By : Alessio Antonangeli
How many of you
always complain
because you don’t want
to go to school?
You should know
that in victorian
times only rich
children went to
school. Poor children
had to go to work or
steal.
Most of the workers in factories were poor children
starting from 4-5 year olds.
Their lives were hard. They had to work for long hours
and got treated with cruelty.
In match factories, children had to dip matches in a
chemical called phosphorous. That would rotten their
teeth and some unlucky children died because they
breathed it into their lungs.
Often orphans were taken to mills where they would
help the master to work.
They worked for long hours and didn’t have fresh air or
excercise, they spent their Sunday cleaning the
machines. Some children had their hands crushed
while working with the machines and some died
because they fell in the machines while sleeping.
Coal mines weren’t very nice , roofs often collapsed and
workers got all kinds of injuries. All the works that are
now done by machines were done by men, women or
children. Some children were “asked” to open the
doors when they heard the vagons were coming. In
order to do this job they had to sit down in dark and
damp places and pull a rope to open the door when the
vagons were coming.
Then luckily in 1842 the Mines Act stopped children
from working in the mines under the age of 12.
During victorian times children were also used as
chimney sweeps because they were very small and they
would fit inside the chimney. Children suffered many
cuts, grazes and bruises on their knees, elbows and
thighs however after months of suffering their skin
became hardened.
Poor families who lived in the countryside were also
forced to send their children out to work. Seven and
eight year olds could work as bird scarers, out in the
fields from four in the morning until seven at night.
It took a long time for things to change because nobody
thought that it was a bad thing for children to work.
Lord Shaftesbury was one of the first to make people
understand that children shouldn’t work or miss
school.