Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 2 of 4.—1857-1874. Graves Charles Larcom
and found the dormitories rather better and the workroom rather worse than had been expected.
Madame La Modiste: "We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any sacrifice, and the robe is finished à merveille."
These tragedies and the efforts which they prompted serve as a convenient transition to a more general survey of Labour problems, Labour legislation, and Labour organization and representation as they are revealed and discussed in the pages of Punch from 1857 to 1874. Under the recently established and rapidly extending joint reign of steam and coal, it was only natural that rural life should recede into the background. Railway construction had drawn off many labourers from agriculture, and the influx of labour into the manufacturing districts continued apace. In the prospectus of the Dressmaking Company given above, the work-hours are given as ten. But in 1859 the movement among working-men for a nine-hours' day had already been started. Strikes were common, but Punch discourages them on the ground that the men always lost in the long run, and that the "agitators" – the name "Labour Leaders" had not yet emerged – were the real criminals. The Examiner took the same line in 1861 when it wrote "the submission of workmen to the tyranny of their Unions is at once one of the most curious and lamentable phenomena of our time." Yet the existence of genuine distress is not denied, and in a little parable in verse entitled "Men and Bees," profit-sharing between masters and men is recommended as the true solution.
On what was still, in spite of Factory Acts and other measures, the greatest blot on our industrial system – the employment of child labour —Punch spoke with no uncertain voice. Early in 1860 he gives Lord Brougham a good mark for taking up the question in the Lords: —
Lord Brougham, always true to his humane instincts, brought before the Lords the case of the young children employed in Bleach Works. It is a cruel one. Infants of seven and eight years old are at work for eighteen hours, and are sometimes four nights without sleep. The brutalities by which the poor little children are kept sufficiently awake for the purposes of their task-masters are shocking. Years ago, when the cruelties of the climbing-boy trade were exposed in the Lords, a noble Lord told a good story, made their Lordships laugh, and by getting the Bill thrown over for a year, left a new batch of children to the mercies of the Sweep. There was nothing of this kind to-night, and Lord Granville promised information. He will be good enough to remember that Lord Brougham has tendered information, which proves that our friend Mammon is, as usual, doing the work of Moloch.
Climbing Boys and Girls
Here, at any rate, there is no sympathy for the greedy capitalist, who comes off as badly as the "agitator." The mention of the chimney-sweeps is timely. In 1864 the employment of the climbing boys had been prohibited by Act of Parliament for twenty years. Yet the Act had been so systematically evaded that in that year more than 3,000 children were still kept at labour in that filthy and unhealthy form of slavery. The subject was brought up in the House of Commons in April by Mr. Digby Seymour, and furnished Punch with an excuse for assailing those "sentimental and pious ladies" who "prefer subscribing to societies for converting little Hottentots to using influence to suppress the atrocities committed upon little white children at home." A month later Lord Shaftesbury intervened in the Lords: the details which he brought forward were too shocking for reproduction, but "fine ladies who mew over the sorrows of the Circassians, and devout ladies who send missionaries to the Chinese, had better know what is done in their own houses, and within a few feet of their own beds, with the children of white English folk."
The kidnapping of little boys had been revived, and at a meeting held in York the following agreement was signed by the assembled sweeps: —
"We, the undersigned Master Sweeps of the City of York, mutually agree, from and after this date, not to employ Climbing Boys and Girls in our business; that the Act of Parliament on their behalf made should be strictly complied with; and that we ought no longer to risk the heavy penalties it prescribes, both against householders and ourselves."
It thus appears that, in York at least, the employment of climbing girls had become almost or quite as common as that of climbing boys.
Lord Shaftesbury's "Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act" (1864) provided that a chimney sweeper convicted of causing or allowing any person under the age of twenty-one to ascend or descend a chimney or enter a flue for the purpose of sweeping it or extinguishing a fire might be sent to prison for a term not exceeding six months with or without hard labour. But master chimney sweeps still continued to "snap their sooty fingers at the law." In the issue of March 2, 1867, Punch reproduces the following business "card": —
"William Burges, Chimney Sweeper, No. 36 Bolton Street, Chorley, flatters himself with having boys of the best size for such branch of business suitable for a Tunnel or Chimney, and that it is now in his power to render his assistance in a more extensive manner than he usually has done. He also carries his boys from room to room occasionally, to prevent them staining or marking any room floor with their feet."
In short, there was good ground for the complaint that while a great deal had been said about our working men, but little notice had been taken of our working children. A discussion of the "half-time system" at a working men's club in which another enlightened and benevolent peer, Lord Lyttelton, took part, is accordingly welcomed as sensible and opportune: —
"By this system," said Lord Lyttelton, "which compelled every parent who chose to send his child to work also to send him or her half the day to school, a very useful compromise had been effected between the demands of labour and education… This system, as carried out in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, had resulted in the increased education, and consequent improved life and conduct, of their inhabitants, as had been manifested during the late cotton famine, and in many other ways."
Gentlemen of England who live at home at ease perhaps have little notion of how hard some children work, and how needful it appears to make some effort to relieve them. From a Blue-Book he produced at the meeting we have mentioned, Lord Lyttelton
"Gave an instance of a little girl engaged in a brickyard near Birmingham from 6 a. m. to 8 p. m., only having fifteen minutes for breakfast, and thirty minutes for dinner, no time for tea, and during one day she would have to catch and throw to her neighbour fifteen tons of bricks."
What a mercy it would be to such poor little working children if their fathers were compelled to send them every day to school!
White Slaves in the Black Country
Towards the end of the same year the Town Council of Sheffield met to consider the report of the Children's Employment Commission relative to the overworking of children in the trades of that town: —
According to that Report, a boy, only nine years old, living at Wadsley, four or five miles from Sheffield, was obliged by his father to work as cellar-boy in one of the furnaces, on most days of the week from six in the morning to six or seven in the evening, and on Saturdays from three in the morning till three in the afternoon. This enforced labour at a high temperature would, if only occasional, appear to be equivalent to a somewhat long compulsory innings in the Turkish bath. Imposed nearly every day, it may be considered by some who do not consider too deeply, to constitute a combination of the Turkish bath with Turkish tyranny, and tyranny about as barbarous as ever was practised in Turkey.
The "Good Parson" (to applicant for instruction in the Night School): "Have you been confirmed, my boy?"
Boy (hesitating): "Please, sir – I – don't know."
Parson: "You understand me; has the Bishop laid his hands on you?"
Boy: "Oh, no, sir, but his Keeper have, sir – very often, sir!"
Naturally, such outspoken comments gave offence, and in 1866 and again in 1868 Punch was very much in the black books of the Black Country for what he said on the state of morals, manners and education among the workers of that region of coal and iron. The controversy began with some lines, "The Queen in the Black Country," which were inspired by the inauguration of Prince Albert's statue at Wolverhampton. These gave pain to certain susceptible inhabitants of that town. Punch's reply was to quote from the report of the Children's Employment Commission of 1864 on the trades in the Wolverhampton