Using campaigning material to understand exploited and destitute children in nineteenth-century England

Author / Creator

Montgomery, Heather (Heather Kate), author

Available as

Online

Summary

Focusing on two nineteenth-century documents, published fifty years apart, this Document Case Study will examine what they can tell a contemporary audience about childhood in the past. Both documen...

Focusing on two nineteenth-century documents, published fifty years apart, this Document Case Study will examine what they can tell a contemporary audience about childhood in the past. Both documents examine the lives and experiences of the very poorest children in the nineteenth century and raise questions about the nature of childhood; whether it is, or should be, an innocent, protected stage of life, nurtured by adults or whether children are, in some ways, less valuable than adults. The first document, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy (1832), is an account of a parish apprentice sent to work in a Nottinghamshire mill at the age of 7, where he was treated with appalling brutality. The second document, a pamphlet written by a Liberal MP called The Industrial Training of Destitute Children in 1885, displays very different attitudes toward poor children in that, while they are still seen as a problem, and a potential threat to society, they are nevertheless seen as a social challenge for which all adults had some responsibility.

Show More