Child Labour During The Industrial Revolution

Children were the victims and not beneficiaries during the Industrial Revolution due to the exploitation and use of child labour during this period of rapid industrialization. The Industrial Revolution, which centered on Great Britain, took advantage of its abundant coal resources, its beneficial climate and topography and its international relations during the 18th to 19th century. This led to the switch from the domestic system for small agricultural communities to the mass production in urban factories. Although new and efficient machines worked many factories, it still required cheap sources of labour: children. The "dark satanic mills", as portrayed by William Blake’s poem, despite its contrast to the prosperity of the Industrial Revolution,

However, these resources needed to be mined at a fast rate to keep up with new factories. Children worked arduous jobs in coal and metal mines. Likewise to any industry during the Industrial Revolution, child labour was the ideal method to reduce costs of production. Consequently, children and youth took up from 19 to 40% of the workforce in coal and metal mines in 1842 (Tuttle, C., n.d.). The job of the youngest workers was trapping, who had to sit in complete darkness and solitude, waiting to open a door to let in a load of coal. The older children were the hurriers, who dragged or carried loaded baskets of coal to the surface. The hurriers at a mine in East Scotland had to climb up with baskets of coal, held in by a strap on their foreheads. (Speed, P.F., 1975) No child should suffer as victims to these

Most families lived in factory towns or slums, overcrowded streets packed with tiny apartments with rooms that held 5 to 9 people. Furthermore, they had no toilets like today’s society, but instead had water closets that weren’t emptied regularly or had none at all. A few families possessed lavatories, but were rare. In one instance, two streets in one factory town owned thirty-three lavatories for about 7000 people (Bartley P., 1987, p. 36). Furthermore, the water they drank was pumped from the Thames, where they dumped their waste. Combined with the unhygienic conditions and the densely crowded area, diseases often ravaged the slums. Children were the most vulnerable. Although cholera had a 50% mortality rate, it was sudden and painful. Cholera devastated families throughout slums, with no medicine to show its progress and claimed the lives of 7000 in its first year. (Trueman, C., 2014). The illness that children were at risk of was not beneficiary to their