ARTICLE: Vanished Occupations: Please Sir, No More

Child Labour in the first part of the Industrial Revolution

For this one, I’m going to look at the fortunes of tiny kids driven into the workhouse as Britain built itself up as an industrial powerhouse. I wouldn’t be the first to make the claim that Britain’s Victorian wealth was built on the blood of small people. According to historian Douglas Galbi in 1788, two thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills in Britain were children. Rather than stats, though, I went looking for a first hand account. The main source for this one is the memoir of a man named Robert Blincoe, whose account of working in mills in the midlands at the turn of the nineteenth century turned out to be one of the first working class stories put into print. Born in about 1792, put into the workhouse at St. Pancras a few years later, he had no options.

How did they recruit children?

By Blincoe’s account, in August 1799, he and about 80 other children from the workhouse that were presumed to be about seven were signed over as apprentices to a mill. Like Oliver Twist, he escaped life as a chimney sweep. The plan was that these children would spend fourteen years learning a trade, and emerge well trained as either hosiers or lacemakers at the end of it. The way he told it, they were also kept compliant in making the move out of London with many promises of roast beef and plum puddings. In fact, their heads were so filled with nonsense that they all but bounded into the wagons that took them north. Everything they were promised and told turned out to be bullsh*it…