Child labour and the Factory Acts

Under Britain’s Factory Act of 1833, no child under nine could work in a textile mill, and four inspectors were appointed to enforce the law in about 4,000 mills.

Children at work before the factories

Children had always worked. On farms they scared birds, minded animals and helped at harvest; in cottage industries they carded wool and wound yarn for their parents. What changed with the factories was the place, the pace and the hours. In a mill, a child worked away from the family, under an overseer, at the speed of a machine that did not stop. Mill owners wanted children because they were cheap, small enough to crawl under machines and nimble enough to join broken threads. Children worked as piecers, tying broken threads on spinning machines, and as scavengers, sweeping up cotton waste from under machines while they were running. Some early mills took orphans from workhouses as “apprentices”, who lived in the mill and could not leave.

The campaign for shorter hours

Early laws in 1802 and 1819 set limits but had no one to enforce them. By the 1830s the pressure for reform had grown. Campaigners compared the treatment of mill children with that of enslaved people, at the same time as Parliament was debating the abolition of slavery in the colonies (unit 5 of the exploration course). The MPs Michael Sadler and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later Lord Shaftesbury, led the “Ten Hours” movement in Parliament, supported by workers’ committees and by some mill owners in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Sadler’s committee of 1832 took evidence from children and parents about beatings, injuries and fourteen-hour days.

The Factory Act of 1833

The Factory Act of 1833 was the first of these laws with teeth. It applied to textile mills. No child under nine could be employed, and employers had to hold a certificate of each child’s age. Children aged 9 to 13 could work no more than nine hours a day, according to the National Archives’ summary of the Act, and young people aged 13 to 18 no more than twelve. No one under 18 was to work at night. Children under 13 had to receive two hours of schooling each day. Most important, the Act created four factory inspectors, reporting to the Home Office, with power to enter mills and fine employers. Four people could not watch about 4,000 mills, and the law was widely evaded, but for the first time the state had its own officials inside the factories, and their reports are still read by historians today.

Mines, and the long road after

In 1842 a Royal Commission reported on women and children in coal mines. It described children of eight, and often younger, working underground: opening and closing ventilation doors in the dark for twelve hours, or dragging tubs of coal along low tunnels with a chain around the waist. The public was shocked, and Ashley, who went down a coal mine himself, pushed the Mines Act through Parliament the same year. It banned all women and girls, and boys under ten, from working underground. Later Factory Acts cut children’s hours further, and in 1847 the Ten Hours Act limited women and young people in textile mills to ten hours a day. In the United States, the photographer Lewis Hine worked for the National Child Labor Committee from 1908, travelling the country to photograph children in mills, mines, canneries and streets. More than 5,100 of his prints are now in the Library of Congress. Hine wrote that “the object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.”