Child Labour Learning Journey
Follow the Learning Journey steps and travel across time and space with our special correspondents in our groundbreaking investigation into the use of child labour in cotton manufacturing.
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Child Labour Learning Journey Step 2
The Case for Child LabourIn the second of our special reports we investigate the question of child labour and the factory system. Today Dr. Andrew Ure and William Cooke Taylor present the case for child labour: At the age children in 2003 start school, children of the poor in late 18th century Lancashire start working 12 - 15 hours a day in the cotton mills. The wages are low, especially for the apprentices, who work for little more than their board and lodgings. Opinion is divided about the benefits of child labour - many manufacturers and writers agree that it is a good idea for poor children to work in the mills. Dr. Andrew Ure finds that in 1835 the new factories are full of happy, prosperous people enjoying conditions which he thinks compare with those of the aristocracy: "In my recent tour through the manufacturing districts I have seen tens of thousands of old, young and middle aged of both sexes earning abundant food, raiment (clothing) and domestic accommodation, without perspiring at a single pore, screened meanwhile from the summer's sun and winters frost, in apartments more airy and salubrious than those of the metropolis in which our legislative and fashionable aristocracies assemble" And seven years later, in 1842, William Cooke Taylor, finds that child labour is a national blessing since the children of the operatives have mouths and must be fed; they have limbs and must be clothed. (Source: W. Cooke Taylor (1842) Notes of a Tour (repr. Frank Cass 1968) page 25 A. Ure, (1835) The Philosophy of Manufacture, quoted in Michael Winstanley (1995) Working Children in Nineteenth Century Lancashire, Lancashire County Books |
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