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
Of the few adventures of Robert Blincoe, during his residence in old
Saint Pancras workhouse, the principal occurred when he had been there
about two years. He acknowledges he was well fed, decently clad, and
comfortably lodged, and not at all overdone, as regarded work; yet, with
all these blessings in possession, this destitute child grew melancholy.
He relished none of the humble comforts he enjoyed. It was liberty he
wanted. The busy world lay outside the workhouse gates, and those he was
seldom, if ever permitted to pass. He was cooped up in a gloomy, though
liberal sort of a prison-house. His buoyant spirits longed to rove at
large. He was too young to understand the necessity of the restraint
to which he was subjected, and too opinionative to admit it could be
intended for his good. Of the world he knew nothing, and the society
of a workhouse was not very well calculated to delight the mind of a
volatile child. He saw givers, destitute of charity, receivers of insult,
instead of gratitude, witnessed little besides sullenness and discontent,
and heard little but murmurs or malicious and slanderous whispers. The
aged were commonly petulant and miserable—the young demoralized and
wholly destitute of gaiety of heart. From the top to the bottom, the
whole of this motley mass was tainted with dissimulation, and he saw
the most abhorrent hypocrisy in constant operation. Like a bird newly
caged, that flutters from side to side, and foolishly beats its wings
against its prison walls, in hope of obtaining its liberty, so young
Blincoe, weary of confinement and resolved, if possible to be free, often
watched the outer gates of the house, in the hope, that some favourable
opportunity might facilitate his escape. He wistfully measured the height
of the wall, and found it too lofty for him to scale, and too well
guarded were the gates to admit of his egress unnoticed. His spirits, he
says, which were naturally lively and buoyant, sank under this vehement
longing after liberty. His appetite declined, and he wholly forsook his
usual sports and comrades. It is hard to say how this disease of the mind
might have terminated, if an accident had not occurred, which afforded
a chance of emerging from the lifeless monotony of a workhouse, and of
launching into the busy world, with which he longed to mingle.