Peter Kirby acknowledges that the question of children's industrial health in nineteenth-century Britain is buried under three layers of epistemic complexity. Because the topics of occupational disease and injury among working children were framed within a larger discussion over factory reform, medical experts called to testify on both sides of the issue had biases about the healthfulness of child labor. Children who worked in factories might also experience squalid urban living conditions, familial poverty, parental neglect, lack of sunlight, and malnutrition. Which one of these factors “caused” ill health? Finally, medical categories used by nineteenth-century doctors do not map neatly onto diseases acknowledged by modern medicine, making it difficult to know whether nineteenth-century doctors were correctly identifying the aetiology of conditions they described.

Having issued this disclaimer, Kirby moves to debunking some of the claims often made by nineteenth-century factory reformers. He argues that while factory work was rumored to cause deformities, cases of bowlegs and knock-knees were just as likely to be congenital or a result of rickets as results of factory work. Factory children were reputed to be small, but smaller, weaker children may also have been selected for factory work, because they were unable to do harder manual labor outdoors or in service. In contrast, conditions largely unmentioned by reformers, including the terrible contamination of factory air with cotton particles and contaminating impurities, could and did lead to infectious diseases, “brown lung” or byssinosis, cholera, and even anthrax. Although reformers rarely publicized acute injuries to children, Kirby shows that the problem of lacerations, amputations, and other injuries to the upper body was widespread.

While factory work could be dangerous, parents, employers, and others subverted new regulations intended to keep young children out of factory settings. Children seeking employment in factories had to be certified as of age by a surgeon, but few children had proof of their ages. The factory inspectorate responded by developing anthropometric standards based on average heights of children at certain ages and the timing of tooth eruption. While these initiatives did not stop widespread falsification of child workers' ages, they did result in widespread data collection on children's heights. This data shows that urban children, whether they worked in factories or not, significantly lagged behind their rural counterparts. Mining children, who spent long days underground, were the shortest of all, suggesting that lack of sunlight and vitamin D stunted their growth.

Turning to a final category, allegations that factory children were corporally punished, Kirby argues that workplace abuse cannot be separated from the often violent context of the early nineteenth century. Parish apprentices and boys in the metal trades were the most likely to be beaten, but all children might be ill treated at some time or another, whether owing to widespread acceptance of a moderate beating as part of training or to some particular slipup on the part of the child. Still, he asserts, major episodes of violence against young workers were overstated.

Kirby hints at, but might profitably have explored in greater detail, the reasons why leaders of the movement to regulate child labor emphasized some aspects of ill health but not others. The discourse of child deformity—the “factory cripple” whose illness developed over time—was much more common than that of the factory amputee, even though the latter problem was easier to substantiate. Overlookers wielding billy rollers who transformed children into “white slaves” were more compelling for reformers than were parents who worked alongside their children and occasionally boxed their ears. But Kirby might also have recognized that factory proponents had their own discourse, emphasizing the light and pleasant work that children had to do, and he might have explored whether children had access to food, drink, bathroom breaks, or periods of rest.

Kirby's book occasionally reads like an effort to rescue misunderstood employers of children from the vast condescension of posterity. He notes the difficulty of separating the health effects of urbanization from those of the industrial workplace, but he does not acknowledge that such workplaces brought poor families to cities in the first place. On the basis of a single source, Kirby speculates that factories may have provided needed work opportunities for children with disabilities. He endorses the conclusions of the 1833 Factory Commission that textile factories were wholesome places for children to work, without considering the shortcomings of that body in terms of both membership and consideration of the evidence. More disturbingly, he also suggests that there may have been good reasons for workplace violence against children, including increasing labor productivity and ensuring workplace safety. He cites Clark Nardinelli's assertion that corporal punishment was a rational choice on the part of factory employers, who had to motivate workers who they paid very little but did not brag about the connection between physical punishment and worker productivity. Kirby's indebtedness to Nardinelli's understanding of child labor is also underlined in Kirby's surprising conclusion—that regulatory legislation brought no measurable advancement to the health or well-being of children employed in industry.

Based on an impressive array of secondary and primary sources, Kirby's book shows that a combination of well-conducted old-fashioned social history and thoughtful consideration of alternative explanations for events can result in new propositions even in an area about which much has been written. The book's brevity, crisp writing style, and controversial arguments will make it attractive both to teachers of undergraduate and graduate history seminars and to scholars seeking an introduction to the issue of working children in the nineteenth century.