Child Labor Conditions and the Improvements Provided by the Factory Act

by Connie Gomez

Child labor creeped in alongside the many evils brought on by the industrial revolution, which began in the 1760s in Britain, remaining unaddressed until public outcry called for change. The economic and cultural shift from handcrafted goods to mass produced factory items meant society now had to interact with a new unregulated system. For children it meant mental and physical abuse from the very adults who were meant to protect them. Abuse materialized in various forms from verbal to physical beatings and even rape, shaping the lasting image of ragged Victorian children. Child labor remained unregulated until Parliament passed the 1833 Factory Act which set in motion regulations to improve working conditions for all.

The Factory Act of 1833 passed in Parliament with public support to improve the physical and mental condition of children by limiting work hours and promoting schooling. Limitations on labor included no employment for children under the age of nine, a limit of 48 hours per week for children aged 9 to 13 with a daily limit of 8 hours, and a daily limit of 12 hours for children aged 13 to 18. The Factory Act also implemented mandatory elementary schooling of 2 hours per day for children under the age of 13 to improve education. Despite the positive changes, the act faced opposition from politicians and factory owners who contested the efficiency of the new regulations. Yet, unlike prior regulations, the Factory Act of 1833 came about from public concern following Queen Victoria’s inquiry into actual conditions conducted by various commissioners. Prior to the revolutionary Factory Act of 1833, children in British factories endured grueling work conditions, developed physical deformities, and received no education as a result of their exploited labor by the unchecked system of industrial capitalism.

A child’s general day of labor consisted of long hours of labor with little to no time to do anything other than rest for the next shift. Lack of regulation gave way to factories working employees for long hours with little to no breaks in between shifts; children were no exception to this practice. In an interview with a child worker, he recounted his factory shift that began at five o’clock on Monday morning …then went on till nine on Monday evening and stopped half an hour; then went on to twelve at midnight and stopped an hour; then went on to half-past four on Tuesday morning and stopped half an hour ; then went on till twelve and stopped an hour; then went on again from one to five, and stopped half an hour; then went on again to nine at night, when [he] went home.¹

40-hour shifts were a normal occurrence within factories with some children working more hours under the coal and wool industries. Long work shifts left children exhausted and in a perpetual state of drowsiness that factory managers combated through painful methods. Children would be “strapped, both boys and girls” to their machines while continuing to work.² Those who did fall asleep faced even harsher consequences like John Saville, a boy of seven, who got his leg run over by a cart full of coal.³ Accidents due to the exhaustion from long shifts were only one of the many risks children were exposed to. Most industry owners preferred to focus on their sales profit than the conditions of their workers, children being the most affected by performing harsh labor while in their formative years.

The coal industry, infamous to this day for its negative side effects on workers, worked children ragged and fostered environments shocking to even adults. The mines preferred children to adults as they could fit in small chambers and complete the same work as an adult for lower pay. Mine workers performed the “heaviest species of manual and bodily fatigue” leaving children like John Chambers, who began working at the age of seven, feeling “so tired, and his legs, arms, and back ached so much, that his brother has had to carry him home many times.”⁴ Labor standards were so unregulated it was normal and accepted that children were expected to have the same output as adults. The mines were exceptionally shocking to commissioners upon seeing girls and women employed in the same demanding roles. Girls employed in hurrying, pushing and pulling carts on all fours by chains and a belt tied to them, “worked naked down to their waist, the same as men” who often worked “stark naked.”⁵ Commissioners were shocked to find girls exposed to nudity on the daily working underground surrounded by men and boys for long hours while mine owners viewed it with indifference. The abuse of girls went on in extreme cases to rape where the “men take liberty with the drawers, and some of the women have bastards.”⁶ Children faced unsafe conditions all around from the machinery and intense labor to the adults around them. The coal industry employed children, surrounded by nudity and preying adults, in mule-like labor for the exchange of two shillings a day, going unnoticed until exposed by public inquiries brought on by the Factory Act of 1833.

The textile industry, chief employer of children, presented children with obvious dangers but also invisible life-lasting marks. The factories posed a danger to children where many injuries were caused by exposed machinery. It was observed by doctors “in many instances, the integuments, and the muscles, and the skin [would be] stripped off down to the bone” due to the arms of children being caught in machinery.⁷ Unregulated factories had exposed machinery which was a danger to children who performed maintenance as they were small enough to fit in cramped areas for cleaning. Below the surface, factories often caused lung complications from all the cotton fibers in the air. The work areas were cramped with workers in an “enervating, heated atmosphere, which [was] frequently loaded with dust or filaments of cotton, and impure from constant respiration.”⁸ Lung complications were not attributed to the textile industries until the 1860s when further research linked the sickness to the job, yet doctors such as James Kay discovered a cotton cough while conducting examinations. Unregulated factory conditions exposed children to dangers from byproducts such as fibers and more obvious dangers such as exposed machines.

Lack of proper nourishment and extended static work led many children to develop physical deformities. Many children in textile mills suffered bone complications from high heats and prolonged sitting or standing. Doctors in Manchester had a consensus of factory children visibly appearing sickly and pallid; children employed before the age of ten suffered “severely from excessive employments” and after some time when the children grew accustomed to the sickness, their ailments became “not so severe to their constitutions.”⁹ As a generation of children experienced the same deformities, the deformities became a normal occurrence instead of the anomaly that it was. Working in fixed positions and low ceiling height areas also caused abnormal deformities in children that had not been observed before the industrial boom. Children that had otherwise been developing normally began to show crippled limbs and distorted bodies.¹⁰ The growth and development of children was stunted by the work conditions they had to face and the lack of nutrients as their food intake did not match the energy they expended. A direct correlation between deformities in children and factory work can be drawn, demonstrating just how negative industrial labor was to children.

Children were off on Sundays to attend school or mass, but no free education meant children went without and instead rested all day, to the benefit of industry owners. Education was funded by charities and churches often having little to no funding making it difficult for working class children to receive any education. A commissioner found a school in South Wales “more resembles a stable than a place for education.”¹¹ Lack of appropriate funding for a building and supplies meant children went without any education regardless of how much they wanted to learn. The lack of education made it so children would gain no skills that would improve their station in life or employment. Children took part in unspecialized factory work where “intellect slumbers in supine inertness; but the grosser parts of our nature attain a rank development.”¹² With no education, the factory owners could pay the labor force less and less as their skillset decreased from lack of education. The lack of a free or well-funded education system kept children and the future workforce mentally stagnant with factories lowering pay and creating a bigger division between the working and owning class.

The Factory Act of 1833 reformed child labor and factory conditions, succeeding where other attempts failed in part due to the expository work of commissioners and other journalists, gaining opposition along the way from politicians and factory owners. William Cooke Taylor, an Irish historian and son of a manufacturer vehemently opposed the act reasoning that “factory labour [supplied] the children with food, clothing, shelter, and protection.”¹³ The detailed reports from commissioners supplied the public with the facts and even though some owners might treat their employees well, it was safer as a whole to limit the exposure of children to labor and promote instead education. Similarly in Parliament, John T. Hope argued factory workers as “the sick were, on the average, only as one in a hundred” and low in numbers as well in the hospital of Manchester, a highly industrious city.¹⁴ The argument was weak when compared to the accounts of injuries, most unreported, from the inquiry. The Factory Act began the reform of labor for all through age limits, work hour limits, and mandatory schoolings with the help of public concern raised by the accounts of many child laborers.

The Factory Act of 1833 began the trajectory of child labor laws, not just in Britain but the world, making the public see it for its barbaric nature. With the help of commissioners and journalists, the public was introduced to the harsh realities of working children and swiftly picked up the torch as defenders in Parliament. Charles Dickens himself raised concern for children in his literature, creating a long-lasting image of sickly Victorian children pale from lack of sun and a persistent cough from the fumes inhaled. While child labor reform may seem like the distant past, everyone can be linked to a person that experienced child labor either through a familial link or the purchase of an item made by a child. The fight for reform continues in various ways but for the Victorian children at least, their part is done.

Cavie Richardson, Factory Children. A Short Description of the Factory System, Descriptive of Its Effects on the Religion, Morals, Comforts, and Health of the Children Employed in the Manufactories of England and Scotland (United Kingdom: WM. Bemrose, 1832), 8. ↩
Richardson, Factory Children, 8. ↩
First Report of the Commissioners: Mines (United Kingdom: W. Clowes and Sons, 1842), 71. ↩
The Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Collieries of the United Kingdom. Carefully Compiled from the Appendix to the First Report of the Commissioners ... With Copious Extracts from the Evidence, and Illustrative Engravings. [The Preface signed: W.C.] (United Kingdom: William Strange, 1842), 55. ↩
First Report of the Commissioners, 25. ↩
First Report of the Commissioners, 104. ↩
Charles Wing, Evils of the Factory System: Demonstrated by Parliamentary Evidence (United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1967), clxxii. ↩
The Condition and Treatment, 55. ↩
Wing, Evils of the Factory System, clxxv. ↩
The Condition and Treatment, 69. ↩
First Report of the Commissioners, 170. ↩
James Kay, “The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Working Classes… in Manchester (1832),” in The Past Speaks: Sources and Problems in British History, Volume II, ed. Walter Arnstein (Canada: Wadsworth Publishing, 1993), 155. ↩
William Cooke Taylor, Factories and the factory system (United Kingdom: J. How, 1844), 27. ↩
11 Parl. Deb. (3d ser.) (1832) 389. ↩

Page last updated 11:50 AM, June 29, 2026