I spent the holidays reading a book that has continued to haunt me, The Real Oliver Twist/Robert Blincoe: A life that illuminates an age, by John Waller (Icon Books, 2005).
The author is a historian who lectures in the department of history and philosophy of science at Melbourne University.
In 1832, John Brown, a British campaigner to release young children from the servitude of the textile mills, wrote a memoir of workhouse orphan Robert Blincoe in a popular pamphlet.
The author of The Real Oliver Twist uses that memoir and a 22-page bibliography to re-create the times of poor Robert Blincoe, born in 1792 in rural St. Pancras Parish and abandoned at four to a “work’us” (workhouse) never to see his family again. At seven he was sent 200 miles north to work in the horrendous and unrelenting abuse of the cotton mills.
“The Memoir details the cruelty of masters and overseers, the weakness of the law, and the harsh realities of a child’s life dictated by the relentless rhythm of machines and the clanging of the work-place bell…He was remembered, if at all, as somebody who fought bravely against the cruel vicissitudes of life. But his own hard work and his devotion to his family eventually achieved for them a degree of respectability beyond the wildest imaginings of anybody who had known him,” writes John Waller. “as a bruised, lonely and desperately unhappy parish apprentice.”
According to Waller, there is strong textual evidence that Charles Dickens read Blincoe’s Memoir shortly before writing Oliver Twist, and the parallels are striking. “Blincoe’s Memoir must have had a deep impact on a man who had been sent to work in a bleaching factory aged twelve and never reconciled himself to his family’s loss of gentility,” he says. “And it would also have yielded rich background material that Charles Dickens’ own life didn’t provide but which the plot of Oliver Twist required.”
He writes that “making children like Blincoe work was almost universally agreed to be a good thing. Schooling, on the other hand, was seen to have its dangers. Juvenile, sweated labour inured poor children to their ‘inferior offices in life’, but education threatened to give them ideas above their stations. This was a real concern in the highly-stratified world of 18th –century England, in which everyone was meant to have their place upon a vast hierarchical chain stretching from the most degraded humans – beggars, actors and minstrels – on to artisans, shopkeepers and tenant farmers; next to bankers and merchants; and finally arriving at the dizzy heights of squires, barons, earls, dukes, archbishops and, at the very top, monarchs.”
And as bad as the work’us was, apprenticeship as a ‘sweep’s boy’ and indentured work in the mills, was worse.
“When Parliament set up a committee in 1816 to inquire into the ‘State of Children Employed in the Manufactories of The United Kingdom’, it was revealed that few mills worked their child apprentices for less than eleven-and-a-half hours. Many forced them to labour for fifteen hours, with minimal breaks for refreshment …Lunch eaten next to the machines.”
As the book continues, “only at nine or ten o’clock at night, after more than sixteen hours of work, and with less than half an hour to rest, did the wheel finally come to a stand. The absence of milk in the diet, combined with near-constant standing during the day and the awkward motions required to operate the machines, took a heavy toll on Blincoe. At the age of fifteen, as he entered puberty and needed proper nutrition to build up healthy bones, his legs began to bow… Continuous standing and monotonous movements ensured that for the remainder of his life Blincoe would walk with difficulty on buckled legs.”
It would be nice to think that the world has changed, but in so many ways it is evident that it hasn’t, as the children suffering throughout the world in child labour, the sex trade, orphans of AIDS in Africa attests.
This book, about a time hundreds of years past, is a reminder and an impetus to care about children still in need of advocacy now.
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