SOURCE: Ferguson, Sheila. “Children at Work.” In Growing Up in Victorian Britain, pp. 54-61. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1977.

In the following excerpt, Ferguson discusses the various trades in which children were employed in nineteenth-century England and the abuses associated with each particular form of child labor.

Children in Industry

In the 1830s thousands of children worked in factories, workshops and mines in the most appalling conditions, often for a mere pittance in wages. Their employers, the manufacturers who had successfully carried through a revolution in industry, resisted the demand for factory reform on the grounds that it would increase their costs and that it was an unreasonable interference with private property and individual freedom. It seemed that the prosperity of industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire depended on a few thousand children. William Cobbett made this point in the House of Commons:

… a most surprising discovery has been made...