The Working Body: Re-forming the Factory Body

This image on the 1832 title page of John Brown's A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (fig. 1), foregrounds the centrality of physical deformity in Blincoe's life story: he is knock-kneed, both feet are turned outward, his legs are disproportionately short compared to the length of his arms and torso, and his non-functioning left index finger is displayed prominently against the brim of his hat. The illustration invites the reader into the book to discover what kind of life could have produced this body. In addition to telling his life story to Brown, a middle-class journalist who composed and published the Memoir for him, Blincoe testified before Parliament as to the long-term effects of factory work, displaying his deformities and scars as evidence authenticating the book's claims. Early nineteenth-century debates over the "factory question" created a variety of opportunities for even illiterate workers like Blincoe to describe the physical impact of factory labour and make their bodies visible to those who would never set foot in a factory. I have chosen to prioritize these voices throughout my contribution to this forum, as they offer our most direct insight into the pains and politics of the working body.

Fig 1.

Frontispiece from A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (1832).

Long-term damage and accidental injury were common in nineteenth-century factory work. Brown describes the physical state of his fellow child workers:

Some had the skin scraped off the knuckles, clean to the bone, by the fliers; others a finger crushed, a joint or two nipped off in the cogs of the spinning-frame wheels!—When [Blincoe's] turn to suffer came, the fore-finger of his left hand was caught, and almost before he could cry out, off was the first joint. … he clapped the mangled joint, streaming with blood, to the finger, and ran off to Burton, to the surgeon, who very composedly put the parts together again, and sent him back to the mill.

(Brown 122)

Brown offers an extended description of one extremely gruesome accident endured by his friend Mary Richards:

He saw her whirled round and round with the shaft—he heard the bones of her arms, legs, thighs, &c. successively snap asunder, crushed, seemingly, to atoms, as the machinery whirled her round, and drew tighter and tighter her body within the works, her blood was scattered over the frame and streamed upon the floor, her head appeared dashed to pieces—at last, her mangled body was jammed in so fast, between the shafts and the floor, that the water being low and the wheels off the gear, it stopped the main shaft! When she was extricated, every bone was found broken!—her head dreadfully crushed!—her clothes and mangled flesh were, apparently inextricably mixed together, and she was carried off, as supposed, quite lifeless. "I cannot describe," said Blincoe, "my sensations at this appalling scene. I shouted out aloud for them to stop the wheels! When I saw her blood thrown about like the water from a twirled mop, I fainted. But neither the spine of her back was broken, nor were her brains injured, and to the amazement of every one, who beheld her mangled and horrible state, by the skill of the surgeon, and the excellence of her constitution, she was saved!"

(123)

Graphic and disturbing accounts such as these are far from anomalous. In addition to Blincoe's Memoir, we can look to A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, a Factory Cripple, Written by Himself (1841)² as well as the interviews Dodd conducted with former factory workers for The Factory System Illustrated in a Series of Letters to the Right Hon. Lord Ashley (1842). These adults' stories of their experiences as child factory workers often centre on the long-term effects that labouring alongside industrial machinery had on the child worker's still-developing body. Dodd presents a detailed analysis based on his own experience:

The position in which the piecer stands to his work is...