Dr Ken Davies gave a lecture to the Flintshire Historical Society today entitled Children in Early Flintshire Industries. He examined the working lives of young children in between the period c1760 to 1850. By todays standards many of children of that time experienced tough, brutal lives. In Holywell alone there were over 500 apprentices in the cotton mills of the Greenfield Valley. Add to this the children employed in the lead mines and coal mines of the county and the proportion of children in employment was hugely significant.
Dr Davies went on to look at child labour in agriculture, which in numerical terms accounted for even more children than the mines and mills. He then reflected upon the moral position of employers who were prepared to 'turn a blind eye' to these practices. He correctly concluded that child labour had always been the norm and that we should not judge by the standards of the 21st century. Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century was a developing industrial nation, in much the same was as, for example, India is today.
Childhood, the lecture reminded me, is a relatively new concept.
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