investigations (Select Committees and Royal Commissions) took place in 1816 and the early 1830s and led to numerous legislative measures, but most of their provisions were meaningless because they were not enforced. The Factories Regulation Act of 1833 marks the first significant point of successful intervention: the act both established a minimum age for all workers in textile mills (nine years old) and set limits to the hours that children in different age groups and women could work in a week. More broadly, a Royal Commission was convened in 1842?43 to examine 'the mines and collieries of the United Kingdom and all trades and manufactures whatever in which children work together in numbers.' The reports of the commission, from which this extract and two illustrations are taken, caused dismay and disbelief when they were made generally available; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'The Cry of the Children' (1843) was one of the many public responses to the scandal. In the legislation that followed, girls and women were banned from mine work; although the authors of the bdl had also hoped to prohibit the employment of boys under thirteen years of age, parliamentary debate knocked the age down to ten.
The first illustration shows a hurrier, a worker who dragged a loaded corve, or
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FIRST REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS, MINES / 1563
wagon; these weighed between two hundred and five hundred pounds and were attached to the hurrier by a chain. The passageways in the mine (or pit) were sometimes only sixteen inches high. The second illustration presents a thruster, who pushed a con e. The child on the left is a trapper: the youngest workers of all, these five- or six-year-olds sat alone in darkness to open and close the doors that controlled the mine's ventilation system. The extract comes from the evidence collected by Commissioner S. S. Scriven, who visited the mines in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the company of a local doctor and lawyer, and interviewed the child laborers there.
From First Report of the Commissioners, Mines
[CHILD MINE-WORKER IN YORKSHIRE]
Margaret Gomley, living at Lindley Moor, aged 9. May 7:
They call me Peggy for my nick-name down here, but my right name is Margaret; I am about nine years, or going nine; I have been at work in the pit thrusting corves above a year; come in the morning sometimes at seven o'clock, sometimes half-past seven, and I go sometimes home at six o'clock, sometimes at seven when I do over- work. I get my breakfast of porridge before I come, and bring a piece of muffin, which I eat on coming to pit; I get my dinner at
12 o'clock, which is a dry muffin, and sometimes butter on, but have no time allowed to stop to eat it, I eat it while I am thrusting the load; I get no tea, but get some supper when I get home, and then go to bed when I have washed me; and am very tired. I worked in pit last winter; I don't know at what hour I went down, as we have no clock, but it was day-light; it was six o'clock when we came up, but not always. They flog us down in the pit, sometimes with their hand upon my bottom, which hurts me very much; Thomas Copeland flogs me more than once in a day, which makes me cry. There are two other girls working with me, and there was four, but one left because she had the bellyache; I am poorly myself sometimes with bellyache, and sometimes headache. I had rather lake than go into the pit; I get 5d. a-day, but I had rather set cards1 for 5d. a-day than go into the pit. The men often swear at me; many times they say Damn thee, and other times God damn thee (and such like), Peggy.
[Commissioner Scriven's commentary]
I descended this pit accompanied by one of the banksmen,2 and, on alighting at the bottom, found the entrance to the mainway 2 feet 10 inches, and, which extended 500 yards. The bottom was deep in mire, and, as I had no corves low enough to convey me to the workings, waited some time under the dripping shaft the arrival of the hurriers, as I had reason to suspect there were some very young children labouring there. At length three girls arrived, with as many boys. It was impossible in the dark to distinguish the sexes. They were all naked excepting their shifts or shirts. Having placed one into the corve, I gave the signal, and ascended. On alighting on the pit's bank I discovered that it was a girl. I could not have believed that I should have found human nature so
1. I.e., work in a textile factory, where workers (Yorkshire dialect). '5d.': five pence Id. abbreviates programmed looms to weave patterns with a series denarius, 'penny' in Latin). of punched cards. 'Lake': play truant, or hookey 2. Colliery supervisors who worked above ground.
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1 556 / INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE?
An illustration of a 'hurrier' in a Yorkshire coalmine, taken from the 1842?43 Children's Employment Commission report.
An illustration of a 'trapper' and a 'thruster' in a Lancashire coalmine, taken from the 1842? 43 Children's Employment Commission report.
degraded. There is nothing that I can conceive amidst all the misery and wretchedness in the worst of factories equal to this. Mr. Holroyd, solicitor, and Mr. Brook, surgeon, practising in Stainland, were present, who confessed that, although living within a few miles, they could not have believed that such a system of unchristian cruelty could have existed.
1842-43
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
These eyewitness accounts from The Condition of the Working Class (1845) describe conditions of 1844, when Engels (1820?1895), the son of a successful German industrialist, had been living in England, chiefly in Manchester. The book was first translated from the German into English in 1892; this translation is by W. O. Henderson
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ENGELS: THE GREAT TOWNS / 156 5
and W. H. Chaloner (1958). The first two paragraphs are the conclusion of chapter
2, The Industrial Proletariat; the balance is from chapter 3.
From The Great Towns
Industry and commerce attain their highest stage of development in the big towns, so that it is here that the effects of industrialization on the wage earners can be most clearly seen. It is in these big towns that the concentration of property has reached its highest point. Here the manners and customs of the good old days have been most effectively destroyed. Here the very name of 'Merry England' has long since been forgotten, because the
