or those where the approach path was too narrow for adults. Younger children worked as ‘trappers’ who opened and shut doors as the coal wagons travelled through mines, or carried heavy loads of coal on their backs as ‘coal bearers.’ Factory managers considered child labour to be important training for future factory work. The evidence from British factory records reveals that about half of the factory workers had started work when they were less than ten years old and per cent when they were under . Women may well have gained increased financial independence and self-esteem from their jobs; but this was more than offset by the humiliating terms of work they endured, the children they lost at birth or in early childhood and the squalid urban slums that industrial work compelled them to live in.
In his novel Hard Times , Charles Dickens ( - ), perhaps the most severe contemporary critic of the horrors of industrialisation for the poor, wrote a fictional account of an industrial town he aptly called Coketown. ‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a stare of melancholy madness.’ A lane in the poorer quarters of London; engraving by the French artist Dore, .
T HE I NDUSTRIAL R EVOLUTION T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY D.H.Lawrence ( - ), British essayist and novelist, writing seventy years after Dickens, described the change in a village in the coal-belt, change