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
ROBERT BLINCOE commenced his melancholy narrative, by stating, that he
was a parish orphan, and knew not either his father or mother. From the
age of four years, he says, “till I had completed my seventh, I was
supported in Saint Pancras poorhouse, near London.” In very pathetic
terms, he frequently censured and regretted the remissness of the
parish officers, who, when they received him into the workhouse, had,
as he seemed to believe, neglected to make any entry, or, at least, any
to which he could obtain access, of his mother’s and father’s name,
occupation, age, or residence. Blincoe argued, and plausibly too, that
those officers would not have received him, if his mother had not proved
her settlement; and he considered it inhuman in the extreme, either to
neglect to record the names of his parents, or, if recorded, to refuse
to give him that information, which, after his attaining his freedom,
he had requested at their hands. His lamentations, on this head, were
truely touching, and evinced a far higher degree of susceptibility of
heart, than could have been expected from the extreme and long continued
wretchedness he had endured in the den of vice and misery, where he
was so long immured. Experience often evinces, that, whilst moderate
adversity mollifies and expands the human heart, extreme and long
continued wretchedness has a direct and powerful contrary tendency, and
renders it impenetrably callous.
In one of our early interviews, tears trickling down his pallid cheeks,
and his voice tremulous and faltering, Blincoe said, “I am worse off
than a child reared in the Foundling Hospital. Those orphans have a name
given them by the heads of that institution, at the time of baptism, to
which they are legally entitled. But I have no name I can call my own.”
He said he perfectly recollected riding in a coach to the workhouse,
accompanied by some female, that he did not however think this female
was his mother, for he had not the least consciousness of having felt
either sorrow or uneasiness at being separated from her, as he very
naturally supposed he should have felt, if that person had been his
mother. Blincoe also appeared to think he had not been nursed by his
mother, but had passed through many hands before he arrived at the
workhouse; because he had no recollection of ever having experienced a
mother’s caresses. It seems, young as he was, he often enquired of the
nurses, when the parents and relations of other children came to see
his young associates, _why no one came to him_, and used to weep, when
he was told, that _no one had ever owned him_, after his being placed
in that house. Some of the nurses stated, that a female, who called
soon after his arrival, inquired for him by the name of “Saint;” and,
when he was produced, gave him a penny-piece, and told him his mother
was dead. If this report were well founded, his mother’s illness was
the cause of his being removed and sent to the workhouse. According to