ABSTRACT
The Industrial Revolution created factory jobs for tens of thousands of people, including children, but its overuse of working-class child labor in manufacturing, mining, and cottage industries incurred public outcry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens being some of the more prominent literary voices. Adults sought to rescue both the child and childhood itself, reformers emerging from such disparate groups as literary professionals, socially concerned churchgoers, middle-class philanthropic reformers, working-class agitators, and some visible upper-class politicians such as the Earl of Shaftesbury,1 all to address child overwork and suffering. At stake, truly, were the very lives of children, who could die from unsafe conditions and sheer exhaustion. Thus, the reformation of children’s lives “was the product of philanthropic or compassionate motives, together with the concern for social control, at a time of unprecedented social change” (Hopkins 6); it was accomplished specifically through factory reform, church schools, government reform and enforcement, and a national education system, much of which has already been discussed.2 Consequently, Laura
C. Berry suggests that “[r]epresenting childhood as endangered is instrumental to nineteenth-century debates” (4), and thus a phenomenon vitally important to childhood studies.3
