II. A SOCIAL ISSUE
2. A Shattered Life
a. Death Rate of the Working-class Children and Physical Health Deficiency.
During the nineteenth century, the popular vision of the labouring child evolved. Working-class children, first characterized by their working capacity , were now identified through the consequences of the industrial work on their physical health and psyche. Although industrialists continued to hire children massively during the Victorian period, English society started progressively to feel the effects of the children's over-exploitation.
The matter mainly appeared in the study of the death rate of the working-class children. Although the 1841 census reported a population growth, it seemed that an increase in the young labourers' death rate was obvious.
28 Boston, Phillippa. Deadly Jobs, Paris: Didier Editions, 2013, p.17. Print.
29 Hopkins, Eric. Childhood Transformed:Working-class Children in the Nineteenth Century England, Manchester: Manchester university Press, 1994, p.13. Print.
30 Hopkins, Eric. Childhood Transformed:Working-class Children in the Nineteenth Century England, Manchester: Manchester university Press, 1994, p.13. Print.
PRADON Fanette | Child Labor – The children of a Revolution
Measurements of occupational mortality were first introduced by doctor William Farr during the first decades of the century. English historian Henry Waldron, specialized on the occupational health practice in the nineteenth century England, explains: “He[ William Farr] used census population figures and recorded deaths in certain occupations to calculate mortality rates. This drew attention to the gross risks of injury and disease in factory workers and miners at that time.31” What he points out is the fact that mortality was particularly high during the first years of the child, that is to say from birth, to five-year-old. Several reasons were at the origin of the phenomenon. The first reason was the dreadful living conditions of working-class and the lack of health-care. The second was extensive hours of work and exhaustion, implied by a need of money to overcome misery. Historian Edward Palmer Thompson attributes that heavy child mortality to “the general environmental health conditions”, but also to “the characteristic deformation and narrowing of the pelvic bones in girls who had worked since childhood in the mills.32” Fearing to lose their job, the mothers came back to work as soon as the week after the delivery of the child. Among the testimonies gathered by Robert Peel 's commission, investigating on women and children's working conditions in mines, between 1838 and 1842, Isabel Wilson's testimony attested of the difficulty to be a working mother. She was a coal-putter of 38 year-old. She told:
“When women have children thick (fast) they are compelled to take them down early. I have been married nineteen years and have had 10 bairns; seven are in life. When Sir John’s work was a carrier of coals, which caused me to miscarry five times from the strains, and was ill after each. Putting is no so oppressive; last child was born on Saturday morning, and I was at work on the Friday night.”
Thereby, as soon as “bairns” were born, their living probability were reduced. Indeed, since industrial works spread out in urban areas, it had been proved that the death-rate of the labourer's children considerably increased.
According to Eric Hopkins: “The general level of mortality in urban districts in the period 1851-1860 was a quarter as high again as the rate in rural areas: 24.7 per 100 as against 19.9 per 100. Over the period 1838-1844, child mortality was three times higher in Manchester than in Surrey.33” In that quote, Surrey is considered as a rural example, and Manchester an urban area. The statistics were quiet similar for the majority of big cities such as Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle or Birmingham. From the middle of the nineteenth century, several historians and doctors started to argue that these working children were sometimes predestined to a life of misery and death.
Their parent's destitution, their lack of health-care and food, and their physical degeneration due to the long hours of work, smoking or drinking, would have led children to come to life with feeble constitutions and deformities.
Edward Palmer Thompson gives a detailed and authentic portrayal of a degenerated working-class child. He says
31 Waldron, Henry. Occupational Health Practice, London: Butterworth and Heinneman editions, 1989, p.
7. Print.
32 Thompson, Edward, Palmer. The Making of the English Working-class, London:Penguin Modern Classics, 2002, ch. IV, p.346. Print.
33 Hopkins, Eric. Childhood Transformed:Working-class Children in the Nineteenth Century England, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994, p.14. Print.
PRADON Fanette | Child Labor – The children of a Revolution
that the child “could be easily known as he was going along the streets; some of his joints were almost sure to be wrong. Either the knees were in, the ankles swelled, one shoulder lower than the other, or he was round-shoulder, pigeon-breasted, or in some other way deformed.34” Moreover, several testimonies attested that children were not only deformed, but also pale and squalid. Yet, if some observers agree to say that work was the poor children's fate, a great majority of working-class children was not born with such health problems. They acquired them.
The cause of these deformities and weaknesses was not only the fact that children came to life and easily died in the slums of the industrial towns, they also endured fatal working conditions. In the short-term, children were victim of working accidents. In the long term, they suffered deformities and diseases due to bad sanitary conditions and a too early introduction to professional life. All of these health problems led them to die younger.
In most industries, the main cause of death was occupational diseases and working accidents. Professor of history at the University of Paris Nathalie Bourdenet explains: “the danger faced by the miners all day long such as gas explosion or the breaking down of tunnels added to diseases like bronchitis or asthma provoked about 4,000 dead each year in the mines.35” Children were often subject to deformities provoked by their everyday work. However, these deformities only appeared when the child began to grow. For instance, a multitude of calamities affecting the constitution happened in mines. Putters and hurryers moved too heavy trolleys and coal tubs. Regularly, they were obliged to creep into too small tunnels, where to stand up was not possible. When they became teenagers, they started to suffer back ache and muscular atrophy. Their muscles were solicited too much before being totally developed. Moreover, because of the bad ventilation in the tunnels, children lacked the fresh oxygen necessary to a good development. Added to a too poor diet, the physical degradations led to corporal deformations and early death. Most of these young workers were short and large chested, considering that their whole stature endured physical retardedness. Their legs and arms were either unnaturally muscled, or atrophied, and the rest of the body suffered starvation. In 1843, The North of England Magazine declared, that children who worked in mines
“squired a preternatural development of the muscles; that for some time they are capable of prodigious muscular exertion; that in a few years their strength diminishes; that then they become pallid, stunted in growth, short of breath, sometimes thin, and often crooked and crippled.36”However, jobs in the mining industry were not the only jobs which provoked such consequences. Similar observations have been noticed in the textile industry where scavengers crawled under machines all day long and were exposed to a lack of fresh air. Moreover, the loud sound of machines caused hearing decreased. Regularly, children were assigned with the floor damping,
34 Thompson, Edward, Palmer. The Making of the English Working-class, London:Penguin Modern Classics, 2002, ch. IV, p.362. Print.
35 Bourdenet, Nathalie. The Mines Act, 1842, Paris Ouest université: département d'études anglophones.
11 octobre 2003.Web. 26 June 2015.
36 The North of England Magazine, Volume 3, London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co. 1843, p.38. Web. 18 July 2015.
PRADON Fanette | Child Labor – The children of a Revolution
crouching for hours in water, but providing necessary dampness for the threads to be spun without breaking. They were also used to carry heavy baskets of textiles and bobbins from one room to another. That led to back and arms deformation. Chimney sweeps faced the worst corporal abominations. Their life expectancy did not reach eighteen-year-old. Indeed, climbing required to involve the totality of the body strength. Children's elbows and knees were bony and weakened by the frequent rubbing between the chimneys bricks and the skin. They suffered spine, legs and arms deformities. Moreover, the regular contact with the soot affected their eyes. Therefore, the boys suffered of an acute inflammation of the eyes. These ones swelled and the child remained disfigured. In her book, Benita Cullingford highlights the climbing-boys' health situation and questions that fatality. She wonders:
“Must a number of children be dwarf and disfigured who, if rescued, might contribute to the strength of our Navy?37” However, chimney sweeps did not only suffer of corporal deformities. They also contracted diseases that had a deep impact on their puberty and life expectancy.
b. Occupational Diseases and Early Medical Involvement.
Climbing boys were not the only ones to suffer from diseases. Nevertheless, the first industrial cancer diagnosed in England was the chimney sweeps cancer, also known as soot wart. That disease was reported by Londoner surgeon Percival Pott, in 1775, while inquiring on factory children's health and sanitary conditions in their workplaces. He explained: “It is a disease which always makes its first attack on the inferior part of the scrotum[...]When arrived in the abdomen, it affects some of the viscera, and then very soon becomes painfully destructive.” Therefore, that disease was especially linked to the chimney sweeping trade, and could lead to the child's death. Added to that description was a pertinent comment of the doctor, deploring the sad climbing-boys' destiny. He says: “The fate of these people seems singularly hard: in their early infancy, they are more frequently treated with great brutality, and almost starved with cold and hunger. When they get to puberty, they become peculiarly liable to a most noisome, painful and fatal disease.38” It had been said that the soot wart was caused by an over-exposition to soot. That was particularly the case when children climbed along the flues without garments.
Moreover, the “chimney sweeps cancer was often attributed to a lack of personal hygiene.39” Most of time children depended on the protection of careless masters. Consequently, they were often dirty, badly fed and deprived of clean and suitable clothes. All conditions were gathered then for boys to contract soot wart.
37 Cullingford, Benita. British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of Chimney Sweeping, Washington: Dee Ivan Publishing, 2001, p.134. Print.
38 Pott, Percival, and Earles James. The Chirurgical Work of Doctor Percival Pott, New-York: Nabu Press, 2014, p.177. Print.
39 Kirby, Peter. Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780-1850. Suffolk : Boydell an Brewer ltd, 2013, p.17. Print.
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Chimney sweeps faced harsh exposition to cancer. However, numerous occupational diseases were also reported in other industries. In spinning and weaving factories, people were commonly infested by typhus fever which could be fatal when contracted by a child. That disease, commonly called 'factory fever' appeared in 1784, in Robert Peel's cotton factory, in Radcliffe, near Manchester. It then spread inside the main English textile manufactures, and especially in the Midlands. Providing an exact number of children and teenagers killed by that fever appears nearly impossible, as the illness was apparently really common in the nineteenth century and the cases were not always reported.40 British historian Joan Lane explains that this epidemic would have been reported as deadly for five times in fifty years. “Typhus, under its great variety of names, continued to be both epidemic and endemic in the early nineteenth century, with severe outbreaks in 1817-19, 1826-27, 1831-32, 1837 and 1846- 48.41” The peak year of 1819 was apparently the hardest for the young workers, since the number of deaths caused by fever represented 41% of the children death-rate. In the 1780's, doctor Percival Pott suggested that the illness was caused by close confinement and a lack of ventilation. Dampness and high temperature in workplaces had contributed to its large propagation too. During the year, and especially in winter, children endured an important change of temperature when they got out of hot factory rooms, to come back home in the cold, rain or snow.
However, several surgeons contested these arguments and accused the workers' poor living conditions and migrations to be at the origin of such an epidemic. Right after Percival Pott's report, physician and director of the Manchester infirmary, John Ferriar, claimed that “infectious diseases have been conveyed from Manchester to neighbouring towns, and cotton-mills, by persons going from infected houses.42” Thereby, an improvement of sanitary conditions in working-class houses, and a decrease in workers migration could have eradicated the illness.
Yet, factory fever was incessantly reported in the majority of textile manufacture during the nineteenth century.
Consequently, the impact of the work environment on the presence and spread of the disease obviously existed.
Child death resulted in the majority of the cases.
Although factory fever was extremely common in the textile industry, other occupational diseases affected seriously children's body such as cholera and tuberculosis. For instance, phtisis, also known as pulmonary tuberculosis was a contagious disease that harmed the lungs and kidneys, provoking serious respiratory difficulties, breathlessness, and therefore excessive exhaustion. The inhalation of flew, dust and harmful substances was also responsible of the contraction of such a disease. Later, doctors noticed than the girls working in match factories handled a really toxic substance: white phosphor. That substance was used to cover the end of
40 Folhen, Claude, and Bédarida François, Histoire Générale du Travail, Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1976, p.41. Print.
41 Lane, Joan. A Social History of Medicine:Health, Healing and Disease in England 1750-1950, London:
Routledge, 2003,p.144. Print.
42 Kirby, Peter. Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780-1850. Suffolk : Boydell an Brewer ltd, 2013, p. 16-17. Print.
PRADON Fanette | Child Labor – The children of a Revolution
matches. Yet, it provoked numerous cases of neurological disturbances, liver deterioration and phossy jaw.
Phossy jaw was characterized by the development of abscesses in the mouth and a necrosis of the jaw. The only way to save the child from the disease was to remove the jaw bone. Unfortunately, the child remained disfigured.
In the second part of the nineteenth century, doctor Alice Hamilton discovered that, “over time, as the disease process unfolded, the victim gradually became disfigured. Although phosphorous necrosis once reached epidemic proportions, it is now almost extinct.43” At the end of the century white phosphor was replaced by red phosphor that was similarly effective but less toxic.
The various occupational diseases reported in factories, mines and craft shops between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century are uncountable. Therefore, the previous analysis focused especially on the most frequent industrial diseases, and highlighted their consequences on the young labourer's body. Teenagers and young adults who had suffered of such diseases developed serious deficiencies that prevented them of moving, walking or carrying things for a too long time. Therefore, it became impossible for them to keep their job, or to find another one. The mangled children faced the same difficulties when they lack one limb. Indeed, employers did not take the risk to hire and pay inefficient people suffering from psychological or physical disabilities. In the mid-century, English society faced an increase in unemployed and destitute children and teenagers. These victims of work could no longer support themselves, or contribute to family income.
Concerning apprentices, they lost the possibility to offer their skill in favour of an employer, and their training turned to be useless. For instance, a piecer who lost his, or her hand in an accident was no longer able to repair the broken threads, as the task required to be performed with dexterity and precision. The child was then fired or relegated to easier and repetitive tasks. A putter or hurryer working in a coal mine since an early age, and developing asthma could no longer work underground because of lack of fresh air, and would be obliged to work outside the mine. That kind of situation occurred in all the industries. When children did not find back jobs, they were left to their parents or to the workhouses care. Some of them desperately became beggars, pick-pockets or prostitutes. The life of these disfigured and disabled children was therefore shattered for ever.
Although health-care and medical services just started to develop in the Victorian period, several doctors and surgeons focused on the child labour matter. These doctors, including surgeons Percival Pott, William Withering, William Farr, Edward Headlam Greenhow and Joseph black, highlighted not only the direct consequences of working conditions on children's bodies, but also on children's everyday life, and future44. At the beginning of the century, several of them built charity dispensaries and small hospitals, supported by voluntary donations to improve children's situation. For instance, in 1818, surgeon Henry Lilley Smith opened a charity dispensary in
43 Friis, Robert. Occupational Health and Safety for the 21st Century, Long Beach, California: Jones and Barlett Publishers, 2015, p.16. Print.
44 Folhen, Claude, and Bédarida François, Histoire Générale du Travail, Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1976, p.43-44-45. Print.
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Warwick, in the Midlands, where poor children could be freely treated and lodged45. Gradually, science and medicine progressed: anesthesia and rabies vaccine were discovered; psychology studies developed; maternity ward were built; more and more children hospitals were built. In 1851, doctor Charles West, and surgeon and physician to the Queen Victoria William Jenner founded an hospital dedicated to the children of the poor, in London: the London Hospital for Sick Children. The Queen offered her patronage. About a decade after the hospital opened, physician and writer Henry Morley wrote an article for Charles Dickens' weekly magazine, All the Year Round. In that article, he asserts the result of his inquiry on Charles West and William Jenner's hospital.
He points out that:: “so much good and wholesome work on behalf of childhood has been connected with the London Children's Hospital, since we first made its acquaintance, that we hardly know where to begin another report upon it.46” Here, Henry Morley's commentary was pertinent. Indeed, children's health-care tended to be improved in Victorian society. However, at the beginning of the period, young disabled workers, if not dead, bore the striking marks of the suffering from a sad childhood. Thus, after hardest days, weeks, or years spent in the dangerous mines and factories, their teenage and adult life was affected by deep misery and strong illiteracy.
Doctor's involvement in working children's care highly contributed to the vote of the parliamentary acts between 1802 and 1878, improving children's working conditions, and consequently limiting the consequences which resulted of that over-exploitation47. Yet, doctors were not alone to point out necessary social changes.
Indeed, a growing number of politicians and factory owners began to think that the situation needed to be reformed, to overcome social problems. They were called 'social reformers'. Consequently, we could wonder now who were these social reformers and what social reforms did they try to set up.