Meanwhile, there was a revolution in the way goods were manufactured: cottage industry was upended by a trend towards workers serving as unskilled cogs laboring in the pre-cursor of the assembly line, hammering the same nail or gluing the same piece-as an 11-year-old Dickens had to do-hour after hour, day after day. Workers were leaving the countryside to crowd into new manufacturing centers and cities. The population of England had grown 64% between Dickens’ birth in 1812 and the year of the child labor report. This new, brutal reality of child labor was the result of revolutionary changes in British society. Dickens wrote to one of the government investigators that the descriptions left him “stricken.” These were not exceptional stories, but ordinary. He read of 8-year-old children who dragged coal carts through tiny subterranean passages over a standard 11-hour workday. Dickens read the testimony of girls who sewed dresses for the expanding market of middle class consumers they regularly worked 16 hours a day, six days a week, rooming-like Martha Cratchit-above the factory floor.
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