Child Labor

(This essay was written in 1976 but its thesis is as important today as ever, and especially during the holiday season when the conventional view of child labor in early industrial England finds its way into our hearts and homes through Charles Dickens's classic "A Christmas Carol.")

Everyone agrees that in the 100 years between 1750 and 1850 there took place in Great Britain profound economic changes. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution, complete with a cascade of technical innovations, a vast increase in industrial production, a renaissance of world trade, and rapid growth of urban populations.

Where historians and other observers clash is in the interpretation of these great changes. Were they "good" or "bad"? Did they represent improvement to the citizens, or did these events set them back? Perhaps no other issue within this realm has generated more intellectual heat than the one concerning the labor of children. The enemies of freedom--of capitalism--have successfully cast this matter as an irrefutable indictment of the capitalist system as it was emerging in nineteenth-century Britain.

The many reports of poor working conditions and long hours of difficult toil make harrowing reading, to be sure. William Cooke Taylor wrote at the time about contemporary reformers who, witnessing children at work in factories, thought to themselves, "How much more delightful would have been the gambol of the free limbs on the hillside; the sight of the green mead with its spangles of buttercups and daisies; the song of the bird and the humming of the bee." (1)

Of those historians who have interpreted child labor in industrial Britain as a crime of capitalism, none have been more prominent than J. L. and Barbara Hammond. Their many works, including Lord Shaftesbury, The Village Labourer, The Town Labourer, and The Skilled Labourer, have been widely promoted as "authoritative" on the issue.