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An 1876 illustration of children working in a British textile factory. When the Industrial Revolution began, manufacturers used children as a workforce. [1] Children often worked the same 12-hour shifts as adults, but they could work shifts as long as 14 hours. [2] [3] [4] By the 1820s, 50% of English workers were under the age of 20.
The workhouse system was abolished in the UK by the same Act on 1 April 1930, but many workhouses, renamed Public Assistance Institutions, continued under the control of local county councils. [98] At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 almost 100,000 people were accommodated in the former workhouses, 5,629 of whom were children. [99]
In particular, single mothers were then forced to work in prison-like workhouses. In late-Victorian Britain (and, less commonly, in Australia and the United States), baby farming was the practice of accepting custody of an infant or child in exchange for payment.
The Victorian era in particular became notorious for the conditions under which children were employed. [23] Children as young as four were employed in production factories and mines working long hours in dangerous, often fatal, working conditions. [24] In coal mines, children would crawl through tunnels too narrow and low for adults. [25]
The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802 (42 Geo. 3.c. 73) was introduced by Sir Robert Peel; it addressed concerns felt by the medical men of Manchester about the health and welfare of children employed in cotton mills, and first expressed by them in 1784 in a report on an outbreak of 'putrid fever' at a mill at Radcliffe owned by Peel.
The early Victorian era before the reforms of the 1840s became notorious for the employment of young children in factories and mines and as chimney sweeps. [ 18 ] [ 19 ] Child labour played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset: novelist Charles Dickens , for example, worked at the age of 12 in a blacking factory, with ...
The desire to treat all those in poverty via one policy stems from the same impulses that led to reform of poor laws in the 19th century.
The children were sent to the mills of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire from the workhouses in London and other towns and cities in the south of England. About half of the workers in Manchester and Stockport cotton factories surveyed in 1818 and 1819 had begun work at under ten years of age.