Charles Dickens (aged 30). This portrait of Charles Dickens was painted by the American artist Francis Alexander (1800-1880) early in 1842, shortly after Dickens arrived in Boston at the start of his first visit to North America.
After returning from his 1842 visit to America, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) read a disturbing government report on child labor in the United Kingdom titled the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission. He read testimonies of little girls working as seamstresses, six hours a day, six days a week, and rooming above the factory floor. Girls told of dragging coal carts through tight underground passages over eleven-hour days.
A child laborer known as a “hurrier” is shown harnessed to a coal corve. Hurriers were required to drag an empty coal cart down from the shaft bottom along passageways between 24 to 30 inches high and return with a full load from the coal face. One child would be harnessed to the front of the corve, while another would follow behind, pushing the load with their hands and their heads. Most hurriers would have large septic calluses on their legs, hands and knees and many were bald as a result of pushing corves up steep inclines with their heads. Their bodies were often ‘old’ and broken before they reached adulthood.
Factory bosses used children to climb into the insides of industrial machinery to clear a jam, sometimes with fatal consequences. These were not isolated incidents but common. Families were poor and hungry and they took what work they could find, even if it meant sending a child as young as five to work.
Dickens at the Blacking Warehouse, From a drawing by Fred Bernard. Reproduced in “The Dickens Country” by kind permission of Messrs. Chapman and Hall
It is believed that, at the age of twelve, Charles Dickens had been forced to drop out of school, sell his books, and go to work at the dirty, rat-infested Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a shoe polish factory, near Charing Cross leading from the Strand to the Thames, where Charles typed up and labeled countless pots of shoe-blacking. Dickens’ father was locked up in a debtors’ prison, taking with him his wife and youngest children, and young Charles was expected to support his family at this grinding toil. The pay was meager, only a few shillings a week. Young Dickens worked ten-hour days and saw his family only on Sundays. This he endured for three years, a most painful episode in his young life.
Influenced by his youth and a recent visit to the Field Lane Ragged School for street children, Dickens decided to shine a light on uneven workforce wages by writing a novella. The story came to him over six weeks as he took his nighttime strolls through London, walking fifteen or twenty miles a night, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing. The result was a masterpiece called A Christmas Carol, published on December 19, 1843, a morality tale pointing out the benefits of compassion and the terrible cost of miserliness. In one scene, men and women, bosses and workers, young and old, dance and drink merrily, feast, and celebrate the joys of Christmas together. The book was a runaway bestseller.
John Leech, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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