The industrial revolution led to the need for cheap labour while the absence of child labour laws made children a valuable and resource in the newly-built factories, mines and workshops of the booming industrial age.
Not only did the poor send their children to work for long hours at pitiful wages but the overseers of the poor utilised the opportunities to remove their young charges from the burden on the parish rate.
The ruling aristocracy and gentry saw the arrangement as wholly beneficial - not only was industry provided with the cheap labour it demanded but the children were removed from the parish relief.
By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, child labour had become so common that Parliament found itself obliged to enact the first law regulating child labour in 1802; the British Health and Morals of Apprentices Act.
The Act provided that children in receipt of relief could not work in cotton mills below the age of nine, those under fourteen years of age could not work at night and their working day was restricted to twelve hours. The Act made no provision for those children sent to work by their parents to whom the provisions were extended by an Act of 1819.
Little heed was paid to either of these acts until the passing of the Factory Act in 1833 which was the first to provide for inspections.
Some children helped their parents pay off debts, as did the youthful Dickens. Debt was
a crime in Victorian England, and debtors were sent to prison until they could pay off
their creditors. Such prisons were filthy, rat-infested places where inmates usually
lived with their entire families during the period of incarceration. Family members
were free to come and go as they pleased. The 12-year-old Dickens ate with his family
at Marshalsea Debtor's Prison, and slept in a squalid rooming house near his job at the
Warren Blacking Polish factory.
