Child Labor in the Industrial Revolution

Child labor was one of the most disturbing features of the Industrial Revolution. Children as young as five or six worked in the new factories and mines, often for twelve to sixteen hours a day, and they suffered accidents, exhaustion, and disease at alarming rates.

The Extent of Child Labor

Child labor was widespread in the early Industrial Revolution, and it was particularly common in the textile mills and the coal mines. In the cotton mills of Lancashire, children as young as five or six were employed as scavengers, doffers, and piecers, working alongside adult workers and often performing the most dangerous and unpleasant tasks. The article on children in mines describes the conditions in the mines in more detail. The article on the Education Acts covers the long campaign for compulsory education that grew out of the campaign against child labor.

The Campaign Against Child Labor

The campaign against child labor was one of the defining social movements of the nineteenth century. The campaign was led by a coalition of reformers, including evangelical Christians, utilitarians, trade unionists, and politicians, who argued that the state had a responsibility to protect children from exploitation.

The Factory Acts and the Mines Acts

The campaign against child labor eventually led to a series of laws that restricted the employment of children and improved the conditions of their work. The Factory Act of 1833 was the first major piece of legislation, and it limited the working hours of children in textile mills. The Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 banned women and girls of any age, and boys under ten, from working underground in mines.

The Education Acts

The campaign against child labor was closely tied to the campaign for compulsory education. The reformers argued that children who were working in the factories and mines were not only suffering from physical abuse but were also being denied the education they needed to escape poverty. The result was a long campaign for compulsory education, which eventually led to a series of Education Acts.

The 1842 Children’s Employment Commission

The principal documentary source for child labor in the mines and factories of the early Industrial Revolution is the 1842 Report of the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines), presented to Parliament on June 7, 1842. The Commission, chaired by Lord Ashley (later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury), included Robert Howard Myers and the Reverend Thomas Tancred, and it took testimony from 39 children, most of them under 12, as well as from mine owners, doctors, and clergymen. The testimony of Sarah Gooder, aged eight, who described carrying a corf of coal up a 12-yard ladder by a chain passed around her waist, was widely reprinted. The accompanying engravings by William Neild and others, published as a folio volume by the Children’s Employment Commission on July 4, 1842, sold widely and became one of the most widely circulated reform documents of the century. The Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, which received Royal Assent on August 10, 1842, banned women and girls of any age and boys under ten from underground work, and it was a direct consequence of the Commission’s report.

Sadler’s 1832 Report and the First Factory Bill

The campaign for factory reform began with Michael Thomas Sadler, the Tory MP for Newark, who in 1832 secured a Parliamentary Select Committee to investigate child labor in the textile mills. The Sadler Committee, which sat from June to August 1832, took testimony from 96 witnesses, mostly adult and child workers, and the resulting Report of the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes was published in 1832. The report contained testimony from children as young as six, and Sadler’s 1832 speech to the House of Commons, in which he read some of the most shocking testimony, is one of the famous speeches of the early reform period. Sadler’s bill, the Regulation of the Labour of Children in the Mills and Factories Bill, was introduced in 1832 and again in 1833, but it was blocked by the Manchester millowners. The Factory Act of 1833, drafted by Lord Ashley, was a watered-down version of Sadler’s bill: it limited the working hours of children under 13 to nine hours per day, and of adolescents 13-18 to twelve hours, and it established a system of factory inspectors under Leonard Horner. The bill was a major concession to the reform movement, and it was the first major piece of factory legislation.

The Education Acts and Child Labor Reform

The campaign against child labor was closely tied to the campaign for compulsory education, and the two campaigns were largely the work of the same coalition of evangelical Christians, utilitarians, and trade unionists. The Factory Act of 1833 required that children working in textile mills receive at least two hours of schooling per day, but the provision was poorly enforced, and the Education of Pauper Children Act of 1834 extended the requirement to children in the workhouses. The Mines Act of 1842 was followed by the establishment of schools in the mining districts, and the Factory Act of 1844 strengthened the educational requirements. The campaign for general compulsory education, led by Lord Shaftesbury, James Kay-Shuttleworth, and the National Public School Association, was finally achieved by the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (the “Forster Act”) and the Elementary Education Act of 1880 (the “Mundella Act”), which required school attendance for children between 5 and 12. The combined effect of the factory legislation and the education acts was to reduce child labor in the formal sector to a small fraction of its 1830s peak.

The “Hungry Forties” and the Worst Abuses

The decade 1840-1850 was the period of the worst abuses of child labor in Britain. The “Hungry Forties” — the period of agricultural depression, the Irish Famine (1845-1852), and the European potato blight — produced widespread poverty, and the result was a sharp increase in the number of children in the industrial workforce. The 1841 Census, the first to record occupations, found that 192,000 children under 13 were working in textile mills, of whom perhaps 20,000 were under 8. The 1842 Children’s Employment Commission found that perhaps 50,000 women and children were working underground in the coal mines, in some cases as young as four or five. The worst single abuse was the “trapper” system, in which children as young as four sat alone in the dark for 12-hour shifts, opening and closing the ventilation doors as the coal wagons passed. The Commission’s report led to the 1842 Mines Act, and the second wave of reform legislation — the 1844 Factory Act, the 1847 Ten Hours Act, the 1850 Factory Act — gradually brought the abuses under control. The same period saw a series of reform measures in the United States, beginning with Massachusetts’ 1842 child labor law and continuing with the Pennsylvania mining law of 1870 and the federal Keating-Owen Act of 1916.

The Continuing Problem: Child Labor in the Twentieth Century

Child labor was not effectively eliminated in the formal industrial sector until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it continues to exist in parts of the developing world to the present. In the United States, the 1900 Census recorded 1,752,000 children under 15 in the workforce, about 6.7 percent of all children; in 1910, the figure was 1,990,000. The peak year for child labor in American manufacturing was probably 1910, when about 250,000 children under 15 were working in textile mills, garment shops, and other manufacturing establishments. The Keating-Owen Act of 1916, which prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor, was the first federal child labor law, but it was struck down by the Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918). The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set 16 as the minimum age for non-agricultural work, was the first effective federal regulation, and it was upheld by the Court in United States v. Darby Lumber Co. (1941). The international campaign against child labor has been a major concern of the ILO since its founding in 1919, and the ILO Convention 138 on Minimum Age (1973) and the ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (1999) are the principal international instruments.

Historiography: The Standard-of-Living Debate

The question of child labor is one of the central issues in the standard-of-living debate of the 1960s and 1970s. The “pessimist” case, associated with E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and with the earlier Hammond essays, treated the working-class child of the 1830s and 1840s as a victim of industrial capitalism. The “optimist” case, advanced by Max Hartwell in The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (1971) and by the cliometric work of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, argued that the conditions of child labor in the 1830s were not as bad as the contemporary reformers claimed, and that the lot of the working-class child improved steadily through the period. The most recent work, including Jane Humphries’ Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England (2010), based on the autobiography project of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for History and Economics, has returned to the pessimist case with a new and much more detailed evidence base, arguing that the conditions of child labor in the 1830s and 1840s were, in many cases, as bad as the contemporary reformers claimed. The debate has not been resolved, but the more recent literature has tended to return to the older view.

The Post-War Consensus and the ILO

The international campaign against child labor produced a series of post-war instruments. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, in Article 25, recognized the right of children to special protection. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, has been ratified by 196 countries (the United States is the only major country not to have ratified it). The ILO, founded in 1919, has been the principal international organization for the campaign against child labor, and its Minimum Age Convention (No. 138) of 1973 and its Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (No. 182) of 1999 have been ratified by 187 and 182 countries respectively. The International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, established in 1992, has worked in over 90 countries to reduce child labor. The most recent data, from the ILO’s 2020 Global Estimates, indicate that about 160 million children — about 1 in 10 of the world’s children — are still engaged in child labor, with 70 million in hazardous work. The figures, while better than the 246 million of the 2000 estimate, indicate that the campaign against child labor, started in the 1830s, is still incomplete.

The Persistence of Child Labor in the Global Economy

The campaign against child labor, while successful in the formal industrial sector, has been less successful in the informal economies of the developing world. The 2020 ILO estimates suggest that 160 million children — about 1 in 10 of the world’s children — are still engaged in child labor, with 70 million in hazardous work. The principal sectors in which child labor persists are agriculture (about 70 percent of the total), services (about 20 percent), and industry (about 10 percent). The principal countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, with the highest rates in the Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The principal causes of contemporary child labor are poverty, the lack of schools, the lack of family-friendly labor laws, and the demand for cheap labor in the global supply chain. The 2010 California Transparency in Supply Chains Act and the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act have attempted to address the problem through the supply chain, and the 2011 UNGPs on Business and Human Rights and the 2015 EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive are the principal international instruments. The contemporary campaign against child labor is the direct descendant of the 19th-century campaign, and the 1830s and the 2010s are, in this sense, two phases of a single long struggle.

The Statistical Evidence: Heights, Mortality, and the Debate

The empirical core of the modern standard-of-living debate is the anthropometric data assembled by Robert Fogel and his collaborators. The NBER studies of the 1960s and 1970s — including Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory’s Height, Health and History (1990), and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure’s work — established that the average height of British working-class men fell from 1730-1780 and rose steadily after 1830, with the heights of the new generation of factory workers being about 2-3 cm taller than the heights of the agricultural workers they replaced. The interpretation of these data has been the subject of a long debate. The “optimist” reading, associated with Fogel and R. M. Hartwell, is that the height data show that the working class was better fed and healthier in the 1830s and 1840s than it had been in the 1770s, and that the conditions of child labor were not as bad as the reformers had claimed. The “pessimist” reading, associated with John Komlos in The Biological Standard of Living in Europe and America, 1700-1900 (1989) and Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development (1995), is that the height data show a stagnation or decline in the biological standard of living in the early Industrial Revolution, and that the conditions of child labor were, on average, worse than the older historical accounts had allowed. The debate has not been resolved, but the more recent literature, including the work of Jane Humphries in Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England (2010), has tended to return to the pessimist case with new and more detailed evidence.

The Moral Economy of the Reformers

The campaign against child labor was, at its heart, a moral campaign. The reformers — Lord Ashley, Michael Sadler, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Lord Macaulay, Lord Brougham, and the women of the Evangelical and Quaker movements — argued that the state had a moral obligation to protect children from exploitation. The 1842 Royal Commission’s report, with its 39 testimonies of children, was widely read and was a major influence on the passage of the Mines Act of 1842. The campaign also drew on the language of natural rights and political economy, and it was part of a broader 19th-century debate about the limits of the free market, the obligations of the state, and the moral foundations of industrial society. The reform movement was, in the words of E. P. Thompson’s “Moral Economy of the English Crowd” (1971), part of a long English tradition of protest against the abuse of power, and the moral arguments developed in the 1830s and 1840s remain the foundation of the modern welfare state. The history of the moral arguments is the subject of Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement (1988) and of Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class (1983), which place the reform movement in the larger context of the Victorian moral tradition.

Key Dates in the Child Labor Campaign

A short chronology of the principal dates in the campaign against child labor:

1788 — First attempts to regulate child labor in cotton mills
1819 — Cotton Mills and Factories Act, the first Factory Act
1832 — Sadler Committee investigates child labor
1833 — Factory Act limits children’s hours in textile mills
1842 — Royal Commission report; Mines and Collieries Act
1844 — Factory Act further limits children’s hours
1847 — Ten Hours Act limits women’s and children’s work
1870 — Education Act begins compulsory schooling
1880 — Mundella Act makes school attendance compulsory
1890 — Britain has 50,000 children in textile mills (down from 200,000 in 1850)
1900 — U.S. has 1.75 million children in the workforce
1916 — U.S. Keating-Owen Act passed; later struck down
1938 — U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act effectively regulates child labor
1973 — ILO Convention 138 on Minimum Age
1999 — ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor

In this section

Children in the Mines The story of the children who worked in the British coal mines, the dangers they faced, and the 1842 report that exposed the worst abuses and led to the Mines and Collieries Act. Education Acts and the Long Campaign for Compulsory Schooling The history of the Education Acts in Britain, from the first attempts at elementary education to the establishment of compulsory schooling for all children.