Child Labour and Ragged Schools in Victorian London

The essay discusses the impact of child labour on the development of children in Victorian London and the role of ragged schools in providing education to these children. It explores different discourses of childhood like romantic child, factory child and the schooled child. The essay also highlights the devastating effects of child labour on the physical and mental health of children and how ragged schools succeeded in creating schooled children out of the oppressed and psychologically tortured children. The article cites various sources to support the discussion.

Running head: CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Child Labour and Ragged Schools
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
The essay would delve into different discourses of childhood with reference to Victorian
London like romantic child, factory child and the schooled child. The scholars like Rousseau
stressed on the needs of the romantic period in the lives of children. However, in the poor
families, the children were often forced to work and the romantic child faded into the factory
children. The oppression of child labour often gave birth to delinquent child and the psycho-
medical child. The ragged schools evolved in England around the 18th century to provide
elementary and free education to these children. They to a certain extent succeeded in creating
schooled child out of the oppressed and the psychologically tortured child (bl.uk 2018). The
essay would delve into these stages of the various forms of the poor children thriving in
Victorian London.
The first document on child labour is an article from the British Library which
sketches a picture of 19th century Victorian London (Appendix 1). Rousseau proposed the
concept that children have individuality and have the right to enjoy their childhood. This phase
of a phase child’s life came to be termed as romantic childhood was often interrupted by social
issues like child labour. The use of children to do dangerous work in factories devastated their
romantic children and turned them into factory children. The practice of employing child most
probably started with the advancement of the manufacturing industries which used machines for
mass production. The owners of these factories usually recruited children to do jobs like picking
coal, cleaning machines and helping workers by reaching out their tools for them. The spread of
industrialisation around the cities required more children to be employed in the factories. This
led to a large population of child labour in the cities. The scenario in the rural areas were much
better, at least the children started working at a little stage of their lives. They did works like
sowing seeds in the fields, scaring off birds from crops and riding horses. Child labour,

2
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
irrespective of industry and region of employment had a very devastating effect on their
development (Sanghera 2017).
Child labour had a very painful impact on the mind, lives, growth and development
of the children which even scarred their future. The employers exploited the children by
making them work for long hours, longer than the elder workers. They were had to work under
machines and in the mines, all of which were dangerous. According to Kiss et al. (2015), in
additional to gruelling hours of exploitation, these children were paid far less compared to the
senior workers and were exploited physically. They were not given enough food and were beaten
up. The employers often chose the youngest children to work in their factories. The dangerous
working conditions in which children were made to work like mines were responsible for
accidents. Children working in the queries often suffered cuts, burns, fractures, dizziness and
breathing problem, some of which were severe and led to permanent damage to the children
caught in the accidents. The exploitation of the factory owners led deep mark on the minds of the
children and they suffered from nightmares and abnormal and inexplicable fear. The children
often faced rejected from their family and friends. They usually faced painful remarks which
pushed them into social alienation and depression, thus damaging them psychology altogether.
They had to compete with the adult workers who worked for shorter hours and at comparatively
higher salary. It can be summarised that these painful experiences of physical and mental
exploitation in these psycho-medical children caught in the maze of child labour was worsened
by lack of education (ilo.org 2018).
The children in London caught in child labour were deprived of education which
marred their future, worsening their painful life experiences. The children working in the
mines were deprived of education because they could not attend school. This impaired their

3
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
ability to acquire well paid jobs and lead a respectable life. This fear of their future being
doomed created further depression and insecurity. A report by the National Bureau of Economic
Research, the United States of America points out that access to sharp tools coupled with the
inhuman treatment which children trapped in child labour receive lead to arousal of criminal
mentality, thus giving birth to the delinquent children (nber.org 2018). There have also been
reports that these children took up activities like thieving to earn their living. These poor and
suffering children were given education in the ragged schools, which was perhaps the only gleam
of hope in these painful lives (Fontana and Grugel 2015).
The second article from the British Library deals about a brighter form of the
delinquent and the psycho-medical children, the evangelical child (Appendix 2). The ragged
schools were usually free schools which provided education to the destitute children. These
schools were charitable organisations which were run by churches and tried to create evangelical
children out of the delinquent factory children (nationalarchives.gov.uk 2018). The teachers who
imparted education to these children were usually local people without any formal training
though some were employed. The subjects which the unfortunate children learnt were arithmetic,
reading, writing and education on the Holy Bible. These schools also included some basic
lessons on machine operating which was a sort of technical education the children labouring the
industries received. The venue for these ragged schools were often streets and railway arches.
Many of these schools were held at night to allow the children work during the day (Bandara,
Dehejia and Lavie-Rouse 2015).
Education is shown to have positive and strengthening impact on child development.
The child labour receiving education in the ragged school started showing positive
behavioural and cognitive skills, thus enhancing their social acceptances. This in turn

4
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
resulted in fall of crime and better performances in the jobs. These benefits of child education
which ragged school ushered into nineteenth century London led to founding of more ragged
schools (Parker and Parker 2018). The system of ragged schools in a way held the torch for
modern elementary education system. There were scores of ragged schools for the welfare
children in London which were managed by philanthropists and churches. There were several
volunteers who were involved in imparting education to these children, boosting the education
system. The growth strength of the students receiving education in these schools and the
emergence of the London Ragged School Union promoted the social status of these schools in
London. The institution become respectable and increased basic literacy among the poor people
in England. School boards were formed under the Elementary Education Act 1870, thus making
the education of child labour more organised and powerful (Pound 2017). Thus it can be inferred
that ragged schools not only changed the lives of the destitute children but also transformed
elementary education in Victorian London.
One can conclude from the discussion that child labour is fatal to the development of
children. The exploitation level which children involved undergo are far higher compared to the
adult workers. The exploitation makes them physically and mentally weak. The countries around
the world have to take steps to provide education to these child labour and rescue from this
heinous form of exploitation. The countries can follow the ragged school model of London to
impart education to these unlucky children.

5
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
References:
Bandara, A., Dehejia, R. and Lavie-Rouse, S., 2015. The impact of income and non-income
shocks on child labor: evidence from a panel survey of tanzania. World development, 67, pp.218-
237.
Evans, G., 2016. Educational failure and working class white children in Britain. Springer.
Fontana, L.B. and Grugel, J., 2015. To eradicate or to legalize? Child labor debates and ILO
convention 182 in Bolivia. Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International
Organizations, 21(1), pp.61-78.
Ilo.org. 2018. Causes and Consequences of Child Labour in Ethiopia. [online] Available at:
http://www.ilo.org/ipec/Regionsandcountries/Africa/WCMS_101161/lang--en/index.htm
[Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].
Kiss, L., Yun, K., Pocock, N. and Zimmerman, C., 2015. Exploitation, violence, and suicide risk
among child and adolescent survivors of human trafficking in the Greater Mekong
Subregion. JAMA pediatrics, 169(9), pp.e152278-e152278.
Nber.org. 2018. Does Child Abuse Cause Crime?. [online] Available at:
http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12171.html [Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].
Parker, F. and Parker, B.J., 2018. Education in England and Wales: an annotated bibliography.
Routledge.
Pound, L., 2017. How Children Learn-Book 1: From Montessori to Vygosky-Educational
Theories and Approaches Made Easy (Vol. 1). Andrews UK Limited.

6
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Sanghera, J., 2017. Unpacking the trafficking discourse. In Trafficking and prostitution
reconsidered (pp. 37-58). Routledge.
The British Library. 2018. Child labour. [online] Available at: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-
victorians/articles/child-labour [Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].
The National Archives. 2018. The National Archives. [online] Available at:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ [Accessed 23 Apr. 2018].

7
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Appendices:
Appendix 1: The article on child labour:
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Child labour
 Article by:Emma Griffin
 Theme:Childhood and children's literature
 Published:15 May 2014
Industrialisation led to a dramatic increase in child labour. Professor Emma
Griffin explores the dangerous, exhausting work undertaken by children in
factories and mines, and the literary responses of writers including Charles
Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

9
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Child labour was not an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Poor children have always started
work as soon as their parents could find employment for them. But in much of pre-industrial Britain,
there simply was not very much work available for children. This changed with industrialisation. The
new factories and mines were hungry for workers and required the execution of simple tasks that
could easily be performed by children. The result was a surge in child labour – presenting a new kind
of problem that Victorian society had to tackle.
Geological map of England, showing coal-mining districts
Map revealing vast expanses of coal mining and industrial districts in early 19th century Britain,
particularly in the north, 1820.
View images from this item (1)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Research has shown that the average age at which children started work in early 19th-century
Britain was 10 years old, but that this varied widely between regions. In industrial areas, children
started work on average at eight and a half years old. Most of these young workers entered the
factories as piecers, standing at the spinning machines repairing breaks in the thread. A few started
as scavengers, crawling beneath the machinery to clear it of dirt, dust or anything else that might
disturb the mechanism. In the mines, children usually started by minding the trap doors, picking out
coals at the pit mouth, or by carrying picks for the miners. As work was often scarce in the country,
rural children tended to start work later – typically at 10 and a half years old. Their work consisted of
bird-scaring, sowing crops and driving horses. In towns, most boys were employed as errand boys
or chimney sweeps, though once again finding employers who wanted to hire a child could be a
difficult task. The average age for starting work was 11 and a half years old. There was, therefore,
considerable variety in the age at which children started work, with those in the industrial districts
typically starting work the youngest. All children laboured under the same disadvantages, though,

10
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
working for very low pay, performing work that was dirty and dangerous, and usually working long
hours as well.
The life and adventures of Michael Armstrong, the
factory boy
Published in 1840, Michael Armstrong, the factory boy depicted life for children in a Manchester
factory as horrific and unnatural.
View images from this item (2)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Literary responses to child labour
The widespread employment of very young children in factories and mines marked a break with
traditional practice, and was something that some contemporaries found distasteful. It triggered a
series of Parliamentary enquiries into the working conditions of children in mines and factories. Their
reports famously shocked Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens – inspiring ‘The Cry of
the Children’ and A Christmas Carol. Child workers appeared in several other Dickens novels, most
memorably in the form of Oliver Twist, with his narrow escape as the apprentice of Mr Gamfield the
chimney-sweep, and in David Copperfield. David Copperfield was based loosely on Dickens’s own
experiences of starting work at Warren’s Blacking factory at the age of 12 following his father’s
imprisonment for debt. Charles Kingsley’s Water Babiestook up the plight of the nation’s chimney
sweeps and a host more ephemeral novels, such as Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of
Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth’s, Helen Fleetwood also exposed the
suffering of child workers to the middle-class reader. In addition, many of the period’s most vocal
and prolific commentators turned their attention to child workers. And of course, the situation of child

11
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
workers entered the political heart of the nation when reformers such as John Fielden and Lord
Ashley, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, took up their cause in Parliament.
 John Leech’s illustration
from the first edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843.Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
 Previous
 Next
Report on child labour, 1842
Distressing illustrations of children’s working conditions from a revised edition of the Report of the
Royal Commission on the Employment of Children and Very Young People in Mines and Factories,
1842.
View images from this item (12)

12
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Usage terms: Public Domain
Legislation
The campaign against child labour culminated in two important pieces of legislation – the Factory Act
(1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children younger
than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work. The
Mines Act raised the starting age of colliery workers to 10 years. In effect, these two Acts brought
the industrial districts into line with the rest of the country and brought an end to the systematic
employment of young children.
Information concerning the state of children employed
in cotton factories
Published in Manchester, Nathan Gould’s Information concerning the state of children employed in cotton
factories (1818) provided statistical and documented information on the employment of children in
cotton mills.
View images from this item (7)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Abuse
Raising the age at which children started work was an important step forward for child welfare, but it
did little to improve the working conditions of the many children that remained at work. Children in
the workplace still remained largely unprotected from the mistreatment at the hands of employers
and co-workers. In the 1850s the future liberal MP, George Edwards, worked as a farmboy under a
man who ‘never missed an opportunity to thrash me’. This, he concluded though, was ‘no exception
to the rule, all poor boys in those days were badly treated.’[1] Even when parents were aware of their

13
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
children’s abuse, poverty often meant they were unable to take any effective action. Roger Langdon,
for example, described how he was nearly killed by the drunken ploughman under whom he worked.
He informed his parents, but as ‘every other place in the parish was filled and my parents could not
afford to keep me in idleness’ he carried on working for the man.[2] Tackling the systematic abuse of
young and vulnerable workers proved a more difficult problem than removing small children from the
factories.
Further progress was made towards the end of Victoria's reign. The Factory Act of 1878 prohibited
work before the age of 10 and applied to all trades. It was bolstered by the Education Act of 1880,
which introduced compulsory schooling up to the age of 10. Subsequent amendments raised the
school-leaving age to 12, with dispensations to leave before this age if pupils reached the required
standards in reading, writing and arithmetic. By the end of Victoria's reign, almost all children were in
school up to the age of 12. This helped to ensure that a marked improvement in child welfare
occurred between the beginning and end of Victoria's reign.
Footnotes
[1] George Edwards, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster: an Autobiography with a foreword by the Rt.
Hon. Lord Ailwyn of Honingham, introduction by W R Smith (London: Labour Publishing, 1922), pp.18-
19.
[2] Roger Langdon, The Life of Roger Langdon, Told by Himself (London: Elliot Stock, 1909), pp.31-3.
 Written by Emma Griffin
 Emma Griffin is a Professor of History at UEA, where she specialises in the social and cultural
history of Victorian Britain. She has published on the history of popular recreation, hunting, and the
industrial revolution. Her most recent book, Liberty’s Dawn (Yale University Press) considers the
impact of the industrial revolution on the ordinary men, women and children who did the most to
make it happen. She is currently working on a history of everyday life in Victorian Britain.
The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.
See also
MORE ARTICLES ON:CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
 Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Fantasy and fairytale in children's literature
 Moral and instructive children’s literature
 Orphans in fiction
 The origins of children’s literature
 Jane Eyre and the rebellious child
 The Brontës’ early writings: Combining fantasy and fact
 Juvenile crime in the 19th century

14
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
 Jane Austen’s juvenilia
 The title page of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789)
 Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Understanding Alice
 The Governess
 Perceptions of childhood
 William Blake and 18th-century children’s literature
 Ragged Schools
 Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers
 Childhood in Jane Eyre
Related Collection Items
 First edition of A Christmas Carol
 Advertisement for Warren's Blacking Warehouse with cat crest
 Advertisement for Warren's Blacking Warehouse with cockerel crest
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Cry of the Children' as first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine
 Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies
 'Infant Slavery', a poem
 A Voice from the Factories, a poem by Caroline Norton about 19th century child labour
 Factory children. A short description of the factory system
 The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Album
 House of Commons report of boy chimney sweeps
 Report into employing boys as chimney sweeps
 William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience
 The Notebook of William Blake
 The Manufacturing Population of England
 The Guide to Trade: The Dress-maker, and the Milliner
 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1897, Parliamentary
Papers
 Newspaper report about a baker being charged for flogging his apprentice
 'Collier's Explosion in Staffordshire' from A Collection of Songs
 Newspaper article reporting the Match Girls' strike
Related Teaching Resources
 19th-century non-fiction texts: Work and welfare
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18
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Child labour
 Article by:Emma Griffin
 Theme:Childhood and children's literature
 Published:15 May 2014
Industrialisation led to a dramatic increase in child labour. Professor Emma
Griffin explores the dangerous, exhausting work undertaken by children in

19
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
factories and mines, and the literary responses of writers including Charles
Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Child labour was not an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Poor children have always started
work as soon as their parents could find employment for them. But in much of pre-industrial Britain,
there simply was not very much work available for children. This changed with industrialisation. The
new factories and mines were hungry for workers and required the execution of simple tasks that
could easily be performed by children. The result was a surge in child labour – presenting a new kind
of problem that Victorian society had to tackle.
Geological map of England, showing coal-mining districts
Map revealing vast expanses of coal mining and industrial districts in early 19th century Britain,
particularly in the north, 1820.
View images from this item (1)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Research has shown that the average age at which children started work in early 19th-century
Britain was 10 years old, but that this varied widely between regions. In industrial areas, children
started work on average at eight and a half years old. Most of these young workers entered the
factories as piecers, standing at the spinning machines repairing breaks in the thread. A few started
as scavengers, crawling beneath the machinery to clear it of dirt, dust or anything else that might
disturb the mechanism. In the mines, children usually started by minding the trap doors, picking out
coals at the pit mouth, or by carrying picks for the miners. As work was often scarce in the country,
rural children tended to start work later – typically at 10 and a half years old. Their work consisted of
bird-scaring, sowing crops and driving horses. In towns, most boys were employed as errand boys
or chimney sweeps, though once again finding employers who wanted to hire a child could be a

20
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
difficult task. The average age for starting work was 11 and a half years old. There was, therefore,
considerable variety in the age at which children started work, with those in the industrial districts
typically starting work the youngest. All children laboured under the same disadvantages, though,
working for very low pay, performing work that was dirty and dangerous, and usually working long
hours as well.
The life and adventures of Michael Armstrong, the
factory boy
Published in 1840, Michael Armstrong, the factory boy depicted life for children in a Manchester
factory as horrific and unnatural.
View images from this item (2)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Literary responses to child labour
The widespread employment of very young children in factories and mines marked a break with
traditional practice, and was something that some contemporaries found distasteful. It triggered a
series of Parliamentary enquiries into the working conditions of children in mines and factories. Their
reports famously shocked Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens – inspiring ‘The Cry of
the Children’ and A Christmas Carol. Child workers appeared in several other Dickens novels, most
memorably in the form of Oliver Twist, with his narrow escape as the apprentice of Mr Gamfield the
chimney-sweep, and in David Copperfield. David Copperfield was based loosely on Dickens’s own
experiences of starting work at Warren’s Blacking factory at the age of 12 following his father’s
imprisonment for debt. Charles Kingsley’s Water Babiestook up the plight of the nation’s chimney
sweeps and a host more ephemeral novels, such as Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of

21
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth’s, Helen Fleetwood also exposed the
suffering of child workers to the middle-class reader. In addition, many of the period’s most vocal
and prolific commentators turned their attention to child workers. And of course, the situation of child
workers entered the political heart of the nation when reformers such as John Fielden and Lord
Ashley, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, took up their cause in Parliament.
 John Leech’s illustration
from the first edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843.Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
 Previous
 Next
Report on child labour, 1842

22
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Distressing illustrations of children’s working conditions from a revised edition of the Report of the
Royal Commission on the Employment of Children and Very Young People in Mines and Factories,
1842.
View images from this item (12)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Legislation
The campaign against child labour culminated in two important pieces of legislation – the Factory Act
(1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children younger
than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work. The
Mines Act raised the starting age of colliery workers to 10 years. In effect, these two Acts brought
the industrial districts into line with the rest of the country and brought an end to the systematic
employment of young children.
Information concerning the state of children employed
in cotton factories
Published in Manchester, Nathan Gould’s Information concerning the state of children employed in cotton
factories (1818) provided statistical and documented information on the employment of children in
cotton mills.
View images from this item (7)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Abuse
Raising the age at which children started work was an important step forward for child welfare, but it
did little to improve the working conditions of the many children that remained at work. Children in
the workplace still remained largely unprotected from the mistreatment at the hands of employers

23
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
and co-workers. In the 1850s the future liberal MP, George Edwards, worked as a farmboy under a
man who ‘never missed an opportunity to thrash me’. This, he concluded though, was ‘no exception
to the rule, all poor boys in those days were badly treated.’[1] Even when parents were aware of their
children’s abuse, poverty often meant they were unable to take any effective action. Roger Langdon,
for example, described how he was nearly killed by the drunken ploughman under whom he worked.
He informed his parents, but as ‘every other place in the parish was filled and my parents could not
afford to keep me in idleness’ he carried on working for the man.[2] Tackling the systematic abuse of
young and vulnerable workers proved a more difficult problem than removing small children from the
factories.
Further progress was made towards the end of Victoria's reign. The Factory Act of 1878 prohibited
work before the age of 10 and applied to all trades. It was bolstered by the Education Act of 1880,
which introduced compulsory schooling up to the age of 10. Subsequent amendments raised the
school-leaving age to 12, with dispensations to leave before this age if pupils reached the required
standards in reading, writing and arithmetic. By the end of Victoria's reign, almost all children were in
school up to the age of 12. This helped to ensure that a marked improvement in child welfare
occurred between the beginning and end of Victoria's reign.
Footnotes
[1] George Edwards, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster: an Autobiography with a foreword by the Rt.
Hon. Lord Ailwyn of Honingham, introduction by W R Smith (London: Labour Publishing, 1922), pp.18-
19.
[2] Roger Langdon, The Life of Roger Langdon, Told by Himself (London: Elliot Stock, 1909), pp.31-3.
 Written by Emma Griffin
 Emma Griffin is a Professor of History at UEA, where she specialises in the social and cultural
history of Victorian Britain. She has published on the history of popular recreation, hunting, and the
industrial revolution. Her most recent book, Liberty’s Dawn (Yale University Press) considers the
impact of the industrial revolution on the ordinary men, women and children who did the most to
make it happen. She is currently working on a history of everyday life in Victorian Britain.
The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.
See also
MORE ARTICLES ON:CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
 Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Fantasy and fairytale in children's literature

24
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
 Moral and instructive children’s literature
 Orphans in fiction
 The origins of children’s literature
 Jane Eyre and the rebellious child
 The Brontës’ early writings: Combining fantasy and fact
 Juvenile crime in the 19th century
 Jane Austen’s juvenilia
 The title page of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789)
 Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Understanding Alice
 The Governess
 Perceptions of childhood
 William Blake and 18th-century children’s literature
 Ragged Schools
 Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers
 Childhood in Jane Eyre
Related Collection Items
 First edition of A Christmas Carol
 Advertisement for Warren's Blacking Warehouse with cat crest
 Advertisement for Warren's Blacking Warehouse with cockerel crest
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Cry of the Children' as first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine
 Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies
 'Infant Slavery', a poem
 A Voice from the Factories, a poem by Caroline Norton about 19th century child labour
 Factory children. A short description of the factory system
 The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Album
 House of Commons report of boy chimney sweeps
 Report into employing boys as chimney sweeps
 William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience
 The Notebook of William Blake
 The Manufacturing Population of England
 The Guide to Trade: The Dress-maker, and the Milliner
 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1897, Parliamentary
Papers
 Newspaper report about a baker being charged for flogging his apprentice
 'Collier's Explosion in Staffordshire' from A Collection of Songs
 Newspaper article reporting the Match Girls' strike
Related Teaching Resources
 19th-century non-fiction texts: Work and welfare
Share this page
478 244 98 85

25
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
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CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
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CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
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By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. OK For more details of these cookies and
how to disable them, see our cookie policy. Skip to main content Search our website or
catalogueSearch our website or catalogue Search Our website Main Catalogue Catalogues &
Collections Discover & Learn What’s On Visit Business Support Shop Join Discovering Literature
Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians Home Authors Works Articles Collection items
Themes Videos Teaching resources About the project Search Child labour Article by: Emma Griffin
Theme: Childhood and children's literature Published: 15 May 2014 Industrialisation led to a
dramatic increase in child labour. Professor Emma Griffin explores the dangerous, exhausting work
undertaken by children in factories and mines, and the literary responses of writers including Charles
Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Child labour was not an invention of the Industrial
Revolution. Poor children have always started work as soon as their parents could find employment
for them. But in much of pre-industrial Britain, there simply was not very much work available for
children. This changed with industrialisation. The new factories and mines were hungry for workers
and required the execution of simple tasks that could easily be performed by children. The result
was a surge in child labour – presenting a new kind of problem that Victorian society had to tackle.
Geological map of England, showing coal-mining districts Map revealing vast expanses of coal
mining and industrial districts in early 19th century Britain, particularly in the north, 1820. View
images from this item (1) Usage terms: Public Domain Research has shown that the average age at
which children started work in early 19th-century Britain was 10 years old, but that this varied widely
between regions. In industrial areas, children started work on average at eight and a half years old.

28
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Most of these young workers entered the factories as piecers, standing at the spinning machines
repairing breaks in the thread. A few started as scavengers, crawling beneath the machinery to clear
it of dirt, dust or anything else that might disturb the mechanism. In the mines, children usually
started by minding the trap doors, picking out coals at the pit mouth, or by carrying picks for the
miners. As work was often scarce in the country, rural children tended to start work later – typically
at 10 and a half years old. Their work consisted of bird-scaring, sowing crops and driving horses. In
towns, most boys were employed as errand boys or chimney sweeps, though once again finding
employers who wanted to hire a child could be a difficult task. The average age for starting work was
11 and a half years old. There was, therefore, considerable variety in the age at which children
started work, with those in the industrial districts typically starting work the youngest. All children
laboured under the same disadvantages, though, working for very low pay, performing work that was
dirty and dangerous, and usually working long hours as well. The life and adventures of Michael
Armstrong, the factory boy Published in 1840, Michael Armstrong, the factory boy depicted life for
children in a Manchester factory as horrific and unnatural. View images from this item (2) Usage
terms: Public Domain Literary responses to child labour The widespread employment of very young
children in factories and mines marked a break with traditional practice, and was something that
some contemporaries found distasteful. It triggered a series of Parliamentary enquiries into the
working conditions of children in mines and factories. Their reports famously shocked Elizabeth
Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens – inspiring ‘The Cry of the Children’ and A Christmas Carol.
Child workers appeared in several other Dickens novels, most memorably in the form of Oliver Twist,
with his narrow escape as the apprentice of Mr Gamfield the chimney-sweep, and in David
Copperfield. David Copperfield was based loosely on Dickens’s own experiences of starting work at
Warren’s Blacking factory at the age of 12 following his father’s imprisonment for debt. Charles
Kingsley’s Water Babies took up the plight of the nation’s chimney sweeps and a host more
ephemeral novels, such as Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the
Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth’s, Helen Fleetwood also exposed the suffering of child workers
to the middle-class reader. In addition, many of the period’s most vocal and prolific commentators

29
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
turned their attention to child workers. And of course, the situation of child workers entered the
political heart of the nation when reformers such as John Fielden and Lord Ashley, the Seventh Earl
of Shaftesbury, took up their cause in Parliament. John Leech’s illustration of the children ‘Ignorance
and Want’ with industrial chimneys in the background, from the first edition of A Christmas Carol,
1843. Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions Previous Next Report on child labour,
1842 Distressing illustrations of children’s working conditions from a revised edition of the Report of
the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children and Very Young People in Mines and
Factories, 1842. View images from this item (12) Usage terms: Public Domain Legislation The
campaign against child labour culminated in two important pieces of legislation – the Factory Act
(1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children younger
than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work. The
Mines Act raised the starting age of colliery workers to 10 years. In effect, these two Acts brought
the industrial districts into line with the rest of the country and brought an end to the systematic
employment of young children. Information concerning the state of children employed in cotton
factories Published in Manchester, Nathan Gould’s Information concerning the state of children
employed in cotton factories (1818) provided statistical and documented information on the
employment of children in cotton mills. View images from this item (7) Usage terms: Public Domain
Abuse Raising the age at which children started work was an important step forward for child
welfare, but it did little to improve the working conditions of the many children that remained at work.
Children in the workplace still remained largely unprotected from the mistreatment at the hands of
employers and co-workers. In the 1850s the future liberal MP, George Edwards, worked as a
farmboy under a man who ‘never missed an opportunity to thrash me’. This, he concluded though,
was ‘no exception to the rule, all poor boys in those days were badly treated.’[1] Even when parents
were aware of their children’s abuse, poverty often meant they were unable to take any effective
action. Roger Langdon, for example, described how he was nearly killed by the drunken ploughman
under whom he worked. He informed his parents, but as ‘every other place in the parish was filled
and my parents could not afford to keep me in idleness’ he carried on working for the man.[2]

30
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Tackling the systematic abuse of young and vulnerable workers proved a more difficult problem than
removing small children from the factories. Further progress was made towards the end of Victoria's
reign. The Factory Act of 1878 prohibited work before the age of 10 and applied to all trades. It was
bolstered by the Education Act of 1880, which introduced compulsory schooling up to the age of 10.
Subsequent amendments raised the school-leaving age to 12, with dispensations to leave before
this age if pupils reached the required standards in reading, writing and arithmetic. By the end of
Victoria's reign, almost all children were in school up to the age of 12. This helped to ensure that a
marked improvement in child welfare occurred between the beginning and end of Victoria's reign.
Footnotes [1] George Edwards, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster: an Autobiography with a
foreword by the Rt. Hon. Lord Ailwyn of Honingham, introduction by W R Smith (London: Labour
Publishing, 1922), pp.18-19. [2] Roger Langdon, The Life of Roger Langdon, Told by Himself
(London: Elliot Stock, 1909), pp.31-3. Written by Emma Griffin Emma Griffin is a Professor of History
at UEA, where she specialises in the social and cultural history of Victorian Britain. She has
published on the history of popular recreation, hunting, and the industrial revolution. Her most recent
book, Liberty’s Dawn (Yale University Press) considers the impact of the industrial revolution on the
ordinary men, women and children who did the most to make it happen. She is currently working on
a history of everyday life in Victorian Britain. The text in this article is available under the Creative
Commons License. See also MORE ARTICLES ON: CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S
LITERATURE Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Fantasy and fairytale in
children's literature Moral and instructive children’s literature Orphans in fiction The origins of
children’s literature Jane Eyre and the rebellious child The Brontës’ early writings: Combining
fantasy and fact Juvenile crime in the 19th century Jane Austen’s juvenilia The title page of William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Understanding Alice The Governess Perceptions of childhood William Blake and 18th-century
children’s literature Ragged Schools Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers Childhood in Jane
Eyre Related Collection Items First edition of A Christmas Carol Advertisement for Warren's Blacking
Warehouse with cat crest Advertisement for Warren's Blacking Warehouse with cockerel crest

31
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Cry of the Children' as first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies 'Infant Slavery', a poem A Voice from the Factories,
a poem by Caroline Norton about 19th century child labour Factory children. A short description of
the factory system The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Album House of Commons
report of boy chimney sweeps Report into employing boys as chimney sweeps William Blake's
Songs of Innocence and Experience The Notebook of William Blake The Manufacturing Population
of England The Guide to Trade: The Dress-maker, and the Milliner Annual Report of the Chief
Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1897, Parliamentary Papers Newspaper report
about a baker being charged for flogging his apprentice 'Collier's Explosion in Staffordshire' from A
Collection of Songs Newspaper article reporting the Match Girls' strike Related Teaching Resources
19th-century non-fiction texts: Work and welfare Share this page 478 244 98 85 Print this page
Please consider the environment before printing Join our mailing list Keep up to date with news and
events at the British Library Romantics and Victorians Authors Works Articles Collection items
Themes Videos Teaching resources About the project Supported since inception by About UsAbout
the British LibraryOpening timesContact usPress OfficeBlogsJobs and opportunitiesFreedom of
Information Support UsMake a donationBecome a PatronExplore Business Partnerships Quick
LinksMy accountMy Reading Rooms requests ServicesBritish Library On DemandDigitisation
ServicesImages OnlineVenue HireCollection MetadataDataCite Information forResearch
CollaborationAuthorsLibrariansEntrepreneursJournalistsPublishersScientistsSocial
ScientistsTeachers Mobile siteTerms of UseAbout the British
LibraryPrivacyCookiesAccessibilityContact Us All text is British Library and is available under
Creative Commons Attribution Licence except where otherwise stated By using this site, you agree
we can set and use cookies. OK For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our
cookie policy. Skip to main content Search our website or catalogueSearch our website or catalogue
Search Our website Main Catalogue Catalogues & Collections Discover & Learn What’s On Visit
Business Support Shop Join Discovering Literature Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians
Home Authors Works Articles Collection items Themes Videos Teaching resources About the project

32
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Search Child labour Article by: Emma Griffin Theme: Childhood and children's literature Published:
15 May 2014 Industrialisation led to a dramatic increase in child labour. Professor Emma Griffin
explores the dangerous, exhausting work undertaken by children in factories and mines, and the
literary responses of writers including Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Child labour
was not an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Poor children have always started work as soon as
their parents could find employment for them. But in much of pre-industrial Britain, there simply was
not very much work available for children. This changed with industrialisation. The new factories and
mines were hungry for workers and required the execution of simple tasks that could easily be
performed by children. The result was a surge in child labour – presenting a new kind of problem
that Victorian society had to tackle. Geological map of England, showing coal-mining districts Map
revealing vast expanses of coal mining and industrial districts in early 19th century Britain,
particularly in the north, 1820. View images from this item (1) Usage terms: Public Domain
Research has shown that the average age at which children started work in early 19th-century
Britain was 10 years old, but that this varied widely between regions. In industrial areas, children
started work on average at eight and a half years old. Most of these young workers entered the
factories as piecers, standing at the spinning machines repairing breaks in the thread. A few started
as scavengers, crawling beneath the machinery to clear it of dirt, dust or anything else that might
disturb the mechanism. In the mines, children usually started by minding the trap doors, picking out
coals at the pit mouth, or by carrying picks for the miners. As work was often scarce in the country,
rural children tended to start work later – typically at 10 and a half years old. Their work consisted of
bird-scaring, sowing crops and driving horses. In towns, most boys were employed as errand boys
or chimney sweeps, though once again finding employers who wanted to hire a child could be a
difficult task. The average age for starting work was 11 and a half years old. There was, therefore,
considerable variety in the age at which children started work, with those in the industrial districts
typically starting work the youngest. All children laboured under the same disadvantages, though,
working for very low pay, performing work that was dirty and dangerous, and usually working long
hours as well. The life and adventures of Michael Armstrong, the factory boy Published in 1840,

33
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Michael Armstrong, the factory boy depicted life for children in a Manchester factory as horrific and
unnatural. View images from this item (2) Usage terms: Public Domain Literary responses to child
labour The widespread employment of very young children in factories and mines marked a break
with traditional practice, and was something that some contemporaries found distasteful. It triggered
a series of Parliamentary enquiries into the working conditions of children in mines and factories.
Their reports famously shocked Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens – inspiring ‘The Cry
of the Children’ and A Christmas Carol. Child workers appeared in several other Dickens novels,
most memorably in the form of Oliver Twist, with his narrow escape as the apprentice of Mr Gamfield
the chimney-sweep, and in David Copperfield. David Copperfield was based loosely on Dickens’s
own experiences of starting work at Warren’s Blacking factory at the age of 12 following his father’s
imprisonment for debt. Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies took up the plight of the nation’s chimney
sweeps and a host more ephemeral novels, such as Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of
Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth’s, Helen Fleetwood also exposed the
suffering of child workers to the middle-class reader. In addition, many of the period’s most vocal
and prolific commentators turned their attention to child workers. And of course, the situation of child
workers entered the political heart of the nation when reformers such as John Fielden and Lord
Ashley, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, took up their cause in Parliament. John Leech’s illustration
of the children ‘Ignorance and Want’ with industrial chimneys in the background, from the first edition
of A Christmas Carol, 1843. Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions Previous Next
Report on child labour, 1842 Distressing illustrations of children’s working conditions from a revised
edition of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children and Very Young
People in Mines and Factories, 1842. View images from this item (12) Usage terms: Public Domain
Legislation The campaign against child labour culminated in two important pieces of legislation – the
Factory Act (1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children
younger than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work.
The Mines Act raised the starting age of colliery workers to 10 years. In effect, these two Acts
brought the industrial districts into line with the rest of the country and brought an end to the

34
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
systematic employment of young children. Information concerning the state of children employed in
cotton factories Published in Manchester, Nathan Gould’s Information concerning the state of
children employed in cotton factories (1818) provided statistical and documented information on the
employment of children in cotton mills. View images from this item (7) Usage terms: Public Domain
Abuse Raising the age at which children started work was an important step forward for child
welfare, but it did little to improve the working conditions of the many children that remained at work.
Children in the workplace still remained largely unprotected from the mistreatment at the hands of
employers and co-workers. In the 1850s the future liberal MP, George Edwards, worked as a
farmboy under a man who ‘never missed an opportunity to thrash me’. This, he concluded though,
was ‘no exception to the rule, all poor boys in those days were badly treated.’[1] Even when parents
were aware of their children’s abuse, poverty often meant they were unable to take any effective
action. Roger Langdon, for example, described how he was nearly killed by the drunken ploughman
under whom he worked. He informed his parents, but as ‘every other place in the parish was filled
and my parents could not afford to keep me in idleness’ he carried on working for the man.[2]
Tackling the systematic abuse of young and vulnerable workers proved a more difficult problem than
removing small children from the factories. Further progress was made towards the end of Victoria's
reign. The Factory Act of 1878 prohibited work before the age of 10 and applied to all trades. It was
bolstered by the Education Act of 1880, which introduced compulsory schooling up to the age of 10.
Subsequent amendments raised the school-leaving age to 12, with dispensations to leave before
this age if pupils reached the required standards in reading, writing and arithmetic. By the end of
Victoria's reign, almost all children were in school up to the age of 12. This helped to ensure that a
marked improvement in child welfare occurred between the beginning and end of Victoria's reign.
Footnotes [1] George Edwards, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster: an Autobiography with a
foreword by the Rt. Hon. Lord Ailwyn of Honingham, introduction by W R Smith (London: Labour
Publishing, 1922), pp.18-19. [2] Roger Langdon, The Life of Roger Langdon, Told by Himself
(London: Elliot Stock, 1909), pp.31-3. Written by Emma Griffin Emma Griffin is a Professor of History
at UEA, where she specialises in the social and cultural history of Victorian Britain. She has

35
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
published on the history of popular recreation, hunting, and the industrial revolution. Her most recent
book, Liberty’s Dawn (Yale University Press) considers the impact of the industrial revolution on the
ordinary men, women and children who did the most to make it happen. She is currently working on
a history of everyday life in Victorian Britain. The text in this article is available under the Creative
Commons License. See also MORE ARTICLES ON: CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S
LITERATURE Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Fantasy and fairytale in
children's literature Moral and instructive children’s literature Orphans in fiction The origins of
children’s literature Jane Eyre and the rebellious child The Brontës’ early writings: Combining
fantasy and fact Juvenile crime in the 19th century Jane Austen’s juvenilia The title page of William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Understanding Alice The Governess Perceptions of childhood William Blake and 18th-century
children’s literature Ragged Schools Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers Childhood in Jane
Eyre Related Collection Items First edition of A Christmas Carol Advertisement for Warren's Blacking
Warehouse with cat crest Advertisement for Warren's Blacking Warehouse with cockerel crest
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Cry of the Children' as first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies 'Infant Slavery', a poem A Voice from the Factories,
a poem by Caroline Norton about 19th century child labour Factory children. A short description of
the factory system The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Album House of Commons
report of boy chimney sweeps Report into employing boys as chimney sweeps William Blake's
Songs of Innocence and Experience The Notebook of William Blake The Manufacturing Population
of England The Guide to Trade: The Dress-maker, and the Milliner Annual Report of the Chief
Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1897, Parliamentary Papers Newspaper report
about a baker being charged for flogging his apprentice 'Collier's Explosion in Staffordshire' from A
Collection of Songs Newspaper article reporting the Match Girls' strike Related Teaching Resources
19th-century non-fiction texts: Work and welfare Share this page 478 244 98 85 Print this page
Please consider the environment before printing Join our mailing list Keep up to date with news and
events at the British Library Romantics and Victorians Authors Works Articles Collection items

36
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Themes Videos Teaching resources About the project Supported since inception by About UsAbout
the British LibraryOpening timesContact usPress OfficeBlogsJobs and opportunitiesFreedom of
Information Support UsMake a donationBecome a PatronExplore Business Partnerships Quick
LinksMy accountMy Reading Rooms requests ServicesBritish Library On DemandDigitisation
ServicesImages OnlineVenue HireCollection MetadataDataCite Information forResearch
CollaborationAuthorsLibrariansEntrepreneursJournalistsPublishersScientistsSocial
ScientistsTeachers Mobile siteTerms of UseAbout the British
LibraryPrivacyCookiesAccessibilityContact Us All text is British Library and is available under
Creative Commons Attribution Licence except where otherwise stated

37
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Appendix 2: Ragged schools:
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. OK For more details of these cookies
and how to disable them, see our cookie policy.
Skip to main content
Search our website or catalogueSearch our website or catalogue
Search
Our website Main Catalogue
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Discover & Learn
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What’s On
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Visit
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38
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
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Shop
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Search
Ragged Schools
 Article by:Imogen Lee
 Theme:Childhood and children's literature
 Published:15 May 2014
Ragged Schools provided free education for children too poor to receive it
elsewhere. Imogen Lee explains the origins and aims of the movement that
established such schools, focusing on the London’s Field Lane Ragged School,
which Charles Dickens visited.

39
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy; and the
air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in
trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at
the doors, or screaming from the inside (Oliver Twist, ch. 8).
Charles Dickens’s description of a night walk through Islington and Holborn in Oliver Twist (1838)
depicts a metropolis that stumbled with stunted life. By 1841 almost 2 million people lived in London,
but without compulsory schooling only a fraction of this population had received any formal
education, contributing to an illiterate workforce and a rising prison population. As Britain sought to
expand as its Empire and the domestic population grew, the image of London as an Imperial Capital,
made up of poor, unschooled and (due to the 1832 Reform Act), recently enfranchised individuals,
was a visceral muse to the anxieties of Victorian writers and their readers. Without more schools,
‘the capital city of the world,’ feared Dickens, would become, ‘a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance,
misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails’.[1]
Letter from Charles Dickens on ragged schools, from
the Daily News
Charles Dickens’s ‘letter on ragged schooling’ from the Daily News, February 1846.
View images from this item (1)
Usage terms: Public Domain

40
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Field Lane Ragged School
Dickens’s fears for the uneducated masses permeated his work, but so too did his hope for charity
and his faith in schooling. In 1846, eight years after he imagined piles of children punctuating
London’s landscape, Dickens recalled a visit to Field Lane Ragged School, which opened in 1842
near to the very location in which he set Fagin’s fictional den of thieves. The school consisted of,
‘two or three…miserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house,’ where children ‘huddled together on
a bench,’ while, ‘some flaring candles [were] stuck against the walls.’ Not to be ‘trusted with books’
the children were taught ‘orally’ by a voluntary teacher, ‘to look forward in a hymn…to another life,
which would correct the miseries and woes of this’.
Ragged School Rhymes
Illustration of ragged school pupils in torn and tattered clothing from Ragged School Rhymes, 1851.
View images from this item (5)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Field Lane’s humble setting belied its grander aims. The school was part of a new and growing
educational movement, which was ‘willing to teach’ children for free, who were, ‘too ragged,
wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place’. Prior to 1870, under Britain’s laissez-faire, fee-
paying education system schools usually hand picked their students according to academic ability,
wealth, or religion. By contrast Ragged Schools could be attended by anyone and showed ‘some
sympathy’ especially to children and adults, ‘who could gain admission into no charity school, and
who would be driven from any church door’.[2]
By the 1850s Field Lane consisted of a day school, which taught reading, writing, counting and the
Bible; two night schools, one for ‘vagrant and destitute adults,’ another for boys who were employed
during the day; as well as classes in shoemaking and tailoring for boys, and sewing classes for girls.
Alongside its academic and vocational lessons, Field Lane fed and clothed its students, while also

41
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
running a night refuge, lessons on parenting for mothers and a Bible school at weekends. Indeed,
while the school accepted a child of any faith or background, evangelical Christianity was at the
heart of Ragged schooling, with the aim being to,
Teach poor mothers how to clothe and bring up their offspring, to teach fathers their duties to their
families and children their duty to their parents, to teach above all things that true wisdom is true
religion and true religion supreme love to God.[3]
Newspaper report on a visit to the Field Lane ragged school
Outline of the management of Field Lane Ragged School, 1859.
View images from this item (9)
Usage terms: Public Domain
The school’s origins
Field Lane was opened by the London City Mission (LCM), which had been founded in 1835 by
Scottish missionary-worker David Nasmith. Nasmith asked his fellow missionaries to bring ‘an
acquaintance with salvation, through our Lord Jesus Christ’ by providing free education and ‘doing…
good by every means in your power’ for London’s growing population of the ‘destitute poor’. [4] The
work of the LCM received significant financial and political support from the reforming conservative,
Lord Ashley the 7th Earl of Shaftsbury, and in 1844 he helped to establish and chair the Ragged
School Union. The Union was founded with the aim of turning a movement of individual schools, like
LCM’s Field Lane, into a system of free education for poor children that could be sustained by
charity or even government grants.
Dickens visited Field Lane just before the Ragged School Union was formed and just after the
publication of the reports from the Children’s Employment Commission, which the Earl of Shaftsbury

42
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
had also instigated in 1840. These parliamentary reports detailed the horror of child labour in Britain.
The first was published in 1842 and described the low pay, long hours and dangerous work
conditions experienced by children working in mines and collieries. The second report was published
the following year and provided interviews with hundreds of children who worked in various trades
and manufactures. The reports captured Dickens’s imagination, giving urgency to his interest in child
poverty, and this urgency was compounded by the children he encountered in Field Lane. The
students of the Ragged school, who ranged, ‘from mere infants to young men; sellers of fruit, herbs,
lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of bridges; young thieves and beggars,’ gave
faces to the interviews that filled the Commission’s reports.[5] The hardship faced by these children,
and the religious and economic illiteracy the Ragged Schools attempted to stem, would in turn
inspire the child-like figures of Want and Ignorance that clung to the Ghost of Christmas Future in
Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.[6]
 John Leech’s illustration
from the first edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843.Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions
1.
2.
3.

43
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
4.
 Previous
 Next
Ragged children and Ragged jobs
Ragged Schools by no means received unconditional public support. Dickens himself had, ‘no desire
to praise the system’, believing it was not ‘sufficiently secular…presenting too many religious
mysteries and difficulties to minds not sufficiently prepared for their reception’. In 1850, the journalist
Henry Mayhew highlighted the ineffectual nature of the schools by arguing that juvenile delinquency
rates were rising.[7] In his 1851 investigative work, London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew
described the lives of a group of Mudlarks who traipsed up and down the banks of the Thames
looking for coal, copper, rope and any other scrap they might be able to sell. These were the
children for whom Ragged Schools had been established, but instead,
These poor creatures…may be seen of all ages, from mere childhood to positive decrepitude,
crawling among the barges at the various wharfs … with but few exceptions, these people are dull,
and apparently stupid; this is observable particularly among the boys and girls, who, when engaged
in searching the mud, hold but little converse one with another.[8]
Few of these children had been to church or school, and for those who had it was more, ‘because
other boys go there, than from any desire to learn’.[9] As one boy commented, he did not think he
could learn even if he tried 'ever so much’.[10] Indeed, due to their acts of ‘petty theft’ brought about by
hunger, the most common institution these children had encountered was the House of Correction.
[11] For Mayhew, Mudlarks were both young and old, not just in age but in experience. Poverty had
stunted their development, while institutions, like schools and prisons, had left them weary of their
own achievements.
Concerned that their schools did not induce a ‘desire to learn’, and that families saw the classes on
offer as irrelevant, the Ragged School Union began to establish ‘brigades’ for their male pupils in
1857. These extra-curricular groups provided certified jobs in street vending or shoe shining, with a
proportion of the boys’ earnings being placed in a personal bank account.[12] Yet, as the historian
Lionel Rose has shown, many children already worked in such industries outside of Ragged
Schools. As a result, boys from the brigades were vulnerable to ridicule outside the classroom from

44
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
children who chose not to join.[13] Despite hostility from the streets, however, the brigades were
approved by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, who saw them as encouraging discipline
and work-skills among children who might otherwise enter a life of crime.[14]
Limited success
Until the end of the 19th century, schooling remained a mainly voluntary affair, but under the 1857
Industrial Schools Act any Ragged School prepared to be inspected by the Home Office and provide
boarding for children in exchange for Government grants, had the power to compel children to attend
lessons.[15] The Act, and its subsequent 1860 amendment, enabled magistrates to send children as
young as seven or as old as 14, who had been found in the company of criminals or were vagrant
and begging to attend residential schooling for up to two years. While parents or guardians were
expected to fit the bill for this boarding, Ragged Industrial Schools continued to rely almost solely on
charity and Government handouts because many parents were incarcerated or simply too poor to
pay.[16]
The popularity of Ragged Schools among the poorest in society remained dubious throughout the
second half of the 19th century. In the Ragged School Union’s Annual Report for 1857, for example,
out of London’s estimated half a million children, just over 21,500 had attended their lessons or used
their services. Indeed at Field Lane, of the 563 children registered for the day school, only 275 were
actively attending. The Ragged School Union concluded that they were, ‘far from thinking that they
have reached the limits of their work or even accomplished half that which is necessary for the
Metropolis alone’.[17] The quality of the education given was equally questionable. By 1861 an
investigator for the Royal Commission on Education declared that,
There may, perhaps, be one or two cases in which under unpromising circumstances, a boy or girl
has derived benefit from a ragged school, though I admit that I have been unable to discover any.[18]

45
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
It would take a further nine years before Parliament agreed that Ragged schooling alone would not
solve the problems of Ignorance and Want. The introduction of universal, compulsory schooling in
London under the 1870 Education Act finally ensured that every child had a right to a secular school
place and with it, as Dickens had desired 30 years earlier, ‘to correct the miseries and woes’ of
poverty.[19]
Footnotes
[1] Charles Dickens, ‘A letter on ragged schooling’, The Daily News, (4th February 1846) [accessed:
13/08/13]
[2] Ibid., [accessed 13/08/13]
[3] Ragged School Union, Thirteen Annual Report For The Ragged School Union (London: Ragged
School Union, 1857), p.26.
[4] Timothy Keller, ‘Our History’ [accessed: 13/08/13]
[5] Dickens, A Letter [accessed 13/08/13]
[6] See Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 149.
[7] Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 118.
[8] Mayhew’s London being selections from London Labour and the London Poor, ed. by Henry
Mayhew (London: Spring Books, 1851), pp.338-339.
[9] All quotes from Ibid., p. 340.
[10] Ibid., p. 341.
[11] Ibid., p. 342.
[12] Ibid., p. 340. For details of the Boys’ Shoeblack Brigade, see J. S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling
and the working classes, 1860-1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 56-7.
[13] Rose, p.69.
[14] Ibid., p. 69.
[15] 1857 A Bill [as amended in committee] to make better provision for the care and education of
vagrant, destitute, and disorderly children, and for the extension of industrial schools. HC, 1857-58,
[2315], London : Committee of Privy Council on Education, p. 2, cl. 5b
[16] HC Deb 17 June 1857 Vol 145 c. 1954. See ‘Ragged Schools, Industrial Schools and
Reformatories’, Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive – Children in Care 1881-1981[accessed 1
April 2014]

46
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
[17] Ragged School Union, p.26.
[18] Quoted in Rose, pp. 117-118.
[19] Dickens, A Letter [accessed 13/08/13]
Further reading
Pamela Horn, The Victorian and Edwardian School Child (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1989)
JS Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860-1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979)
Seth Koven, Slumming Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2004)
Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English society Volume II, From the Eighteenth
Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)
Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London: Routledge,
1991)
Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012)
 Written by Imogen Lee
 Imogen Lee is a historian and writer who specialises in the history of London childhoods and
disability. She has just completed her PhD thesis 'Creating Childhoods: Ideas of Child and School in
London 1870-1914' at Goldsmiths College.
The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.
See also
MORE ARTICLES ON:CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
 Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Fantasy and fairytale in children's literature
 Moral and instructive children’s literature
 Orphans in fiction
 The origins of children’s literature
 Jane Eyre and the rebellious child
 The Brontës’ early writings: Combining fantasy and fact
 Juvenile crime in the 19th century
 Jane Austen’s juvenilia
 The title page of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789)
 Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Understanding Alice
 The Governess

47
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
 Perceptions of childhood
 Child labour
 William Blake and 18th-century children’s literature
 Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers
 Childhood in Jane Eyre
Related Collection Items
 A plea for Ragged Schools
 'A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 'The Lamb and Flag Ragged Schools, Clerkenwell' from the Illustrated London News
 'Ragged Schools' from the Illustrated London News
 'On Ragged Schools' from the Daily News
 Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis
 An account of the Asylum for Orphan Girls
 A letter about Ragged Schools
Related Works
 A Christmas Carol
 'The Cry of the Children'
Related Teaching Resources
 Dickens’s Oliver Twist: Depictions of Childhood
 19th-century non-fiction texts: Education
Related People
 Charles Dickens
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Share this page
115 23 12 14
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Join our mailing list
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CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
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All text is British Library and is available under Creative Commons Attribution Licence except where
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CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
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CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
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Ragged Schools
 Article by:Imogen Lee
 Theme:Childhood and children's literature
 Published:15 May 2014
Ragged Schools provided free education for children too poor to receive it
elsewhere. Imogen Lee explains the origins and aims of the movement that
established such schools, focusing on the London’s Field Lane Ragged School,
which Charles Dickens visited.
A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy; and the
air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in
trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at
the doors, or screaming from the inside (Oliver Twist, ch. 8).

52
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Charles Dickens’s description of a night walk through Islington and Holborn in Oliver Twist (1838)
depicts a metropolis that stumbled with stunted life. By 1841 almost 2 million people lived in London,
but without compulsory schooling only a fraction of this population had received any formal
education, contributing to an illiterate workforce and a rising prison population. As Britain sought to
expand as its Empire and the domestic population grew, the image of London as an Imperial Capital,
made up of poor, unschooled and (due to the 1832 Reform Act), recently enfranchised individuals,
was a visceral muse to the anxieties of Victorian writers and their readers. Without more schools,
‘the capital city of the world,’ feared Dickens, would become, ‘a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance,
misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails’.[1]
Letter from Charles Dickens on ragged schools, from
the Daily News
Charles Dickens’s ‘letter on ragged schooling’ from the Daily News, February 1846.
View images from this item (1)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Field Lane Ragged School
Dickens’s fears for the uneducated masses permeated his work, but so too did his hope for charity
and his faith in schooling. In 1846, eight years after he imagined piles of children punctuating
London’s landscape, Dickens recalled a visit to Field Lane Ragged School, which opened in 1842

53
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
near to the very location in which he set Fagin’s fictional den of thieves. The school consisted of,
‘two or three…miserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house,’ where children ‘huddled together on
a bench,’ while, ‘some flaring candles [were] stuck against the walls.’ Not to be ‘trusted with books’
the children were taught ‘orally’ by a voluntary teacher, ‘to look forward in a hymn…to another life,
which would correct the miseries and woes of this’.
Ragged School Rhymes
Illustration of ragged school pupils in torn and tattered clothing from Ragged School Rhymes, 1851.
View images from this item (5)
Usage terms: Public Domain
Field Lane’s humble setting belied its grander aims. The school was part of a new and growing
educational movement, which was ‘willing to teach’ children for free, who were, ‘too ragged,
wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place’. Prior to 1870, under Britain’s laissez-faire, fee-
paying education system schools usually hand picked their students according to academic ability,
wealth, or religion. By contrast Ragged Schools could be attended by anyone and showed ‘some
sympathy’ especially to children and adults, ‘who could gain admission into no charity school, and
who would be driven from any church door’.[2]
By the 1850s Field Lane consisted of a day school, which taught reading, writing, counting and the
Bible; two night schools, one for ‘vagrant and destitute adults,’ another for boys who were employed
during the day; as well as classes in shoemaking and tailoring for boys, and sewing classes for girls.
Alongside its academic and vocational lessons, Field Lane fed and clothed its students, while also
running a night refuge, lessons on parenting for mothers and a Bible school at weekends. Indeed,
while the school accepted a child of any faith or background, evangelical Christianity was at the
heart of Ragged schooling, with the aim being to,
Teach poor mothers how to clothe and bring up their offspring, to teach fathers their duties to their
families and children their duty to their parents, to teach above all things that true wisdom is true
religion and true religion supreme love to God.[3]

54
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Newspaper report on a visit to the Field Lane ragged school
Outline of the management of Field Lane Ragged School, 1859.
View images from this item (9)
Usage terms: Public Domain
The school’s origins
Field Lane was opened by the London City Mission (LCM), which had been founded in 1835 by
Scottish missionary-worker David Nasmith. Nasmith asked his fellow missionaries to bring ‘an
acquaintance with salvation, through our Lord Jesus Christ’ by providing free education and ‘doing…
good by every means in your power’ for London’s growing population of the ‘destitute poor’. [4] The
work of the LCM received significant financial and political support from the reforming conservative,
Lord Ashley the 7th Earl of Shaftsbury, and in 1844 he helped to establish and chair the Ragged
School Union. The Union was founded with the aim of turning a movement of individual schools, like
LCM’s Field Lane, into a system of free education for poor children that could be sustained by
charity or even government grants.
Dickens visited Field Lane just before the Ragged School Union was formed and just after the
publication of the reports from the Children’s Employment Commission, which the Earl of Shaftsbury
had also instigated in 1840. These parliamentary reports detailed the horror of child labour in Britain.
The first was published in 1842 and described the low pay, long hours and dangerous work
conditions experienced by children working in mines and collieries. The second report was published
the following year and provided interviews with hundreds of children who worked in various trades
and manufactures. The reports captured Dickens’s imagination, giving urgency to his interest in child
poverty, and this urgency was compounded by the children he encountered in Field Lane. The

55
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
students of the Ragged school, who ranged, ‘from mere infants to young men; sellers of fruit, herbs,
lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of bridges; young thieves and beggars,’ gave
faces to the interviews that filled the Commission’s reports.[5] The hardship faced by these children,
and the religious and economic illiteracy the Ragged Schools attempted to stem, would in turn
inspire the child-like figures of Want and Ignorance that clung to the Ghost of Christmas Future in
Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.[6]
 John Leech’s illustration
from the first edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843.Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions
1.
2.
3.
4.
 Previous
 Next
Ragged children and Ragged jobs
Ragged Schools by no means received unconditional public support. Dickens himself had, ‘no desire
to praise the system’, believing it was not ‘sufficiently secular…presenting too many religious

56
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
mysteries and difficulties to minds not sufficiently prepared for their reception’. In 1850, the journalist
Henry Mayhew highlighted the ineffectual nature of the schools by arguing that juvenile delinquency
rates were rising.[7] In his 1851 investigative work, London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew
described the lives of a group of Mudlarks who traipsed up and down the banks of the Thames
looking for coal, copper, rope and any other scrap they might be able to sell. These were the
children for whom Ragged Schools had been established, but instead,
These poor creatures…may be seen of all ages, from mere childhood to positive decrepitude,
crawling among the barges at the various wharfs … with but few exceptions, these people are dull,
and apparently stupid; this is observable particularly among the boys and girls, who, when engaged
in searching the mud, hold but little converse one with another.[8]
Few of these children had been to church or school, and for those who had it was more, ‘because
other boys go there, than from any desire to learn’.[9] As one boy commented, he did not think he
could learn even if he tried 'ever so much’.[10] Indeed, due to their acts of ‘petty theft’ brought about by
hunger, the most common institution these children had encountered was the House of Correction.
[11] For Mayhew, Mudlarks were both young and old, not just in age but in experience. Poverty had
stunted their development, while institutions, like schools and prisons, had left them weary of their
own achievements.
Concerned that their schools did not induce a ‘desire to learn’, and that families saw the classes on
offer as irrelevant, the Ragged School Union began to establish ‘brigades’ for their male pupils in
1857. These extra-curricular groups provided certified jobs in street vending or shoe shining, with a
proportion of the boys’ earnings being placed in a personal bank account.[12] Yet, as the historian
Lionel Rose has shown, many children already worked in such industries outside of Ragged
Schools. As a result, boys from the brigades were vulnerable to ridicule outside the classroom from
children who chose not to join.[13] Despite hostility from the streets, however, the brigades were
approved by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, who saw them as encouraging discipline
and work-skills among children who might otherwise enter a life of crime.[14]

57
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Limited success
Until the end of the 19th century, schooling remained a mainly voluntary affair, but under the 1857
Industrial Schools Act any Ragged School prepared to be inspected by the Home Office and provide
boarding for children in exchange for Government grants, had the power to compel children to attend
lessons.[15] The Act, and its subsequent 1860 amendment, enabled magistrates to send children as
young as seven or as old as 14, who had been found in the company of criminals or were vagrant
and begging to attend residential schooling for up to two years. While parents or guardians were
expected to fit the bill for this boarding, Ragged Industrial Schools continued to rely almost solely on
charity and Government handouts because many parents were incarcerated or simply too poor to
pay.[16]
The popularity of Ragged Schools among the poorest in society remained dubious throughout the
second half of the 19th century. In the Ragged School Union’s Annual Report for 1857, for example,
out of London’s estimated half a million children, just over 21,500 had attended their lessons or used
their services. Indeed at Field Lane, of the 563 children registered for the day school, only 275 were
actively attending. The Ragged School Union concluded that they were, ‘far from thinking that they
have reached the limits of their work or even accomplished half that which is necessary for the
Metropolis alone’.[17] The quality of the education given was equally questionable. By 1861 an
investigator for the Royal Commission on Education declared that,
There may, perhaps, be one or two cases in which under unpromising circumstances, a boy or girl
has derived benefit from a ragged school, though I admit that I have been unable to discover any.[18]
It would take a further nine years before Parliament agreed that Ragged schooling alone would not
solve the problems of Ignorance and Want. The introduction of universal, compulsory schooling in
London under the 1870 Education Act finally ensured that every child had a right to a secular school
place and with it, as Dickens had desired 30 years earlier, ‘to correct the miseries and woes’ of
poverty.[19]

58
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Footnotes
[1] Charles Dickens, ‘A letter on ragged schooling’, The Daily News, (4th February 1846) [accessed:
13/08/13]
[2] Ibid., [accessed 13/08/13]
[3] Ragged School Union, Thirteen Annual Report For The Ragged School Union (London: Ragged
School Union, 1857), p.26.
[4] Timothy Keller, ‘Our History’ [accessed: 13/08/13]
[5] Dickens, A Letter [accessed 13/08/13]
[6] See Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 149.
[7] Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 118.
[8] Mayhew’s London being selections from London Labour and the London Poor, ed. by Henry
Mayhew (London: Spring Books, 1851), pp.338-339.
[9] All quotes from Ibid., p. 340.
[10] Ibid., p. 341.
[11] Ibid., p. 342.
[12] Ibid., p. 340. For details of the Boys’ Shoeblack Brigade, see J. S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling
and the working classes, 1860-1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 56-7.
[13] Rose, p.69.
[14] Ibid., p. 69.
[15] 1857 A Bill [as amended in committee] to make better provision for the care and education of
vagrant, destitute, and disorderly children, and for the extension of industrial schools. HC, 1857-58,
[2315], London : Committee of Privy Council on Education, p. 2, cl. 5b
[16] HC Deb 17 June 1857 Vol 145 c. 1954. See ‘Ragged Schools, Industrial Schools and
Reformatories’, Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive – Children in Care 1881-1981[accessed 1
April 2014]
[17] Ragged School Union, p.26.
[18] Quoted in Rose, pp. 117-118.
[19] Dickens, A Letter [accessed 13/08/13]

59
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Further reading
Pamela Horn, The Victorian and Edwardian School Child (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1989)
JS Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860-1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979)
Seth Koven, Slumming Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2004)
Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English society Volume II, From the Eighteenth
Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)
Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London: Routledge,
1991)
Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012)
 Written by Imogen Lee
 Imogen Lee is a historian and writer who specialises in the history of London childhoods and
disability. She has just completed her PhD thesis 'Creating Childhoods: Ideas of Child and School in
London 1870-1914' at Goldsmiths College.
The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.
See also
MORE ARTICLES ON:CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
 Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Fantasy and fairytale in children's literature
 Moral and instructive children’s literature
 Orphans in fiction
 The origins of children’s literature
 Jane Eyre and the rebellious child
 The Brontës’ early writings: Combining fantasy and fact
 Juvenile crime in the 19th century
 Jane Austen’s juvenilia
 The title page of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789)
 Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 Understanding Alice
 The Governess
 Perceptions of childhood
 Child labour
 William Blake and 18th-century children’s literature
 Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers
 Childhood in Jane Eyre

60
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Related Collection Items
 A plea for Ragged Schools
 'A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 'The Lamb and Flag Ragged Schools, Clerkenwell' from the Illustrated London News
 'Ragged Schools' from the Illustrated London News
 'On Ragged Schools' from the Daily News
 Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis
 An account of the Asylum for Orphan Girls
 A letter about Ragged Schools
Related Works
 A Christmas Carol
 'The Cry of the Children'
Related Teaching Resources
 Dickens’s Oliver Twist: Depictions of Childhood
 19th-century non-fiction texts: Education
Related People
 Charles Dickens
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Share this page
115 23 12 14
Print this page
Please consider the environment before printing
Join our mailing list
Keep up to date with news and events at the British Library
 Romantics and Victorians
 Authors
 Works
 Articles

61
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
 Collection items
 Themes
 Videos
 Teaching resources
 About the project
Supported since inception by
About Us
About the British Library
Opening times
Contact us
Press Office
Blogs
Jobs and opportunities
Freedom of Information
Support Us
Make a donation
Become a Patron
Explore Business Partnerships
Quick Links
My account
My Reading Rooms requests
Services

62
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
British Library On Demand
Digitisation Services
Images Online
Venue Hire
Collection Metadata
DataCite
Information for
Research Collaboration
Authors
Librarians
Entrepreneurs
Journalists
Publishers
Scientists
Social Scientists
Teachers
 Mobile site
 Terms of Use
 About the British Library
 Privacy
 Cookies
 Accessibility
 Contact Us
All text is British Library and is available under Creative Commons Attribution Licence except where
otherwise stated
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. OK For more details of these cookies and
how to disable them, see our cookie policy. Skip to main content Search our website or

63
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
catalogueSearch our website or catalogue Search Our website Main Catalogue Catalogues &
Collections Discover & Learn What’s On Visit Business Support Shop Join Discovering Literature
Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians Home Authors Works Articles Collection items
Themes Videos Teaching resources About the project Search Ragged Schools Article by: Imogen
Lee Theme: Childhood and children's literature Published: 15 May 2014 Ragged Schools provided
free education for children too poor to receive it elsewhere. Imogen Lee explains the origins and
aims of the movement that established such schools, focusing on the London’s Field Lane Ragged
School, which Charles Dickens visited. A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The
street was very narrow and muddy; and the air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a
good many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at
that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside (Oliver Twist,
ch. 8). Charles Dickens’s description of a night walk through Islington and Holborn in Oliver Twist
(1838) depicts a metropolis that stumbled with stunted life. By 1841 almost 2 million people lived in
London, but without compulsory schooling only a fraction of this population had received any formal
education, contributing to an illiterate workforce and a rising prison population. As Britain sought to
expand as its Empire and the domestic population grew, the image of London as an Imperial Capital,
made up of poor, unschooled and (due to the 1832 Reform Act), recently enfranchised individuals,
was a visceral muse to the anxieties of Victorian writers and their readers. Without more schools,
‘the capital city of the world,’ feared Dickens, would become, ‘a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance,
misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails’.[1] Letter from Charles Dickens on ragged
schools, from the Daily News Charles Dickens’s ‘letter on ragged schooling’ from the Daily News,
February 1846. View images from this item (1) Usage terms: Public Domain Field Lane Ragged
School Dickens’s fears for the uneducated masses permeated his work, but so too did his hope for
charity and his faith in schooling. In 1846, eight years after he imagined piles of children punctuating
London’s landscape, Dickens recalled a visit to Field Lane Ragged School, which opened in 1842
near to the very location in which he set Fagin’s fictional den of thieves. The school consisted of,
‘two or three…miserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house,’ where children ‘huddled together on

64
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
a bench,’ while, ‘some flaring candles [were] stuck against the walls.’ Not to be ‘trusted with books’
the children were taught ‘orally’ by a voluntary teacher, ‘to look forward in a hymn…to another life,
which would correct the miseries and woes of this’. Ragged School Rhymes Illustration of ragged
school pupils in torn and tattered clothing from Ragged School Rhymes, 1851. View images from
this item (5) Usage terms: Public Domain Field Lane’s humble setting belied its grander aims. The
school was part of a new and growing educational movement, which was ‘willing to teach’ children
for free, who were, ‘too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place’. Prior to 1870,
under Britain’s laissez-faire, fee-paying education system schools usually hand picked their students
according to academic ability, wealth, or religion. By contrast Ragged Schools could be attended by
anyone and showed ‘some sympathy’ especially to children and adults, ‘who could gain admission
into no charity school, and who would be driven from any church door’.[2] By the 1850s Field Lane
consisted of a day school, which taught reading, writing, counting and the Bible; two night schools,
one for ‘vagrant and destitute adults,’ another for boys who were employed during the day; as well
as classes in shoemaking and tailoring for boys, and sewing classes for girls. Alongside its academic
and vocational lessons, Field Lane fed and clothed its students, while also running a night refuge,
lessons on parenting for mothers and a Bible school at weekends. Indeed, while the school accepted
a child of any faith or background, evangelical Christianity was at the heart of Ragged schooling,
with the aim being to, Teach poor mothers how to clothe and bring up their offspring, to teach fathers
their duties to their families and children their duty to their parents, to teach above all things that true
wisdom is true religion and true religion supreme love to God.[3] Newspaper report on a visit to the
Field Lane ragged school Outline of the management of Field Lane Ragged School, 1859. View
images from this item (9) Usage terms: Public Domain The school’s origins Field Lane was opened
by the London City Mission (LCM), which had been founded in 1835 by Scottish missionary-worker
David Nasmith. Nasmith asked his fellow missionaries to bring ‘an acquaintance with salvation,
through our Lord Jesus Christ’ by providing free education and ‘doing…good by every means in your
power’ for London’s growing population of the ‘destitute poor’.[4] The work of the LCM received
significant financial and political support from the reforming conservative, Lord Ashley the 7th Earl of

65
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Shaftsbury, and in 1844 he helped to establish and chair the Ragged School Union. The Union was
founded with the aim of turning a movement of individual schools, like LCM’s Field Lane, into a
system of free education for poor children that could be sustained by charity or even government
grants. Dickens visited Field Lane just before the Ragged School Union was formed and just after
the publication of the reports from the Children’s Employment Commission, which the Earl of
Shaftsbury had also instigated in 1840. These parliamentary reports detailed the horror of child
labour in Britain. The first was published in 1842 and described the low pay, long hours and
dangerous work conditions experienced by children working in mines and collieries. The second
report was published the following year and provided interviews with hundreds of children who
worked in various trades and manufactures. The reports captured Dickens’s imagination, giving
urgency to his interest in child poverty, and this urgency was compounded by the children he
encountered in Field Lane. The students of the Ragged school, who ranged, ‘from mere infants to
young men; sellers of fruit, herbs, lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of bridges;
young thieves and beggars,’ gave faces to the interviews that filled the Commission’s reports.[5] The
hardship faced by these children, and the religious and economic illiteracy the Ragged Schools
attempted to stem, would in turn inspire the child-like figures of Want and Ignorance that clung to the
Ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.[6] John Leech’s illustration
of the children ‘Ignorance and Want’ with industrial chimneys in the background, from the first edition
of A Christmas Carol, 1843. Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions Previous Next
Ragged children and Ragged jobs Ragged Schools by no means received unconditional public
support. Dickens himself had, ‘no desire to praise the system’, believing it was not ‘sufficiently
secular…presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties to minds not sufficiently prepared
for their reception’. In 1850, the journalist Henry Mayhew highlighted the ineffectual nature of the
schools by arguing that juvenile delinquency rates were rising.[7] In his 1851 investigative work,
London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew described the lives of a group of Mudlarks who
traipsed up and down the banks of the Thames looking for coal, copper, rope and any other scrap
they might be able to sell. These were the children for whom Ragged Schools had been established,

66
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
but instead, These poor creatures…may be seen of all ages, from mere childhood to positive
decrepitude, crawling among the barges at the various wharfs … with but few exceptions, these
people are dull, and apparently stupid; this is observable particularly among the boys and girls, who,
when engaged in searching the mud, hold but little converse one with another.[8] Few of these
children had been to church or school, and for those who had it was more, ‘because other boys go
there, than from any desire to learn’.[9] As one boy commented, he did not think he could learn even
if he tried 'ever so much’.[10] Indeed, due to their acts of ‘petty theft’ brought about by hunger, the
most common institution these children had encountered was the House of Correction.[11] For
Mayhew, Mudlarks were both young and old, not just in age but in experience. Poverty had stunted
their development, while institutions, like schools and prisons, had left them weary of their own
achievements. Concerned that their schools did not induce a ‘desire to learn’, and that families saw
the classes on offer as irrelevant, the Ragged School Union began to establish ‘brigades’ for their
male pupils in 1857. These extra-curricular groups provided certified jobs in street vending or shoe
shining, with a proportion of the boys’ earnings being placed in a personal bank account.[12] Yet, as
the historian Lionel Rose has shown, many children already worked in such industries outside of
Ragged Schools. As a result, boys from the brigades were vulnerable to ridicule outside the
classroom from children who chose not to join.[13] Despite hostility from the streets, however, the
brigades were approved by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, who saw them as
encouraging discipline and work-skills among children who might otherwise enter a life of crime.[14]
Limited success Until the end of the 19th century, schooling remained a mainly voluntary affair, but
under the 1857 Industrial Schools Act any Ragged School prepared to be inspected by the Home
Office and provide boarding for children in exchange for Government grants, had the power to
compel children to attend lessons.[15] The Act, and its subsequent 1860 amendment, enabled
magistrates to send children as young as seven or as old as 14, who had been found in the
company of criminals or were vagrant and begging to attend residential schooling for up to two
years. While parents or guardians were expected to fit the bill for this boarding, Ragged Industrial
Schools continued to rely almost solely on charity and Government handouts because many parents

67
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
were incarcerated or simply too poor to pay.[16] The popularity of Ragged Schools among the
poorest in society remained dubious throughout the second half of the 19th century. In the Ragged
School Union’s Annual Report for 1857, for example, out of London’s estimated half a million
children, just over 21,500 had attended their lessons or used their services. Indeed at Field Lane, of
the 563 children registered for the day school, only 275 were actively attending. The Ragged School
Union concluded that they were, ‘far from thinking that they have reached the limits of their work or
even accomplished half that which is necessary for the Metropolis alone’.[17] The quality of the
education given was equally questionable. By 1861 an investigator for the Royal Commission on
Education declared that, There may, perhaps, be one or two cases in which under unpromising
circumstances, a boy or girl has derived benefit from a ragged school, though I admit that I have
been unable to discover any.[18] It would take a further nine years before Parliament agreed that
Ragged schooling alone would not solve the problems of Ignorance and Want. The introduction of
universal, compulsory schooling in London under the 1870 Education Act finally ensured that every
child had a right to a secular school place and with it, as Dickens had desired 30 years earlier, ‘to
correct the miseries and woes’ of poverty.[19] Footnotes [1] Charles Dickens, ‘A letter on ragged
schooling’, The Daily News, (4th February 1846) [accessed: 13/08/13] [2] Ibid., [accessed 13/08/13]
[3] Ragged School Union, Thirteen Annual Report For The Ragged School Union (London: Ragged
School Union, 1857), p.26. [4] Timothy Keller, ‘Our History’ [accessed: 13/08/13] [5] Dickens, A
Letter [accessed 13/08/13] [6] See Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012),
p. 149. [7] Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 118. [8] Mayhew’s London being selections from London Labour and the
London Poor, ed. by Henry Mayhew (London: Spring Books, 1851), pp.338-339. [9] All quotes from
Ibid., p. 340. [10] Ibid., p. 341. [11] Ibid., p. 342. [12] Ibid., p. 340. For details of the Boys’ Shoeblack
Brigade, see J. S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the working classes, 1860-1918 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 56-7. [13] Rose, p.69. [14] Ibid., p. 69. [15] 1857 A Bill [as
amended in committee] to make better provision for the care and education of vagrant, destitute, and
disorderly children, and for the extension of industrial schools. HC, 1857-58, [2315], London :

68
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Committee of Privy Council on Education, p. 2, cl. 5b [16] HC Deb 17 June 1857 Vol 145 c. 1954.
See ‘Ragged Schools, Industrial Schools and Reformatories’, Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual
Archive – Children in Care 1881-1981 [accessed 1 April 2014] [17] Ragged School Union, p.26. [18]
Quoted in Rose, pp. 117-118. [19] Dickens, A Letter [accessed 13/08/13] Further reading Pamela
Horn, The Victorian and Edwardian School Child (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1989) JS Hurt,
Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860-1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1979) Seth Koven, Slumming Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2004) Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English society Volume II,
From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)
Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London: Routledge,
1991) Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012) Written by Imogen Lee
Imogen Lee is a historian and writer who specialises in the history of London childhoods and
disability. She has just completed her PhD thesis 'Creating Childhoods: Ideas of Child and School in
London 1870-1914' at Goldsmiths College. The text in this article is available under the Creative
Commons License. See also MORE ARTICLES ON: CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S
LITERATURE Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Fantasy and fairytale in
children's literature Moral and instructive children’s literature Orphans in fiction The origins of
children’s literature Jane Eyre and the rebellious child The Brontës’ early writings: Combining
fantasy and fact Juvenile crime in the 19th century Jane Austen’s juvenilia The title page of William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Understanding Alice The Governess Perceptions of childhood Child labour William Blake and 18th-
century children’s literature Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers Childhood in Jane Eyre
Related Collection Items A plea for Ragged Schools 'A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London' by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 'The Lamb and Flag Ragged Schools, Clerkenwell' from the Illustrated
London News 'Ragged Schools' from the Illustrated London News 'On Ragged Schools' from the
Daily News Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis An account of the Asylum
for Orphan Girls A letter about Ragged Schools Related Works A Christmas Carol 'The Cry of the

69
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Children' Related Teaching Resources Dickens’s Oliver Twist: Depictions of Childhood 19th-century
non-fiction texts: Education Related People Charles Dickens Elizabeth Barrett Browning Share this
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Search Ragged Schools Article by: Imogen Lee Theme: Childhood and children's literature
Published: 15 May 2014 Ragged Schools provided free education for children too poor to receive it
elsewhere. Imogen Lee explains the origins and aims of the movement that established such
schools, focusing on the London’s Field Lane Ragged School, which Charles Dickens visited. A
dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy; and the
air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in
trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at
the doors, or screaming from the inside (Oliver Twist, ch. 8). Charles Dickens’s description of a night

70
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
walk through Islington and Holborn in Oliver Twist (1838) depicts a metropolis that stumbled with
stunted life. By 1841 almost 2 million people lived in London, but without compulsory schooling only
a fraction of this population had received any formal education, contributing to an illiterate workforce
and a rising prison population. As Britain sought to expand as its Empire and the domestic
population grew, the image of London as an Imperial Capital, made up of poor, unschooled and (due
to the 1832 Reform Act), recently enfranchised individuals, was a visceral muse to the anxieties of
Victorian writers and their readers. Without more schools, ‘the capital city of the world,’ feared
Dickens, would become, ‘a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place
for the hulks and jails’.[1] Letter from Charles Dickens on ragged schools, from the Daily News
Charles Dickens’s ‘letter on ragged schooling’ from the Daily News, February 1846. View images
from this item (1) Usage terms: Public Domain Field Lane Ragged School Dickens’s fears for the
uneducated masses permeated his work, but so too did his hope for charity and his faith in
schooling. In 1846, eight years after he imagined piles of children punctuating London’s landscape,
Dickens recalled a visit to Field Lane Ragged School, which opened in 1842 near to the very
location in which he set Fagin’s fictional den of thieves. The school consisted of, ‘two or three…
miserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house,’ where children ‘huddled together on a bench,’
while, ‘some flaring candles [were] stuck against the walls.’ Not to be ‘trusted with books’ the
children were taught ‘orally’ by a voluntary teacher, ‘to look forward in a hymn…to another life, which
would correct the miseries and woes of this’. Ragged School Rhymes Illustration of ragged school
pupils in torn and tattered clothing from Ragged School Rhymes, 1851. View images from this item
(5) Usage terms: Public Domain Field Lane’s humble setting belied its grander aims. The school was
part of a new and growing educational movement, which was ‘willing to teach’ children for free, who
were, ‘too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place’. Prior to 1870, under
Britain’s laissez-faire, fee-paying education system schools usually hand picked their students
according to academic ability, wealth, or religion. By contrast Ragged Schools could be attended by
anyone and showed ‘some sympathy’ especially to children and adults, ‘who could gain admission
into no charity school, and who would be driven from any church door’.[2] By the 1850s Field Lane

71
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
consisted of a day school, which taught reading, writing, counting and the Bible; two night schools,
one for ‘vagrant and destitute adults,’ another for boys who were employed during the day; as well
as classes in shoemaking and tailoring for boys, and sewing classes for girls. Alongside its academic
and vocational lessons, Field Lane fed and clothed its students, while also running a night refuge,
lessons on parenting for mothers and a Bible school at weekends. Indeed, while the school accepted
a child of any faith or background, evangelical Christianity was at the heart of Ragged schooling,
with the aim being to, Teach poor mothers how to clothe and bring up their offspring, to teach fathers
their duties to their families and children their duty to their parents, to teach above all things that true
wisdom is true religion and true religion supreme love to God.[3] Newspaper report on a visit to the
Field Lane ragged school Outline of the management of Field Lane Ragged School, 1859. View
images from this item (9) Usage terms: Public Domain The school’s origins Field Lane was opened
by the London City Mission (LCM), which had been founded in 1835 by Scottish missionary-worker
David Nasmith. Nasmith asked his fellow missionaries to bring ‘an acquaintance with salvation,
through our Lord Jesus Christ’ by providing free education and ‘doing…good by every means in your
power’ for London’s growing population of the ‘destitute poor’.[4] The work of the LCM received
significant financial and political support from the reforming conservative, Lord Ashley the 7th Earl of
Shaftsbury, and in 1844 he helped to establish and chair the Ragged School Union. The Union was
founded with the aim of turning a movement of individual schools, like LCM’s Field Lane, into a
system of free education for poor children that could be sustained by charity or even government
grants. Dickens visited Field Lane just before the Ragged School Union was formed and just after
the publication of the reports from the Children’s Employment Commission, which the Earl of
Shaftsbury had also instigated in 1840. These parliamentary reports detailed the horror of child
labour in Britain. The first was published in 1842 and described the low pay, long hours and
dangerous work conditions experienced by children working in mines and collieries. The second
report was published the following year and provided interviews with hundreds of children who
worked in various trades and manufactures. The reports captured Dickens’s imagination, giving
urgency to his interest in child poverty, and this urgency was compounded by the children he

72
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
encountered in Field Lane. The students of the Ragged school, who ranged, ‘from mere infants to
young men; sellers of fruit, herbs, lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of bridges;
young thieves and beggars,’ gave faces to the interviews that filled the Commission’s reports.[5] The
hardship faced by these children, and the religious and economic illiteracy the Ragged Schools
attempted to stem, would in turn inspire the child-like figures of Want and Ignorance that clung to the
Ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.[6] John Leech’s illustration
of the children ‘Ignorance and Want’ with industrial chimneys in the background, from the first edition
of A Christmas Carol, 1843. Usage terms: Free from known copyright restrictions Previous Next
Ragged children and Ragged jobs Ragged Schools by no means received unconditional public
support. Dickens himself had, ‘no desire to praise the system’, believing it was not ‘sufficiently
secular…presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties to minds not sufficiently prepared
for their reception’. In 1850, the journalist Henry Mayhew highlighted the ineffectual nature of the
schools by arguing that juvenile delinquency rates were rising.[7] In his 1851 investigative work,
London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew described the lives of a group of Mudlarks who
traipsed up and down the banks of the Thames looking for coal, copper, rope and any other scrap
they might be able to sell. These were the children for whom Ragged Schools had been established,
but instead, These poor creatures…may be seen of all ages, from mere childhood to positive
decrepitude, crawling among the barges at the various wharfs … with but few exceptions, these
people are dull, and apparently stupid; this is observable particularly among the boys and girls, who,
when engaged in searching the mud, hold but little converse one with another.[8] Few of these
children had been to church or school, and for those who had it was more, ‘because other boys go
there, than from any desire to learn’.[9] As one boy commented, he did not think he could learn even
if he tried 'ever so much’.[10] Indeed, due to their acts of ‘petty theft’ brought about by hunger, the
most common institution these children had encountered was the House of Correction.[11] For
Mayhew, Mudlarks were both young and old, not just in age but in experience. Poverty had stunted
their development, while institutions, like schools and prisons, had left them weary of their own
achievements. Concerned that their schools did not induce a ‘desire to learn’, and that families saw

73
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
the classes on offer as irrelevant, the Ragged School Union began to establish ‘brigades’ for their
male pupils in 1857. These extra-curricular groups provided certified jobs in street vending or shoe
shining, with a proportion of the boys’ earnings being placed in a personal bank account.[12] Yet, as
the historian Lionel Rose has shown, many children already worked in such industries outside of
Ragged Schools. As a result, boys from the brigades were vulnerable to ridicule outside the
classroom from children who chose not to join.[13] Despite hostility from the streets, however, the
brigades were approved by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, who saw them as
encouraging discipline and work-skills among children who might otherwise enter a life of crime.[14]
Limited success Until the end of the 19th century, schooling remained a mainly voluntary affair, but
under the 1857 Industrial Schools Act any Ragged School prepared to be inspected by the Home
Office and provide boarding for children in exchange for Government grants, had the power to
compel children to attend lessons.[15] The Act, and its subsequent 1860 amendment, enabled
magistrates to send children as young as seven or as old as 14, who had been found in the
company of criminals or were vagrant and begging to attend residential schooling for up to two
years. While parents or guardians were expected to fit the bill for this boarding, Ragged Industrial
Schools continued to rely almost solely on charity and Government handouts because many parents
were incarcerated or simply too poor to pay.[16] The popularity of Ragged Schools among the
poorest in society remained dubious throughout the second half of the 19th century. In the Ragged
School Union’s Annual Report for 1857, for example, out of London’s estimated half a million
children, just over 21,500 had attended their lessons or used their services. Indeed at Field Lane, of
the 563 children registered for the day school, only 275 were actively attending. The Ragged School
Union concluded that they were, ‘far from thinking that they have reached the limits of their work or
even accomplished half that which is necessary for the Metropolis alone’.[17] The quality of the
education given was equally questionable. By 1861 an investigator for the Royal Commission on
Education declared that, There may, perhaps, be one or two cases in which under unpromising
circumstances, a boy or girl has derived benefit from a ragged school, though I admit that I have
been unable to discover any.[18] It would take a further nine years before Parliament agreed that

74
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Ragged schooling alone would not solve the problems of Ignorance and Want. The introduction of
universal, compulsory schooling in London under the 1870 Education Act finally ensured that every
child had a right to a secular school place and with it, as Dickens had desired 30 years earlier, ‘to
correct the miseries and woes’ of poverty.[19] Footnotes [1] Charles Dickens, ‘A letter on ragged
schooling’, The Daily News, (4th February 1846) [accessed: 13/08/13] [2] Ibid., [accessed 13/08/13]
[3] Ragged School Union, Thirteen Annual Report For The Ragged School Union (London: Ragged
School Union, 1857), p.26. [4] Timothy Keller, ‘Our History’ [accessed: 13/08/13] [5] Dickens, A
Letter [accessed 13/08/13] [6] See Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012),
p. 149. [7] Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London:
Routledge, 1991), p. 118. [8] Mayhew’s London being selections from London Labour and the
London Poor, ed. by Henry Mayhew (London: Spring Books, 1851), pp.338-339. [9] All quotes from
Ibid., p. 340. [10] Ibid., p. 341. [11] Ibid., p. 342. [12] Ibid., p. 340. For details of the Boys’ Shoeblack
Brigade, see J. S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the working classes, 1860-1918 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 56-7. [13] Rose, p.69. [14] Ibid., p. 69. [15] 1857 A Bill [as
amended in committee] to make better provision for the care and education of vagrant, destitute, and
disorderly children, and for the extension of industrial schools. HC, 1857-58, [2315], London :
Committee of Privy Council on Education, p. 2, cl. 5b [16] HC Deb 17 June 1857 Vol 145 c. 1954.
See ‘Ragged Schools, Industrial Schools and Reformatories’, Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual
Archive – Children in Care 1881-1981 [accessed 1 April 2014] [17] Ragged School Union, p.26. [18]
Quoted in Rose, pp. 117-118. [19] Dickens, A Letter [accessed 13/08/13] Further reading Pamela
Horn, The Victorian and Edwardian School Child (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1989) JS Hurt,
Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860-1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1979) Seth Koven, Slumming Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2004) Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English society Volume II,
From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)
Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London: Routledge,
1991) Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (London: Penguin, 2012) Written by Imogen Lee

75
CHILD LABOUR AND RAGGED SCHOOLS
Imogen Lee is a historian and writer who specialises in the history of London childhoods and
disability. She has just completed her PhD thesis 'Creating Childhoods: Ideas of Child and School in
London 1870-1914' at Goldsmiths College. The text in this article is available under the Creative
Commons License. See also MORE ARTICLES ON: CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S
LITERATURE Anthropomorphism in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Fantasy and fairytale in
children's literature Moral and instructive children’s literature Orphans in fiction The origins of
children’s literature Jane Eyre and the rebellious child The Brontës’ early writings: Combining
fantasy and fact Juvenile crime in the 19th century Jane Austen’s juvenilia The title page of William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) Eating and drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Understanding Alice The Governess Perceptions of childhood Child labour William Blake and 18th-
century children’s literature Foundlings, orphans and unmarried mothers Childhood in Jane Eyre
Related Collection Items A plea for Ragged Schools 'A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London' by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 'The Lamb and Flag Ragged Schools, Clerkenwell' from the Illustrated
London News 'Ragged Schools' from the Illustrated London News 'On Ragged Schools' from the
Daily News Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis An account of the Asylum
for Orphan Girls A letter about Ragged Schools Related Works A Christmas Carol 'The Cry of the
Children' Related Teaching Resources Dickens’s Oliver Twist: Depictions of Childhood 19th-century
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Appendix 3: