IT’S WRONG and foolish to make a fantasy of the past, to glorify what was not glorious. By the same token, it is wrong to demonize it. This review from last September of Jane Humphries’ book, Childhood and Child Labor in the British Industrial Revolution fits into the latter category. Annabel Venning of The Daily Mail writes:

While the upper classes professed horror at the iniquities of the slave trade, British children were regularly shackled and starved in their own country. The silks and cottons the upper classes wore, the glass jugs and steel knives on their tables, the coal in their fireplaces, the food on their plates – almost all of it was produced by children working in pitiful conditions on their doorsteps.

But to many of the monied classes, the poor were invisible: an inhuman sub-species who did not have the same feelings as their own and whose sufferings were unimportant. If they spared a thought for them at all, it was nothing more than a shudder of revulsion at the filth and disease they carried.

It is not true that “almost all” industrial goods in Britain were produced by child laborers. Imagine an industrial economy run almost entirely by children while the adults did what? Adult men and women worked even more so. Nor is it true that the monied classes were indifferent.  Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a public outcry and activism on behalf of child laborers. Much of that outcry came from the upper classes, from people such as wealthy heiress and budding socialist Beatrice Potter, and led to the birth of the welfare state.

Starting in the 1830s, laws were enacted to improve the working conditions of children and limit their hours, laws which sometimes made their conditions worse as children sought jobs that were unregulated when larger and newer factories would no longer hire them, as this author points out. The children who suffered the most were the minority who did not live with their families but were kept by “parish houses,” or workhouses. These were government institutions. These were children under government care, abandoned to a system that was outside family protection.

Chimney sweeps, such as the one pictured above; miners, and factory workers were often injured and maimed. But these child laborers had to work to help support their families. The alternative was total want. Is it possible to look back on the contribution of these children as heroic rather than shameful? Did their suffering, as wrenching as it is to contemplate, destroy or build up a culture?

Their families wanted them to be employed. Those who were not under the workhouse system, which was reformed due to the public outcry, were not “slaves,” but free workers under the authority of their parents. Once the economy was productive enough, parents withdrew their children from the labor pool.

No one would want to replicate the worst of the conditions of factory children. But, the lot of these children seems too often part of the  prosecution against both capitalism and the traditional family. See what the past was? 

Today, there is no sense of urgency among our elites about the dangers to children, the sort of urgency that characterized Victorian social reformers faced with chimney sweeps and match girls. These dangers are not material but spiritual.

Charles Booth, who spent 17 years researching and writing his voluminous Life and Labor of the People of London, which he began in the 1880s, praised the family-centered lives of the city’s working poor. “The simple natural lives of the working-class people tend to their own and their children’s happiness more than the artificial complicated existence of the rich.”  (As quoted in Poverty and Compassion by Gertrude Himmelfarb.)

Britain’s illegitimacy rate is expected to exceed 50 percent within the next five years. In some towns, two out of three births are out of wedlock, as reported in The Daily Mail. The overall figure for native-born whites exceeds 50 percent. In Knowsley, near Liverpool, 68 percent of births were out of wedlock in 2007. The figure in Knowsley is expected to reach 75 percent by 2014.

These children grow up starved.

No one would want to bring back the harrowing conditions of factory work and mining, most especially those conditions of the workhouse apprentices. But it’s important to remember that the poor children of yesterday were often taught survival and discipline by their own resources while the poor children of today possess the shallow dictates of popular culture.

What is the answer? Well, for starters, we could heap more scorn on the present and less on the past.

— Comments —

Bruce writes:

It is a huge error to imagine that industrialization created more poverty and physical suffering in England; in fact the poverty and physical suffering was considerably greater during the preceding pre-industrial, agricultural era (except for a few generations following the massive population cull of the Black Death).

The industrial revolution benefitted the poorest classes more than any other class – in objective, material terms (food, housing, clothing).

It was the extreme, endemic rural, agricultural poverty which was invisible, and still is invisible to popular culture.

For many hundreds of years there had been millions upon millions of children and old people, injured men and damaged women, quietly starving to death and dying of infections; each invisibly secluded in a dark, cold, damp hovel.

When poverty came into the cities it was noticed – daily, hourly – by the upper classes, who began to write and agitate about it. But this new urban mass poverty was not new poverty – nor was it as extreme as rural poverty – just easier for the ruling class to observe.

This is not to argue that the industrial revolution was ‘a good thing’ overall, but to argue that its main effect was to alleviate poverty, on a huge scale. That – of course – was exactly why the population grew so rapidly during this era.

Laura writes:

Industrial poverty has a moral stature that agricultural poverty has never had. For one, the former is more amenable to the schemes of experts. The alleviation of industrial poverty creates many government jobs.

Eric writes:

The young man in the picture was a chimney sweep. Children were used because they were small enough to creep through the flue. The carcinogens in the soot gave them a high rate of scrotal cancer, which was the first cancer to be tied to a particular occupation.

Laura writes:

That is correct. Chimney sweeps are classified among the most abused of child workers. Their employers were said to light the fireplaces while they were working to make them move faster. Many of them were injured. Dickens drew attention to their working conditions in Oliver Twist.  An evil chimney sweep attempts to buy Oliver as a workhouse apprentice.

This particular chimney sweep in the photograph lacks the requisite tragic composure.

Jeff W. writes:

Agitating against inhumane working conditions in factories is the ideal form of statist propaganda. A statist propaganda initiative needs two things: 1) Some kind of danger or atrocity that must be corrected; and 2) A source of funds to do the work. The ideal source of funds is always rich people.

A proposal to set up a government agency to correct working conditions in factories is ideal for propaganda purposes because here the rich people’s money will be used to correct the atrocities that the rich people themselves have committed. What could be more just?

We can contrast that initiative with another which would be far less popular. Some other statist might campaign to tax all the people to correct the plague of childhood obesity. That propaganda fails on two levels: taxing all the people is not popular, and a problem that is caused by people of all classes (not just the rich) does not stir up wrath against the rich.

Lefists and statists are always scheming to get rich people’s money (and, increasingly, middle-class people’s money too). A campaign to tax rich people to improve working conditions in factories is a path of least resistance. It is perfect for their purposes.

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