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

The history of child labor, writes Peter Kirby, is ill-served by inaccurate assumptions about the dangers of the factory workplace to child workers. Evidence prior to the emergence of Britain’s Factory Acts, Kirby points out, is spotty and does not include sufficient discussion of the general living conditions of poor children. As a result, he argues, the image of children as brutalized victims of “avaricious employers” in the early years of factory industrialization needs to be challenged. Kirby sees young factory workers as no worse off than other poor children in the same urban neighborhoods. The medical professionals of the time, who did not fully understand the industrial processes, focused their gaze on the workplace, and were horrified by what they saw—deformities, hazards from materials, and accidents—and, as a result, they generally ignored or diminished the effects of the world beyond the factory gates.

One important aspect of the book is its description of the three basic types of workplace dangers to health, partly based on the theories of seventeenth-century physician Bernardino Ramazzini: ergonomic risks, the materials themselves, and accidents. In each, Kirby examines the medical evidence of the time as well as testimony from workers (and sometimes parents), concluding that “deformed children” were actually better suited for factory tasks than domestic work or certainly hard labor due to the possibility of lighter duty in factories. The prospect of parental agency here looms large. Parents of these children seemed to support the greater employability of children unable to perform more strenuous work. One of the more neglected aspects of the history of child labor has been an understanding of parents’ decisions to send children to the factory due to financial need. Parents were also willing to attribute children’s physical deformities to the shoes or clothing they wore. Many believed that accidents in the workplace were due more to children’s carelessness than to employer reluctance to halt or slow down the factory in order for children to clean the machines.

On the issue of cotton dust, Kirby acknowledges real hazards of pulmonary disease to adult workers, but points out that the common risk to children was the ingestion of cotton dust. Drawing on recent studies of how contaminated raw materials are shipped around the world, Kirby believes that many of the illnesses that afflicted child workers in these early industrial factories were due to the growth of mold during transit, for instance. While it can be risky to apply present-day evidence to the past, Kirby makes good use of impressionistic evidence on children’s illnesses.

Ultimately, then, what improved the working conditions for child factory workers? Kirby argues that it was due less to the medical professionals (and the ultimate involvement of the state) than to the factories themselves, and improvements in the industrial process. He suggests that as larger factories modernized, they did not need to hire small children. Furthermore, these larger factories paid higher wages to the adults, who subsequently did not need to send their children to work. Indeed, he argues that factories held better working conditions for children than domestic work or life in rural areas, and that child labor laws only served to send these kids into the unregulated industries.

In the end, Kirby believes that worries about child labor were limited and misguided because those concerned about it did not recognize the effects of poverty. If they did, they did little to promote a stronger public health approach to child health (and societal health, by extension). Given the environmental understanding of disease that pervaded medicine at the time, I am not convinced that these medical professionals were unaware of the relationship between workplace health and public health, and I wonder if Kirby isn’t pushing such people beyond the norms of the world in which they lived. Is it possible that their reports eventually served to prod public health proponents? Furthermore...