"Working conditions were terrible in 19th century Britain." Does the evidence support this view?

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“Working conditions were terrible in 19th century Britain.”

Does the evidence support this view?

Working conditions varied in different areas of work. In general, they improved over time and towards the end of the nineteenth century many laws and acts had been passed that made conditions better. The working conditions were not the same for all social groups, the middle class people who worked as shop keepers, clerks and skills men still had to work hard but their lives were not as bad as the working class. The early factory workers were treated like slaves and were forced to behave as if they were machines. I do think conditions were terrible for many people especially factory workers and miners. I will explain and discuss in detail more about this later on.

People began to build factories at the beginning of the eighteenth century and there were very few regulations. Factory workers worked in hot and damp overcrowded rooms for long hours and little pay. Children as young as four were made to go and work in mills. Many of these children were paupers and orphans who worked for little or no pay. Work in a mill started very early in the morning, often about six in the morning and they would work until seven-thirty at night with only ten minutes for breakfast, an hour for lunch and twenty minutes for tea. Source 5 is written by an MP at the time so is therefore a primary source. He talks about decreasing the working hours for adults and children, at the beginning he says, “Here, then, is the "curse" of our factory-system; as improvements in machinery have gone on, the "avarice of masters" has prompted many to exact more labour from their hands than they were fitted by nature to perform.” This basically means that as improvements to the machines were made, Mill Owners started expecting more and more from their workers to produce metres of cotton that could then be sold and a profit made. This source was written in 1836 and is quite standard.  Everyone in the family, who could work, would work, so child labour became a big problem. The table in source thirteen shows that most boys between eleven and sixteen worked in the factories and most girls worked in the factories between eleven and twenty-one. These figures were taken before the law in 1833 was passed. Laws and acts were passed to improve working conditions for everyone but mainly children. In 1833 a Factory Act was passed allowing no one under the age of nine to work, children between the ages of nine and thirteen were not allowed to work any more than nine hours a day and no children between thirteen and eighteen were allowed to work more than twelve hours. No children were allowed to work at night either and all had to have two hours of schooling everyday. This law was introduced throughout the whole of the country, but this did not mean the mistreatment of children stopped straight away. Fourteen years later in 1847 another law was passed allowing no one under the age of eighteen to work more than ten hours a day. Factory inspectors visited the mills to make sure the new laws were obeyed. Children were watched by overseers and if they caught a child falling asleep, or slacking in their work then they whipped the child until they were black or blue. Parents often watched their children getting beaten but there was nothing they could do for fear of losing their job. The jobs children had to do were hard. One child was known as a “scavenger” and they had to crawl underneath the mules picking up fluff. Another job was as a “doffer”, this was lifting out bobbins full of cotton and replacing them with empty ones. Many doffers spent their days bent over their machines, one source written in 1848 says, “..And they never quite seem to straighten up again after working as a doffer.” I think this source can be trusted as I have found more than one source that says this; it is also a primary source. It is useful for showing the strain on people’s bodies after working. Another mill owner, Robert Owen stated when he took over a mill, “Many of them became dwarfs in body and mind, and some of them were deformed.” Again showing that the work was hard, manual and stunted the growth of many children, so I think it is reliable and should be trusted.  Hansard took part in a Parliamentary Debate in 1879. “In 1838, being desirous to see the condition of the children--for I knew that they were employed at very early ages in the worsted business....I asked for a collection of cripples and deformities. In a short time more than 80 were gathered in a large courtyard.” To have eighty cripples in one factory, shows how easy it was to get injured; this is a typical source (source 7). Another source similar to this is source 14 written by  from Manchester in March, 1819. He wrote about how many accidents occurred and he who he saw in an infirmary. Nearly half the children working in one factory were injured the same way. This source I think is reliable because he is an independent source not someone who worked in the factory, and is one of the few sources I have found nearer the beginning of the nineteenth century. Source 12 shows all the deformed children in one factory, the boy at the front has lost both his legs and others have lost a leg or an arm. The photo was taken in 1931, two years before it was made illegal for children under the age of nine to work in factories, photographic evidence like this, is very important. Some people did not just lose limbs in the machines, some lost their lives. Source 15 tells of a boy who lost his life and they found his body mangled in the machine. We can trust the source mainly but it may have been a bit exaggerated.

Not all factories were as terrible, Robert Owen was a factory owner in New Lanark. He treated his workers well, he gave them clean houses, and he sold food and clothes at cheap prices. Many of the changes he made to his factory and his worker’s lives were for the best. He also gave the children of his workers two hours of schooling everyday. Robert Owen’s workers were fit, healthy and happy and as a result they worked hard and Robert Owen made a large profit. He tried to get others to do the same but they did not, until laws making factory owners do this were introduced. In mills about two-thirds of the workers were women and children as mill owners found them easier to control and thought they would not complain as much about working conditions. A writer visited a mill in Glasgow and this is what he said, “..Glasgow cotton mill where young women workers, some of them pregnant, had to stand for twelve hours a day” from this account you can see that conditions for these people were very hard and from the hard work many of them were thin and pale. A source written by P. Gaskell in 1833 (source 6) shows just how ill and unhealthy many of them were, he says, “Their complexion is sallow and pallid…the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches….Their limbs slender… A very general bowing of the legs” The growth of many of these people was stunted as P. Gaskell tells us. The source he wrote is not exceptional as many government MPs and factory reformers wrote about the terrible health many factory workers were in.

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