Katrina Honeyman - Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914

Diversity and Agency, 17501914

Edited by

NIGEL GOOSE

KATRINA HONEYMAN

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright Nigel Goose, Katrina Honeyman and the contributors 2013

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Childhood and child labour in industrial England : diversity and agency, 17501914 / edited by Nigel Goose and Katrina Honeyman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781409411147 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 9781315571478 (ebook) ISBN 9781317167914 (epub)1. Child labor Great Britain History. 2. Children Great Britain Social conditions. 3. Industrial revolution Great Britain. 4. Great Britain Social conditions.

I. Goose, Nigel. II. Honeyman, Katrina.

HD6250.G7C45 2013

331.31094209034dc23

2013002717

ISBN 9781409411147 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315571478 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781317167914 (ebk-ePUB)

Colin Creighton teaches in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Hull and is interested in the family and gender in their relation to social and economic development.

Kathryn Gleadle is Lecturer in Modern History at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, UK. Her research focuses on British political culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and she has published extensively on womens history in this period, including her recent Borderline citizens: women, gender and political culture in Britain, 18151867 (British Academy, 2009).

Nigel Goose is Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He has published widely in the field of early modern and modern social, demographic and economic history, his most recent book being A history of Doughtys Hospital, Norwich, 16872009 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010). His research now focuses mainly on English philanthropy.

Katrina Honeyman was Reader in Social and Economic History in the School of History, University of Leeds, UK. Her books include Child Workers in England, 17801820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) and Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England 17001870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

Jane Humphries is Professor of Economic History at All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK and President of the Economic History Society. Her book Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

Peter Kirby is Chair of Social History and Joint Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. He is author of Child labour in Britain, 17501870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and is currently completing a book entitled Child Workers and Industrial Health, 17801850 which discusses the illnesses, disabilities and ill-treatment of child labourers in textiles and mining.

Alysa Levene is Reader in History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Recent publications include The childhood of the poor: welfare in eighteenth-century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Childcare, health and mortality at the London Foundling Hospital, 17411800: left to the mercy of the world (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)

Niels van Manen is Postdoctoral Researcher and Course Convenor in the Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He recently completed his PhD in the History of Medical Science at the University of York.

Clare Rose is a historian of fashion, textiles (especially quilts) and childhood, specializing in Britain from 17502000. Her book Making, Selling and Wearing Boys Clothes in Late-Victorian England was published by Ashgate in 2010. She is currently Lecturer in Contextual Studies at the Royal College of Needlework.

Nicola Sheldon was a post-doctoral Research Fellow on the History in Education project at the Institute of Historical Research, UK. She has recently co-edited a book with Laurence Brockliss entitled Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c.18701930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She now works at the Institute of Education in London.

Sarah Toulalan is Senior Lecturer in the History department at the University of Exeter, UK. Her main area of research is in the history of the body, with particular interests in gender, sex, sexuality, ageing, body size, shape and management, health and medicine in early modern England. Dr Toulalan is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded project on Children and sex in early modern England: knowledge, consent, abuse c.15501750, and has recently co-edited The Routledge History of Sex and the Body in the West 1500 to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

Susannah Wright is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her thesis and subsequent historical research have investigated moral education and citizenship in English schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and also sources for local studies of schools and their local communities.

This book originated in a panel session held at the Economic History Society annual conference in March 2008, at which Katrina Honeyman, Jane Humphries and myself gave papers. That panel took as its starting point the view that the time was ripe for a new look at child labour in industrial England, and this issue remains central to the present book. It is one of those many topics in economic history that, having caused considerable debate and moral outrage among both contemporaries and a previous generation of historians, appeared to have been resolved once the parliamentary papers had been reasonably thoroughly trawled and a balanced view with regard to children in factories and mines achieved. More recent recognition of the small role that factories played in the child labour market, more thorough examination of the quantifiable evidence provided by published census reports and unpublished census enumerators books, and the exploitation of a range of hitherto largely ignored source material in the form of autobiographical evidence and parish documentation all of this has enabled a more sophisticated and thorough examination of the nature and significance of child labour in industrial England.