Industrialization

I wanted to focus this post on parts of the hard life in the textile system.

Accidents

Nearly a thousand people with wounds and mutilations from factory machinery were treated at one of any of the hospitals.  A doctor, Michael Ward, has seen many injuries.  Mostly children.  Their arms get stuck in machinery.  They lose fingers and their skin is stripped down to the bone.  Much other tragedies have occured.  The working conditions have changed children.  Abraham Whitehead, a cloth merchant, said, "I have seen a little boy, only this winter, who works in the mill, and who lives within two hundred or three hundred yards of my own door; he is not yet six years old, and I have seen him, when he had a few coppers in his pocket, go to a beer shop, call for a glass of ale, and drink as boldly as any full-grown man, cursing and swearing."  This man believed that the accidents were caused by how tired the children were.  

Here is a paragraph taken from  http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRaccidents.htm?menu=Textiles

This paragraph explained a heart-wrenching accident that I could not think to put into my own words.

[Robert Blincoe saw several accidents while working in the textile industry: "A girl named Mary Richards, who was thought remarkably handsome when she left the workhouse, and, who was not quite ten years of age, attended a drawing frame, below which, and about a foot from the floor, was a horizontal shaft, by which the frames above were turned. It happened one evening, when her apron was caught by the shaft. In an instant the poor girl was drawn by an irresistible force and dashed on the floor. She uttered the most heart-rending shrieks! Blincoe ran towards her, an agonized and helpless beholder of a scene of horror. He saw her whirled round and round with the shaft - he heard the bones of her arms, legs, thighs, etc. successively snap asunder, crushed, seemingly, to atoms, as the machinery whirled her round, and drew tighter and tighter her body within the works, her blood was scattered over the frame and streamed upon the floor, her head appeared dashed to pieces - at last, her mangled body was jammed in so fast, between the shafts and the floor, that the water being low and the wheels off the gear, it stopped the main shaft. When she was extricated, every bone was found broken - her head dreadfully crushed. She was carried off quite lifeless." ]

Orphan Workers

Many parents were not going to allow children to work at these factories.  Especially, in those conditions.  But owners need workers.  So, they turned to orphanages.  Children would sign a contract that made them officially property of these factories.  They became known as pauper apprentices.  Reading on, it sounded like they tricked these orphans into coming to work.  John Birley was an orphan.  He said that about twenty men pulled him and about forty other orphans in a room.  Called them up one by one.  John went up and a man said, "Well John, you are a fine lad, would you like to go into the country?"  That isn't asking them to work in a factory under terrible conditions.  

To cut to the chase, factory life were basically terrible.