Child Exploitation in Victorian Britain.

 

Victorian child exploitation

Many Victorian working-class kids were literally worked to death. Some of these children died of exhaustion. This is mentioned in E.P. Thompson's book 'The Making of the English Working Class'. He refers to the death of a young boy in Cragg Dale, in West Yorkshire. An Anglican minister, told a social reformer that he'd recently buried a boy who had died. The boy had been found asleep at work with his arms full of wood and had been beaten awake. He had worked 17 hours and was carried home by his father. He was unable to eat his supper and woke at 4.00 a.m. the next morning. He asked his brother's if they could see the lights in the mill as he was afraid of being late for work, and then died. His younger brother aged nine, had died previously. The father was described as "sober and industrious" and a Sunday school teacher.

The exploitation of children on this scale and intensity, was one of most shameful events in Britain's history. Thompson says that many English middle-class people of this period, were infected with class hatred for the labouring classes and suffered from "atrophy of conscience" and a "deformity of the sensibility." Lord Shaftesbury had said that the Anglican clergy as "a body...will do nothing on the children's behalf."

In Chapter 25, of 'Das Kapital', Karl Marx, quoted extensively from the work of Reverend Joseph Townsend called "A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well-wisher of Mankind.” (1786). Marx referred to Townsend as that "delicate priestly sycophant." Townsend had argued that poverty and hunger are necessary to force the working-class to labour for capitalists. He had written:

"It seems to be a law of nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, that there may always be some to perform the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved of drudgery - but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions..."

Like Edmund Burke, Townsend believed that the laws of commerce were the laws of nature and therefore the laws of God.