Question

The child labour and the Inspector story writing​

Answer 1

Answer:

The widespread employment of very young children in factories and mines marked a break with traditional practice, and was something that some contemporaries found distasteful. It triggered a series of Parliamentary enquiries into the working conditions of children in mines and factories. Their reports famously shocked Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens – inspiring ‘The Cry of the Children’ and A Christmas Carol. Child workers appeared in several other Dickens novels, most memorably in the form of Oliver Twist, with his narrow escape as the apprentice of Mr Gamfield the chimney-sweep, and in David Copperfield. David Copperfield was based loosely on Dickens’s own experiences of starting work at Warren’s Blacking factory at the age of 12 following his father’s imprisonment for debt. Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies took up the plight of the nation’s chimney sweeps and a host more ephemeral novels, such as Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth’s, Helen Fleetwood also exposed the suffering of child workers to the middle-class reader. In addition, many of the period’s most vocal and prolific commentators turned their attention to child workers. And of course, the situation of child workers entered the political heart of the nation when reformers such as John Fielden and Lord Ashley, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, took up their cause in Parliament.