Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven Introduction | Materials For Lesson 1 |
Twelve varied sources (written, statistical, visual) used in Lesson 1 | Child Labour and the Industrial Revolution | The Making of the English Working Class | Industrial Revolution Lesson Plans | Objectives for Interpretations for Use with Activity 7.5 | Bibliography

The Making of the English Working Class

Source : Adapted from E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class

We do not have to rehearse the long miserable chronicle of the child in the mill, from the early pauper apprentice mills to the demands for factory reform in the 1830s and 1840s. But, since comforting notions are now abroad as to the ‘exaggerated’ stories of people at the time and of historians, we should discuss some of this . . .

One point often made is that the Sadler Report of 1832 was biased, and that historians such as the Hammonds can be criticized for using it too uncritically. It is true that Michael Sadler was an MP who wanted working hours for children reduced and that most of the evidence in the report comes from the workers and not the employers or factory owners. However, this does not mean that we can assume that the evidence of the report is untrue. Anyone who reads the bulk of the report will be convinced of its authenticity.

Those who criticize the Sadler Report often welcome the report of the Factory Commission in 1833, which gives a better picture of the factory owners making them seem less cruel. Yet there is evidence that the commissioners carrying out the interview for this report often ate and drank with the mill owners themselves, and didn’t spend much time investigating. Mill owners were whitewashing and cleaning their mills before the visit of these inspectors, and small under-aged children were removed from sight. Just as many workers criticized the findings of the Factory Commissioners’ report as factory owners and their supporters criticized the Sadler Report.

It is true and a fact that multitudes of children began their day in the factories at dawn and continued there until seven or eight o’clock at night; in the last hours they would be crying or falling asleep on their feet, their hands bleeding from ‘piecing’, even their parents having to slap them to keep them awake, while the overlookers patrolled with the strap. Historians today, such as Professor Hutt, says this is not cruelty, but kind and humane mill-owners at the time, such as Robert Owen, Fielden and Wood said that it was.

Adult factory workers also wanted better conditions for the child workers as well as themselves. Evidence from the time about the demonstrations they attended on behalf of the factory child in the 1830s tell us this.

Yes, parents needed their children’s earnings and expected them to work, but although a few of the factory operatives might have been brutal, even to their own children, the majority were not and they condemned the ill-treatment of children in the factories. For example, a witness described to the Sadler committee, how when he was a child, he was beaten by an over-looker and ‘One of the young men in the factory went out and found my mother . . .’.

The evidence of both the Sadler Report and the Factory Commissioners’ report suggests that it was the machinery itself, the harshness of the over-lookers and (in the small mills) of the profit-driven factory owner which were the source of cruelty. The factory owners knew about the cruelties in their factories and allowed it to continue.