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As they entered the millworks the first time, Agnes and Janet were directed toward the overseer, also called an “overlooker.” Standing above the fray on a small platform, he ordered each girl to tie her hair in a bun and pull her sleeves above her elbows. Anything not tethered tightly was an accident waiting to happen. A strand of hair caught in machines scalped some girls on the job. There were no shutoff valves for a sleeve or a finger that caught in the looms. Each child was responsible for her own safety. If she hurt herself, the overseer blamed her stupidity.

The mill was a notorious breeding ground for abuse and perversion. If a child fell asleep on her feet, the overseer dipped her head into an iron vat filled with water. “Some adult operatives and overlookers did not look beyond themselves for tools of abuse. They kicked children, struck them with clenched fist, and yanked children’s hair and ears.”19

Disaster loomed ominously over the wide-eyed apprentices, imprisoned in a maze of spindles, tangled threads, swaying metal bars, and exposed wire teeth. Agnes, Janet, and the other young thieves stood before the spinning machines like flies examining a spider’s web. From every corner, gas lamps sputtered and hissed. The swinging rods crisscrossing the sunless tomb clanked noisy warnings. Strange sounds bombarded the new arrivals from every direction as they strained to hear the overseer. Stone walls reverberated and amplified the auditory assault: the whir of spinning bobbins, the slapping of the looms’ reeds, the hypnotic drone of leather belts and pulleys, the spastic flapping of the newly woven wool.

By the time Agnes and Janet were sent to Mr. Green’s, conditions of child labor had become so appalling that several government investigations were taking place. Evidence for an 1832 House of Commons Committee on the Factories Labour Regulation Bill described “one girl so bow-legg’d that you could put a chair between her legs.”20 Page after page of testimony described the fate for those conscripted as weans. A man about thirty years old “does not stand, with his deformity, above 4 feet 6 inches high, and had he grown to his proper height I think he would have been about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches. He has been in the mills since he was 5 years old, and he is reduced to that state that he slides along on a stool to do his work.”21

Another investigation, by a committee on the Employment of Children in Manufactories, interviewed adults about their experience as child workers. Robert Blincoe offered testimony that could not be challenged. He hobbled forward on his crooked legs, the deformity most common from youthful years spent in a mill. The committee asked Blincoe, now a father of three, if he would send his children to work in a factory. Without hesitation, he responded: “No; I would rather have them transported to Australia.”22 Robert had watched ten-year-old Mary Richards being torn to pieces when her apron caught on a shaft that turned a drawing frame, the device used to straighten fibers. “In an instant the poor girl was drawn by an irresistible force and dashed on the floor . . . the bones of her arms, legs, thighs . . . crushed, seemingly, to atoms, as the machinery whirled her round, and drew tighter and tighter her body within the works.”23

At the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the same risks stalked Agnes. Seasoned mill laborers soon figured out that keeping pace with the frames and spindles meant staying alive. They developed rhythmic movements that mimicked the millworks; their motions turned mechanical, their gait robotic. Speech, too, took on a short staccato cadence to compete with the mill’s deafening cacophony.

Wool production was a labor-intensive business. It took ten girls to prepare the yarn for one weaver. Older lasses like thirteen-year-old Janet were assigned sorting, according to the wool’s texture. “Picking” the wool, the mill’s most unpleasant task, was primarily assigned to