Sharpe on Honeyman, _Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (October 2008)

Katrina Honeyman, _Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: Parish 
Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force_. 
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. xiii + 340 pp. $100/£60 (hardcover), ISBN: 
978-0-7546-6272-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Pamela Sharpe, School of History and Classics, 
University of Tasmania,


Child laborers are the iconic figures of the evils of Industrial 
Revolution. The purpose of this book -- by one of economic history’s 
most seasoned practitioners -- is to unveil the real story. Despite the 
broad main title, the subjects of the book are not all child workers but 
those children who went to work in mills and factories under schemes 
developed by their local parishes. Effectively this was an extension of 
the pauper apprenticeship scheme that, by 1780, when Honeyman’s story 
starts, had been operating for well over two hundred years. It had 
placed many tens of thousands of English children into the homes of 
their more wealthy counterparts where they were given some training 
(although often we cannot be sure what this amounted to beyond the 
menial aspects of husbandry or housewifery), promised some clothing and 
given a roof over their heads until their indentures expired.

Honeyman subjects the evidence about the first generation of child 
factory workers to extremely detailed examination. It becomes clear that 
the placing of these children involved negotiation on both sides -- both 
by the parish officials and overseers and by the employers. Some 
traveled large distances, from London parishes or southern rural places 
that were feeling the burden of overpopulation to the industrializing 
north, but there was a more numerically significant movement of children 
over short distances. Factory owners -- some setting up in areas with 
access to water power or other necessary natural resources -- could 
expect to assemble a small band of local children from within a few 
miles of their mills and factories. In this way, Honeyman convincingly 
argues, child labor was a ‘vital kick start’ to enterprises that 
otherwise would not have ever gotten off the ground.

On detailed examination the children’s jobs -- and these were rarely 
children under seven -- were less menial and perhaps less arduous than 
has been thought. After some initial training, children became 
independent workers responsible for their own machines and with the 
dexterity to piece together threads. In the same way that modern 
children take to technology more rapidly than their parents, it can be 
suggested (though this is not a point that Honeyman dwells on) that 
children’s adaptability -- with no need to “unlearn” old methods of 
production -- must have been an enormous advantage. Employers specified 
whether they preferred boys or girls or would take either. Honeyman 
argues that they developed a gendered work identity in this way. These 
children certainly received some training in how to fit into the new 
environment of the factory as a useful worker. There were markedly 
different experiences of exploitation. While some children ran away, 
others stayed on as mill workers beyond the time of the expiry of their 
indentures.

An area that has not to this reviewer’s knowledge been systematically 
explored previously is the extent to which the settlement parishes of 
the factory children were involved in the placement. Honeyman devises a 
range of measures to show how parish officials had communicated with or 
visited the mills or factories before placing children and remained in 
contact with their employers when the children were working there. A 
wealthy London parish, St James’s, Piccadilly was very early to send 
children to northern industrialists and remained involved in the schemes 
for the years to follow. As a result, the historian can turn up a paper 
trail, not unlike that generated by a contemporary fostering or adoption 
arrangement. An area that Honeyman does not investigate is the 
settlement implications of the placements. Presumably many of the 
children took on new settlements in their new workplaces. For many, the 
negotiations between parish official and industrialist meant their 
transition from ploughboy to mule spinner or from female servant to 
drawer or rover.

This is a meticulously researched and very balanced investigation. It is 
the work of a very experienced economic historian. It is Katrina 
Honeyman’s seventh book. She is Professor of Economic and Social History 
at the University of Leeds and has worked in both the History department 
and Business School in Leeds. Her reputation has been built on her work 
in gender history, in the history of textiles and clothing and in 
producing clear and accessible textbooks about the process of 
industrialization.

The overall findings of this book are more optimistic than many other 
accounts of child labor in factories. It is probable that the 
paternalistic concerns of some southern parishes and institutions such 
as the Foundling Hospital made a material difference to the lives of 
these children that was lost a generation later. By the 1840s children 
were employed in mines and factories in free market situations that were 
widely investigated in Parliamentary commissions. By then the types of 
sweated labor that emanated from partial mechanization of productive 
processes took full effect. And, following the Poor Law Act of 1834, 
there were no poor law officials to monitor the progress of their young 
charges. Factory work was no longer novel and interesting and the cheap 
and adaptable aspects of child labor had become its distinguishing 
advantage.


Pamela Sharpe is Professor of History in the School of History and 
Classics, at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. She was 
previously a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and 
Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the University of Bristol. 
She is currently editing a book about living arrangements of the poor in 
long eighteenth century England (to be published by Palgrave in 2009) 
and compiling a study of an outback mining community.

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