Doffer in a Lincolnton, North Carolina mill. c.1918. Library of Congress/Flickr. Creative Commons.
British efforts against the slave trade and slavery from the late eighteenth century coincided with a mounting concern for the working conditions of children, and contemporary campaigns often linked the two issues together. Samuel Roberts, on behalf of the boys who climbed and swept chimneys, claimed in 1803 that their lot was “far, very far, worse than that of a Negro in the West Indies”. Britain’s young labourers also made the connection between their lot and slavery. Joseph Herbergam, who worked as a young teen in a British cotton factory in the late 1820s, wrote of his experience: “I wished many times they would have sent me for a West India slave … I thought … that there could not be worse slaves than those who worked in factories”.
Romantic childhood
Samuel Coleridge, the Romantic poet, described factory children as “our poor little White-Slaves”. This Romantic view of childhood marked a sharp break with previous conceptions of children, who up until this point were either born into sin and in need of salvation or wax to be moulded into a good adulthood. William Blake in Songs of Innocence imagined a two-day-old child, telling his mother “I happy am, Joy is my name”. Wordsworth wrote how babies came “trailing clouds of glory … from God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy”. Innocent when born, Romantics thought children perceived nature and morality more ‘freshly’ than adults. Childhood was not so much the prelude to adulthood but the pinnacle of life. Given this, it was incumbent on adults to protect childhood and to prolong it.
