The case for the factory acts / edited by Mrs. Sidney Webb ; with a preface by Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The case for the factory acts / edited by Mrs. Sidney Webb ; with a preface by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/260
    now. I have a deal of trouble to get them up in the morning. I have been obliged to beat them to get them well awake. It made me cry to be obliged to do it.” Or, last of all, hear the man of middle age looking sadly back, in the year after the passing of the great Reform Bill, over his working life:— “ I see the men who were hand-spinners when I came to Manchester in 1801; I can call their images to mind, though they have been long in their coffins; the men I see now are not like them. Their children were kept in the factories, and became feeble in frame; and now their children again are feebler still. Those who have passed their lives in mule-spinning—their intellect has shrunk up and become dry like a tree; they have become children again. It is the long hours and the heat. They can't eat, and go to drink. A man may drink a dram, when he is too tired to eat a crust.”1 Voices of pity and of shame!—that may well bring round us the whole phantom host of those lost generations which perished for the making of industrial England—of those deformed children and youths, those sickly demoralised girls, those 1 These extracts are condensed from the evidence given before the great Factories Enquiry Commission of 1833.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3