Child Labour
Children were sent to work at about 10 years of age, although many were
much younger.

Many factories operated from sunrise to sundown. This meant that in summer
the workers, including young children, worked 14 hours per day. During the
Industrial Revolution children and women made up 77 percent of the textile
industry work force because they could be paid far less than adult men.

That the shameful practice of child labor should have played an important
role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset is not to be wondered at.
The displaced working classes, from the seventeenth century on, took it
for granted that a family would not be able to support itself if the
children were not employed. In Defoe's day it was thought admirable that in
the vicinity of Halifax scarcely anybody above the age of 4 was idle. The
children of the poor were forced by economic conditions to work, as
Dickens, with his family in debtor's prison, worked at age 12 in the
Blacking Factory. In 1840 perhaps only twenty percent of the children of
London had any schooling, a number which had risen by 1860, when perhaps
half of the children between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school, if only
a day school (of the sort in which Dickens's Pip finds himself in Great
Expectations) or a Sunday school; the others were working. Many of the
more fortunate found employment as apprentices to respectable trades (in
the building trade workers put in 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in
winter) or as general servants -- there were over 120,000 domestic servants
in London alone at mid-century, who worked 80 hour weeks for one halfpenny
per hour -- but many more were not so lucky. Most prostitutes (and there
were thousands in London alone) were between 15 and 22 years of age.

Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their
elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of
workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day had
been passed as early as 1802 and 1819. After radical agitation, notably in
1831, when "Short Time Committees" organized largely by Evangelicals began
to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission established by the Whig
government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 be permitted to
work a maximum of twelve hours per day; children 9-11 were allowed to work
8 hour days; and children under 9 were no longer permitted to work at all
(children as young as 3 had been put to work previously). This act applied
only to the textile industry, where children were put to work at the age of
5, and not to a host of other industries and occupations. Iron and coal
mines (where children, again, both boys and girls, began work at age 5, and
generally died before they were 25), gas works, shipyards, construction,
match factories, nail factories, and the business of chimney sweeping, for
example (which Blake would use as an emblem of the destruction of the
innocent), where the exploitation of child labor was more extensive, was to
be enforced in all of England by a total of four inspectors. After further
radical agitation, another act in 1847 limited both adults and children to
ten hours of work daily. 

Eventually public outcry and pressure from unions led to the passage of
laws that corrected the worst abuses of the factory system. The first
effective law, the Factory Act of 1833, limited the work of persons between
age 12 and 18 to 12 hours a day. It also provided for state inspection of
working conditions. In 1847 the working hours of children were limited to
10 a day.

Those looking into conditions among milliners and dressmakers found much
higher than average rates of anemia, deteriorating vision, and various lung
diseases caused by breathing dust and fine particles of fiber. In many
places of work, ten to twelve hours a day standing or sitting in one spot,
often in an unnatural positions, damaged the spine, the digestion, and the
circulation.