Redefining Family Relationships: The Impact of Disability on Working-Class Families during the Industrial Revolution in Britain

In June 1832, the Manchester cotton-spinner turned radical journalist John Doherty published a ‘Memoir’ of former millworker John Mears in his newspaper The Poor Man's Advocate. When he was little more than 5 years old, Mears had been sent to work at Crompton's cotton mill in Wigan. Here, he had been forced to endure long hours of fatiguing labour, which had caused his young limbs to become ‘distorted’. His knees bent inwards, and his ankle joints were so damaged that walking became ‘very difficult’ for him. Moving to Darwell's mill as a young adult, Mears endured frequent beatings and sadistic treatment, such as when a foreman rubbed tobacco in his eyes, causing a lasting ‘intolerable pain’. Determined to leave such a hellish working environment, Mears saved up a little money and set up a small shop. Now married, and with a ‘rising family’, Mears was able to provide for himself and his wife and children by selling meal, flour, and potatoes to his former co-workers at Darwell's. He was ‘just beginning to look forward to a comfortable competency’, when the mill went bankrupt, putting its employees out of work and leaving them unable to pay the money they owed to Mears for goods purchased in his shop. Left ‘penniless and heartbroken’ but ‘ashamed to beg’, Mears tramped around the country in search of work, but each application met with the rebuff that there were ‘too many strong and healthy men to be had for us to employ cripples’. Doherty noted that when Mears related this part of his tale, his sense of failure at not being able to provide for his ‘destitute family’ caused a deep emotional reaction: his ‘utterances’ became ‘choked with grief’ and he ‘stood mute and motionless for some time, until a flood of tears relieved him’. ¹

We do not know what happened next for John Mears. His story ends with Doherty drawing up a petition to Parliament to call for redress for the cruel treatment he had received from his factory employers. However, the implication was that as someone unable to sell his labour on the same terms as others, thanks to his physical impairment, his prospects were bleak. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries has been seen in Disability Studies as marking a decisive shift in the lives of disabled people. In a view originating in historical materialist accounts of disability in the 1980s, it was argued that the rise of mechanisation, time discipline, and standardisation made the industrial workplace a hostile environment for people with non-standard bodies. Where previously work had been undertaken at home, allowing families to better balance work and care, and enabling sick, aged and impaired people to work at their own pace, it is argued that the rise of the industrial workplace undermined traditional ways in which disabled people had been supported and integrated into the economy. According to this argument, people such as Mears were destined to become a burden on their families and increasingly susceptible to institutionalisation. ² But was this fate inevitable? Did social and economic change weaken ties within families and contribute to the marginalisation of the sick and impaired? And were disabled people simply the ‘victims’ of industrialisation – as Doherty portrayed Mears – or were they able to contribute to their families? These questions are explored in this article.

1. Perspectives on disability, industrialisation and the family

The characterisation of industrialisation as a rapid transition from ‘traditional’ employment in agriculture and small-scale manufacturing focused on the home, to one of ‘modern’ mechanised factory production that underpins materialist accounts of disability presents an over-simplified view of social and economic change in 18th- and 19th-century Britain. This perspective has been rejected in scholarship on industrialisation published since the 1970s. Instead, historians have emphasised the regional diversity of the British economy in this period and presented evidence for a more gradual transition in the methods and organisation of production. ³ While the mechanised factory had, by the 1840s, become symbolic of economic change for contemporary social commentators, factory production was far from dominant. As King and Timmins point out, in 1851 around 30% of the adult male labour force was employed in some sort of ‘manufacturing’, but factory workers probably accounted for no more than 5% of the total. Even in areas heavily associated with factory production, such as cotton manufacturing districts of Lancashire, factory workers were a minority of the adult workforce. Moreover, hand production, centred on the home or small workshop, remained prevalent in some areas of textile production such as hosiery and ribbon weaving through the first half of the 19th century. ⁴ Small workshops where groups of skilled artisans used hand-held tools, were common in the metal trades around Birmingham for much of the 19th century. ⁵

It is only recently that scholars of disability have begun to engage with these more complex social and economic histories. A more variable picture of deaf and disabled people's experiences of industrialisation is now emerging through research on Britain, the United States and parts of continental Europe, which is substantially revising the view that these groups were simply excluded from work in this period. ⁶ Sophie de Vierman, for instance, has shown that rather than wholesale exclusion from the workforce, deaf people's employment prospects in industrialising Belgium became more narrowly focused on a more limited range of trades, thanks in part to the narrow range of skills taught in new deaf schools. ⁷ This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the history of disability and work, while its reassessment of disabled people's place in working-class families brings a new dimension to this analysis.

Since the 1990s, more detailed research on the ‘locus of care’ – the question of where care for sick and disabled people has been delivered and by whom – has also begun to add more nuance to our understanding of the place of institutionalisation within care practices. ⁸ In contrast to the view that pre-industrial Britain was a ‘golden age’ of family care, where almost all care of ill, disabled, or older people was done within the household, historians have demonstrated the long-standing importance of the ‘mixed economy’ of care based on the interaction of family, state and charity both before and during industrialisation. ⁹ David Wright has argued that although institutional care for children with learning disabilities expanded during the 19th century, the nuclear family remained central to the provision of support. ¹⁰ Cathy Smith has similarly shown that although families could resort to institutional care for ‘insane’ relatives in times of crisis during the 19th century, this did not supplant care in the home. ¹¹ Steven King has highlighted regional variations in practices of institutionalisation, showing how the propensity towards institutional care of disabled children was greatest in London during the first half of the 19th century. Despite legislative changes such as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the County Lunatic Asylums legislation of 1845 that made institutional care more widely available – and promoted as necessary or desirable – King argues that Poor Law authorities ‘often spent prodigiously on nursing care’ for pauper disabled children to keep them out of institutions, as care in the community was still cheaper. ¹²

This remained the case throughout the 19th century. Anne Borsay has demonstrated that although the proportion of ‘adult non-able-bodied’ paupers residing in workhouses rose from 11% in 1849 to 28% in 1900, most sick and infirm recipients of poor relief continued to receive support outside institutional settings. ¹³ In the case of pauper lunatics at least, there is little evidence that families in industrial areas were less likely to be able to provide support than those in ‘traditional’ agrarian employment. In his research on Lancashire in the 1840s, J. K. Walton found that asylum admissions were in fact lower in industrial towns compared to rural agricultural areas. ¹⁴ The higher wages of factory workers may have made them better able to buy in nursing care, while kin played an important role in the care of the infirm. ¹⁵ More generally, the assumption that families would simply abandon their duties of care towards sick and disabled relatives due to new modes of production and the associated economic pressures does not take into account the complex emotional variables around questions of care that any family might wrestle with in moments of crisis. Feelings of obligation, guilt, and a reluctance to abandon loved ones to uncertain institutional fates are at least as relevant to questions of care provision as ‘rational’ assessments of the costs and benefits of institutionalisation. ¹⁶

While historians have debated the relationship between familial and institutional care and examined the nature of care provision, less attention has been paid to the impact of disability on family life, or to the roles played by disabled people within the household. New research is beginning to challenge the assumption that disabled people necessarily took on ‘dependent’ roles within families in the past, and has highlighted the variability of familial experiences of impairment, but more work is needed to understand the ways disability shaped interpersonal relations within – and beyond – the home. ¹⁷ As Emma Griffin has argued, provision was central to working-class concepts of fatherhood in industrialising Britain, and John Mears's tears at the prospect of being unable to perform the role of family breadwinner showed how the economic aspects of disablement had emotional consequences, especially for the role and identities of husbands and fathers. ¹⁸ Although, as Martha Stoddard Holmes has argued, 19th-century literary framings of disability in emotional terms were often used to sidestep discussions of its material consequences, in worker accounts of industrial injury and deformity the emotional and the economic were often inextricably linked. ¹⁹ At a time when households were becoming increasingly reliant on the wages of the male breadwinner, disability threatened to throw families into poverty and redraw relations within the home. ²⁰

The discussion that follows analyses how working-class families managed disablement during Britain's industrial development. Rather than examining the Industrial Revolution as a whole, the analysis focuses more narrowly on the 1830s and 40s as this was a time when concerns about the health impact of some of the social and economic changes we associate most readily with industrialisation – the factory system, urbanisation and expansion of extractive industries – came into public focus in the context of broader concerns about conditions of work. Inquiries into the state of industrial society, such as the Factory Commission of 1833 and Children's Employment Commission of the early 1840s, produced a wealth of data, including interviews with hundreds of impaired workers in factories, coalmines and workshops, which brought into focus the impact of disablement on individuals, families and communities. ²¹

These accounts provide rich information about how impairment was discussed in relation to work and home life, but they need to be handled with care. In the case of inquiries into factory work in the 1830s and 1840s, evidence was gathered against the backdrop of wider debates about regulation of the workplace and campaigns for the introduction of a Ten-Hour Bill to reduce working hours. The polarised nature of these discussions led to frequent accusations of bias and of witnesses carefully selected (and coached in what to say) by the worker-led Short Time Committees that organised reform agitation in Manchester, Leeds and other textile towns, or by their millowner opponents. ²² While we may not be able to take this material at face value, it is nevertheless important in showing how questions of worker health and its impact on families were politicised issues in this period rather than just private matters of individual coping. ²³ Investigations were framed by growing humanitarian concerns about the health and morals of child workers in particular. Children were employed across the 19th-century economy, but it was horror stories of young bodies maimed or deformed through accidents or the perceived effects of long hours of labour in factories and coalmines that raised particular concerns in this period. This meant that evidence was slanted towards certain sectors of the industrial economy while excluding others. Such evidence is important due to its richness, but this article makes no claims that it was representative of all working-class experience.

Concerns about child labour brought broader questions of health and the domestic circumstances of workers under the spotlight, allowing us to analyse the relationship between disability, work and the familial economy. However, it is important to note that industrial disease, injury and impairment were not always – or even primarily – framed in terms of ‘disability’ in these sources. In the context of industrialising Britain, the word ‘disabled’ was most often applied to people incapacitated from doing paid work. ²⁴ Yet investigations into the health impacts of minework and factory labour in the 1830s and 1840s were not surveys of ‘disability’ as such. Rather, government inspectors and political campaigners were concerned with documenting damage caused to workers’ bodies which may or may not have resulted in incapacity. Commentators and workers testifying to their own experiences documented a wide range of bodily infirmity or debility that does not map easily onto either contemporary or modern ideas of ‘disability’. As Karen Bourrier has argued, there was considerable slippage between illness and what we now refer to as ‘disability’ in 19th-century texts, and the term ‘disabled’ was much less widely used to indicate a physical or mental impairment than it is today. ²⁵ Accordingly, while this article uses the word ‘disabled’ to describe people marked with physical difference, it remains sensitive to the historical nuances of language.

Official inquiries indicate that living with bodily difference was commonplace in growing industrial towns. One witness before the Parliamentary Select Committee – chaired by Michael Sadler with the aim of gathering evidence to support a bill to reduce the hours of work in factories in 1832 – testified that there were ‘waggon-loads’ of deformed children working in the textile factories of Keighley in Yorkshire. ²⁶ In Willenhall, near Wolverhampton, workers in the town's iron trade were described as developing a distinctive malformation caused by the way they held their tools and stood at their benches, whereby ‘the right shoulder-blade becomes displaced, and projects, and the right leg crooks and bends inwards at the knee, like a letter K’. According to R. H. Horne, who gathered evidence there for the Children's Employment Commission in the early 1840s, it was impossible to pass through the town ‘without seeing from three to five adults thus distorted’. ²⁷ The ‘K’ leg was a local deformity that distinguished men and boys from Willenhall from those who lived in neighbouring towns and villages. Thirty-four miles to the north in the Staffordshire Potteries, the main occupational illnesses were lung disease and sickness (including paralysis) caused by contact with harmful materials, which gradually diminished capacity to work. Thirty-two-year-old kiln worker John Benbow had developed breathing difficulties and a permanent cough thanks to the dusty atmosphere in which he worked, and he had mobility problems due to an accident years before when he had slipped and fallen on an iron crow bar. ‘Whether the work agrees with me or not I am obliged to support my family’, he told government investigators in 1842, adding that ‘I work many a day when I am not able’. ²⁸

The concept of working when ‘not able’ challenges the binary distinction between ‘disabled’ and ‘able-bodied’ and calls for a more expansive view of ‘disability’ in 19th-century working-class communities. Indeed, while competition for labour has been seen as forcing older and disabled workers out of the industrial workplace, it may also have increased pressure particularly on male breadwinners to continue to work through pain and impairment for fear of losing work to fitter operatives. William Cooper told the Sadler Committee that he had felt obliged to take on extra work in the textile mill that employed him, despite being ‘stuffed’ in his breathing (due to dust) and stiff in his limbs, because there were a ‘great number of able-bodied individuals in Leeds totally out of employment’, who he feared would take his job if he took sick leave. ²⁹ Rather than seeing disabled people as being removed from the workforce (and separated from families unable to look after them), we need to examine the Industrial Revolution as a moment of increasing visibility of bodily difference, where social, economic and environmental changes increased susceptibility to ill health and deformity. The doctor Charles Turner Thackrah, writing in 1831 about workers in his native Leeds, contended that only 10% of the population of industrial towns enjoyed ‘full health’, thanks to dangerous working conditions, poor sanitation, and ‘impure atmosphere’ caused by smoke. ³⁰ Partial health was normal, and visible signs of impairment were commonplace.

The demand that people worked with deformities, impairments or after the onset of chronic diseases has implications for how we approach household histories of disability. Often, disabled people are positioned in ‘cared for’ roles in studies of disability and the family. The focus has been on how families enacted (or neglected) their duty of care for sick, disabled, and vulnerable members, particularly the treatment of disabled children. ³¹ However, to fully understand the place of disabled people in family life we also need to examine their contribution to the family economy in the past. In practice, the nature, severity and duration of an impairment or injury, the size, composition and structure of someone's family, the specific place of the family within its life cycle when the disability occurred (such as whether a person had young children dependent on them), the number of disabled individuals in a family, and wider socio-economic structures, welfare systems and attitudes all influenced familial experiences of disability in this period. ³² As we shall see, it is important that we broaden the focus of our research on disability and the family, examining impaired family members not just as passive recipients of care, but as active participants in family life as wage earners and caregivers.

2. Disability, family and care

The system of welfare established in England and Wales under the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 established the principle that the family had both a legal and moral duty to care for its members in sickness, ‘impotence’ and old age. ³³ This principle continued throughout the 19th century, but social commentators argued that it was increasingly tested by changing economic circumstances. Industrialisation was presented as causing demoralisation among the working poor, leading to weakening ties within families. Because family care of sick and disabled people was a fundamental moral principle (and legal duty), then its absence was seen as a sign of the degeneracy of industrial society. For example, in his study of the Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, published in 1832, Dr James Kay argued that affective bonds were damaged by the lack of religion in families employed in cotton mills, which meant that when ‘age and decrepitude cripple the energies’ of parents, their adult children frequently abandoned them to the ‘scanty maintenance derived from parochial poor relief’. ³⁴

The Manchester social reformer Peter Gaskell similarly argued that family relations were damaged by industrialisation. In his view, the early entry of children into wage labour in factory towns led to the ‘growth of disobedience’, undermining traditional patriarchal familial relations and weakening the duties of family members to each other, including the obligations of care during sickness, old age or impairment. ³⁵ Government investigator of child labour R. H. Horne likewise observed that in the iron trade of the West Midlands, children and young people ‘possess but little sense of moral duty towards their parents and have little affection for them’. He attributed this to them being sent out to work at an early age, which dehumanised them, making them feel like a ‘mere bit of machinery’ and quickly leading to the loss of affection for their parents and siblings. ³⁶

Mothers working outside the home were frequently blamed for poor infant health. In his General View of the Coal Trade in Scotland (1812), the engineer Robert Bald criticised women who worked in collieries as coal bearers (carriers of baskets of coal underground) for leaving young children in the care of old women who swapped maternal milk for ‘ale or whisky mixed with water’. It was from this ‘neglect’, Bald opined, that ‘infectious diseases make in general greater havoc among the children of colliers than among those of any other class of labourers’. ³⁷ Likewise, Robert Garner, a surgeon from Stoke-on-Trent, told the Children's Employment Commission of the early 1840s that mothers ‘being obliged, from necessity, or in some cases choosing without such necessity, to absent themselves at work for several hours’ was a significant cause of infant mortality in the Potteries, with the care of children being left to ‘hired attendants’, who were poor substitutes for the ‘cares and attentions of the mother herself’. ³⁸ The supposed ‘indifference’ of parents towards their children's wellbeing extended to a neglect of their educational development, denying them opportunities to go to school because they couldn’t ‘spare’ their wages. ³⁹ For some writers, conditions in new industrial towns were so dehumanising that parents viewed the death of a child as a merciful release rather than a tragedy. In Tales of the Factories (1833), written in support of the campaign for the Ten Hour Bill that aimed to reduce the working hours of factory operatives, Caroline Southey described a widowed factory operative ‘bowed, but not by years’, his two ‘sickly, shivering’ daughters, and ‘idiot’ son, gathering at a freezing graveside to bury a child with emotionless impassivity, silent but for the man's utterance ‘One's gone – thank God’ when the grave is filled. ⁴⁰

In contrast with images of weakened family bonds or lack of concern towards the fate of disabled relatives, other writers pointed to the resilience of working families and praised their efforts in adverse circumstances to support their members in need. The journalist and social investigator Henry Mayhew, writing in one of his series of letters on the London working poor to the Morning Chronicle in 1849, praised the ‘patience’ of many poverty-stricken families in the face of ‘miseries and privations of the most appalling nature’. He was full of admiration for a poor needleworker he encountered, who bore the ‘heavy burden’ of caring for her paralysed husband with a ‘meek and uncomplaining spirit’, praising her acceptance that it was ‘the will of God that they should be afflicted as they were’. He also commended the industry of a ‘poor stock-maker’ who laboured day and night ‘so that she might save her disabled parent from the workhouse’. Mayhew romanticised caregiving among the poor as an act of ‘heroism and nobility’ that was ‘unknown and unheard of among those who are well-to-do in the land’. ⁴¹ Other commentators marvelled at the sacrifices made by impoverished families so they could support their relatives in times of sickness. ⁴² Idealised and sentimental as these accounts were, they nonetheless counter the prevailing rhetoric of ‘indifference’ or absence of concern for disabled relatives in working-class families. In Mayhew's view, disability was something that could sometimes bring out the best in working-class families (provided they faced the challenges of impairment with the right moral character), as well as causing material hardship.

In testimony collected by official inquiries into factory, workshop and mine work during the 1830s and 1840s and by advocates for industrial reform, there is little evidence of families resorting to institutions because they were unable to care for disabled people at home. In these accounts, the workhouse was a looming threat, but a place of last resort for families who tried above all to maintain disabled parents, children, and siblings in the home. The prospect of institutional care was greatest for people who lacked support in their homes, most often due to the death of parents. Elizabeth Bennett, who gave evidence to both the Sadler Committee and the Factory Commission in the early 1830s, had lost her mother when she was young and had tried to support herself through her own work in factories in Leeds, becoming ‘considerably deformed’ in the process. At the age of 23, she had become incapable of labour and, without family to support her, she now found herself living in Hunslet Poor House. ⁴³ William Dodd, who described himself as a ‘factory cripple’ after losing his arm in a machinery accident, toured industrial towns to gather evidence to support the Ten Hour Bill, which he subsequently published as a series of letters to the politician Lord Ashley, The Factory System Illustrated (1842). In one of his letters, he described Joseph Lockett, who had worked in a silk mill in Macclesfield until the age of 20, when he became ‘done up’ and incapable of working. As his parents were ‘both dead’, he relied on an old woman who was paid a small allowance from the parish to look after him in his home. Her advancing age, however, meant that it was likely he would soon be ‘incarcerated in some union workhouse, till death comes to release him’. ⁴⁴

Nevertheless, for the most part, witnesses described disabled parents, children and siblings unable to earn a living themselves, but resident in the family home and supported by the wages of other household members. Nine-year-old John Mayer, who worked at a pottery in Burslem (Staffordshire), told the Children's Employment Commission that his father was formerly a ‘plate maker’ but he was now blind and had not worked for 4 years. The family got by thanks to the work of John and his two brothers, as well as their mother, who took in washing to earn extra money. James Bradley, aged 12, reported that his father, a ‘dish maker’, was unable to work because of his asthma, while 10-year-old Samuel Littler, who worked at another Burslem pottery, described having a brother at home who has ‘had a paralytic stroke and lost his arm’. ⁴⁵ The matter-of-fact way in which such evidence was minuted reinforces the view that disability was a normal part of working-class family life. Another witness, James Hughes, a 47-year-old journeyman keymaker from Willenhall, described how his wife, Jane, was a ‘cripple’ and earned a little by patching clothes. R. H. Horne described visiting Hughes's home, where he found Jane Hughes in a pitiful state, ‘full of animal spirits [i.e., mentally agitated], and in utter destitution’. ⁴⁶

The description of Jane Hughes, dressed in rags and talking incoherently, is a powerful reminder that disabled people unable to leave their homes sometimes faced real hardship and endured squalid living conditions. Michael Rembis observes that domestic environments could be places of neglect, danger or oppression for disabled people, as well as places of refuge or safety. ⁴⁷ Poor living conditions in industrial areas exacerbated problems for disabled people. R. P. Leyson, a surgeon from Neath, testified to the 1842 Children's Employment Commission that houses which were damp and had poor drainage in parts of the South Wales coalfield contributed to frequent cases of ‘rheumatic afflictions’ and ‘inflammatory attacks of various kinds’ among mining families. ⁴⁸ Care work was absorbing and could lead to the neglect of other family members, and therefore to further ill health. Sixteen-year-old Nicholas Hall, who worked underground at Jarrow Colliery, testified that he had suffered ill health ever since he had fallen into a mill pond as a young child and his mother had neglected to put him in dry clothes ‘because his father was ill and took up her attention’. ⁴⁹ In some poor families, disabled people received little care if their caregivers had to go out to work. In November 1849, Mayhew described how the adult daughter of two of London's poor street sellers, ‘paralysed all over’ since infancy, had to be locked in the house ‘without any one but the Lord to take care of her’, while her parents worked. ⁵⁰

Some witnesses before industrial inquiries of the 1830s and 1840s also testified to the difficulties they faced at home due to the failure of adults to properly support them. Seventeen-year-old witness Eliza Marshall told the Sadler Committee in 1832 that despite a disabling limb difference she had been forced to work in the factories because her stepfather was ‘not willing to keep me’. ⁵¹ Not only was she made to support herself, she was also expected to care for her sick mother. She told the Factory Commission in 1833 that her mother was taken ‘very ill’ and she had to ‘mind her’ despite being ‘very poorly and in the infirmary’ herself for treatment for her ‘lameness’. ⁵² Similarly, in Camilla Toulmin's novel, A Story of the Factories (1840), the character Margaret Brown, described as a ‘pale, hunchbacked factory girl’, suffered at the hands of her ‘selfish, extravagant, and every way unprincipled’ stepmother, whose profligacy ruined her family's fortunes and forced her to earn her living despite her ‘weak’ constitution. By being forced into ‘toil […] beyond her strength, her deformity became incurable, and her constitution yet further impaired’. ⁵³ Both these examples illustrate the dangers of malign domestic forces on disabled people, particularly girls and young women, whose cruel treatment powerfully illustrated the horrors of industrial life. ⁵⁴

3. Emotional and economic effects of disablement

The economic impact of disablement depended on the nature of impairment and whether it permitted someone to take up other work, and on the attitude of employers. For many workers, disablement meant reduced income or reliance on poorly paid alternative employment. In coalmining areas such as North East England, where there was a strong culture of paternalism, employers faced pressure to place the victims of accidents in ancillary work, such as sorting coal or tending the lamp room. While such work was considered lower status, it enabled men in a highly dangerous industry to continue to contribute to the domestic economy after disablement. ⁵⁵ In textile factories where adult male spinners and weavers often subcontracted ancillary work, there are examples of operatives choosing to keep young ‘deformed’ workers in employment to ease the financial strain on their families. For example, the Glasgow cotton spinner James McNish told the Sadler Committee that he had kept a girl working for him who suffered from swollen legs and feet ‘at a heavy loss’ because her ‘parents were very poor’. ⁵⁶

For injured and impaired men, continuing to contribute to the household economy where it was possible to do so was a matter of both pride and necessity. In his letter to the Morning Chronicle of 20 November 1849, Mayhew described visiting the home of a seller of ‘chickweed and grunsell’ (groundsel) for bird food in a squalid court in London's Saffron Hill. The man had originally worked as a weaver but had become ‘paralysed’ 19 years previously and ‘lost the use of all [of] one side’ of his body. Losing his trade had impoverished the family, leaving them short of money to buy food, but he remained determined to provide for them. Despite his leg and foot being ‘quite dead’, he tramped the streets for up to 10 hours a day selling goods that he scavenged from the fields. Mayhew observed that the man had carved the head of a bird on the handle of the walking stick he depended upon for mobility, a symbol perhaps of how the man had managed to incorporate his trade into his identity as a ‘crippled’ person. ⁵⁷ Mayhew noted that other London street sellers turned to this trade because they had been ‘disabled from their work, and have resorted to it to save themselves from the workhouse’. ⁵⁸ An eel seller, who had formerly worked as a coal heaver before breaking his knee in an accident, told Mayhew that despite being offered poor relief he was ‘anxious to do something’ for his family. He relied on the help of his daughter, who fetched eels for him from Billingsgate fish market, since he was reliant on a crutch and unable to walk far. ⁵⁹ A toymaker of Bethnal Green, forced to work from his bed due to degenerative disease in his thigh, described his desire to remain economically productive despite severe impairment. ‘The pain was dreadful, and the anxiety of mind I suffered for my wife and children made it a thousand times worse’, he told Mayhew, but since he couldn’t bear the thought of them ‘going to the workhouse’, he ‘kept on my feet until I could stand no longer’. Becoming confined to his bed, he continued to work thanks to his teenage daughter, who had taught herself how to cut out the wooden shapes he would then fashion into mouse traps and other goods for sale. Familial interdependence was central to the survival strategies of the disabled poor. ⁶⁰

In particularly dangerous occupations such as coalmining, the contribution of other family members was important in mitigating the effects of disablement on family income. In 1850 the risk of death by occupational accident was an estimated four or five times higher for mineworkers (4.5 to 5.0 per 1000 employed per year) than for the rest of the working population. ⁶¹ While enumerating disablement in coalmining is difficult at this time due to the absence of reliable data, it is likely that the number of workers whose bodies were left permanently damaged by accidents or ill health were much higher than the number killed. ⁶² John Benson estimated that for every miner killed, a further 100 were injured by accidents such as explosions, transport injuries and coal slides – in some cases becoming permanently disabled. ⁶³ Coalminers married young and had large families, something which reflected both the higher wages they could command, and the value of children to the household economy. ⁶⁴ Child labour not only helped to protect families from starving if the main breadwinner became incapacitated. In areas such as North East England and South Wales, where many coalminers lived in company-owned housing, it also helped to protect pitmen and their families from homelessness. ⁶⁵

The hard physical labour in coalmines meant that by the age of 40, miners were often beyond their peak of earnings, and stories of men becoming ‘worn out’ through their labour or prematurely aged were common. ⁶⁶ Before 1842, when legislation was introduced that prevented all women, girls and children under ten from working underground, sending children to work in coalmines from an early age was a familiar survival strategy for families struggling to cope with the effects of disability or other family misfortune. ⁶⁷ Time and again, young witnesses reported that their employment underground was motivated by the need to support their families. For example, 11-year-old David Woddell of Edgehead Colliery, Midlothian, testified that he and his sister worked long hours underground pulling carts of coal, since their ‘father cannot labour much, as he is nearly done in his breath’, and their mother was ‘clean done for; she can hardly breathe and has not worked some years’. ⁶⁸ Matthew Mills of Blaydon, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was sent to work in a coalmine at the age of 6 years and 4 months, his mother told the 1842 Children's Employment Commission, ‘on account of her husband's bad health’. Now aged ten, he earned 15 pence a day as a driver and occasionally attended school on ‘idle days’. ⁶⁹

As families became increasingly dependent on the earnings of male household heads, they faced pressure to supplement earnings when men were sick, injured or unemployed. Mothers sometimes needed to return to the labour force in such circumstances, but official inquiries of the 1830s and 1840s indicate that child labour was an especially valuable resource in mitigating the loss of breadwinner earnings. ⁷⁰ Samuel Cook had been sent to work in a factory aged just seven or eight, where he was regularly beaten to keep him awake, since his father was ‘lame, and could not work’. The Members of Parliament sitting on the Sadler Committee praised Cook's actions in doing his duty as a ‘good boy, in labouring the utmost’ that he could, to support his ‘sick and poor father’. ⁷¹ Such was the desire for children to start work at a young age in the mining industry (a result not just of higher rates of accident and injury, but also the belief that workers were best trained or ‘seasoned’ at a young age so they could acclimatise themselves to working underground) that Dr James Mitchell reported to the Children's Employment Commission in 1842 that in the North East coalfield mine owners were ‘beset by the entreaties of fathers and widows to employ their young children, and are in a manner compelled to do it’. ⁷² Some witnesses blamed parental desire for their sons to begin work at a young age for causing impairment and ill health among young people in coalmining communities, where employers faced pressure to ‘employ them beyond their strength’. ⁷³ Those children whose labour might best help a family in times of need were sometimes favoured by their parents over others. All but the most ‘unsound’ children were drafted into mine work, testified one colliery manager. ⁷⁴ Children seen as ‘unsound’ faced an uncertain future in coalmining families. An essay published in Charles Dickens's periodical Household Words in 1857 even claimed that such was the demand for healthy children – particularly boys – in these families that ‘superfluous children’ such as those with congenital impairments were ‘willfully left to slip into the grave’. ⁷⁵

Despite such gloomy assessments, evidence before official inquiries into child labour in the 1830s and 1840s testifies to the important contribution made by impaired as well as healthy children to the household economy. William Hebden told the Sadler Committee in 1832 that despite his limbs beginning to fail him at the age of eight, he had carried on working in a factory in Leeds because his father was sick and his parents ‘could not afford to keep me doing nothing’. ⁷⁶ Gillet Sharpe, assistant overseer of the poor at Keighley, Yorkshire, told the same inquiry that he knew of many young people who were carried to their work at the town's textile factories by family and neighbours despite being ‘poor cripples’ and incapable of walking. ⁷⁷ Fifteen-year-old William Pickles of Bradford told the Factory Commission in 1833 that each day he was ‘hugged’ (or carried) to the mill by his parents due to his inability to walk unaided. His legs were ‘bent dreadfully both inwards and forwards’ and he was barely 115 cm tall, but his parents said he had to work since they couldn’t afford for him to be ‘laiking’ – doing nothing – at home. ⁷⁸ Seventeen-year-old Joseph Habergam, who testified before the Sadler Committee and the Factory Commission, similarly described how his brother and sister would ‘out of kindness […] take me under each arm and run with me to the mill, and my legs dragged on the ground in consequence of the pain; I could not walk’. ⁷⁹

Impaired children also worked in coalmines in the early 19th century. ⁸⁰ For example, at Edmonstone Colliery near Edinburgh, 16-year-old David Brown and his sister worked underground in the early 1840s to support their widowed mother. David told the Children's Employment Commission that despite suffering from an ankle injury, his sister had to carry on working, as the family needed her wages. ⁸¹ While the ‘deaf and dumb’ sister of Agnes Grey was not able to join her siblings ‘working below’ at Pentcaitland Colliery, she was ‘learning the straw trade in Edinburgh’ (making straw hats) to help support her father, who, like so many other Scottish miners, was disabled due to lung disease. ⁸²

Despite allegations that parents exploited the wage-earning potential of their children to fund their ‘cupidity’ or ‘improvidence’, many witnesses before industrial inquiries presented the work of their children, healthy or ‘deformed’, as an unavoidable consequence of poverty. ⁸³ Gillet Sharpe testified that all his children had suffered in their health from working in factories. His son Edwin developed a deformity in his legs due to long hours standing at machinery, and his daughter Barbara had become ‘weak and lame in one of her knees’, which had left her ‘very much bow-legged’. Yet despite being fully aware of the damaging impact of factory work, he accepted that this work was necessary, especially as he knew that because they were still deemed capable of work, they would not receive any poor relief. The only child of his to have escaped the factory was his eldest daughter, whose ‘health was impaired’ by working in a textile mill from the age of six but who had been taken out to manage the household after her mother had died. ⁸⁴ William Swithenbank, a Leeds cloth dresser, similarly testified that parishes denied relief to families if children were old enough to work at a mill and work was available. Consequently, he had sent his eldest son to work minding a machine called a ‘crab’, which had ‘pulled him in and caught his arm’. He survived this terrible mangling but was left a ‘cripple for life’. ⁸⁵

Official inquiries into industrial work in the 1830s and 1840s repeatedly emphasised the harmful impact of sending very young children to work in factories or coalmines. However, on occasion these sources present more positive perspectives on the labour of disabled children. For example, the Children's Employment Commission in 1842 reported that 8-year-old Benjamin Jones had been removed from school by his father and taken to work with him at the ironworks in Dowlais, South Wales. According to the report, the boy was ‘labouring under a kind of spinal complaint’, and Benjamin's father said that he had been advised by a surgeon to take his child to work with him because the exercise was better for his body than being ‘inactive’ at home or in the classroom. Consequently, he now found his son ‘in better health’ than before. ⁸⁶ While this appears to be an unusual case, the belief that industrial workplaces might be beneficial environments for people with certain impairments or chronic illnesses was espoused by other witnesses who participated in official inquiries. The constant temperature of coalmines or factories was argued by defenders of conditions in these workplaces to be advantageous to health compared to working in damp homes or being exposed to cold and wet weather in the fields. ⁸⁷ Samuel Holt, John Rowbotham and Joseph Gaskell, managers at Birley's mill in Manchester, told the 1833 Royal Commission on factory work that children who were ‘naturally deformed, others who are weak in their limbs’ and people of ‘weakly health’ could only find work in factories, since the warm atmosphere was beneficial to them. Holt testified that ‘we have a few at our works who are unfit for anything else but factory work – grown up people who have lost their limbs’. ⁸⁸

While such statements were clearly intended to undermine reformers’ claims that factories were dangerous and disabling environments, they nonetheless suggest that to view the labour of impaired children simply through the lens of economic necessity might not capture the range of parental motives involved. Parents sought opportunities for their disabled children to find future employment. Official inquiries indicated that in some cases boys and girls might have been sent to school by their parents after becoming disabled due to work to learn new skills that would enable them to take up clerical work or serve their communities as teachers. ⁸⁹ Fourteen-year-old Mary Bucktrout lost her arm in a machine accident at Leeds and was given just £1 in compensation so that her father, ‘a poor working man’, was obliged to support her. However, when William Dodd met her in September 1841, she was attending St John's School and was ‘receiving such instruction as may enable her to undertake the management of an infant school’. ⁹⁰ Benjamin Jones might have been taken out of Dowlais school by his father, but there were twelve other boys ‘maimed and crippled’ on the school's books at that time, almost all of them injured in accidents at the iron works ‘so as to render them incapable of labour’. One of them, Thomas George, aged 17 and a half, had lost an arm after having it crushed in rollers at the forge. After taking 3 months to recover, he had gone to school, where he had learned to write and was now learning ciphering, perhaps with a view to finding future work in bookkeeping. ⁹¹

It was not just the loss or reduction of breadwinner wages through disablement that threatened the economic well-being of families. While women's wages made a decreasing contribution to household income as the 19th-century progressed, women's inability to undertake domestic work, including caring responsibilities for children, could pose difficulties for families, with children – especially girls – stepping into these roles. Injury or impairment among offspring could also impoverish families, especially if children needed to be supported into adulthood. William Dodd gave several examples of this in The Factory System Illustrated. A young man from Bolton who had lost both his arms at the age of 19 in a machine accident told him that he was now forced to depend on his parents for support, but his father was a ‘poor working man’ and he had seven younger siblings to maintain. ‘This accident has caused great privation in our family’, he told Dodd, since he was ‘not able to do anything’ for himself and was ‘obliged to have a brother’ to ‘wait’ on him. ⁹² Twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Ashcroft of Wigan found herself in a similarly impoverished situation after losing her right leg ‘a little below the knee’ in William Wood's factory, which left her dependent for economic support on her handloom weaver father. Supporting children who had been incapacitated by work into adulthood placed families under strain, even more so in the case of those in trades such as handloom weaving whose livelihoods were threatened by mechanisation. ⁹³

Injury and illness had the potential to disrupt established roles, relations and dynamics in working-class families in profound ways. Parental disability forced children to grow up quickly, and older children had to take on quasi-parental roles in relation to their younger siblings. Henry Worton of Willenhall described how he had been obliged to look after himself from a young age because ‘his father was lame, and his mother was blind’. He told the Children's Employment Commission that he had needed to take charge when his younger brother was mistreated in his apprenticeship, gaining a court order to free him from his indenture. ⁹⁴ Disabled fathers continued to be named as heads of households on census returns, which recognised their continued symbolic authority within their families, but when they ceded the breadwinner role to their sons this inevitably led to a surrendering of responsibility for the wellbeing of their families, which could be humiliating. ⁹⁵ As we have seen, although most men attempted to maintain their breadwinner role for as long as their health or opportunity allowed, those who were incapable of earning a living outside the home sometimes took on domestic responsibilities. Thirteen-year-old James Foster, who cut coal at Haugh Lynn Colliery, Midlothian (Scotland), told the Children's Employment Commission that his father was ‘clean gone in the breath’ and incapable of any work. Before the banning of women from working underground in 1842, it was customary for families to work together in Scottish coalmines. Foster's brother and mother both worked alongside him – his mother pushing the coal that he cut to the mineshaft to be raised to the surface. This meant that his disabled father took on the traditional maternal role, caring for the family's seven other children. Inability to do traditional breadwinner work did not prevent him from undertaking emotional labour in the home. ⁹⁶

4. Conclusion

Despite the traditional view in Disability Studies that the Industrial Revolution led to the increased segregation of disabled people from work and family life, there is much evidence to suggest that impaired people continued to live with their families and, where circumstances allowed, contributed to the family economy. Rather than a private refuge from the world of work and industrial relations, the family was a political arena and featured prominently in public discourse about the nature and impact of industrialisation. For critics of industrialisation, the claim that urban industrial labourers cared little for the welfare of disabled people within the home symbolised the demoralisation of the industrial working class, uprooted from rural societies and set adrift from Christian moral values. For supporters of government intervention to regulate industrial workplaces, tales of the suffering of ‘crippled’ children sent by their families to work in mines or factories provided compelling reasons for reform. For radicals and trade unionists, breadwinner fragility, illustrated by the spectacle of the honest working man worn out through his exertions and unable to provide for his wife and children, demonstrated the cold indifference of employers to the fate of their increasingly proletarianised workforce, who paid for their profits with their health.

Yet behind the rhetoric, what emerges is a more complex picture of working families struggling to negotiate the economic and psychological impacts of ill health and disablement using their own resources and sometimes drawing on wider networks of institutional and informal support.

Workplace inquiries of the 1830s and 1840s drew attention to the frequency of ill health among factory hands and colliers. This provides an important context for understanding the contribution of children to the familial economy. E. P. Thompson famously described the ‘exploitation of little children’ as one of the most ‘shameful’ aspects of early 19th-century industrialisation, but for families struggling to come to terms with the reduction or loss of breadwinner earnings through ill health or disability, it was a necessary survival strategy. ⁹⁷ After 1840, the relative contribution of children's wages to the family economy declined. The evidence gathered in official inquiries into working conditions led to legislative action to restrict the labour of children, such as the 1833 Factories Act, which banned children under nine from working in factories and restricted the hours worked by older children, and the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act, which prohibited all females and boys under 10 from working underground. Children's work remained a means of supporting families through crisis, but opportunities became more limited as time went on. ⁹⁸

Although the nature and location of work was changing, the role of the family as a locus of care for sick and disabled members remained constant through this period, even though the household was not always a safe environment. Indeed, when disabled working people such as William Dodd began to speak out against the neglect of people injured or deformed in factories by their employers and to highlight the difficulties faced by working families in providing care, the complaint was not about families having to warehouse disabled people in institutions (although that was a constant fear), but about the lack of proper places of safety for disabled people in a world that seemed to care little for their needs. In Dodd's view, the responsibility for the care of his fellow ‘factory cripples’ should not be a further burden on struggling working families, rather these people should be maintained in dignity in recognition of the sacrifices they had made for their employers’ wealth. Accordingly, he called for the establishment of an ‘asylum’ for ‘mutilated factory cripples’, like the provision for disabled ex-servicemen in the military and naval hospitals at Chelsea and Greenwich. ⁹⁹

Disability could place families under significant economic strain and unleash feelings of shame in breadwinners incapacitated by their years of earning a living. But what is also striking from the evidence provided by investigations into working lives in industrialising Britain, is what it reveals about the contribution made by impaired men, women and children to family life and the domestic economy. While disability could challenge gender roles, with men unable to work facing emasculation, evidence gathered on industrial work from the 1830s and 1840s also reveals the desire to maintain traditional gendered identities in the face of impairment. Men expected to continue to provide for their families as far as they were capable, and failure to fulfil this role was a source of anxiety that was used to encourage responsible working fathers to protect their family fortunes against future disablement by joining friendly societies or trade unions. ¹⁰⁰ Disabled girls and women were still expected to perform traditional domestic roles. While historians have focused on the types of care provided for disabled children, this article has highlighted the necessity of these children's economic contribution to struggling families. The numerous accounts of young children with limb deformities, or ‘lamed’ by workplace accidents, going to work in Britain's factories and coalmines – sometimes literally ‘dragged’ there by their siblings or workmates – was used as horrifying evidence of the ill effects of industrial work on young bodies, but it also testified to the important role played by infirm as well as ‘healthy’ young people in supporting themselves and their families.

While the evidence presented in this article provides a catalyst for new thinking about disability and the 19th-century working-class family, there is more work to be done. The evidence provided by official inquiries during the 1830s and 1840s provides exceptionally rich worker testimonies about their work and family lives, but the accounts of factory operatives and coalminers examined here do not reflect the full range of working people's experiences. Our understanding of disability and working-class family life would benefit from more comparative work between regions and occupations. The caring responsibilities of disabled people within working-class families are less visible in the evidence examined in this article, which tends to focus on conditions in the workplace rather than the home, but it is nonetheless an important part of disabled people's histories that deserves further investigation. In 2019, the charity Carers UK reported that people providing high levels of care for others were ‘twice as likely to be permanently sick or disabled’ compared to the wider population. ¹⁰¹ The concept of disability as an inability to undertake paid work (thus disregarding other types of unpaid and emotional labour) was reinforced during the Industrial Revolution. For example, Henry Mayhew divided London's poor into the ‘striving’, who earned their living through their own labours, and ‘the disabled’, who did not. ¹⁰² But this binary distinction does not map easily onto the experiences of people Mayhew described, or those who testified about their work and family lives to official inquiries. There were many ‘disabled’ people who worked ‘when not able’, and others who, although disabled by paid work, strove to provide care for others in the home. By taking a wider perspective on the history of disability and work, we might better understand the role of disabled people as contributors both inside and outside the home.