Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780–1850 by Peter Kirby (review)

This book promises a “nuanced” picture of child health and labor during the British Industrial Revolution, and thus a revision of the “enduring stereotype of the health-impaired and abused industrial child,” a stereotype that Kirby thinks has mesmerized modern historians. The revision relies on a reassessment of contemporary accounts of children’s health rather than an analysis of new archival materials. Chapter 1 suggests that historians have been looking in the wrong places when searching for the causes of child ill health. Poverty, inadequate diets, unsanitary and crowded living conditions, large families, and primitive medical care provided worse and more common insults than did factory jobs. Contemporary medical commentators and the historians, who have relied upon them, simply confused broader epidemiological effects such as deformity or short stature with the influence of work. Moreover, doctors of the era were unable to diagnose many industrial diseases, calling into question their expertise. Medical witnesses were also often partial and theoretical, metropolitan practitioners recruited by avowed opponents of the factory system with little experience of industrial workplaces let alone their specific hazards. Chapter 2 focuses on the workplace. While dismissive of deformities as the product of long hours and repetitive work, it agrees that materials and machinery could be hazardous. Chapter 3 covers the difficulties involved in estimating children’s ages before vital registration and suggests ways in which the assessment of children’s health could be informed by studies of physical growth. The final chapter turns to the issue of workplace violence, concluding that “beating was extremely rare” (p. 150)

The survey is of value to students of children’s health, but whether it provides a dramatic revision of the conventional wisdom is more doubtful. Much rests on the credibility of opposing sources. Michael Sadler was undoubtedly a champion of protective labor legislation, but some of Kirby’s sources were equally partisan. W. H. Hutt is cited approvingly for confirming Kirby’s view that overrepresentation of puniness among factory children was likely the result of strong selection effects: “children who were insufficiently strong for other employments were sent to the cotton factories” (p. 178). But E. P. Thompson derided Hutt’s article as “slight, scarcely documented, and often directly misleading.” ¹Indeed, much evidence exists to counter the suggestion that frail children were tolerated in factories, indicating the lightness of the labor. Most factory masters employed doctors to check youngsters’ health and when recruiting prioritized fitness sometimes for instance requiring minimum heights. Andrew Ure, whom Kirby describes as “the eminent Scottish chemist and geologist” (p. 149) and an expert on the effects of factory work, was widely ridiculed by contemporaries and historians for describing working children as like “lively elves at play.” Ure’s factory inspections were brief, and one contemporary suggested that “if he had prolonged his visit … he would have found languor … as to his never having seen an instance of corporal punishment … perhaps he did not enter the spinning rooms quite so unexpectedly as he imagined.” ²Nor is it fair to charge historians with presenting working children as “mere victims … rarely … recognised as viable workers and earners in their own right” (p. 2). Honeyman, for example, insists that “early factory apprentices were not merely passive victims. … They responded to their situation” (p. 264). ³Nor is Kirby safe in suggesting that historians have exaggerated the role of pauper apprentices, children in the care of the state who were dispatched to work (unpaid) in textile mills. Kirby accepts that such children were an important source of labor in the early water-powered industry and suffered demonstrably disadvantaged life chances, for example, dying at a rate “around three times the expected level” (p. 25). However he believes that the system of binding pauper children was “short-lived” (p. 26), over by the 1820s. Honeyman’s study of a vast number of indentures disagrees...