Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution Hardback
by Jane (University of Oxford) Humphries
Part of the Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series series
Hardback
Description
This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010.
Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling.
The classic era of industrialisation, 1790-1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour.
While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together.
The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling.
Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.
Information
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Out of stock
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:454 pages, 37 Tables, black and white; 7 Line drawings, unspecified
- Publisher:Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date:24/06/2010
- Category:
- ISBN:9780521847568
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:454 pages, 37 Tables, black and white; 7 Line drawings, unspecified
- Publisher:Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date:24/06/2010
- Category:
- ISBN:9780521847568
