The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [12]
A controversial celebrity of his time, Malthus advocated against the Poor Laws and any assistance that might help sustain the struggling. This was the brand of popular thinking that permitted the abuses of power under the Transportation Act, including shipping twenty-five thousand girls and women to the other side of the world, Agnes and Janet among them.
Throughout the British Isles, madness and hypocrisy permeated politics and everyday life. In 1820, a child who stole clothing could be banished and worked to death in Australia, but George IV, a known bigamist and suspected murderer, would be crowned king. King George IV humiliated Queen Caroline when he continued his relationship with a commoner to whom he’d been secretly married years earlier. Her Highness, too, engaged in scandalous behavior, including dressing in see-through gowns during alleged affairs with her servants. Her death in 1821 was widely attributed to poisoning by His Majesty.
The Industrial Revolution heightened society’s imbalances. It fattened the prosperous and starved the weak, widening the chasm between classes and creating an incubator for juvenile criminals like Agnes and Janet. In earlier decades, parish schools in rural villages welcomed children during the slower farming cycles and fostered a relatively high literacy rate. Had Agnes been born into an agrarian family, hard labor would still have been her fate, but she would have eaten better food, grown up in healthier surroundings, and perhaps learned to read. Though farm hands labored long and hard, there were changes in pace and a variety in chores, unlike the perpetual monotony that poisoned the factory floor. Farm children were valued by their parents, if for no other reason than their ability to work the fields. This bond helped keep rural families intact.
Factories, on the other hand, demanded labor every day of the week, every month of the year. As industry enhanced technology, it stunted education for the poor, and literacy declined. There were simply not enough hours in the day for children to learn to read and write. The lowest classes, following the lure of progress, traded a self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle for enslavement in an urban jungle. From 1780 to 1830, child labor grew exponentially, largely due to the end of a family-centered economy.
Well on its way to becoming one of the largest cities in Europe and already Scotland’s most congested, Glasgow had grown to a population of two hundred thousand. As daylight broke, low-lying smog erased the city’s color. Ashen figures wandered hopelessly through a black-and-white world. By Christmas 1832, Agnes’s hometown, unrivaled in squalor, was dirtier and more dangerous than any city in the empire.
This was a far cry from the pristine paradise enjoyed by Glasgow’s seventy thousand inhabitants just thirty years earlier. The city’s name came from the Gaelic Glaschu, or “clean green place.” English writer Daniel Defoe described eighteenth-century Glasgow as “one of the cleanliest, most beautiful and best cities in Great Britain.”10 Built along the River Clyde, this peaceful enclave was protected by steep rolling hills. Children played in the water, and men fished in the streams by tree-lined meadows. This was an urban oasis defined by nature’s beauty, resplendent in its orchards, cornfields, and terraced flower gardens.
Agnes and Janet never knew the green, open spaces of a more serene Glasgow. The tobacco and linen trade had set the Garden of Eden on fire. Seldom did the close companions see the magical northern lights, hidden under a murky haze that rarely lifted from their city’s sky. The lazy River Clyde was widened and violated to make room for noisy steam-powered ships bringing sugar and raw cotton to fuel Glasgow’s new industries. The fragrance of buds in bloom was replaced by the stench of the slum. A once-glistening metropolis had lost