‘The exploitation of little children’? Parish apprentices and factory work in early industrial England

Katrina Honeyman

As the first children to experience the experimental nature of factory life separate from the protection of family or poor law officials, parish apprentices were potentially subject to rigid discipline and other forms of exploitation. Whether parish factory apprentices encountered more abuse than pre-factory apprentices is hotly contested by historians, yet most now agree that the peculiar features of industrial capitalism originating in the late eighteenth century should be subject to careful consideration[1]. Wally Seccombe, for example, warns of minimising the difference in exploitation potential between factory manufacturing and pre-industrial work. Industrial capitalism, Seccombe argues, did not inaugurate the use of child labour, but transformed the context.[2] This paper is not concerned with quantifying exploitation but rather aims to assess the experience of parish apprentices, the first generation of textile factory workers, by adapting Clark Nardinelli’s concept of indirect exploitation.[3] It considers evidence of compulsion, experimentation, corporal punishment, sexual abuse, intensification of labour and damage to health through a combination of long hours and inadequate diet.

It uses a variety of documentation kept by parishes, including apprenticeship registers and indentures, minutes of meetings of parish officials, and reports of factory visits and inspections, to demonstrate that while the parishes were complicit in the exploitation of their children not least in the involuntary nature of the apprentice binding, parishes varied in the extent to which they ‘protected’ or ‘neglected’ the children during the term of their apprenticeship. Business records as well as communication between factory owner and parish officials are also examined to illustrate the range of experience to which parish apprentices were subject. Finally the paper provides evidence of the children’s own sense of exploitation, the ways in which they were given opportunities to voice grievances, and the extent to which their concerns were addressed.

Early factory experiments in forms of discipline and supervision and in the length and structure of the working day became embedded in factory practice. All young labour was eventually subject to conditions of work initially tested on parish apprentices. The evidence to be presented in this paper suggests that parish apprentices endured a range of levels of exploitation. Factory regimes varied from the ‘brutal’ at one extreme to the ‘humanitarian’ at the other, with the majority falling somewhere in between.

[1] Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘ “The exploitation of little children”: child labour and the family economy in the industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), p485

[2] Wally Seccombe, Weathering the storm: working class families from the industrial revolution to the fertility decline (London 1993) pp35-6

[3] Clark Nardinelli, ‘were children exploited during the industrial revolution?’ Research in Economic History, 11, (1988) pp243-76