For thousands of years, families put their children to work on their farms or in whatever labor was necessary for survival — only children of the wealthy and powerful escaped this fate. Until the last one hundred years or so, children were considered by most societies to be the property of their parents. They had little protection from governments who viewed children as having no human or civil rights outside of their parents’ wishes, and Great Expectations brings some of these conditions to light.
The industrial revolution in early nineteenth-century England (the industrial revolution started about one hundred years later in the United States) made things worse. Laborers were in greater demand than ever. Mines, factories, and shops needed help, and not enough men or women could fill their needs. Children were cheap, plentiful, and easy to control. Orphanages — and even parents — would give their children to the owners of cotton mills and other operations in exchange for the cost of maintaining them.
At that time, the government didn’t establish a minimum age, wage, or working hours. Children as young as five or six were forced to work thirteen to sixteen hours a day for slave wages and barely any food. The Sadler Committee, investigating textile factory conditions for Parliament in 1832, discovered children working from six in the morning to nine at night with no breakfast, one hour for lunch, and a two-mile walk home. Children late for work were often beaten, and if they worked too slowly or fell asleep at the machines, they were hit with a strap, sometimes severely. There was no family time and some of them did not get supper because they were too tired to wait for it. Children who were “bound” to companies often tried to run away. If they were caught, they were whipped. Aside from being underfed, exhausted, sick, or injured, children spending so many hours a day over factory machines often had bowed legs and poorly developed limbs and muscles.
