Historical Summary
The CONDITIONS that existed in the British mines, factories, and slums in the 1840’s and 1850’s were shocking and scandalous. "Is it a street or kennel?" asked Punch:
"Foul sludge and foetid streamThat from a chain of mantling pools sends up a choking stream;Walls black with soot and bright with grease; low doorways,entries dim;And out of every window, pale faces gaunt and grim."
Courtyards were deep with filth, like pigsties, as ragged and naked children crawled around seeking offal among the refuse. In the mines, mingled among tired men chopping at the veins of the earth, were girls crawling on all fours and tugging small coal carts. Others sat in darkness and "trapped," that is, opened and closed doors for the passage of the coal carts. Working underground for long hours, and for pitifully low wages, these children seldom saw the light of day.
Conditions in the early factories were equally as bad. Forced to leave the flowering fields and picturesque cottages of Merrie England by the Industrial Revolution, the factory workers lived in tenements amid squalor, filth, and disease. About three-fourths of the workers in the early cotton factories were either women or children. Youngsters of six or seven worked the same long hours as adults. Those who fell asleep at the machine were recalled to consciousness by the whip. The cotton factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire were manned largely by pauper children brought in carloads from London.
The atrocities visited upon these children resulted in lung diseases, ruined eyesight, and nervous breakdowns. Undernourished, exhausted, degenerate children were robbed of their childhood and killed in mind and body. The effects carried through to the twentieth century—in World War I the British found that they had to allow for 40% of the candidates proving physically unfit.
The conscience of England was lashed by the novelist, Charles Dickens, and the fiery pamphleteer, William Cobbett, whose social tracts denounced the exploitation of workers. With public attention drawn to the degrading situation, Parliament was prevailed upon to intervene. The movement for social legislation gathered momentum throughout the rest of the century.
Conditions in the British mines have improved today, but even at their best the pits are an earthly nightmare. Herbert L. Matthews reported on his trip into the colliery of one of the most modern bituminous coal mines in South Wales:1
"The morning shift goes down between 6 and 6:30. The miners hate to go down in the cages. They distrust the slender frail looking cables and they fear mine shaft accidents more than any other.
"This one takes us 600 feet down, water steadily dripping on your helmet and dungarees, with your own flashlight as the sole illumination. You go down as a clean, civilized-looking human being. You come up as black as a chimney sweep.
"There is a high gas content in this mine and compressed air rushes coldly through the roadways at the bottom of the pit as you start walking toward the coal face, which is a mile away 1,800 feet below the hilltop.
"There is just room for the two pairs of rails and wagons that carry the coal back to the cages. Always you have to watch your step and when you are tall it is rare to be able to walk upright. . . .
"The air gets warmer and warmer until at the end you are streaming with perspiration. For hundreds of yards you are not doing much better than crawling over the coat conveyor or obstructions of various sorts and squeezing past wooden props. You have turned black with coal dust and even your eyes are caked with it.
"And after more than half an hour you have reached only the coal face. If you were a miner your day’s work would be just beginning—seven hours of it, with only twenty minutes to sit there in hot fetid dust eating sandwiches and perhaps drinking cold tea.
"So the day goes by. You are black as the coal you mine but your shift ends and at last you trudge out that whole long mile to the cage."
The first four of the following documents give the testimony of four English girls, aged, respectively, eight, twelve, fourteen, and seventeen, during the investigation of the conditions of labor in mines made by Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission in 1842. As a result of this inquiry, the Mines Act of 1842 excluded boys under eleven, together with girls and women, from further employment in the coal-pits. The fifth excerpt is from a doctor’s report on the Lancashire towns. The sixth is taken from a letter sent to the Duke of Wellington by a local Justice of the Peace, who described a visit to the district of Skibbereen.
Key Quote
The conscience of England lashed by eyewitness accounts: "I have heard tell of Jesus many a time."