by Bill Bryson
The least envied child workers of all were the chimney sweeps, or “climbing boys,” as they were also known. They started earlier, worked harder, and died sooner than any other group. Most began their short careers at about the age of five, though the records show one boy articled into the profession at three and a half, an age at which even the simplest tasks must have been confusing and frightening. Little boys were needed because flues were tight and often wildly convoluted. “Some,” writes John Waller in The Real Oliver Twist, “turned at right angles, ran horizontally or diagonally, even zig-zagged or plunged downward before rising up toward the stack. One London chimney switched direction an amazing fourteen times.” It was brutal work. One method of encouraging the boys not to slack was to light a pile of straw in the grate to send a blast of heat up the chimney after them. Many climbing boys ended their short careers stooped and ruined by the age of eleven or twelve. Cancer of the scrotum seems to have been a particular occupational hazard.
In such a harsh and hopeless world, the case of Isaac Ware stands out as a happy miracle. Ware’s is a name that crops up regularly in architectural histories of the eighteenth century, for he was the leading building critic of the age and his opinions carried a great deal of weight. (It was he, you may remember from our visit to the cellar, who helped make red brick unfashionable in the mid-eighteenth century by pronouncing it “fiery and disagreeable to the eye.”) But Ware was not born to a life of eminence. He started, in fact, as a street urchin and chimney sweep, and owed his polish and success to a single extraordinary act of kindness. In about 1712, an anonymous gentleman—never formally identified but more or less universally assumed to be the third Earl of Burlington, the builder of Chiswick House and one of the tastemakers of the age—was walking up Whitehall in London when he spotted a young sweep making a sketch of the Banqueting House on the pavement with a piece of charcoal. The drawing showed such extraordinary talent that Burlington tried to examine it, but the boy, thinking he was in trouble, burst into tears and made to rub it out. The gentleman calmed him, engaged him in conversation, and became so impressed with the boy’s natural brightness that he purchased the boy’s freedom from his employer, took him into his own household, and began the long process of turning him into a gentleman. He sent him on a grand tour of Europe and had him trained in all the refinements of life.
Under this tutelage Ware became an accomplished if not brilliant architect, but his real gift was as an arbiter and thinker. His several important books included a respected translation of Palladio’s Quattro libri, and The Complete Body of Architecture, which became a kind of bible of taste and discernment for professionals and amateurs both. Yet he never entirely shed his humble origins. When he died in 1766, his skin, it was said, still bore the indelible sooty stains of the chimney sweep.
Ware was, needless to say, an exception. Most children were wholly at the mercy of their employers and were sometimes treated in the most shocking manner. In one briefly notorious case, a farmer at Malmesbury, Wiltshire, hit on the idea of castrating two of his young apprentices and selling them to an opera company as singers. He was thwarted in the second part of his ambition, but unfortunately not before he had successfully snipped his way to the first.
Until well into the nineteenth century children received almost nothing in the way of legal protection. Before 1814, no law forbade the theft of a child, for instance. In Middlesex in 1802, a woman named Elizabeth Salmon, after abducting a child named Elizabeth Impey, was charged with stealing the child’s cap and gown because that was the only part of the offense that was illegal. Because abduction carried so little risk, it was widely believed that Gypsies stole children and sold them on, and there appears to have been some truth in that. A celebrated case was that of a Mary Davis, a woman of good background who in 1812, by chance, found her lost son sweeping a chimney at the inn where she was staying.
The Industrial Revolution only made matters worse, at least at first. Before the 1844 Factory Act reduced the workday for children, most worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week. Some worked even longer, particularly during busy periods when it was necessary to meet large orders. Apprentices at one mill in 1810 were discovered to be at their machines from 5:50 a.m. till after 9:00 p.m., with a single meal break of thirty to forty-five minutes for dinner, and that was sometimes taken while standing at machines. Diet almost everywhere was often barely adequate to sustain life. “They have Water Porridge for Breakfast and Supper, and generally Oatcake and Treacle, or Oatcake and poor Broth, for Dinner,” an inspector reported. In some factories, discomfort was both chronic and considerable. Some materials, like flax, had to be kept moist as they were being worked, so some of the workers were permanently drenched by spray off the machines. In winter it must have been unbearable. Nearly all industrial machinery was really dangerous, but especially when those working around it were starved and exhausted. Some children reportedly were so tired that they hadn’t the energy to eat and sometimes fell asleep with food in their mouths.
At least they had steady work. For those dependent on casual labor, existence was an endless lottery. One-third of the inhabitants of Central London were estimated in 1750 to go to bed each night “almost Pennyless,” and the proportion only worsened as time went on. Casual laborers seldom knew when they woke in the morning whether they would earn enough that day to eat. So comprehensively dire were conditions for many that Henry Mayhew devoted a whole volume of his four-volume London Labour and the London Poor to the lowest of the low, scavengers, whose desperation led them to find value in almost anything that was dropped by the roadside. As he wrote:
Many a thing which in a country town is kicked by the penniless out of their path … will in London be snatched up as a prize; it is money’s worth. A crushed and torn bonnet, for instance, or, better still, an old hat, napless, shapeless, crownless, and brimless, will be picked up in the street, and carefully placed in a bag.
The conditions in which they lived were sometimes so squalid as to shock even the most hardened investigators. One housing inspector in the 1830s reported: “I found [one room] occupied by one man, two women, and two children, and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before.” Poor parents habitually produced large broods, as a sort of pension policy, hoping that enough offspring would survive to support them in their dotage. By the second half of the nineteenth century, one-third of families in England had eight or more children, another third had five to seven, and the final third (the wealthier third overwhelmingly) had four or fewer. In poorer districts it was a rare household that could adequately feed everyone, so malnutrition at some level was more or less endemic. At least 15 percent of children, it is thought, had the bowed legs and pelvic distortions of rickets, and these unfortunates were overwhelmingly found among the poorest of the poor. One doctor in mid-Victorian London published a list of the things he had seen tiny infants fed—jellied calves’ feet, hard muffins soaked in oil, gristly meat they could not chew. Toddlers sometimes survived on what fell on the floor or what they could otherwise scavenge. By the time they were seven or eight, many children were sent out onto the streets to fend for themselves. By the 1860s, London had an estimated one hundred thousand “street Arabs” who had no education, no skills, no purpose, and no future. “Their very number makes one stand aghast,” one contemporary recorded.
Yet the idea of educating them was treated almost universally with abhorrence. The fear was that educating the poor would fill them with aspirations to which they were neither suited nor, frankly, entitled. Sir Charles Adderley, who was in charge of government education policy in the late 1850s, stated flatly: “It is clearly wrong to keep ordinary children of the working-class at school after the age at which their proper work begins.” To do so “would be as arbitrary and improper as it would be to keep the boys at Eton and Harrow at spade labour.”
No one better represented the harsh side of beliefs than the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1
766–1834), whose Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvements of Society was published anonymously in 1798 and became immediately and resoundingly influential. Malthus blamed the poor for their own hardships and opposed the idea of relief for the masses on the grounds that it simply increased their tendency to idleness. “Even when they have an opportunity of saving,” he wrote, “they seldom exercise it for all that is beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale-house. The poor-laws of England may therefore be said to diminish both the power and the will to save among the common people, and thus to weaken one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry, and consequently to happiness.” He was particularly troubled by the Irish, and believed, as he wrote to a friend in 1817, that “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” This was not a man with a lot of Christian charity in his heart.
In consequence of the unrelentingly dire conditions, mortality figures soared wherever the poor congregated. In Dudley, in the Midlands, the average life expectancy at birth at midcentury had sunk to just 18.5 years, a life span not seen in Britain since the Bronze Age. In even the healthiest cities, the average life expectancy was 26 to 28, and nowhere in urban Britain did it exceed thirty.
As ever, those who suffered most were the youngest, yet their welfare and safety excited remarkably scant attention. There can be few more telling facts about life in nineteenth-century Britain than that the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals preceded by sixty years the founding of a similar organization for the protection of children. It is perhaps no less notable that the first named was made Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840, a little more than a decade and a half after its founding. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children remains to this day regally unblessed.
II
Just when it must have seemed to the poor of England that life couldn’t get much worse, life got worse. The cause of the blow was the introduction and strict implementation of new poor relief laws starting in 1834. Poor relief had always been a sensitive issue in Britain. What particularly exercised many better-off Victorians was not the sad plight of the poor, but the cost. Poor laws had been around since Elizabethan times, but it was left to each parish to decide how to administer them. Some were reasonably generous, but others were so cheap that they were known to carry sick people or women in labor into another parish so that they became some other jurisdiction’s responsibility. Illegitimate births were a particular source of official irritation, and making sure that malfeasants were both suitably punished and made to shoulder the responsibility for what they had done was an almost obsessive preoccupation for local authorities. A typical decree from a court in Lancashire—this one in the late 1600s—reads:
Jane Sotworth of Wrightington, spinster, swears that Richard Garstange of Fazerkerley, husbandman, is the father of Alice, her bastard daughter. She is to have charge of the child for two years, provided she does not beg, and Richard is then to take charge until it is twelve years old. He shall give Jane a cow and 6 shillings in money. Both he and she shall this day be whipped in Ormeskirke.
By the early nineteenth century, the problem of poor relief had become a national crisis. The costs of the Napoleonic wars had severely strained the national exchequer, and matters only worsened with the coming of peace, as some three hundred thousand soldiers and sailors returned to civilian life and began looking for work in an already depressed economy.
The solution, almost everyone agreed, was to set up a national network of workhouses where rules would be enforced consistently to a single national standard. A commission, whose secretary was the indefatigable Edwin Chadwick, considered the matter with the thoroughness typical of the age (and of Chadwick) and at length produced a thirteen-volume report. One point of almost universal consensus was that the new workhouses should be made as disagreeable as possible, to keep them from becoming attractive to the poor. One of those providing testimony offered a cautionary tale so symptomatic of prevailing thought that it is worth giving here in full:
I remember the case of a family named Wintle, consisting of a man, his wife, and five children. About two years ago, the father, mother and two children, were very ill, and reduced to great distress, being obliged to sell all their little furniture for their subsistence; they were settled with us; and as we heard of their extreme distress, I went to them to offer relief; they, however, strenuously refused the aid. I reported this to the churchwarden, who determined to accompany me, and together we again pressed on the family the necessity of receiving relief; but still they refused, and we could not prevail upon them to accept our offer. We felt so much interested in the case, however, that we sent them 4 shillings in a parcel with a letter, desiring them to apply for more, if they continued ill; this they did, and from that time to this (now more than two years) I do not believe that they have been for three weeks off our books, although there has been little or no ill health in the family. Thus we effectually spoiled the habits acquired by their previous industry; and I have no hesitation in saying, that, in nine cases out of ten, such is the constant effect of having tasted of parish bounty.
The commissioners’ report fulmigated against those “who value parish support as their privilege, and demand it as their right.” Poor relief had become so generously available, the commissioners believed, that “it appears to the pauper that the Government has undertaken to repeal, in his favour, the ordinary laws of nature; to enact that the children shall not suffer for the misconduct of their parents—the wife for that of the husband, or the husband for that of the wife; that no one shall lose the means of comfortable subsistence, whatever be his indolence, prodigality or vice.” With a zeal that came perilously close to paranoia, the report went on to suggest that a poor working man might wilfully choose to “revenge himself on the parish” by marrying and producing children to “increase that local overpopulation which is gradually eating away the fund out of which he and all the other labourers of the parish are to be maintained.” He had nothing to lose from such a strategy after all, for his children could be put to work at home and “become a source of profit to the parents if the trade is good, and, if it should fail, they are maintained by the parish.”
To make sure that the poor were never rewarded for their idleness, the new workhouses were made as strict and joyless as possible. Husbands were separated from wives, children from their parents. At some workhouses inmates were required to wear prison-style uniforms. Food was calculatedly grim. (“On no account must the diet be superior or equal to the ordinary mode of subsistence of the labouring classes of the neighbourhood,” decreed the commissioners.) Conversation in dining halls and during hours of work was forbidden. All hope of happiness was ruthlessly banished.
Inmates had to perform hours of daily work to earn their meals and shelter. One common task was picking oakum. Oakum was old rope that had been heavily coated in tar to make it usable for ships’ caulking. To pick it was simply to disentangle strands so that they could be reused. It was hard and unpleasant work—the stiff fibers could inflict painful cuts—and agonizingly slow. At Poplar Workhouse in East London male inmates were required to pick five and a half pounds of oakum per day—a quota nearly twice that imposed on prison convicts. Those who failed to achieve their targets were put on a reduced diet of bread and water. By 1873, two-thirds of the inmates at Poplar were on short rations. At Andover Workhouse in Hampshire, where inmates were made to crush bones for fertilizer, they were said to be so permanently famished that they sucked the bones to get at the marrow.
Medical care almost everywhere was scant and reluctantly granted. Twenty years after the invention of anesthetics, workhouse patients commonly underwent surgery without them, to keep down costs. Disease was endemic. Tuberculosis—both phthisis, or consumption (which affected the lungs), and scrofula (which affected bones, muscle, and skin)—was notoriously rife, and typhus was a constant fear. Becaus
e children were so weakened generally, diseases that are now minor inconveniences were then devastating. Measles killed more children in the nineteenth century than any other illness. Whooping cough and croup killed tens of thousands more, and no place was more conducive to their spread than a stale and crowded workhouse.
Some workhouses were so bad that they generated their own diseases. One vague and chronic malady—now thought to have been a combination of skin infections—was simply called “the itch.” It was almost certainly due to lack of hygiene, though poor diet would have contributed, too. Dietary insufficiencies and poor hygiene made threadworms, tapeworms, and other sinuous invaders more or less universal. A patent medicine company in Manchester produced a purgative that was guaranteed to expel, faithfully and perhaps just a touch explosively, every last unwelcome parasite in the intestinal tract. One user proudly testified that he had brought forth three hundred worms, “some of them of Uncommon Thickness.” People in workhouses could only dream of such salvation, however.
Ringworm and other fungoid infections were endemic, too. Lice were a constant problem. One treatment was to soak bed linen in a solution of mercuric chloride and chloride of lime, which made the sheets poisonous not only to the lice but also to the unfortunates who slept on them. Inmates were also often roughly sanitized upon arrival. At one workhouse in the Midlands, a boy named Henry Cartwright was deemed so malodorous that the matron ordered him thrust into a solution of sulphuret of potash in an attempt to eliminate his body odor. Instead she eliminated the poor boy: by the time he was hauled out, he had suffocated. Authorities weren’t entirely indifferent to such abuses. At Brentwood, Essex, when a nurse named Elizabeth Gillespie threw a girl down a flight of stairs to her death, she was brought to trial and sentenced to five years in prison. Even so, physical and sexual abuse, particularly of the young, was widespread.