Child Labour and Education Reform: A Bibliography
he expansion of education from the 1830s to 1840s in Britain was the result of a continuous tension between two beliefs in what children could contribute to society: their immediate economic usefulness as wage-earners, and their social usefulness as disciplined and moral subjects (Silver 144). Noticeably missing from the justification for removing children from labour, however, was any suggestion that they should be allotted more time for leisure or play. The understanding of childhood at a political level, even after the expansion of education had begun, was still operating solely under the framework of utility, whatever that utility might look like. The Factory Act of 1833 and 1844 were the first pieces of legislation to attempt a reconciliation of these two beliefs in the half-time system, which legislated that time for factory employment had to be balanced with time for schooling (Ward 111; Kestner 73).
Illustration for Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy, 1840. [Click on the image for more information.]
From the 1850s onwards, however, sustained increases in adult male earnings and the move away from low-skilled labour that children specialized in, combined with stricter schooling regulations, slowly dissolved the expectation for children to work (Humphries 208). By the 1880s and 1890s, the dilemma between labour and education had virtually disappeared; most children no longer worked, the half-time system was on a decline, and education became compulsory per the Elementary Education Act of 1880 (Hendrick, Children, Childhood..., 12). The demise of labour finally saw the emergence of leisure as a childhood right. The following bibliography suggests some of the resources that help us to trace this development.
Bibliography
Bebbington, David W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Chalmers, Thomas. The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Cruickshank, Marjorie. Children and Industry: Child Health and Welfare in North-West Textile Towns during the Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981.
Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2020.
Digby, Anne, and Peter Searby. Children, School and Society in Nineteenth-Century England. London: Macmillan Press, 1981.
Griffin, Emma. A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hawkins, Angus. Victorian Political Culture: “Habits of Heart and Mind.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Hendrick, Harry. Child Welfare: England 1872–1989. London: Routledge, 1994.
_____. Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Economic History Society, 1997.
Heywood, Colin. A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967.
Honeyman, Katrina. Child Workers in England, 1780–1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Horrell, Sara, and Jane Humphries. “‘The Exploitation of Little Children’: Child Labor and the Family Economy in the Industrial Revolution.” Explorations in Economic History 32, no. 4 (1995): 485–516. https://doi.org/10.1006/exeh.1995.1021.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labor in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
._____. “Child Labor, Cliometrics, and the Industrial Revolution.” Critical Review 13, nos. 3–4 (1999): 1–4.
Hurt, J. S. Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1918. London: Routledge, 1979.
Jacob, William M. Religious Vitality in Victorian London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Kestner, Joseph A. “The Concept of Working-Class Education in Industrial Investigative Reports of the Eighteen-Thirties.” Browning Institute Studies 16 (1988): 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0092472500002091.
Kirby, Peter. Child Labor in Britain, 1750–1870. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
_____. Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780–1850. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013.
Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Laslett, Peter. Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
_____. The World We Have Lost. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965.
Levene, Alysa. The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-Century London. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Levine, David. “Industrialization and the Proletarian Family in England.” Past & Present, no. 107 (1985): 168–203. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/107.1.168.
Marten, James. The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
McCann, Phillip, ed. Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century. London: Methuen, 1977.
McCulloch, Gary, ed. The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in History of Education. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005.
Nardinelli, Clark. “Corporal Punishment and Children’s Wages in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Explorations in Economic History 19, no. 3 (1982): 283–95.
Rapple, Brendan A. “Payment by Results (1862–1897): Ensuring a Good Return on Governmental Expenditure.” Journal of Educational Thought / Revue de la Pensée Éducative 25, no. 3 (1991): 183–201. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23767372.
Roberts, F. David. The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Robson, Adam H. The Education of Children Engaged in Industry in England, 1833–1876. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931.
Sanderson, Michael. Education, Economic Change and Society in England, 1780–1870. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1991.
Silver, Harold. “Ideology and the Factory Child: Attitudes to Half-Time Education.” Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Phillip McCann. London: Methuen, 1977: 141–166.
Smelser, Neil J. Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Snell, K. D. M. “The Sunday-School Movement in England and Wales: Child Labor, Denominational Control and Working-Class Culture.” Past & Present, no. 164 (August 1999): 122–68.
Szreter, Simon. Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin Books, 2009.
Tuttle, Carolyn. Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor during the British Industrial Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.
Ward, Gertrude. “The Education of Factory Child Workers, 1833–1850.” Economic Journal 45, supplement 1 (1935): 110–24. https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/45.Supplement_1.110.
Woodward, Llewellyn. The Age of Reform, 1815–1870. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Wrigley, E. A., et al. English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Created 2 August 2026