556 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution
Some contemporaries believed that long days of labor instilled discipline,
whereas idleness would turn children into sinners and criminals. But
Methodists, among other British evangelical Protestants, wanted to save
children from exhausting and sometimes dangerous work. A British law
passed by Parliament in 1833 forced employers to start part-time schools in
factories employing children, although in some cases the owners simply des
ignated a worker to be “teacher,” whether or not he could read or write very
well. The 1833 Factory Act in Britain banned work by children less than
nine years of age and limited labor by older children to eight hours (subse
quent legislation in 1847 limited older children and women to a ten-hour
day). In 1841, France’s first child labor law banned factory work for children
under eight years of age and limited the workday to eight hours for those
eight to thirteen years old and to twelve hours for those thirteen to sixteen
years old, banning child labor at night and on Sundays and holidays. The
law, however, was extremely difficult to enforce, and was routinely circum
vented by employers and ignored by parents who needed the additional fam
ily income, however small.
The Laboring Poor
In 1838, a British member of Parliament described a cotton mill:[It was] a sight that froze my blood. The place was full of women, young,
all of them, some large with child, and obliged to stand twelve hours a
day. Their hours are from five in the morning to seven in the evening,
two hours of that being for rest, so that they stand twelve hours a day.
The heat was excessive in some of the rooms, the stink pestiferous, and
in all an atmosphere of cotton flue. I nearly fainted. The young women
were all pale, sallow, thin, yet generally fairly grown, all with bare feet—
a strange sight to English eyes.The northern industrial cities of England in particular attracted the atten
tion of horrified observers. There were, to be sure, people of means in Man
chester, but Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), a German Rhinelander, sought
and found the grim face of unrestrained capitalism there:At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irwell, a narrow, coal
black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse.... Above the
bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains
and refuse find their way to the Irk, which receives further the contents
of all the neighboring sewers and privies... here each house is packed
close behind its neighbor and a bit of each is visible, all black, smoky,
crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window-frames. The back
ground is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings.... [Beyond]
the background embraces the pauper burial ground, the station of the
Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse...