The Child Labour in England During the Industrial Revolution (the Medical Aspect)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the medical aspect of child labour during the Industrial Revolution in England. As it is known one of the most excesses of the Industrial Revolution was the brutal exploitation оf child labour. However, the medical consequences of such exploitation have not been sufficiently studied by historians. The use of the large-scale application of child labour at factories and mines was one of the most visible social phenomena of the Industrial Revolution in England. The first machines were quite easy to use and did not require high qualification and considerable physical strength, so that women and children could work on them. The manufacturers noticed that they could exploit children more profitable than adults, as they could pay less and children couldn’t defend their interests. Therefore, children worked alongside adults up to 14 – 16 hours a day and for wages several times lower. Even children of 5 – 7 years had to work at the factories. The hours of their work were only limited by complete exhaustion after various coercive methods had been unavailingly applied to continue working (for example, after beating by overseers). Their treatment was most inhuman. Even worse were the conditions in which children worked in the coal mines (as a rule, in the dirty and dangerous conditions), until this was stopped by an Act in 1842. As Henry Gibbins wrote in his «Industrial History of England»: «We hear of children and young people in factories overworked and beaten as if they were slaves; of diseases and distortions only found in manufacturing districts; of filthy, wretched homes where people huddle together like wild beasts; we hear of girls and women working underground in the dark recesses of the coal-mines, dragging loads of coal in cars in places where no horses could go, and harnessed and crawling along the subterranean pathways like beasts of burden. Everywhere we find cruelty and oppression, and in many cases the workmen were as slaves bound to fulfil their master’s commands under fear of dismissal and starvation». The English public was shocked when it became known about terrible sufferings and hardships of children as a result of capitalist greed and cruelty. With time the evils of this system of child labour were evident, and the results of their sufferings were seen in the early deaths of the majority of children and in the crippled and distorted forms of the majority of those who survived. Engels was right when he wrote that the wealth of British industrial monopoly was created at the expense of the health and lives of English children. The author of article analyses the negative influence of exhaustive work at factories and mines on health of children (occupational injuries, chronic diseases, mutilation). She also traces the main stages of the public movement for legislative restriction of child labour in England’s industry which served one of important reasons for the first Factory Legislation. As a result of research, the original conclusion was made that the medical aspect of child labour could significantly impair the production characteristics of future generations of English workers. This circumstance, according to the author, has become one of the main motives that prompted the ruling elites of the state to accept the adoption of factory laws.