Child Labour in Victorian England.
..., bronchitis and asthma in factory workers. Because of a lack of education about the machinery that they would be handling, many children were mangled or crushed to death by them. In the agricultural world, there was a gang system, each gang had children, male and female, and the gang master would hire them out to do physical labour in farms. The work was extremely hard and the gang masters were brutal in their dealings with the children. The gangs would usually sleep, boys and girls together, in barns, unsurprisingly, this led to the ruin of many a young girl. “Chained, belted, harnessed like dogs…black, saturated with wet, and more than half-naked, crawling upon their hands and knees, and dragging their heavy loads behind them” This quote from Ivor Brown probably gives you a fairly accurate picture of the work of a Chimney Sweep. Young boys would be hired to crawl up long narrow chimneys and clean out the average 40 galleons of soot that gathered there in a year, older boys would usually follow up behind them and prick the soles of their feet with needles, or light burning straw beneath their feet in order to hurry them up. The work was dangerous, and their owners were notorious for abusing them, hardly the jolly occupation shown in Mary Poppins. Coal Mines: these are deadly and claustrophobic places. Usually it would be the last place one would expect a child of nine to be, let alone work. Not so in the nineteenth century. In fact, thousands of children spent their early lives in these dank, confined spaces. Thousands died before they were fifteen. The work was strenuous and backbreaking. “The female child had first to descend a nine ladder pit to the 1st rest, even to which a shaft is sunk. She then has to draw up the baskets or tubs of coal filled by the bearers: she then takes her ‘creel’ or basket shaped to conform to her back not unlike a cockle-shell flattened towards the neck, so as to allow lumps of coal to rest on the neck and shoulders. She then pursues her journey to the wall face or as it is called the room of work. She then lays down her basket, into which coal is rolled, and it is frequently more than one man can do to lift the burthen on her back. The tugs or straps are placed over the forehead and the body bent to a semi-circular form, in order to stiffen the arch.” This is a quote from R. H. Franke, Esq., one of the sub-commissioners in an 1842 enquiry report. Other jobs had to be done in the mines were equally unpleasant, “trappers” were children who opened and shut the doors through which the coal carts went through, in order to secure proper ventilation in the mines. It wouldn’t be hard, but definitely monotonous and secluded, no light was allowed and the children would spend their hours alone, in the dark and cold. Coal breakers work above ground, sorting out slate and other refuse from the pieces of coal, the coal was hard and injuries such as mangled fingers, crushed or broken hands weren’t uncommon. Every so often there would be a more serious accident, bodies getting caught in the machinery, or disappearing down the chute, only to be found later, ripped to shreds and dead. All of the children working there would have been bent backed and deformed, from the cramped position that they would have to sit in during their work hours. Mudlarks were groups of people, mainly children, who spent their days wading through the filth and muck of the Thames, which in those d...