Factory Reform Acts

I

Introduction

Factory Reform Acts, pieces of legislation designed to shape hours and conditions of employment, at first in textile factories, ultimately in all places of work, being public attempts to regulate by law the processes of industrialization as it went through many different phases (see Industrial Revolution). In retrospect, the 19th-century acts constituted a sequence, beginning in 1802 with an act (the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act) to limit the working hours of pauper child apprentices in cotton factories to 12 (see Hours of Labour), to abolish their night work, and to introduce minimal educational provision, and culminating in 1901 with a comprehensive consolidating act granting the Home Office power to “prohibit, limit or control use of any material or process in industry” and to regulate “matters of health” by issuing departmental orders.

To treat this sequence as “natural” or “logical”, however, and to go on to relate it to the later making of a “welfare state” is unwise, for the struggle, local and national, and in Parliament and outside, sometimes dramatic, usually protracted, to secure each particular act had distinctive features, and the widening of the scope of legislation to cover women as well as children, men as well as women, and places of work that were not factories was rarely uncontentious. Moreover, to place stress mainly on legislation is misleading. The development of inspection, introduced in 1833, was essential to the implementation of policy. It was missing in 1801, but taken for granted in 1901.

At every point in the story, social history must be related to economic history and the language of the factory to the language of industry. The word “factory” itself, originally meaning a trading establishment, was already being applied to places of production, not sale, in the generation before 1802, when child and women workers were being concentrated beside their machines and subjected to an external “discipline” that was totally unfamiliar to them when they carried on “outwork” in “domestic circumstances” in their homes. “Discipline” was usually praised: “exploitation” was condemned, even compared with slavery on the cotton-growing plantations of the United States. Aware of abuses, Robert Owen, mill-owner pioneer of cooperation (see Cooperative Movement), and Robert Peel, mill-owner father of the future prime minister (see Robert Peel), joined forces to sponsor the 1802 legislation, which was much mutilated, and Owen went on to secure a further limited act in 1819, amended in 1825 and 1831. Other leaders had by then taken up the cause, including the mill owner John Fielden, the Tory radicals Michael Sadler and Richard Oastler, and the great evangelical aristocrat, Lord Ashley, later 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.

II

The Act of 1833

The Act of 1833, which introduced the principle and machinery of inspection, was the result of their labours, backed by the pressure of “working people” who in Fielden’s phrase “will not long submit to the chains with which they are enthralled”. It restricted the hours of children below the age of 13 years to 48 a week and of young workers from the ages 13 to 18 years to 65 a week, and extended the night-working restrictions of 1802 and 1819 to silk, wool, and linen factories as Peel and Owen had intended. Most important, four government inspectors had powers of entry. In their reports, rich in detail, they made use both of case studies and statistics, and what they reported was made use of in turn by Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels in their writings on the impact of the factory system on capital and labour. For militant factory operatives, however, the Act did not go anywhere near far enough. For them a ten-hour working day was the minimum that they would accept and their drive to secure it often merged into militant Chartism with more than a flavour of violence. New legislation was always contested in Parliament, however, where individual votes and voting alliances shifted, and most political economists, led by Professor Nassau Senior, maintained their opposition to state intervention, arguing in difficult economic circumstances that long hours were necessary for competitive prosperity.

III

The Act of 1844

The Act of 1844, relating solely to textile factories, was carried two years after a regulatory act was passed relating to mines, and it was important in that it cut the starting age for children to eight years, restricted women’s work as well as the work of older children to 12 hours, and strengthened safety controls in factories and on factory premises. The changes made it more difficult to keep textile factories open for longer than 12 hours.

IV

The Ten Hours Act of 1847

The Ten Hours Act, 1847, was hailed as the long-awaited triumph, particularly since a previous bill along the same lines limiting labour to 63 hours a week had been defeated in 1846. Celebrations were unrestrained. Nevertheless, it required further legislation in 1850 to enforce the act.