Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (review)

This is an important and path-breaking book that will be of interest not only to historians of childhood, but also much more widely. Humphries bases her work on the material that she extracted from 617 working-class autobiographies that she has divided by date of birth into four cohorts, up to 1790, 1791-1820, 1821-50 and 1851-1878. These sources not only give her information on schooling, date of first working, type of work, earnings, whether or not apprenticed, and other matters germane to child labor, but also to the kinds of family children lived in, the household economy, and relationships within the family and with wider kin. Humphries situates her discussions of these matters within a wide context and thus contributes to understanding of British economic growth, the debates around a consumer revolution and an industrious revolution, standards of living, the Poor Law, women's workforce participation, family history and dynamics, and the impact of war. Her conclusions are broadly, in the context of debates on these issues, pessimistic. In line with the latest evidence on standards of living, her middle two cohorts started work earlier than the first and the fourth, suggesting that improvements in living standards came to a halt or went into reverse from 1790, only recovering in the mid-nineteenth century. It was in this period, too, particularly in the early phase of it, that her autobiographers, an astonishing one-third of them, were most likely to lose their fathers, to death, desertion or service in the armed forces. The resulting lone-parent households were highly vulnerable. Humphries' evidence suggests, intriguingly, that the male breadwinner family structure was in place in the eighteenth century, perhaps before that, and that married women were reluctant to enter the labor force. With fathers gone, there was overwhelming pressure on children to contribute to family resources, and, on the basis of the wages that sons could earn in comparison with anything mothers might, it was a rational decision to expect them to enter the labor market.

Humphries' evidence is about boys only. She finds that many of them had much closer relations with their mothers than with their fathers, and accepted without protest that they must leave school to go to work. They found work in all sectors of the economy, roughly paralleling that of adults, though cotton factories stood out for their employment of children. Humphries measures many things in this book, children's contribution to the classic industrial revolution industries being a rare exception, but she is no doubt that there were "astonishing levels of child labour" (7). There were also much higher rates of apprenticeship (almost half of all writers) than might have been expected from the existing literature that stresses the decline of apprenticeship. Setting up a son in an apprenticeship was seen as a much more significant way of helping him get on than investing in prolonged schooling. Most of the autobiographers, however, had some schooling, on average some three years, often intermittent and fitted around work, the amount of schooling at its lowest in the decades when work started earliest.

Histories of child labor in the British industrial revolution have tended to rely chiefly on the extensive Parliamentary Papers, both the censuses and commission reports, and on pamphlet literature, with a focus on campaigns to stop or restrict child labor. Humphries sometimes uses other historians' work on these issues, but her focus is resolutely elsewhere, on how these boys and their families (and these families often extended to kin) decided about their schooling and work. In passing she notes how many boys in the later period were either rescued from work by the Factory Acts or prevented from working by them, suggesting that legislation was more effective than often supposed, but the genesis of it receives no mention. She is also occasionally insufficiently attentive to chronology and geography, drawing indiscriminately on evidence from across the four cohorts on some topics, and...