A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy: Sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the horrors of a cotton-mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published. — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy: Sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the horrors of a cotton-mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published.
John Stuart Mill · en
trick,” said Blincoe, “I have never been able to conquer the aversion it
created against Methodists; although I am bound to believe, the wretch
was one of the myriads of _counterfeits_, who flock to their standard
from venal and corrupt motives.”
After Blincoe had received his punishment, every weal and bruise with
which he had started found a fellow. He was handed back to Smith, his
task-master, by whom he was laughed at and jeered unmercifully, and
worked with an increase of severity. When Blincoe left work, his old
associates flocked around him, condoling his misfortune, and offering
him half-pence and bits of bread that they had saved! When they heard
how _godly_ had caught him, their indignation swelled to such a height,
they declared they would drown him in the mill-dam, if ever they had an
opportunity. These condolements were grateful to his wounded pride and
disappointed hopes. As he retired to his miserable bed, the governor,
grinning horribly, made him a low bow in the military style, and gave
him a hearty kick on his _seat of honour_ at the same instant. In this
manner, was he ushered to his bed, laughed at by that portion of the
elder apprentices, who had made similar attempts, and had undergone a
similar or more vindictive punishment. Having abandoned all thoughts of
escape, Blincoe submitted sullenly and patiently to his fate;—he worked
according to his age and stature, as hard as any one in the mill. When
his strength failed, and his limbs refused their office, he endured the
strap or the stick, the cuff or the kick, with as much resignation as any
of his fellow-sufferers. In the faded complexions, and sallow looks of
his associates, he could see, as, in a mirror, his own altered condition!
Many of his comrades had, by this time, been more or less injured by
the machinery. Some had the skin scraped off the knuckles, clean to the
bone, by the fliers; others a finger crushed, a joint or two nipped off
in the cogs of the spinning-frame wheels! When his turn to suffer came,
the fore-finger of his left hand was caught, and almost before he could
cry out, off was the first joint—his lamentations excited no manner of
emotion in the spectators, except a coarse joke—he clapped the mangled
joint, streaming with blood, to the finger, and ran off to Burton, to the
surgeon, who, very composedly put the parts together again, and sent him
back to the mill. Though the pain was so intense, he could scarcely help
crying out every minute, he was not allowed to leave the frame. He said
but little to any one; but was almost continually bemoaning in secret the
cruelty of his fate. Before he was eight years old, Blincoe declared,
that many a time he had been tempted to throw himself out of one of the
upper windows of the factory—but when he came to look at the leap he
purposed taking, his courage failed him—a propensity, he mentioned not as
thinking it evinced any commendable feeling, but as an illustration of