OASTLER ON FACTORY LIFE
In volume II of Cobbett’s Magazine, there is an article on “Doctrinaire Government and the factory system,” and a quotation is made from a speech by Oastler, asserting that “the factory system has caused a great deal of the distress and immorality of the time, and a great deal of the weakness of men’s constitutions.” Oastler said he would not present fiction to them, but tell them what he himself had seen. “Take,” he said, “a little child. She shall rise from her bed at four in the morning of a cold winter’s day—before that time she awakes perhaps half-a-dozen times, and says, ‘Father, is it time—father, is it time?’ When she gets up she feels about her for her little bits of rags, her clothes, and puts them on her weary limbs and trudges on to the mill, through rain or snow, one or two miles, and there she works from thirteen to eighteen hours, with only thirty minutes’ interval. Homewards again at night she would go when she was able, but many a time she hid herself in the wool in the mill, not being able to reach home; at last she sunk under these cruelties into the grave.” Mr Oastler said he could bring hundreds of instances of this kind, with this difference, that they worked 15 instead of 18 hours.
This was delivered a few years before Bill was born, but it held good in some cases, he was sure, in his early boyhood. There were then some cotton mills in Keighley district, and the young were allowed to submit to toil which was far too exhausting to allow of nature battling for the support of the human frame. Hence, Bill’s own description of the poor little factory girl is an apt corroboration:—
They are up in the morning reight early,
They are sometimes afore leet;
Ah hear ther clogs they are clamping,
As t’little things go dahn the street.
They are off in the morning reight early,
With ther basket o’ jock on ther arm;
The bell is ting-tonging, ting-tonging,
As they enter the mill in a swarm.
They are skapering backward and forward,
Ther ends to keep up if they can;
They are doing ther utmost endeavours,
For fear o’ the frown o’ man.
. . . . .
And naw from her ten hours’ labour,
Back to her cottage she shogs:
Ah hear by the tramping and singing,
’Tis the factory girl in her clogs.
An’ at night, when she’s folded i’ slumber,
She’s dreaming o’ noises an’ drawls;—
Of all human toil under-rated,
’Tis our poor little factory girl.