to use child labour as they could not afford to send their children to school or pay for their food and lodging.

In some cases, children were even sold into employment in order to pay off debts.

Despite the fact that the employment of children was common during the Industrial Revolution, it was still illegal according to British law.

However, factory owners often flouted the law, as there was little enforcement of it.

The working conditions for child labourers were extremely poor, and many people spoke out against it.

One of the most well-known was Lord Shaftesbury, who advocated for the Factory Act of 1833 in the UK.

These reformers argued that children should not have to work in such dangerous and unhealthy conditions.

They also believed that education was important, and that children should be given the opportunity to go to school instead of working.

The employment of children was finally outlawed in the UK in 1833, after a long campaign by reformers.

This legislation made it illegal for children under the age of nine to work in factories, and restricted the hours that older children could work.

While the 1833 Factory Act did set some regulations for child labor, it didn't completely abolish child labor.

It was not until the 1870s, with the introduction of compulsory education laws, that the use of child labor in Britain started to decline significantly.

Even then, it took many more years for child labor to be eradicated.

The issue of child labour is still relevant today. Unfortunately, there are still many children around the world who are forced to work in factories and other hazardous conditions.

We need to continue to fight for the rights of these children and ensure that they are given a childhood instead of being exploited for labour.

Child Labour During the Industrial Revolution

Category: History
Topic: Industrial Revolution

Pages: 1 (645 words)

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