The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [18]
As she crossed into adolescence, the grey-eyed girl met few adults who were able to rise above the despair and drudgery that overran the slums. On the days she sang on the streets, Agnes had been propositioned by smelly sailors, cursed by pawnbrokers who bristled at her bargaining, and scammed by the bitter crone who owned the boardinghouse. A few of the older women in the mill offered the new apprentices snippets of motherly advice, though they had walked no easy path themselves.
A factory owner held full rein over the daily life of his indentured “street vermin.” Under his authority, sexual abuse was tolerated and even encouraged. After all, he owned these young women for eighteen months or longer. It was not uncommon for owners to offer sons and friends their choice among the mill girls.
Nineteenth-century law provided protections for industry, while labor had none. Parliamentary legislation lavished loving care on its principal source of wealth in the hundreds of laws covering the wool trade, ranging from the correct clipping of sheep to the length and weight of the wool. As for child protection, there wasn’t any. Humanitarianism was in the thoughts of very few. In 1816, utopian socialist Robert Owen first proposed day care for working mothers, free medical care, and comprehensive education. In his mind, a humane government was necessary to temper technology’s rising cruelty, spawned by the Industrial Revolution. A mill owner himself, Owen tried to set an example by providing schools for his workers and allowing children to work no more than ten hours a day. He was considered idealistic for his time, and his forward thinking was widely ignored in an era when greed was the order of the day.
Owen prompted Sir Robert Peel, home secretary and later Britain’s prime minister, to form a Committee of Investigation into the textile factories. Heavily lobbied by the wool industry over fine wine and lavish dinners, the committee examined whether fifteen-hour days were harmful to girls like Agnes and Janet. When mill owners produced long lists of witnesses to testify on their behalf, Owens’s efforts produced exactly the opposite of his intentions. He wanted to expose the abuse of children and ignite social reform. Instead, expert witnesses like Dr. Holmes and Dr. Wilson used medical evidence, provided by the factory owners, to conclude that industrial exploitation brought children no harm.
The committee posed the following question to the physicians it had chosen as experts: “Suppose I were to ask you whether you thought it injurious to a child to be kept standing three and twenty hours out of the four and twenty, should you not think it must be necessarily injurious to the health?” Dr. Holmes replied: “If there were such an extravagant thing to take place and it should appear that the person was not injured by having stood three and twenty hours, I should then say it was not inconsistent with the health of the person so employed.” Dr. Wilson agreed with his colleague, adding that it is “not necessary for young children to have recreation.”25
One way or another, most people born poor ended up in a mill or a coal mine before age ten. Factory owners could buy a child for about five pounds from a workhouse or orphanage. Children signed with an X contracts that bound them to the factory owner until age twenty-one. A lad about the same age as Agnes described his feelings about working in a mill: “I think that if the devil had a particular enemy whom he wished to unmercifully torture the best thing for him to do would be . . . keep him as a child in a factory for the rest of his