"Also central to the Victorian cult of domesticity was the changing role of children. At the start of the nineteenth century, children were likely to be employed either working the family farm or in the early factories. In both cases, the household required the child’s contribution to its income generation in order to get by. Historian of childhood Steven Mintz (2004, p. 136) notes that wages of children between the ages of ten and 15 “often amounted to 20 percent of a family’s income and spelled the difference between economic well-being and destitution.” As Mintz also points out, “key decisions…were based on family needs rather than individual choice…[in] the cooperative family economy.” Surely if parents of that era could have survived without their children working, they would have, as is demonstrated by the relative absence of child labor among the very wealthy of the time. But Prudence still held sway over Love early in the industrial era.
When adult wages did begin to rise over the course of the century, children (and eventually women) were withdrawn from the labor force. Contrary to popular myth, laws against child labor were not the primary reason for its disappearance. Rather it was the rising wages produced by nineteenth century capitalism that ended the need for children to be employed. Nardinelli (1990, pp. 109-112) offers evidence of declining child labor rates in the British cotton and flax factories for two decades before the first Factory Act in 1833, as well as ongoing declines in child labor in the silk factories up until 1890 even though most of the child labor laws did not apply to the silk industry. Together, these provide some confirming evidence for the role of capitalism-driven rising real wages as the cause of the reduction in child labor over the century. Even farm children saw their roles diminish, as improved farm machinery reduced the need for child labor and the increasing returns to farming enabled land owners to hire help from outside the family.
Critics of child labor during the Industrial Revolution also frequently overlook the fact that children worked before industrialization, but it was not for wages and it was in the organizational structure of the household (recall too our earlier discussion of putting out). The real change was children working for wages. The same critics often tend to downplay the real dangers, rigors, and long hours of farm work and overplay the negatives, on net, of industrial work. Many, as Mintz (2004, p. 181) points out, even saw farm work as character building in ways that the more urban forms of labor were not thought to be. In the same way that women were to be sheltered from the unpleasantness of 'filthy lucre,' so were children.
There is no doubt that the conditions children worked under in factories were unpleasant by our own standards, but life on the farm was certainly no better and arguably worse. And if one accounts for the greater family income and greater access to resources, including medicine, that newly urbanized factory workers had, life was, overall, likely better for child factory workers than child farm workers of the generation before. Nardinelli’s (1990, p. 112) conclusion is worth quoting in full:
'The growing real income of nineteenth-century Britain was the most important force removing children from textile factories after 1835. Children worked in factories because their families were poor; as family income increased, child labor decreased. Indeed, as a given family’s income increased younger children began work at a later age than had their older brothers and sisters. The well-known Victorian concern with children was in large part a reflection of rising income. One would therefore expect that, given the rapid rise in income in the last half of the century, the amount of child labor in textile factories would have declined in the long run without factory legislation.'
Certainly the laws had some effect in pushing the process along, but the “most important force” remained the rise in real income that capitalism and industrialization had produced. In contrast to claims by its critics, capitalism did not create unpleasant child labor, as such labor had always existed in the household and on the farm. Instead capitalism was the proximate cause of the disappearance of child labor among the masses for the first time in human history, even if it first made child labor more visible by moving it out of the household and into the factories."
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