Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

A unique 2010 account of childhood during the industrial revolution through the autobiographies of working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Jane Humphries (Author)

9780521248969, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 1 September 2011

454 pages, 7 b/w illus. 37 tables
22.6 x 15 x 2.3 cm, 0.68 kg

'Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution is richly innovative in its marrying of economic data with life stories. The voices of the children - stoical, matter of fact, and moving in their ordinariness - jump off the page. There is no other historical study of British labour during the industrial revolution that so vividly brings to life the world of the working-class child.' History Workshop Journal

This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.

1. Introduction
2. Sources, models, context
3. Families
4. Household economy
5. Family relationships
6. Wider kin
7. Starting work
8. Jobs
9. Apprenticeship
10. Schooling
11. Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], British & Irish history [HBJD1]