Abstract
For many people, the term ‘child labour’ conjures up thoughts of young children toiling in harsh and dangerous conditions in dark ‘satanic’ mills and mines. For much of the twentieth century, child labour was portrayed by historians as little more than a ‘social problem’ of the Industrial Revolution. Condemnation of child labour formed part of the standard critique of early industrial capitalism. This view owed much to early works on the development of factory legislation by historians such as Hutchins and Harrison and to the efforts of early labour historians such as the Hammonds, who went as far as to claim that ‘during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution the employment of children on a vast scale became the most important social feature of English life’.1 Later, during the Cold War, heated debates over the relative merits of communism and Western capitalism led to further interest in the social effects of industrialisation, and generated studies that were highly critical of capitalist development. Left-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that a major feature of early industrial capitalism had been a widespread deployment of child labour.
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Notes
B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation, 3rd edn (1926).
See also A. H. Robson, The Education of Children Engaged in Industry in England, 1833–1876 (London, 1931)
M. W. Thomas, The Early Factory Legislation: A Study in Legislative and Administrative Evolution (London, 1948).
J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer, 1760–1832: The New Civilisation (London, 1966), p. 145.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 384; though Thompson (p. 367) also admitted that ‘Child labour was not new. The child was an intrinsic part of the agricultural and industrial economy before 1780 … The most prevalent form of child labour was in the home or within the family economy.’
B. Inglis, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1972), p. 30.
J. Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914 (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 64.
Walvin’s chief source was a collection of brief extracts from E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1966).
W. H. Chaloner, ‘New Introduction’ to W. Dodd, The Factory System Illustrated: In a Series of Letters to the Rt Hon. Lord Shaftesbury (London, 1968), p. vi.
R. M. Hartwell, The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (London, 1971), p. 392.
Davin has argued that it was ‘easy to accept uncritically what we were all taught at school: in the bad old days there was child labour, but through heroic campaigning by humane and farsighted leaders … successive reforms during the course of the [nineteenth] century eliminated this barbarism and civilized ideas came to prevail … it is important to confront and put aside this set of assumptions if we are to conduct an historical … examination of questions relating to family and labour’: A. Davin, ‘Child Labour, the Working-Class Family and Domestic Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Development and Change, 13 (1982), p. 650.
S. Pollard, Peaceful Conquest (Oxford, 1981); J. Langton, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Regional Geography of England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 9 (1984);
P. Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992);
E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988).
O. Saito, ‘Labour Supply Behaviour of the Poor in the English Industrial Revolution’, Journal of European Economic History, 10 (1981);
J. S. Lyons, ‘Family Response to Economic Decline: Handloom Weavers in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire’, Research in Economic History, 10 (1981).
B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 15;
M. Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’ in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 1990), vol. 2, p. 47;
D. C. Coleman, ‘Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 8 (1955–56), p. 286;
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, 1981), table A3. 1, pp. 528–9.
M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971);
A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981);
K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985);
M. W. Dupree, Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries, 1840–1880 (Oxford, 1995);
see also M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures (London, 1985); J. D. Holley, ‘The Two Family Economies of Industrialism: Factory Workers in Victorian Scotland’, Journal of Family History, 6 (1981); D. Levine, ‘The Demographic Implications of Rural Industrialisation: A Family Reconstitution Study of Shepshed, Leicestershire, 1600–1851’, Social History, 1 (1976). Notable earlier studies of the household economy include
F. Collier, The Family Economy of the Working Classes in the Cotton Industry, 1784–1833, ed. R. S. Fitton (Manchester, 1964);
I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London, 1930);
M. Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian England (London, 1958);
N. J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1959).
D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England, 1450–1750 (Oxford, 1977), p. 19. William Pitt stressed ‘the advantage of early employing them in such branches of manufactures as they were capable to execute … If anyone would take the trouble to compute the amount of all [children’s] earnings… he would be surprised, when he came to consider the weight which their support… took off the country’. Jonas Hanway, the noted philanthropist and campaigner on behalf of climbing boys, urged that the children of the poor should be put to service at ten or eleven years, for ‘where young people are not early in servitude, under the eye of a good master …they had better be dead than in idleness or vice’: I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society (2 vols, London, 1969; 1973), vol. 2, p. 390; Snell, Annals, p. 332; see also H. Cunningham, ‘The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.1680–1851’, Past and Present, 126 (1990).
G. S. Becker, ‘A Theory of the Allocation of Time’, Economic Journal, 75 (1965), pp. 493–517;
G. S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA, 1981).
Nardinelli has more recently attempted to apply this model to the historical study of child employment: C. Nardinelli, Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Bloomington, IN, 1990), pp. 36–45.
N. McKendrick, ‘Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution’ in idem (ed.) Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society (London, 1974);
de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 54 (1994), pp. 249–70.
K. D. M. Snell, ‘Agricultural Seasonal Unemployment, the Standard of Living, and Women’s Work in the South and East, 1690–1860’ Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 34 (1981); P. Kirby, ‘The Historic Viability of Child Labour and the Mines Act of 1842’ in M. Lavalette (ed.) A Thing of the Past? Child Labour in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Liverpool, 1999). Nardinelli has argued that rising real wages and changes in production technology greatly reduced household dependence upon child labour during the early- to mid-nineteenth century: C. Nardinelli: C. Nardinelli, ‘Child Labor and the Factory Acts’, Journal of Economic History, 40 (1980).
P. Horn, ‘Pillow Lace-Making in Victorian England: The Experience of Oxfordshire’, Textile History, 3 (1972); P. Horn, ‘Pillow Lace and Straw Plait Trades of Victorian Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974); H. V. Speechley, ‘Female and Child Agricultural Day Labourers in Somerset, c.1685–1870’, PhD thesis (Exeter, 1999); Nardinelli, ‘Child Labor and the Factory Acts’; Dupree, Family Structure; Kirby, ‘Viability of Child Labour’; D. Simonton, ‘Apprenticeship: Training and Gender in Eighteenth-Century England’ in M. Berg (ed.) Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (London, 1991); K. D. M. Snell, ‘The Apprenticeship System in British History: The Fragmentation of a Cultural Institution’, History of Education, 25 (1996). Traditional approaches to industrial child labour continue, however: see for example
C. Tuttle, Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labour During the British Industrial Revolution (Boulder, CO, 1999)
P. Bolin-Hort, Work, Family and the State: Child Labour and the Organisation of Production in the British Cotton Industry, 1780–1920 (Lund, 1989). One historian has offered the novel suggestion that there was widespread ‘unemployment’ among children in British society from the early modern period to the mid-nineteenth century: Cunningham, ‘Employment and Unemployment’; see also P. Kirby, ‘How Many Children were “Unemployed” in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England?’, Past and Present (forthcoming).
Or, as Laslett put it, ‘the point at which offspring begin to be as big in body and as strong as those who gave them birth’: P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (London, 1977), p. 214.
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© 2003 Peter Kirby
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Kirby, P. (2003). Introduction. In: Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80249-0_1
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