'I have seen them fall asleep,' said an over-looker in 1833, 'and they have been performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the Billy had stopped. Put to bed with supper in their hands, they were clasping it next morning, when their parents dragged them out of bed. Half asleep they stumbled or were carried to the mill, to begin again the ceaseless round.'
'It keeps them out of mischief', said the opponents of shorter hours. Besides, the conditions were no worse than any other industries! Factory work, however, as the doctors show, was different from work in the mines. The heat and confinement of the mill caused precocious sexual development, whilst in the mines the result of exaggerated muscular development was to delay maturity.
In 1842 conditions are better than they were in 1833—thanks to the factory inspectors. There is little positive cruelty, and the sight of deformity—enlarged ankle bones, bow legs, and knock knees, caused by excessive standing as a child—is rare. The problem now is one of industrial fatigue. The children are 'sick-tired'.
5. The Midlands of Leicestershire, Notts, and Derbyshire are a region of red bricks and pantiles, dotted over valleys of exquisite green. So let us leave the smoke of Lancashire and hover here for a while. Here dwell the stocking workers or frame-work knitters—the people who knit on frames stockings, gloves, and other articles of hosiery. It does not look like a region of industry. There are only a few towns, such as Nottingham, Leicester, and Loughborough; and except for a few lace factories in Nottingham, large buildings are rare. The town knitters either work in their own homes or in shops with standings for perhaps as many as fifty frames. In the villages the knitting is nearly all done in the cottages, opposite long low windows, or in a small out-house which might well be a fowl-house.
But in the streets of Leicester we can see 'life' of a sort. We can watch the procession to the pawnbrokers. Some of the knitters pawn their blankets for the day, and most lodge their Sunday clothing during the week. Says a Leicester pawnbroker:
'We regularly pay away from £40 to £50 (to some 300 persons) every Monday morning or on the Tuesday. They will, perhaps, wash on the Monday and get their linen clean preparatory to the next Sunday, and in the course of the week they bring all the linen things they can spare. Friday is the worst; they will then bring their small trifling articles, such as are scarcely worth a penny, and we lend on them, to enable them to buy a bit of meat or a few trifles for dinner.'[41]
They are too poor to indulge in church-going or alcohol. They have no clothes to go to church in. Their publican is the druggist, where they buy opium for themselves and Godfrey's cordial, a preparation from laudanum, for their children. In the whole of Leicester, with its population of 50,000, there are but nine gin-houses. And only on Sundays do they get a bit of schooling. 'We have only one bit of a cover lid to cover the five of us in winter ... we are all obliged to sleep in one bed.'[42]
A frame smith, making his usual inspection of hosiers' frames at workmen's dwellings in Nottingham, after thus spending a fortnight, found his health had begun to suffer from the squalid wretchedness of their abodes. Thinking to improve it, he went on the same errand into the country, but found the frame-work knitters there in a still more deplorable state. From the bad air and other distressing influences in their condition and that of their dwellings, in another fortnight he returned, too ill to attend to his business for some weeks afterwards. This occurred in 1843.[43]
Nottingham, however, with its up-to-date lace trade was usually better off than this. The lace factories, like the cotton mills in Lancashire, eased the position of the hand-workers. In Leicestershire the knitters had no such alternative. The more their earnings were reduced, the more helplessly they were bound to their only trade.
6. 1842 is a long while ago! Let us go to sleep for thirty years and wake up in 1871, when the Truck Commissioners are publishing their report.