Child Workers in England, 17801820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Ea [Paperback]

The use of child workers was widespread in textile manufacturing by the late eighteenth century. A particularly vital supply of child workers was via the parish apprenticeship trade, whereby pauper children could move from the 'care' of poor law officialdom to the 'care' of early industrial textile entrepreneurs. This study is the first to examine in detail both the process and experience of parish factory apprenticeship, and to illuminate the role played by children in early industrial expansion. It challenges prevailing notions of exploitation which permeate historical discussion of the early labour force and questions both the readiness with which parishes 'offloaded' large numbers of their poor children to distant factories, and the harsh discipline assumed to have been universal among early factory masters. Finally the author explores the way in which parish apprentices were used to construct a gendered labour force. Dr Honeyman's book is a major contribution to studies in child labour and to the broader social, economic, and business history of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.A major contribution to studies in child labour, this book explores the contribution of child workers and the particular importance of the parish apprenticeship system to early industrial expansion.Katrina Honeyman is Reader in Social and Economic History in the School of History, University of Leeds, UK.This well-documented study is the first full account of pauper apprentices, the children bound most often to factory work by parishes anxious to reduce poor relief...Essential. Choice Honeyman's book is a major addition to scholarship. Childhood in the Past ... a richly detailed and rigorously constructed account of a unique period in modern Western history--the beginning of the industrial age. ... (Honeyman) has done a vast amount of work in dozens of parishes and factory record collections to create a far more detailed and nuanced picture than we have ever hl³%