Introduction: Locating Children's Industrial Health

Summary

In recent decades, economic and social historians have produced a growing number of monographical studies exploring the complex problem of child labour during the Industrial Revolution. Historical demographers and medical historians, meanwhile, have offered increasingly detailed investigations of child health and welfare in early urban and industrial society. The subject of children's occupational health, however, has attracted little serious analysis. Indeed, the poor health and ill-treatment of child labourers in mills and factories has long remained a seemingly incontrovertible feature of the historiography of British industrialisation. Child industrial workers are popularly represented as marginal figures, creeping along narrow coal seams, clambering up chimneys or suffering beatings at the hands of cruel factory overseers. Such imagery has become emblematic of the panoply of social problems that accompanied early industrial capitalism. Early labour historians such as the Hammonds argued passionately that poor working conditions, ill-health and violence were commonplace in large factories and mines and that such privations increased in intensity alongside the growth of modern industry. The weight of opinion over the health of child industrial workers has for more than a century been profoundly pessimistic. Children are portrayed as victims of avaricious employers and an inherently brutal system of production. Rarely have they been recognised as viable workers and earners in their own right.