Industrial Revolution

             Great-grandmother tells a childhood story
             After the invention of first the Spinning Jenny and then the power loom, the factories took off. There was more than enough work for everyone to go around and that included children. I worked in the cotton mill in Manchester with my parents starting about 1830. I was 10 years old. We all worked together starting at about 6a.m. and we would finish usually about 8p.m. It wasn't that my parents really wanted me to work but our family needed the money. It was just expected that I would go to work as soon as I was able. Also, since my parents and my older siblings all worked, there would be no one at home to take care of me anyway since my mother had started working at the mill. There really was no other choice.
             A typical day in the mill would go something like this: my parents would haul me out of bed usually half asleep. We would walk about a mile and arrive at the mill a little before 6a.m. to make sure we were in the mill by 6. If we were ever late, even by just a couple of minutes, we would be fined or sometimes we were beaten although this didn't happen to me often. My parents tried to make sure we were there on time. After a few minutes the doors would be locked and if we weren't inside by then, we would lose our morning work. My mother and I worked side-by-side everyday. I would help her to comb the raw cotton that would later be spun into threads. Around 8:30a.m. we would stop working for one half hour for breakfast. At 9a.m we would continue our work until 1p.m. when we would stop for an hour for dinner. After an hour we would go back to work until about 8p.m. . (Sources of Western Tradition – Sadler Commission Report on Child Labor – Perry, page 139)
             I was very lucky that my parents were able to protect me most of the time. Some of the other children were often beaten for working too slow. Of course they were working slow because the...

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Industrial Revolution. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 05:41, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/89262.html