Child Workers is a timely and innovative exploration of parish apprenticeship and factory work in the early phase of English industrialization. Tightly focused on the interaction between the poor law and early capitalism, its conclusions are instructive for wider industrial processes: that parish apprentices were used to support the expansion of the factory labor force all over the country, that they were better regulated and supervised than has been previously thought, and that formal apprenticeship did serve a useful purpose in equipping poor children with the skills to become factory employees and to define themselves as gendered workers. This work is underpinned by impressive (and at times downplayed) archival work: a sample of 164 parishes and many textile businesses. Katrina Honeyman considers the three angles of economic, business, and poor law history, although the work sits most comfortably in the first two niches. This is not a poor law history per se, although it profitably uses poor law sources to shed light on industrial and business processes.
The book falls into two parts. The first aims to provide a rigorous exploration of the mechanics and scale of parish factory apprenticeship on a national level. The second, and more genuinely innovative, considers the experience of factory apprenticeship, as frequently as possible from the child's point of view. Honeyman thus sets out both to substantiate what we know (or think we know) about child labor and to move the inquiry into areas that are generally overlooked or dismissed as unrecoverable. These aims are ambitious but are largely successfully realized.
Honeyman achieves a sense of balance in her work by keeping both the supply (parish) and demand (factory) sides of the equation in view. Factory apprenticeships had benefits for both, enabling parishes to dispose of their children and enabling factories to expand and create a flexible workforce. By enumerating the scale and geographical patterns of factory apprenticing, Honeyman lays out a much broader picture of parish child labor than has hitherto been appreciated. Parishes from all over the country engaged in factory apprenticeship, although the extent and distance from the home parish varied considerably according to local employment opportunities. This wide-ranging system was both organized and supervised and showed a long-range continuity in legal terms with the ongoing system of trade apprenticeships.
The chapters in this section are heavily based on the interpretation of numerical analysis, which is at times repetitive. One parish is discussed after another, and more probing insight could have been provided via thematic discussions. Readers would also benefit from a greater provision of average figures and indicators of percentage growth. The sample is biased toward London parishes—a seemingly inevitable skew given the state of surviving sources—but this bias is further highlighted by the use of extensive numerical tables for the metropolitan parishes and not for the provincial ones. The evidence, however, allows reflections on the rationality of using pauper apprentices, a practice often cast as increasingly irrational over time, as legislative requirements on conditions brought more restrictions for employers and greater expense. Honeyman, however, refocuses this assertion by pointing out that many of the costs to employers had to be borne no matter who provided the factory workforce.
In part 2, Honeyman turns to the experience of being a pauper apprentice: what the children actually did, how they were supervised, and how they felt. Some of her analysis is based on a reworking of the familiar returns made to parliamentary investigations, but much more is added by a systematic trawl of parish and business documents. She argues that apprentices learned to be disciplined factory workers, even if they did not acquire specific skills, and that although exploited, they could rely on some level of supervision from the home parish. The most innovative part of the investigation involves a systematized mapping of measures of protection and neglect from parish and employer. This highlights the range of experiences faced by children and also the potential difference between theory and practice. Some parishes and firms made promises and kept them; others promised much but delivered little. It was thus possible to be both protective and neglectful. Ultimately, both parish and employer wanted the arrangement to work, and the children had limited recourse in the case of homesickness and mild mistreatment.
As a whole, the book is honest about what can be achieved and what is undiscoverable in a study of this type. The attempt to capture children's voices is rare and welcome, although it is difficult to assess their freedom to speak and the accuracy of their recorded words. A strong underlying theme throughout is the impact of local conditions: where local industry was vibrant, children tended to stay nearby. This local contextualization is carefully done and convincing. Honeyman chose to present a very focused angle on industrialization and child labor. This is one of the book's strengths, but it does introduce problems. First, it precludes some discussion of how and if pauper factory apprenticeship related to wider trends in the historiography of childhood and sentiment. Second, and perhaps more problematically, by focusing on factory apprenticeship only, we ultimately learn little of how this story fits into the wider contemporary picture of pauper apprenticeship, which was always heavily based on more traditional placements. The reader lacks a sense of how the experience of being a pauper apprentice differed from that of a free child laborer. Were parish children less likely to run away? Did free children have the same gendered experience of work as their pauper peers, and did they acquire the skills that enabled them to remain in the workforce as adults? Rates of successful completion are unknowable but are suggested to be much higher than indicated in parliamentary returns for London parish apprentices. Was this true, and did it differ between pauper apprentices and free child workers?
Honeyman has achieved an impressive balance of viewpoints in her discussion, most notably by keeping both parish and employer in view. She convinces in her analysis of the importance of parish apprenticeship and its significance well into the 1850s. Most important, she reveals a system more organized and rational than often thought, which supplied independent yet pliable units of labor to the rapidly expanding industrial sector.
