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
It is already stated, that the food was very ordinary and not very
plentiful; the apprentices were so oppressed by hunger, that the oldest
and most daring sallied out at night and plundered the fields, and
frequent complaints were made, and the apprentices got a very bad name,
which belonged rather to the masters, in whose parsimony it originated!
When Blincoe had served about three years of his time, an event happened
at Lowdham Mill, arising out of the manner in which apprentices were
treated, that wrought a complete revolution there, and led to a new era
in Blincoe’s biography! Among the girls, who were bound apprentices to
Messrs. Lamberts of Nottingham and Lowdham, were two sisters, named Fanny
and Mary Collier, who had a mother residing in London. These young girls
finding their health declining from excess of labour, bad provisions,
and want of wholesome air and exercise, found means to write a letter
to their mother, full of complaints, upon which, the widow undertook a
journey to Lowdham, where she resided a fortnight, during which time, she
was a reserved and shrewd observer of the condition of her own and of
other children, and then returned to the metropolis. As far as Blincoe
remembers these circumstances, Mrs. Collier did not make any complaints
to Messrs. Lamberts, or to the manager! She reserved such representation
for the parish officers of Saint Pancras, which induced them to send
down a parochial committee, to inquire into the state and condition of
the apprentices. One day, just as the dinner was being served out in the
_usual_ slovenly manner, without the least notice of the intended visit
having been previously given, the Committee arrived, without asking or
waiting for permission, they walked into the common room, and tasting
the viands upon the table, they found them such as had been described.
Whether _conscience_ had any concern in the effort to discover and
reform abuses in the mill, said Blincoe, I know not; but this I do know,
that, if they had had a spark of shame, pity or remorse, the sallow,
and sickly appearance of the eighty victims, saying nothing of Mary
Richards, who was for ever rendered a cripple, ought to have filled them
with sorrow and shame, on account of the base and cruel imposition,
that had been practised in 1799. It is more probable, however, that the
atrocious treatment experienced by the thousands and tens of thousands
of orphan children, poured forth from our charitable institutions, and
from parish workhouses, and the dreadful rapidity with which they were
consumed in the various cotton-mills, to which they were transported,
and the sad spectacle exhibited by most of the survivors, were the real
causes, which, in 1802, produced Sir Robert Peel’s Bill, for the relief
and protection of infant paupers employed in cotton-mills. Hence, the
extraordinary liveliness evinced by the overseers and churchwardens
of Saint Pancras might have been occasioned by the dreadful scenes of