Child Labour, the Working-Class Family, and Domestic Ideology in 19th Century Britain

Anna Davin

CHILDREN’S WORK AND THE FAMILY IN EARLY INDUSTRIALIZATION

In 18th century Britain it was generally assumed at all levels of society but the richest that habits of industry could not be learnt too young. Need often dictated that children work, alongside parent or other adult in field, mine, brickyard or workshop, or fending for themselves in a variety of ways; but even when subsistence was secure their participation was usually expected as soon as they could be useful. In the 1720s Daniel Defoe reported with satisfaction seeing children at work in the domestic woollen weaving industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where he found ‘all employed from the youngest to the oldest, scarce anything above four years old, but its hands were sufficient for its own support. ’

Domestic production - whether for household consumption or for the market (in the ‘proto-industrial family’ interestingly discussed by Hans Medickl), whether in textiles or in agriculture on a nearby smallholding, with pig and poultry and perhaps a cow, or in the wide variety of domestic industry such as nail and chain- making, stocking-knitting, lace-making, etc. - would always utilize the labour of children from the earliest age that was practical, either as auxiliaries in production, or in odd jobs with domestic work, and especially with the care of younger children.

If a family had no older children, they might augment their collective labour power by taking in more distant kin of the right

Development and Change (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), VOI. 13 (1982), 633-652

634 Anna Davin

age, or by employing girls or boys as regular living-in servants or on a daily or weekly basis, to look after babies and help with other domestic or productive work.

In all these households then, whatever their particular branch of production or mix of resources, all members of the household were expected to contribute labour, and the difference between production for consumption and production for the market was blurred, as was the difference between productive and domestic labour. But different work would be expected of different individuals: children’s work was more auxiliary and recognized as having a learning component; while domestic labour, overlapping with production centring on kitchen, dairy, garden, poultry-yard, stillroom, brewery, and certain stages of textile production, especially spinning, was predominantly the domain of women. Exact boundaries probably varied with time and place and with social group and work, but there was always a general division of labour between men and women. How far children were divided by gender depended on their age and availability. Between child and adult status and performance there was a continuum; but children were subordinate to adults, and within the household overall responsibility and authority was vested in a single head - the father and husband while he lived, then widow or son.

Significant features of this family economy survived the long- drawn process of industrialization and urbanization, in particular the responsibility of women for domestic labour, and (though decreasingly by the end of the 19th century) the involvement of all household members in procuring a common livelihood. The father’s claims to authority (at least where there was still an intact parents-and-children family) seem also to have survived, though opponents of the factory system - and especially of women’s labour in it - asserted that paternal authority in the family (and therefore by extension authority in the whole of society) was being undermined by women’s ability to earn when their husbands could not.

Industrialization involved the gradual destruction of most domestic production, though the process was very uneven across time, place and industry. In agriculture the emergence and consolidation of new relations of production meant that the small family farm producing its own subsistence and a little surplus for the market began to give way, especially in arable areas, to larger commercially organized farms, with an increasingly proletarianized

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 63 5

work force. Dependence on the wage was confirmed by enclosures reducing access to common land, and therefore opportunities for grazing and various kinds of foraging. Rural industries gradually declined or disappeared, their products undercut and displaced by cheaper machine-made goods. The rural work force was increasingly stratified: there were ‘labourers’, the largest stratum, who were unskilled workers of whatever age or gender doing seasonal work for low wages; skilled men with regular employment and control of animals or machines as well as a partly supervisory role in relation to the labourers; and farmers and agents in employing and managerial positions. In the big recently-drained farms of the fens, for instance, new labour-intensive techniques depended on gang labour by children and women under male supervision. In the course of the century, while low wages, underemployment and the pull of the towns or even the colonies meant continual migration from the countryside, there was also a steady whittling down of the necessary work force through changes in technology and technique (and sometimes crop), and the work of women and children was increasingly marginalized.

Industrial production gradually shifted from country to town and from home or domestic workshop (whether rural or urban) to factory or industrial workshop. More large-scale units of production emerged, though seldom to the complete exclusion of smaller ones. As in the country, these changes meant a shift to predominantly wage labour, involving differentiation in wage, work and status, according to gender, age, access to training, and so-called skill - the label confirming and justifying much of the differentiation.* Sally Alexander shows clearly for London in the 1820s to 1850s how ‘the sexual division of labour on the labour market originated with, and parallelled, that within the family’; the hierarchy of adult male, adult female, juvenile male, juvenile female, determined both wages within a particular industry and access to the various areas of empl~ymen t .~ The differences were used by employers to beat down wages, break up crafts, and divide the wage force.

Organized workers - inevitably male and skilled - resisted the entry of women into their trades and their attitudes to child and juvenile labour were also coloured by the extent of its use to undercut adults. Apprentices were one thing, their number at least theoretically controlled within the craft, their placing maintaining traditional gender divisions, and their work seen as training. Child

636 Anna Davin

messengers and assistants again posed no threat. But the use of young workers in the factories was very different, both in relation to the adult labour market and in terms of the children’s experience. In the factories especially, it was clear that there was too much room for cruelty and overwork. Although factory children sometimes worked under older relatives, including parents, the work rhythm and discipline were set from above, by overlookers determined to keep up pace and production. Parents had effectively lost control of how their children were trained, and over the demands made on their health and strength. Under earlier conditions children had certainly known overwork and cruelty, but not on the same scale: the power of a master (or mistress) never extended to hundreds of children, nor was it likely that work would have been so unremitting and unvaried, the power of the clock so complete.

The support of sections of the working class for regulation of child labour thus stemmed from revulsion against the super- exploitation of their children, from dislike of their employment and training by others (and often a realization that the training was minimal and held no guarantee of employment), and from recognition that the regulation would at least partly reduce competition on an over-stocked labour market. These views probably contributed to the acceptance of the idea of a ‘family wage’, which gained ground in the course of the 19th century: a wage to be earned only by the man but sufficient for support of wife and children

Whether the impact of industrial capitalism involved the development of the factory system, as in textile production in the north, or exploitation through the endless undercutting and competition of sweated workshops as in London’s clothing industry, or exposure to the insecurities of the (male and female) casual labour market, it was likely to mean that families in the new urban working class were increasingly dependent on wages. There was far less opportunity for supplementary subsistence production, let alone for producing a marketable surplus from domestic labour; nor did the urban environment offer the same range of possibilities for foraging fuel or food or saleable commodities. The most important contributions were increasingly those made in cash rather than in kind, or even time and labour.

Domestic labour remained the responsibility of the woman, though to some extent the conditions of urban life narrowed its

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 637

range. It was increasingly hard to combine with productive work as that became more closely identified with waged work taking place away from the home: but since even women’s wages were better than those of children, where possible whatever domestic work remained irreducible and essential would be passed on to children. In fact this would chiefly mean child care. Children would help with washing, especially in feeding the fire, fetching water, and handing out the clothes, but were unlikely to undertake the whole process until they were well-grown. Where there were no younger children to be cared for, older children would combine earning in various ways with some of the basic housework.

RULING-CLASS VIEWS: THE RISE OF DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY

The sons and daughters of the rich experienced an even longer and more sheltered childhood in this period, which was justified in terms of children’s ‘need’ to be carefully nurtured and protected. Such ideas can be linked to 18th century rationalism and the importance given, for instance by Rousseau, to education and environment; they also found expression in the poems of the Romantic school. For a long time such statements contained an unspoken class qualification. Child labour was acceptable to many members of the ruling classes - indeed quite a few of them were likely to utilize and profit from it in their mines, mills, potteries, estates and houses, at least until legislative restrictions and technological change made older labour (i.e. over 13 years of age) preferable. It fitted well with the belief in individual industry and thrift, in the older religious tradition of Satan making mischief for idle hands, and with the stress on early discipline and training in work appropriate to future station in life. The statesman William Pitt in 1796 recommended that children supported under the Poor Law be sent to work at five; and on another occasion remarked approvingly that

Experience had already shown how much could be done by the industry of children, and the advantages of employing them in such branches of manufacture as they are able to execute.

Even those who, like Sir Robert Peel, felt that ten or even eight hours was enough for any child to work, might also regard limits as

63 8 Anna Davin

impracticable. In successive attempts at legislative restriction of children’s hours at work, reformers argued either that it was politically unacceptable to limit children’s hours, since adult workers needed their auxiliary labour, and consequent restriction of adult hours of work would be an unwarrantable interference with the freedom of the market; or that the working-class family could not do without children’s wages.5

The same realistic acknowledgement that working men did not earn enough to support their families single-handed may be found in the debates over introducing elementary education. The Prince Consort pointed out in an address to the Educational Congress in 1857 that the working man’s children were not only his offspring, to be reared for a future independent position, but constituted part of his productive power, while the daughters were the handmaids of the house. To deprive the labouring family of their help would be almost to paralyse its domestic existence.6

As an illustration of attitudes, this quite clearly shows ruling- class recognition that the working-class family remained an economic unit in which the children’s labour and wage contribution counted. Another example comes from the Newcastle Commissioners, who investigated the question of elementary education in the early 1860s, and who added a further significant consideration, that of the public (rate- and taxpayers’) purse:

... independence is of more importance than education; and if the wages of the child’s labour are necessary, either to keep the parents from the poor rates, or to relieve the pressure of a severe and bitter poverty, it is far better that it should go to work at the earliest age at which it can bear the physical exertion than that it should remain at school.’

Protective ideas about childhood, even where they were gaining ground as far as the children of the wealthy were concerned, were not yet necessarily applied to the children of the poor, even in the 1860s. And the real economic situation of most working-class families (except for a small elite, the so-called aristocracy of labour) did not yet permit exemption of wife and children from wage or work contribution to the family subsistence.

Nevertheless, in the first half of the 19th century new ideas concerning family and childhood were gaining force. An ideology was emerging according to which the family should consist of male breadwinner, dependent housekeeping wife, and dependent children. This coincided of course with the growth of a substantial

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 639

middle class whose prosperity allowed children and wives to be progressively exempted, not only from wage labour but also partly or wholly from domestic labour, performed by servants. Among such people it was increasingly a matter of pride and status that a man’s worldly success should be proclaimed by the domesticity of his wife and daughters, even, in the upper echelons, by their idleness. Their status (and therefore his) was continually confirmed by the labour and deference of their inferiors in the household. Children were no longer to learn by working with adults or assisting them, but through the mother’s moral training at first, then through lessons and books, the boys especially being given over to tutor or even school. Education was increasingly to mean religious, moral and intellectual instruction, not practical.

This bourgeois family, whose heartland was the new suburbs, well away from the jerry-built new or the dilapidated old working- class quarters of the towns, as from the mills and shops and offices which generated the income on which it thrived, of course reflected economic level and status. But it was underpinned by a moral dogma which is important because of its growing significance in relation to ruling-class attitudes to working-class family life, and particularly to the employment of women and children. Its earliest and most vocal exponents were, as Catherine Hall has shown, Evangelicals active in the anti-slavery struggle and convinced (not least by fear of an English replay of the recent French Revolution) of the need to reform the whole of society through ‘manners and morals’ in the interests of social stability and ‘morality’.*

The ideal family elaborated by the Evangelicals was consonant in most ways with the life style being developed in the middle classes in general. Central to it was the notion of ‘separate spheres’ - to men the public world of commerce, industry and politics; to women the domestic world, where patriarchal authority was still over-riding, but women had the compensation of moral force, and had responsibility for order and stability within the household and family. This identification with order and morality in turn had political implications. As Ann Summers points out:

Relationships within the [bourgeois] household offered a model for relations between rich and poor outside it: a model of the working class as economically and socially dependent, obedient, disciplined, clean and broken-in to the daily methods and routines of the middle-class family unit ... Much of the content of home visiting in the 19th century can be seen as an attempt to transpose the values and relations of domestic service to a wider class of the poor.9

640 Anna Davin

Perhaps still more important than the analogy from bourgeois household to society in general, was the belief that the family unit itself should be transposed and reproduced within the working class: that the family (in this form) was the natural unit of society.

From the 1830s or earlier the condition of the urban working classes had become a matter of increasing social concern to those above them. Urbanization dramatized and multiplied the poor and their poverty; personal charity was clearly inadequate. Moreover, concentration also intensified danger, from epidemics on the one hand, and ferment on the other. The diseases spawned in overcrowded and insanitary tenements could also attack those who were better housed and fed. The residences of rich and poor were increasingly separated into different neighbourhoods, but there was no cordon sanitaire to prevent the normal comings and goings: smallpox and diphtheria, even cholera, were no respecters of persons. Equally important, these were decades of growing unrest and militancy in the emerging working class; and concentration of the poor, especially in such appalling conditions as those of the new city slums, presented an obvious political menace.

The family took on central importance in middle-class reaction to all these problems, whether new or newly perceived. Problems were defined in terms of its breakdown: it was the key institution of society - disorders in society proved its breakdown, and its failure endangered all. The problems exposed or intensified by urbanization and industrialization were not economic or social so much as moral, at least at root.

Symptoms and diagnosis were in terms of the pathology of the family, and prescriptions for restoring society to order and health hinged equally on the domestic ideal fundamental to bourgeois concepts of how the family should be. Two major areas of reform - while closely connected to economic changes in the period - need also to be placed in this context of the domestic ideology prevailing in the middle class, particularly as it related to ideas about social stability. The first is factory reform, the second compulsory education. Both, of course, are central to the question of child labour.

Factory reform consisted more or less exclusively of protective legislation applying only to women and children: a minimum age requirement was introduced (to be steadily amended upwards), provisions concerning schooling to be provided by factory owners, restrictions on employment at night or underground, and

642 Anna Davin

independence and irregularity were totally incompatible with the domestic ideology, and presented a general threat to the social order and the smooth conduct of industry - how could such children grow up into punctual hardworking and obedient workers? So again on a more general scale, since the explanation of disharmony and malfunction in society was seen to lie in the family, and hope for the future in the better moral education of the young, concern for social stability pointed towards children and how they were brought up.

These questions are illuminatingly discussed by Richard Johnson,” who suggests that education became a panacea, expected to resolve every problem of industrial society, from epidemics to pauperism to machine-breaking, let alone juvenile crime. The education of the poor, Johnson argues, was essentially a question of control, involving:

an enormously ambitious attempt to determine, through the capture of educational means, the patterns of thought, sentiment and behaviour of the working class. Supervised by its trusty teacher, surrounded by its playground wall, the school was to raise a new race of working people - respectful, cheerful, hardworking, loyal, pacific and religious (Ibidem).

Central to this attempt was the belief in the role of the family, and the supposition that in the working class of the industrial towns the family was in a state of collapse. Johnson’s account of a pamphlet on Manchester by the influential educationalist Dr Kay (later Kay- Shuttleworth) recalls countless similar accusations:

Reading i t , it is easy enough to believe that the working-class family had altogether ceased to embody kindlier purposes, or even to perform the most basic of social functions. It did not support the old for their children ‘cast’ them on poor relief. It provided no comfort for its members because resources were squandered even when adequate. It gave neither training nor education for children since ‘filial and paternal duties’ were uncultivated. Even the common care of children and babies was neglected (Ibidem).

In Johnson’s analysis, based particularly on the writings of Dr Kay and ‘his handful of schools inspectors’ in the 1840s, the school was to replace the deficient family, at least as far as education was concerned, and in the inculcation of morals and discipline. A further aim of schooling, in my view, was to impose on working- class children the bourgeois view of family functions and responsibilities. Education was to form a new generation of parents

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 643

- and especially mothers - whose children would not be wild, self-sufficient and defiant of authority, but dependable and amenable, accepting not only the obvious disciplines of school and work (punctuality, obedience, rote-learning and doing, boredom, silence, accuracy in trivia, etc.), but also the less visible constraints of life at the bottom of the heap. Education was to establish (or, as they believed, to re-establish) the family as a stabilizing force.

CHILDREN’S WORK AND THE WORKING-CLASS FAMILY AFTER 1870

Legislative changes played an important part in the shift away from the productive co-operating unit and towards a family form closer to what was advocated by ruling-class ideology; and the new laws were ones relating to children. But the process was slow and uneven. Restrictions on children’s factory work did not altogether eliminate it: halftime work for older school children persisted until technological change made it less necessary to the production process, and the Labour-influenced 191 8 Education Act abolished it. Many other kinds of work survived: helping in shops and on market stalls, selling papers, delivery work, various odd jobs and errands - all continued as ways in which children could bring in money. But as compulsory school was more and more effectively enforced, such work, and also the children’s contribution in unpaid labour, was pushed to the hours before and after school and at weekends. In the 1890s and 1900s attention was drawn to the strain that employment outside school often placed on children; investigations into its extent took place in the context of general anxiety about working-class health and national efficiency; and attempts were made, especially through local bye-laws and the Children’s Act of 1908, at further legislative restriction.

But from the 1870 Education Act onwards, there was always a problem with enforcing the legislation affecting children’s time. Some magistrates probably held that interference with the family was unwarrantable. Certainly some felt unable to enforce sanctions when the parents pleaded poverty. Even the School Attendance Officers (‘kid-catchers’) whose job was to check up on absent children, might feel such qualms. One of them, in Good Words in 1872, expressed their dilemma:

A girl of eight or nine is often wanted at home ‘to mind the baby’, so as to leave the mother free to go out to do a day’s work, and the ultimate meaning of that child

644 Anna Davin

having to be sent to school is that the mother’s work and wages must cease, and the family in consequence go short of a loaf.’’

The conflict seems to have been most acute (for the authorities anyway) over girls’ attendance. Although girls consistently attended less than boys, official enquiries into attendance invariably focussed on the boys. One London committee on the subject heard evidence from 39 headmasters and three headmistresses (and of course no parents or children). The bias suggests the influence of domestic ideology: education was being defined one way for boys, with school quite indispensable, and another for girls, with parental instruction in domestic affairs at least partly acceptable as an alternative to school if necessary. Boys not at school were assumed to be playing truant - engaged in boyish mischief or worse - and needing to be brought under control. Girls not at school were assumed to be at home, helping, needed. l 3

In the same way there is a distinction between paid and unpaid work. While wage-earning children were increasingly seen (from above) as victims of unnatural and exploiting parents, and their employment, especially from the late 1890s, was being more and more thoroughly investigated and restricted, service within the family, especially by girls, remained acceptable, part of the natural order of things, almost invisible. Yet in terms of demands on their strength the distinction between paid and unpaid work was not always very relevant. ‘The wage earners among the girls do not seem to be distinguishable from those who are merely domestic drudges’, wrote Edith Hogg in 1897.14 Often the only difference in the work would be whether it was done for mother or neighbour.

... while the boys accept employment largely in order to earn a little money, the wages are a subordinate consideration in the case of the girls. I t seems to the mother only natural that a girl should help to clean or baby-mind; and if there is no need of her services at home, then she can ‘oblige’ a neighbour ... she may get 6d ... but if only 2d or 3d were offered, she would do the work just the same.I5

Work in the home was less visible than for instance the long hours of children selling papers, delivering milk, or working on market stalls and in barbers’ shops. But its invisibility was certainly increased by the fact that the official enquiries into children’s work were structured and headed by middle-class men who would have

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 645

very little notion of what housework, childcare and so on might entail, since in their own homes the work would be done by servants and supervised by women. l 6

Paid domestic labour was almost as difficult to detect and to assess as work done at home, and again the attempt was rarely very serious. Sir Charles Elliott, representing the London School Board before the 1902 parliamentary enquiry into children’s employment out of school commented: ‘Domestic labour is of so intermittent a character that it is not usually severe, and to enquire into the hours when it begins would require such inquisition.’l’

Women factory inspectors were concerned about such features of the unregulated employment of children as ‘errand running for girls; dinner-carrying long distances to parents and other relatives between morning and afternoon attendances; stupefying drudgery for girls of school age ... ’. They urged that there should be more study of the educational and physical needs of girls in any occupation; and noted ‘how much more consideration has been given in detail by the Committee to the needs of boys than of girls’. Investigation of girls’ work might be more difficult but it was quite as important.

... apart from any question of physical strain to the girls themselves immense economic harm is done to the community by the bad habits acquired by girls from 9 to 12 years of age ... kept much at home to d o untaught housekeeping for their family. I hardly think it is possible that the mis-employment or over-employment of boys can in any direction be found, bad as it is, to be so opposed to the interests of society and of the individuals as this is ... the girls remain stunted in every way in their domestic calling, or drift into one of the many overcrowded unskilled industrial occupations.]*

This statement is a useful reminder of the context of investigations into children’s employment. They took place at a time when England’s economic and military supremacy were being challenged, in trade by Germany and the Ugited States, in empire by the Boers. A new sense of insecurity was provoking examination of the nation’s assets, with a wider definition and a longer perspective than had been usual before. Children were clearly of key importance, as future labour force and army, and as parents of the succeeding generation. Their health and training acquired a new significance in the 1900s, which dwarfed (though sometimes it accompanied) the earlier humanitarian concern: and the growing concern extended now well beyond the classroom. l 9

646 Anna Davin

But the investigation and discussion of working-class childhood was carried out by people whose experience and definition of childhood was middle class: for them (as for British historians today) children were dependents to be protected, child labour was exploitation of the helpless, and adults (whether employers or parents) who profited by their work had to be prevented and denounced. Since children were by definition helpless and dependent, the space in which youthful independence had existed was being steadily closed off. Children without parents would be taken over by the State or into ophanages;20 informal supervision or adoption by neighbours and relatives was becoming rarer and more difficult. Children roaming during school hours were prey for the official kid-catchers, automatically suspect. And their possibilities of earning were being continually narrowed and marginalized. Even their play was not safe from interference: there were those who wanted to teach these ‘little adults’ of the working class how to play, to restore their childish innocence with kindergarten games. The much-loved traditional singing and dancing games with themes of death or courtship were criticized as too adult, though reformers could not eliminate death from the houses and classes and streets in which the children lived.

Such attitudes were not yet dominant in the working class in spite of real changes in the second half of the 19th century. Dramatically rising real wages (better wage rates and cheaper food), if more influential for some sectors of the working class than for others, did mark a general emergence from the mere struggle to survive. This made possible an extension of childhood often by several years, in the same decades as the demands of school on children’s time and (less concretely or measurably) the pressures of bourgeois ideology were working most effectively in the same direction.

But parents still took for granted their right to their children’s labour; it was the natural thing. Their economic perspective was that of the family budget, not national efficiency; they also might see work in educational terms, like the North London costermonger who was summoned in 1891 for not sending his children to school:

My children are middling educated; but I say labour before scholarship. There are plenty of scholars in this country starving at the present time. And what I want to do is to teach my children to get an honest living in the streets.*’

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 647

Sometimes children’s employment might relate to an effort to raise the family living standard or respectability: ‘the anxiety of the better-off parent to spend more on clothes’ often resulted in ‘serious overwork to the little body in the tidier clothes’. Children too were ‘pleased and proud to be in a position of partial independence’, or to be able to help when the family was struggling to get by.22 There remained many families which had temporary or permanent difficulties. In some, for instance, there was no male breadwinner: such ‘incomplete’ families would most often consist of mother and children, but there were many other combinations, and in most cases every possible contribution would be needed.23 Or again, the male breadwinner though present might be ineffective, because of ill-health or disability or unemployment or drink; and here too the addition of children’s earnings to the mother’s might determine whether the family survived as a group or broke up with the weakest members going into the workhouse.

Even where children’s earnings became less necessary, their labour might be more needed than ever. Rising living standards intensified domestic labour. Standards of cleanliness rose too, and women, especially former domestic servants, tended to set themselves impossibly high ideals. Space and property were likely to expand, and larger quarters, more clothes and linen, more furniture and knick-knacks, meals which were more substantial and ritualized (and were prepared at home), all meant more work. Schools insisted on tidy children - that meant more washing and ironing, bathing and hair-washing, mending and patching, and such time-consuming activities as the struggle against headlice. Much domestic work, especially laundry and cleaning, involved considerable effort because of inadequate facilities - water was not necessarily laid on and would certainly need to be heated; the universal coal fires produced continual dust and grime; while elbow grease (‘free’) supplemented the eked-out cakes of hard soap used for scrubbing floors and clothes. The sexual division of labour in the household (carried over as we have suggested from earlier convention) gave women responsibility for the organization and performance of domestic work, with children as their chief auxiliaries. Since women’s health was often poor (not least because when things were tight it was they who unobtrusively went short of food, and because of child-bearing under unsatisfactory conditions) this burden of domestic labour, especially in large families, was heavy even without the extra demands of any waged

648 Anna Davin

work, whether regular or casual, in the home or outside. So children’s help could take on considerable importance,

though the experience of the individual child would vary enormously - an eldest, especially an eldest girl, would have a far harder time than a youngest, being in a position of responsibility throughout the period of maximum stress for the family, when the proportion of earners to dependents, as of those capable of domestic work to those needing to be cared for,. was least favourable. It is not unusual today to come across elderly women who never married because of such early domestic drudgery. Interestingly, though, they do not usually express resentment, their attitude in retrospect is one of acceptance. Their choice is often expressed in terms of their mothers’ experience, not their own, but they do sometimes express resentment at the unequal division of labour between them and their brothers. It seems that although the boundaries were not invariant and could be crossed, divisions between ‘male’ and ‘female’ work were maintained even in relation to children’s work. Where both boys and girls were available, domestic work was more likely to be done by girls. Boys might have certain regular jobs (cleaning knives and boots for example), but they would not be called on as regularly or as extensively as their sisters, nor get into as much trouble if they skived off and avoided chores.

So the decline of children’s formal employment, first full-time then part-time (before and after school, and on Saturdays) did not mean that their time became their own. Girls especially continued to be largely responsible for younger siblings and ‘it was expected that when a girl came home from school she took off her coat, put on an old dress, and started helping mother’.24 Mothers who took in homework would augment their earnings through children’s help, whether in pasting, stitching, folding and so on, or in going for materials or delivering finished work. Much shopping was also done by children: even really small ones could go to the corner shop for the pennyworths of tea or sugar or jam which were purchased every day, while older ones might be trusted with market shopping for meat and vegetables, or walk extra distances to shops with special bargains. Children were handy for all sorts of messages - to ‘run round and tell’ any news or need to neighbours, friends, relatives, workmates, employers, shopkeepers, where nowadays often the telephone would be used. (Its invention spelt redundancy for many waged messengers, but firms and businesses of course

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 649

had phones long before ordinary people.) They would be sent with tools to be sharpened, boots to be mended (if no-one at home could cobble), parcels to be pawned by a neighbour who could get a better price or had more time, club money to be given to the collector at pub or shop, rabbit skins or bottles or rags to sell. Wherever free food was to be had there would be children in crowds, sometimes on their own account, but often for something to take home. Their foraging also extended to fuel, and as with food there was a spectrum between being sent on an errand, and simply keeping a weather eye open for what could be scavenged. Need sharpened the eyes, and anything edible or combustible (or useful in other ways) would be brought back.

But the time taken by such activities is even harder to assess than the extent of children’s employment. The official enquiries, with their perspective of overwork and employment, tended to discount less formal work, especially if it was unpaid. Similarly, class bias on the part of investigators obscures the importance of much of children’s work outside the home as part of a local economy of favours, in which all kinds of help between neighbours and relatives and friends allowed scarce resources of time and labour or of money and goods to be spread over a number of households, though usually with some sense of debts to be repaid one way or another, favours to be returned. Thus a child running an errand or scrubbing a floor or minding a baby for a neighbour might well receive no payment, or maybe just a sweet or slice of bread. But on the unwritten balance sheet, the child’s mother would then as a result be in credit, or would have wiped out some earlier obligation.

CONCLUSIONS

To understand the place of child labour in 19th century Britain we have to examine changes in gender and age roles, and in family structure, and the relation of these to changing economy and ideology. Child labour has varied with economic and cultural contexts, within which it has taken very different forms. Moreover, since ideas on childhood have altered dramatically over the last 200 years, and have varied with class and social group as well, the evidence on its historical forms has to be used with determined assumptions. In Western Europe in the 20th century childhood has

650 Anna Davin

been seen in the dominant ideology, and to a large extent socially structured, as a time of dependence and innocence prolonged well into the teens, during which the child should be protected for as long as possible from hard realities such as work and responsibility. From that perspective it is easy to accept uncritically what we were all taught at school: in the bad old days there was child labour, but through heroic campaigning by humane and farsighted leaders like Lord Shaftesbury, successive reforms during the course of the 19th century eliminated this barbarism and civilized ideas‘ came to prevail. And rumours of the exploitation of child labour still practised in the ‘less fortunate and enlightened’ parts of the world serve only to reinforce a self-congratulatory pride in how we manage things here and today. Children can be children now, protected from care and toil by loving fathers and mothers, given all they need to develop in their own time, and with leisure and room and security to exercise their true functions of growth and play. Such ‘proper’ childhood is part of progress and the modern world; child labour is exploitative and anachronistic, runs the argument.

Without defending child labour as practised under industrial capitalism, especially in its early decades; and without ignoring that in other contexts too children were often driven beyond their strength and treated cruelly, I would argue that it is important to confront and put aside this set of assumptions if we are to conduct an historical (or a comparative) examination of questions relating to family and labour: their class and cultural specificity will otherwise obstruct both analytical and imaginative understanding. No general picture of child labour can be based on its practice in one form alone. What we need, and do not yet have, are studies of industrial capitalism, carefully relating those shifts to local context and to change over time - technological (how far child labour was useful to employers), ideological (the rise of domestic ideology and its impact on both ruling and working classes, involving ideas about the family wage earned by a male breadwinner for wife and children), economic (the organization of labour markets and the need of the family for the child’s economic contribution; whether that contribution was in cash, kind, or labour), and political (the role of state intervention through protective legislation and the introduction of compulsory schooling). The interaction of all these factors is complex and requires more research, discussion and thought.

Child Labour in 19th Century Britain 65 1

NOTES

I . Hans Medick: ‘The proto-industrial family: the structural function of household and family during the transition from peasant society to industrial capitalism’, Social History, No. 3 (1976).

2. For a recent discussion of this in the 20th century context, see Anne Phillips & Barbara Taylor: ‘Sex and skill: Notes towards a feminine economics’, Feminist Review, No. 6 (1980).

3. Sally Alexander: ‘Women’s work in nineteenth-century London: a study of the years 1820-50’, in Juliet Mitchell & Ann Oakley (eds): The Rights and Wrongs of Women (1976). See also Barbara Taylor: “‘The men are as bad as their masters...”: Socialism, feminism and sexual antagonism in the London tailoring trade in the early 1830s’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 5 , No. 1 (Spring 1979).

4. For an historical discussion of this see Hilary Land: ‘The family wage’, Feminist Review, No. 6 (1980).

5 . See, for example, Hansard Parliamentary Report, 15 March 1844. 6. Albert Saxe Coburg (June 1857). Quoted in evidence to the Newcastle

7. Newcastle Commissioners, ibidem: 188. 8. See the important analysis in Catherine Hall: ‘The early formation of Victorian

domestic ideology’, in Sandra Burman (ed.): Fit Work for Women (1979); and also, Francoise Basch: Relative Creafures (1976); Leonore Davidoff ‘Class and gender in mid,-Victorian Britain’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 5 , No. 1 (Spring 1979).

9. Anne Summers: ‘A home from home! Women’s philanthropic work in 19th century Britain’, in Burman (1979: 39).

10. E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin ed., 1963). 331-49.

1 I . Richard Johnson: ‘Educational policy and social control in early Victorian England’, Past and Present (1970).

12. ‘Riverside visitor’, ‘School board work’, Good Words (1872), 652. See also School Board of London Byelaws Committee 1874 and 1890; John Reeves: Recollections of a School Attendance Officer (1915).

13. Information in this paragraph (and generally in this section) is from my forthcoming thesis/book on the childhood of working-class girls in late 19th century London.

14. Edith Hogg: ‘School children as wage-earners’, The Nineteenfh Century (August 1897), 242.

IS. Ibidem: 239. 16. The earliest investigations were unofficial, under the auspices of two pressure

groups (Women’s Industrial Council and the Committee on Wage-earning Children) in which women were influential. But the official investigations which followed (London School Board, Local Government Board, and the 1902 Interdepartmental Enquiry into Children’s Employment out of school) were solidly male.

Commissioners, PP 1861, XXII, Part I, Chapter 3.

17. P P 1902, xxv, Evidence Sir Charles Elliott, q 16. 18. P P 1902, xxv, Appendix 48, 467. 19. This argument is developed at length in my article: ‘Imperialism and

motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, 5 (Spring 1978). 20. See Joy Parr: Labouring Children (1980) for a case study of the activities of

Barnardo’s, including besides the provision of ‘Homes’ the transfer of children to a new life in the colonies - in some cases by ‘philanthropic abduction’, sending the

652 Anna Davin

children off and informing relatives only afterwards so that they would not try to get the children back into what was considered an immoral environment.

21. The Times (23 September 1891), 8, col. 5 . 22. Hogg (1897), 242. 23. The demographers’ complete family of parents and children is an instance of

24. Mary Philo, born 1903 and recorded by me in 1974. Exact reference missing; how our academic definitions are culturally shaped.

tapes and transcripts in Hackney People’s Autobiography Collection, London.

Anna Davin is on the editorial collective of History Workshop, the journal of feminist and socialist historians. She is an adult education teacher in

London, and a visiting lecturer at New York State University at Binghampton. Her four children (aged 5

to 22) make a significant contribution to the domestic economy.