At Home - Bill Bryson [222]
Ware was, needless to say, an exception. Most children were wholly at the mercy of their employers and were sometimes treated in the most shocking manner. In one briefly notorious case, a farmer at Malmesbury, Wiltshire, hit on the idea of castrating two of his young apprentices and selling them to an opera company as singers. He was thwarted in the second part of his ambition, but unfortunately not before he had successfully snipped his way to the first.
Until well into the nineteenth century children received almost nothing in the way of legal protection. Before 1814, no law forbade the theft of a child, for instance. In Middlesex in 1802, a woman named Elizabeth Salmon, after abducting a child named Elizabeth Impey, was charged with stealing the child’s cap and gown because that was the only part of the offense that was illegal. Because abduction carried so little risk, it was widely believed that Gypsies stole children and sold them on, and there appears to have been some truth in that. A celebrated case was that of a Mary Davis, a woman of good background who in 1812, by chance, found her lost son sweeping a chimney at the inn where she was staying.
The Industrial Revolution only made matters worse, at least at first. Before the 1844 Factory Act reduced the workday for children, most worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week. Some worked even longer, particularly during busy periods when it was necessary to meet large orders. Apprentices at one mill in 1810 were discovered to be at their machines from 5:50 a.m. till after 9:00 p.m., with a single meal break of thirty to forty-five minutes for dinner, and that was sometimes taken while standing at machines. Diet almost everywhere was often barely adequate to sustain life. “They have Water Porridge for Breakfast and Supper, and generally Oatcake and Treacle, or Oatcake and poor Broth, for Dinner,” an inspector reported. In some factories, discomfort was both chronic and considerable. Some materials, like flax, had to be kept moist as they were being worked, so some of the workers were permanently drenched by spray off the machines. In winter it must have been unbearable. Nearly all industrial machinery was really dangerous, but especially when those working around it were starved and exhausted. Some children reportedly were so tired that they hadn’t the energy to eat and sometimes fell asleep with food in their mouths.
At least they had steady work. For those dependent on casual labor, existence was an endless lottery. One-third of the inhabitants of Central London were estimated in 1750 to go to bed each night “almost Pennyless,” and the proportion only worsened as time went on. Casual laborers seldom knew when they woke in the morning whether they would earn enough that day to eat. So comprehensively dire were conditions for many that Henry Mayhew devoted a whole volume of his four-volume London Labour and the London Poor to the lowest of the low, scavengers, whose desperation led them to find value in almost anything that was dropped by the roadside. As he wrote:
Many a thing which in a country town is kicked by the penniless out of their path … will in London be snatched up as a prize; it is money’s worth. A crushed and torn bonnet, for instance, or, better still, an old hat, napless, shapeless, crownless, and brimless, will be picked up in the street, and carefully placed in a bag.
The conditions in which they lived were sometimes so squalid as to shock even the most hardened investigators. One housing inspector in the 1830s reported: “I found [one room] occupied by one man, two women, and two children, and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before.” Poor parents habitually produced large broods, as a sort of pension policy, hoping that enough offspring would survive to support them in their dotage. By the second half of the nineteenth century, one-third of families in England had eight or more children, another third had five to seven, and the final third (the wealthier third overwhelmingly)