Responsible for England's future, children became central to nineteenth-century English society. Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century, London became the industrial center of Europe.
CHILD LABOR IN NEW INDUSTRIALIZED ENGLAND
A Destitute Society
However, what was reported in the 1801 census was a dramatic growth of the English population. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, another period of economic and social distress began.
Parish Apprentices and Free Labour Children
John Lawrence Hammond mainly denounces the poor living conditions of parish schoolchildren during the early industrial era. Parish children from an early age faced the harshness and violence of parish discipline in workhouses and orphanages.
Child Labour in the Coal Mining Industry, Textile Factories, and Other Trades
Indeed, in the 1840s, most children who worked in the mines did not know their age. Consequently, the Commissioner's report attempted to give an approximate estimate of the number of children employed in English mines. Therefore, the total number of children working in the mining industry, as in coal mines, corresponded to a third of the workers.
Child labor was a common practice in the textile industry and especially because of the introduction of large numbers of parish apprentices. The number of children working in the textile industry was almost equal to the number of children working in the English mines. The number of children in the textile industry corresponded to almost a third of the working population57.
Thus, we could only imagine the number of children employed in the textile industry before 1802. Thus, the Industrial Revolution had given birth to the stereotype of the chimney sweep, encountered in. In the countryside, despite the late eighteenth-century exodus, a small number of children continued to work on farms until the 1840s.
A SOCIAL ISSUE
Working Conditions
Age is another important element to take into account when researching working time. Indeed, he denies the idea that children spent most of their time in the workspace. It is true that the attitude of parents towards children in the eighteenth century was exceptionally strict.
Whether or not historians emphasize the brutality of children's exhausting daytime work, working time is an indispensable element to include in the study of working conditions. Child workers in the textile industry began to be effectively protected against excessively long working hours. Transformed Childhood: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth-Century England, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994, prologue.
No time regulation for children in the mines had been made before the end of the century. Indeed, many diseases were caused by the poor ventilation of the rooms and the constant cotton dust floating in the air. Industrialization did not provoke major changes in the work habits of rural people before the late nineteenth century, when electricity spread to most remote farms.
A Shattered Life
Measurements of occupational mortality were first introduced by doctor William Farr in the early decades of the century. The cause of these deformities and weaknesses was not only the fact that children came to life and died easily in the slums of the industrial cities, but also that they faced fatal working conditions. In addition, due to poor ventilation in the tunnels, children lacked the fresh oxygen necessary for proper development.
Their legs and arms were either unnaturally muscular or atrophied, and the rest of the body was starving. To that description was added a pertinent comment from the doctor, in which he lamented the fate of the sad climbing boys. Consequently, there was clearly an impact of the working environment on the presence and spread of the disease.
Fossil jaw was characterized by the development of abscesses in the mouth and necrosis of the jaw. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Dr. Alice Hamilton discovered that, “over time, as the disease process unfolded, the victim was gradually disfigured. The various occupational diseases reported in factories, mines, and craft shops between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries are countless.
Social and Educational Reformation
When the party came back to power, parliament gave real weight to the concerns of the most committed social reformers. As we already know, he proposed to the lower house a reform of the conditions of work and education of apprentices. The law introduced new sanitary clauses, a reduction in the length of the working day and compulsory education for all children.
Nevertheless, the passage of these two laws was a major advance in the regulation of child labor, as for the first time the consequences of the Industrial Revolution on working children were emphasized in a political decision. In 1832 the evangelical and Conservative Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury became the leader of the reformist movement in Parliament. Therefore, it seemed that in the second half of the century, children were no longer considered a commodity for employers and masters.
It obviously brought about positive changes as children were treated more decently than at the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution. Although reformers had an eye on education from the beginning of the century, it seemed that this became a decisive issue after the enactment of the Factories Act in 1833. In one, he noted that the classroom was in the boiler room, the books were blackened by coal, and the teacher was one of the supervisors62.
A LONG ROAD TOWARDS ABOLITION
An Obvious Factor of Economic Progress
Given that misery continued in the lower classes, we could therefore imagine that an increase in wages and an improvement in living standards were not the only phenomena underlying the reduction of child labour. Therefore, it would be relevant now to wonder why children at the end of the century did not find jobs as easily as in the past in factories and mines. A Thing of the Past: Child Labor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999, p.
Yet new machines in the textile industry at the end of the century mainly replaced the young worker's skills and increased factory productivity. Moreover, at the end of the century, the establishment of at least two air ducts per mine was made mandatory. Children sowing crops in the fields also had difficulty finding work due to the invention of the press drill, which sowed the grains automatically.
These inventions contributed greatly to the country's growing economy and thus contributed to the decline of child labor. At the end of the century, two more amendments were added to the Foster Act of 1870. In fact, in the 1840s, ninety percent of the labor force was female and seventy percent were girls under the age of thirteen.
Political Involvement in the Abolition of Child Labour
In fact, by the end of the century they also supported numerous non-governmental organizations whose aim was to protect the rights of children. Matthew Hilton, Professor of Social History at the University of Birmingham claims that the NSPCC was at the origin of the construction of "the criminality of child abuse." Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, child abuse was much more punishable than in the eighteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, trade unions gained legitimacy and began to become deeply involved in the cause.
During the second half of the nineteenth century several trade unions were really involved in child labour. The article points out the employer's point of view: "The manager of the plant now states that the strike was triggered by the ordinary dismissal of a girl. That is why the fighting girls' strike in London has remained a striking example of the role of trade unions in the fight to end child labour.
At the turn of the twentieth century, that sudden political interest in child labor was not just about working-class families and English partisans of children's rights. By the beginning of the Victorian era, England had gained significant supremacy over other European countries. However, by the end of the century, the United States, Germany, Italy and France caught up with England's level of industrialization and the country became relatively less important.
Child Labour: a Literary Subject
Here the English society of the nineteenth century is not described as harshly as it was. This emphasizes the dramatic aspect of the text and makes the story more moving. Through the novel's realistic dimension, Charles Dickens shocked and informed English society at the turn of the century about the needs of child labor reform.
At the beginning of the novel, Charles Kingsley describes the poor working conditions of a chimney sweep named Tom, whose earnings directly serve his master. Thanks to the character of young Catherine, the novel provides a detailed example of child labor in mines at the end of the century in France. Instead of calling 'sweep' in the streets, the poem's young boy can barely cry "cry.
From the beginning of the Victorian era, there were many poets who disagreed with the Romantic novelists' vision of child employment. Poems and novels dealing with the issue of child labor appeared at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Between the late eighteenth century and the late Victorian era, working-class children contributed profoundly to the industrialization of England.
Because child labor had been so important during the industrialization process, the abolition of the phenomenon was long and difficult. A Thing of the Past: Child Labor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.