Child Labor – A Perspective from Nineteenth-Century Literature
Child Labor – A Perspective from
Nineteenth-Century Literature
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Dr.G.
Somasundram,
Assistant Professor
Alagappa Govt. Arts College,
Karaikudi.
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Mr. S.
Saravanan, Ph.D., Scholar
Alagappa Govt. Arts
College,
Karaikudi
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Children’s
life in 19th century was a pathetic one. In that budding age, they
were forced to lead their own life by eking out some menial job. Industrial
Revolution compounded their hardships extremely. The buds had always worked for
their parents in home, in the field, and as apprentices in companies. The
drastic change happened in 18th and 19th centuries due to
increasing the number of industries, which hammered their efforts entering into
the education. Many companies employed children more to get more benefits for
meager wages. They were thrust into dangerous and unhealthy situations within
the adult working world, prompting reformers to call for legislative change. It
paves the way for Romantic and Victorian writers to focus on working children
in their poetry and fiction.
In the early
part of the nineteenth century many a children in England was employed in
textile factories, workshops, and mines.They worked sleepless and live like a
slave in industries.Though they were working for long hours, they got very low wages. According to the Factory Act
of 1833, the child of age 9 and above have to be employed in factories, but it
was rarely followed by companies. Parents of poverty-stricken sent their
children for wages by hiding their real ages. In 1842, children’s Employment
Commission uncovered dangerous and unhealthy conditions prevailing in Mining. The
smallest workers, below the age of six, were most commonly worked as
“trappers,” which was a job of sitting alone in the dark shafts and opening the
trap doors for approaching coal carts. The children of six years old and above
worked in the mines as coolie to carry things, and as a dragger to pull the
loaded coal carts through narrow passages. If we consider the conditions of other
industries, such as the manufacture of glass, lace, pottery, paper, and
tobacco, where children experienced untold hardships to survive in society.
In America,
just as in England, Labour laws were routinely ignored. Catherine Gourley states
that girl child at the age of 8 employed in the infamous Triangle shirtwaist
factory in New York City, although state law prohibited the employment of
children under fourteen. When occasional inspections took place, factory owners
would hide the child workers or thrust them out from the factories or permitted
them to take leave in advance. Every industry posed threats for children, because
of the unfenced machinery in mills to
the toxic chemicals used in tanning and printing.
Canadais an
agricultural country in the nineteenth century. It lured thousand of abandoned British children to work in the
agricultural field as apprentices. The working atmosphere in Canada among
breeze air, green plants, and good weather conditions made them to settle
there. The emigration movement was based on the assumption that the pure air of
Canadian farm country would naturally be more suitable for the youngsters. Joy
Parr reports,
…… in the
absence of legislation regulating this “traffic in children,” overwork and
abuse were common features of the arrangement. Yet government debate on the
importation of British children into Canada most often centered on the threats
posed by the children to public health and to the local labor markets rather
than on concern for the welfare of the young workers themselves.
The most
shocking part of all is children were used as money-lending machine by getting
alms in the street, dancing and singing in public places. There was the custom
of sending Italian children to Paris, London, and New York City, where they
were trained to play music in street and figurine sellers with the supervision
of a master who monitor their performances and collected the money. Children
who did not bring any money would be tortured in dark light on that day.
Despite repeated
representations to the British Government about the Italian children were being
held in virtual slavery, and calls for reform attacked the problem only as a
health menace and public nuisance. John E. Zucchi reports that “the government
and the courts seemed to show less interest in the possibility that a slave
system existed in their ‘liberal Christian’ country than in the possibility
that vagrants and beggars should overrun Britain's major cities and towns.”
British
children in factories and mines inspired calls for reform from such notable
literary figures as Robert Southey, who tripped textile factories in the early
part of the nineteenth century; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who authored numerous
pamphlets and letters on child labor; and William Cobbett, who addressed the
House of Commons, although he appeared to believe the claims of factory owners
that British prosperity was dependent on the labor of youngsters. Cobbett
reported to the ministers that “a most surprising discovery has been made,
namely, that all our greatness and prosperity, that our superiority over other
nations, is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire.” The plight of the
climbing-boys and chimney sweeps seemed particularly to capture the imagination
and sympathy of authors and reformers. William Blake's famous poem “The Chimney
Sweeper” appeared in 1789, and was followed in 1822 by Charles Lamb's essay
“The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers,” wherein Lamb changed their cry from Blake's
“'weep, 'weep, 'weep,” to the “peep peep of a young sparrow,” and referred to
the soot-blackened climbers as “young Africans of our own growth.” Charles
Dickens dealt with the horrors of the chimney-sweeping trade in Oliver Twist (1838), having the cruel sweep Mr.
Gamfield describe the appropriate way to dislodge a young apprentice stuck in a
narrow flue: “there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down with
a run.”
Dickens had anexceptional
perspective on the subject of child labor. He seldom reflected
his own experience working at Warren's Blacking Factory at the age of twelve
when his father was held in debtor's prison. At his tender age, he was
abandoned by his family members, he worked long hours in rat-infected quarters.
The impact of personal bitterness burst out in his writings. Most of his
personal life incidents could be traced out in his works especially the episode
of Warren’s Blacking.
His sympathetic
treatment of working and abandoned children were obvious in many of his novels,
particularly Oliver Twist and the largely autobiographical David Copperfield (1850). Like Dickens, David later
recalled feeling utterly abandoned as he labored in the Murdstone and Grinby
warehouse: “I know enough of the world now to have lost the capacity of being
much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me, even
now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age.” He used David
as his mouthpiece to narrate his life’s woes and wretched mind.
In Frances
Trollope's The Life and
Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840) focused thoroughly on child
labour rather than a single chapter as in David
Copperfield. But this novel
caused special problems for authors for exposing the social problem transparently.
Most writers who exposed the child labour including Trollope were charged for
propagandizing the ideas against the firm and garnering support for the young
victims.
Some critics
felt Trollope crossed limits in her characterization of Sir Matthew Dowling,
the factory owner, as the embodiment of evil. One contemporary reviewer claimed
that the novel was “an exaggerated statement of the vices of a class, and a
mischievous attempt to excite the worst and bitterest feelings against men who
are, like other men, creatures of circumstances, in which their lot has been
cast.” Critic W. H. Chaloner cautions, ‘although Trollope visited factories in
the north of England while writing her novel, her fictional accounts of factory
life for children should not be confused with historically accurate reports of
their conditions’.
Charlotte
Elizabeth Tonna's factory novel, Helen
Fleetwood (1840), drew on
historical sources such as blue books, parliamentary records, and the Sadler
Committee report. Critics Ivanka Kovačević and S. Barbara Kanner compare
Tonna's fictional incidents with actual testimony from parliamentary witnesses
and find many similarities. Kovačevic and Kanner state: “While Helen Fleetwood is unashamedly propagandistic and
self-consciously reliant upon the dry bones of parliamentary and other reports,
it is a genuinely moving assault upon the reader's conscience in its graphic
account of what it is like to be a woman or child forced by compulsions of
poverty to work in a factory.”
The Nineteenth
century novels taught a lesson to capitalist and unveiled the pathetic
conditions of parents and their children. Writers steadfast devotion to expose child labour conditions
makes reform in the later centuries. Nineteenth Century works centering on
child labor conditions and reform movements are now being studied by a new
generation of critics and scholars interested in the current problem of child
labor in developing countries as part of the global economy.
References:
Dickens,
Charles. David Copperfield. Penguin
Classics Revised Edition, 2004.
….Oliver Twist. Penguin Reissue Edition,
2003.
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