by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
Upfront premiums were payable in theory, but by the early nineteenth century these were becoming rarer; a London surgeon, an upmarket grocer, or a lady’s wig maker in London or a fashionable seaside town (‘Margate Ornamental Hair Empororium, 10 Queen Street’) would certainly ask for one. Apprenticeship premiums were sometimes burdensome (a law of 1768 allowed parents to pay in instalments), but they did give the vital right to carry on that profession after successful completion of the seven years. More to the point, it banned untrained people from taking up that trade. It was a privilege held by the poor, and a protection of their livelihood.
This protection was abolished in 1814. From then on, anybody could take up these trades without an apprenticeship. It was a free-market solution for an establishment that now believed that such restrictions were bad for the economy; once again it was noticed by Cobbett and others that it was always the protection of the poor that was first to be legislated away.
Petitions supporting apprenticeships (one with 300,000 signatures) flooded into parliament with the usual degree of success. Supporters viewed apprenticeships as a moral good; during the most turbulent years of their life, ages 14 to 21, children were subject to discipline and the good example of a master. A large proportion of advertisements for apprentices in the paper assured parents that ‘they would be treated as one of the family’. They learnt domestication and subordination and came out the other end as mature men (and it was mostly men) with a trade.
It was also argued that after the abolition of apprenticeships, nobody would pay a premium or do the full term of seven years and that the job market would be become ultra competitive and wages would fall. Others who supported the change did so for the exactly the same reason.
The workhouse was one source of apprenticeships. They differed a little from normal ones; they often concentrated on lower-skilled manual jobs, and would often offer opportunities for girls. This example comes from the Kentish Chronicle:
Apprentices
Wanted by the Parish of New Romney, Masters and Trades for four poor boys. For John Dussler, aged 15 to a baker, James Chittenden, fourteen and a half, to a cordwainer, Robert Puiles fourteen to a carpenter or bricklayer and Henry Warrington, to a painter or glazier.
Child labour such as chimney sweeping was more like child cruelty than job training. Being a ‘climbing boy’ was a perverse sort of apprenticeship. Normal apprentice children were indentured to a master at 14; that is when climbing boys started to lose their job, as they were now too large to scramble up chimney flues that were on average a foot square. Undernourished 6 year olds were used – if they were not already undersized, they could be starved.
Most came from the workhouses as pauper apprentices or from the streets, and would end their life there too. The only advantage was that they had money at an early age; Henry Mayhew in London Street Life suggested they had 2d a day to spend as they wished; however, after age 14, penury and unskilled labour was the norm. By 14 the climbing boy had learnt a trade that had no transferable skills and had stunted his physical development so much that other employment was impossible.
William Moles of Spitalfields was an exploiter of this mockery of the apprenticeship system. He would employ climbing boys to clean the flues of the rich for 1s a time. We know for a fact that one of his apprentices was a boy called John Hewley.
John would probably have lived in the same house as William and his wife Sarah. He would subsist in one soot-infested room of their house, sleeping on a black mattress. There were laws protecting climbing boys that William would have been aware of – these dated from the humanitarian efforts of Jonas Hanway in 1788. Under that law, sweep apprentices had to be at least 8 years old; John was only 6. They had to attend church every Sunday and be washed every week. Moles almost certainly ignored this part of the law as well, given what happened to John afterwards.
On 2 April 1816, Moles and John went to the house of Elizabeth Ware in Fashion Street, Spitalfields. Ware later gave evidence that John was beaten about the legs by his master, presumably as a punishment for his reluctance to go up the flue. On 23 April, at Chick-end in Spitalfields, John was sent up the chimney of Ann Chandler. John was already up the chimney when the witness saw him assaulted, although some details are unclear. While up the chimney he might have panicked and cried out that he was stuck. Then the master would try to ‘buff it’ – pushing the boy upwards by using his shoulders on the poor boy’s feet, forcing the lad to try ‘slanting’ – altering his body to fit the shape of the flue. John clearly got fully stuck; Moles tried to pull him down, but in the process the boy fell on to the marble hearth, breaking his legs and dying a few days later. Staff at the London Hospital tried to save the boy by amputating a leg but it may have been in vain anyway; there would have been traumatic damage to John’s head as he was pulled out and that could have been the cause of death.
Mole’s legal team claimed that it was an accident and the judge decided that murder could not be proven. Moles was found guilty of mistreatment of John. The apprentice’s body had previous marks of abuse, especially around the feet and legs. Moles was imprisoned for two years. Sarah Moles needed protection from a mob of 200 when she left the court.
Child apprentices generally were vulnerable to cruelty and mistreatment, perhaps even more that factory children. Those without parents, or without family nearby, were most at risk. This case is from 1817:
G. Barber, of York Street Bethnal Green, was charged with a series of the most horrid cruelties to his apprentice Mary Elder, a child apparently 11 years of age. His counsel was so disgusted with the recital that he threw up his brief…the jury sentenced him to two years imprisonment.
Her indenture – an apprenticeship agreement – was annulled. She was also rather young for her apprenticeship; the ‘apparently’ in the report shows either disbelief or uncertainty, neither were good. Two years was quite a harsh sentence for the time. Other, less squeamish, newspapers reported that she had been beaten with a stick, caned on her legs, starved to a skeletal state, kicked and punched and dashed against stone floors. When George Barber’s wife complained, the cruelty to the child was redoubled.
Mary’s young age and gender suggest she was a workhouse placement. The workhouse of St John Hackney paid for the prosecution, and it was the overseer who rescued her from death. These were the most vulnerable working children of all, whether they were found in a mill, a weaver’s house, or working for a sweep. The only good news was that the large hostile crowd at the Middlesex sessions showed that this was not a typical case. Mary was nursed back to health at the workhouse.
Domestic service for young people was common before industrialisation and young girls would often take up the role of ‘maid of all work’. By the beginning of the nineteenth century there were many middle-class families whose income was precarious, but liked to advertise their new status by employing a girl to do all the work in the house. Girls were often in their twenties, but those aged 12 or 13 would do this as their first job. From the many advertisements it seems that food preparation – ‘plain cooking’ – is the most often mentioned role. Regency ladies of any ambition did not cook for their own family. Mrs Bennet from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, is offended when the socially inept Mr Collins asks which daughter he should compliment after a nice meal.
The second requirement in the advertisements is that they should be able to cope with loneliness. One advertisement plainly pointed out that they should be able to bear confinement; older servants were meant to have no followers. Cleaning is the next requirement, and many hinted that the maid would need to answer the door to guests as the household would have no footman, but would have social pretensions to want a servant to greet visitors at the door.
It was an open-ended job between 6 am and 11 pm with the option of being turfed out of bed at any other time if necessary – one advertisement asking for washing and ironing, and ‘willingness to do anything required of her’. In the best households, she w
ould be treated as one of the family in the same style as an apprentice; in the Regency this would have been the most common domestic arrangement in the rural areas, but slightly less likely among the urban elites.
Young girl servants often came straight from the countryside, pushed out of agricultural work by enclosure and the new technology that was destroying their casual and seasonal work. One advertisement from a townhouse in Salisbury indicates what part of the job was least liked by promising none of it: ‘No cows, no washing, no brewing.’ Slightly less respectable ways of being a maid were to go to an agency, or apply to a kitchen or public house. There would also be young boys working in the pub as waiters, potboys and errand boys – a step below the level of apprentice.
Eleanor Cooper was a typical maid of all work in this situation. She was working at the Tavistock Arms in St Giles, London, in October 1814 when the barrels at the nearby Meux Brewery exploded and flooded the streets with beer. She was scouring pots and pans at a water pump when she was drowned by the incoming wave, or crushed by a collapsing wall. The newspapers added to the distress by lamenting that sixty pans were smashed beyond recognition. Early newspaper reports gave Eleanor’s age as 10; while this turned out to be incorrect, it did not seem implausible to the newspapers that a 10-year-old would be working as a servant in a public house. Other reports suggest she was nearer 16; again the lack of certainty shows how unimportant a young woman like this was to Regency society. Her body was sent to the local workhouse and her age was settled at a guess of 14.
Nobody in Regency Britain doubted that children working in textile factories were a new phenomenon; but there was some disagreement about whether it was worthy of worry or new laws. In 1818, Sir Robert Peel the elder, the father of a future prime minister, and a factory owner himself, laid out the crucial differences between the old and new patterns of children’s work. Nowhere else were children working a fourteen hour day in 70°F of heat and sticky humidity. All children were doing the same punishing hours with no regard to their individual physical and mental strength. Unlike apprentices, who were worked hard and similarly treated, there were no long-term benefits or career path for factory children. There was no paternal or maternal connection between child and employers; indeed if children sickened, died, or ran away, the master would simply go back into the over-supplied market and replace them. This was not regulated rural work or traditional family labour – from our view, this was red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism, and it was being applied to children first because they were much more likely to put up with it.
Peel eventually managed to get his bill into law, but there was some serious opposition. Lord Stanley, who approved of the protection of pauper apprentice children introduced in 1802, felt he could not support a bill that interfered with the rights of ‘free labour‘. It is hard to understand in what ways Lord Stanley thought a factory child was a free agent. Many MPs in the debate were concerned for the parents – it was they who were having their economic rights infringed by the law limiting the economic value of their children. If children’s work was restricted, the same would happen to adults. It is easy to understand these reluctant attitudes to reform when it is remembered that children were meant to be an asset for the present and an investment for the future. What other security did poor people have?
Lord Lascelles elaborated on his free market philosophy: who was to say which other industries would need regulation? Why should the law say how much a worker should endure? If the working hours of children under 16 were regulated they would be sacked and the burden placed on the poor rates or the poor parents. How would mills, some of which shared the same waterpower source (Lord Lascelles knew of such in York), manage to keep going if hours were restricted? How would British exports remain competitive?
Other arguments were from the same mind-set: if hours were reduced, children would not be improved but ruined by the extra opportunities for vice; the demand for short hours was coming from adult workers in seditious meetings in smoke-filled public houses, and they were doing it to increase their own pay by removing cheaper labour – there was some truth in this.
Other voices in the debate were the cotton mill owners of Manchester who petitioned parliament, claiming to have the names of hundreds of doctors and surgeons who would depose that children working in factories came to no harm. No less a person than Prime Minister Lord Liverpool, not well known for his sympathy for the poor, stated ‘emphatically‘ that: ‘If all the medical staff of Manchester … stated that the working of children for 15 hours a day was not injurious to their health, he would not believe them.’
It was the unusual and novel nature of the work, with perhaps a hint of patrician disdain for middle-class manufacturers, that led Lord Liverpool to this conclusion.
The Bill that passed in 1819 forbade child labour under the age of 9 in cotton mills. It was only passed by the Lords with the understanding that the cotton mills were a special case and that there would be no more interference with private industry. In order to protect the competitiveness of the industry, Peel relented and allowed children to continue to work twelve hours a day. This was despite the fact that evidence suggested overproduction and consequent lower prices were more of a problem than failure to reach production targets. Some factory owners actually supported the 1819 Act, as it enforced minimum standards against unscrupulous owners who would use exploitation of children to undercut them. A bigger problem than this was that the law was never enforced properly anyway.
Children working in cotton mills have become a ‘textbook’ example of cruelty and exploitation. Debate rages about how bad it actually was. The main problem, shared by all other child workers away from home, was that their treatment depended on the whim of the individuals who owned or ran the factory. Robert Blincoe, who produced his own account of child labour in a water-powered cotton mill in the early 1810s, described the capricious cruelties of individual overseers against the pauper apprentices, made worse by the fact that, unlike steam-powered mills in Manchester, the magistrate was a long way away and was more likely to be the mill owner’s dining companion, and less concerned about enforcing the new regulations.1 The 1819 Law did not allow for a proper inspection regime; obeying the law almost became a personal choice.
What can be said with certainty is that work in cotton mills was hot, tedious, and repetitive, and mostly unskilled and dead-end. It was dangerous; but then children who worked elsewhere suffered accidents. The main objection at the time was not just the nature of the work, but also the moral implications of the separation from family. The Manchester weavers petitioned parliament with these complaints in 1823:
There, uninformed, unrestrained youth of both sexes mingle … absent from any parental vigilance … confined in the artificial heart to the injury of health – the mind exposed to corruption and life and limb exposed to machinery.
It was the novelty of this type of work that parents objected to; it lacked the basic definition of work for children: natural conditions, parental supervision, and moral improvement. There would be no more training up of children to take their parent’s place at the loom. The family as a working and social unit had been seriously undermined.
The new factories did not have the monopoly on treating children badly. In 1824, a report on Sligo Protestant Charter School suggested that it was as horrible as any dark satanic mill. Although it was supposed to be a school, most of the time was spent learning handloom weaving – a dying occupation at the time. Robert Robinson was seven in 1811. He deposed that his teacher ‘used to get hold of their neck and knock their heads against the boards or any thing in the way and I often saw him give them clouts on the jaw… A slap on the jaw with the hand.’
He was one of a series of masters, ushers, and overseers who were completely unaccountable to any moderating power. The rot started at the top. Mr Hines, the master in 1824, was accused by the subsequent investigation of serving the children his diseased cow for Sunday lunch. Hines also used vicious, and sometimes ra
ndom, violence against boys, mostly for not working hard enough in the weaving shop. Mr Hines’s son, Richard, attacked Terence Gallagher with the butt of a rifle for a trifling problem with work. Lawrence French, 13, was strangled by Mr Hines and was unable to eat for three days. His crime was having insufficiently clean shoes. Thomas Fullerton (‘twelve, very small’) was locked up in a potato shed and fed on bread and water for not letting out his tight clothes and for weaving badly. Mr Hines survived the scandal:
the master in the ebullition of momentary passion…in which he unfortunately allowed his better judgment to be overcome. He has adopted a mode of punishment extremely objectionable and unjustifiable however…the complaints of the boys are greatly exaggerated and proceed more from a desire to criminate the master.
You did not need to be a factory child to be abused, and then not believed.
One of the arguments against reform of factories in 1818 was that other industries were worse. Lord Stanley, elected (unopposed) for the coal-rich county of Lancashire, thought that collieries were worse, although he had no plans to bring forward new regulations. He had a point. Mines created less excitement as they were less novel, and children continued to work in coal mines without too much comment beyond the era of the Regency. Scottish coalmines still employed 9 year olds in the 1840s.
The Board of Agriculture, ever ready to collect data to improve the productivity of the local industries, published a description of the work of children in collieries in 1817. Both boys and girls were employed to guide a corf (a wagon) out of the mine – using iron rails. It was clear that this was dangerous. It was cramped, dirty, poisonous, and full of dangerous equipment. However, the authors were more concerned with the asses – ‘fine beasts, fourteen hands high’: