Industrial child labour

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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.