Industrial child labour

Assembled from 24 blocks · 2 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. Children had always worked in Britain — on farms, in workshops, at home — and the change industrialisation brought was not the fact of it but its terms. Factory and mine work removed the child from a household economy where a parent set the pace and put them under a machine that set it instead, for twelve hours or more, in a place they could not leave and where the risks were amputation, deafness, lung disease and stunted growth. Mills used children because they were cheap, because small hands could piece broken threads and creep under moving machinery to clear waste, and, in the earliest water-powered mills in remote valleys, because pauper apprentices could be obtained in batches from parish workhouses many counties away and were bound for years. The parliamentary inquiries of the 1830s and early 1840s — the Factory Commission and the Children's Employment Commission — collected sworn testimony from the children themselves, and it is that testimony, not the legislation, which changed public opinion. Regulation followed the evidence rather than preceding it.
3. Knowledge
4. Coal
5. Industrial child labour
6. Connections
7. Coal
8. The Factory Acts
9. The first factory statute is passed and largely ignored
10. The Factory Act creates an inspectorate
11. Women and young boys are barred from working underground
12. The organic economy and its ceiling
13. The Newcomen atmospheric engine
14. Coke smelting of iron
15. The British canal network
16. Industrial child labour
17. The first commercially successful steam engine begins pumping
18. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
19. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens
20. Women and young boys are barred from working underground
21. The main-line steam locomotive
22. Evidence
23. Supports the sworn testimony of child workers underground and the direct causal link between the report's publication and the Mines and Collieries Act of the same year. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; the report is a well-known Parliamentary Paper but no page of it was read here.
24. Supports the existence and working method of the inspectorate created in 1833, and stands as the principal contemporary record of hours, evasions, relay working and accidents on mill floors. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session; the series is real and widely digitised but no volume was opened here.