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
I have not yet done more than to mention the cuffs, kicks, or scourging,
to which, in common with many other of his unhappy comrades, Blincoe
stood exposed, since, by his account, almost from the first hour in which
he entered the Mill, till he arrived at a state of manhood, it was one
continued round of cruel and arbitrary punishment. Blincoe declared, he
was so frequently and immoderately beaten, it became quite familiar; and
if its frequency did not extinguish the sense of feeling, it took away
the terror it excited on his first entrance into this den of ignorance
and crime. I asked him if he could state an average number of times
in which he thought he might in safety say, he had suffered corporeal
punishment in a week. His answer invariably was, that his punishments
were so various and so frequent, it was impossible to state with any
thing approaching to accuracy. If he is to be credited, during his ten
years of hard servitude, his body was never free from contusions, and
from wounds inflicted by the cruel master whom he served, by his sons, or
his brutal and ferocious and merciless overlookers.
It is already stated, that he was put to the back of a stretching-frame,
when he was about eleven years of age, and that often, owing to the
idleness, or the absence of the stretcher, he had his master’s work,
as well as his own to perform. The work being very coarse, the motion
was rapid, and he could not keep up to the ends. For this he was sure
to be unmercifully punished, although, they who punished him knew the
task assigned was beyond what he could perform. There were different
stretchers in the mill; but, according to Blincoe’s account, they were
all of them base and ferocious ruffians. Robert Woodward, who had
escorted the apprentices from Lowdham Mill, was considered the worst of
those illiterate vulgar tyrants. If he made a kick at Blincoe, so great
was his strength, it commonly lifted him off the floor. If he struck him,
even a flat-handed blow, it floored him; If, with a stick, it not only
bruised him, but cut his flesh. It was not enough to use his feet or his
hands, but a stick, a bobby or a rope’s-end. He and others used to throw
rollers one after another, at the poor boy, aiming at his head, which,
of course was uncovered while at work, and nothing delighted the savages
more, than to see Blincoe stagger, and to see the blood gushing out in a
stream! So far were such results from deterring the monsters, that long
before one wound had healed, similar acts of cruelty produced others, so
that, on many occasions, his head was excoriated and bruised to a degree,
that rendered him offensive to himself and others, and so intolerably
painful, as to deprive him of rest at night, however weary he might be.
In consequence of such wounds, his head was over-run by vermin. Being
reduced to this deplorable state, some brute of a quack doctor used to
apply a pitch cap, or plaister to his head. After it had been on a given