After apprenticeship: children, work, and life course in nineteenth-century England

英国的工业化是建立在工厂纺织生产扩张的基础上的。这种增长需要大量的劳动力。令人惊讶的是，历史学家几乎没有提供关于这一劳动力是如何动员和部署的细节。然而，众所周知，许多第一批工厂工人是妇女和儿童，而且一些工厂，特别是农村的工厂，持续使用年轻的童工，其中相当大一部分是教区学徒。自二十世纪初以来，学术界对教区学徒制度的兴趣主要集中在贫困儿童被教区处理和被制造商剥削的方式上。传统上认为，教区学徒制度是虚构的，服务于教区的短期目标，即消除不必要的负担，但不能给孩子或雇主带来任何长期利益。但这项研究构成了这项申请的基础，它提供的证据表明，这些儿童中有相当大一部分人在进入成年后形成了“新的”制造业劳动力的核心。工厂学徒之所以重要，是因为他们接触到了新的工作方式，并获得了新的工作方式；在至少半个世纪的时间里，他们构成了许多工厂劳动力的重要组成部分。许多人有机会留在他们接受过培训的工厂；或者在类似的企业中使用自己的技能，或者实际上在不同的制造部门寻找工作。作为学徒，他们所学到的东西似乎对S/他在工业英格兰的变幻莫测的过程中所学到的个人和整个经济都是有价值的。在这个项目中，使用了从18世纪末到19世纪初供应给纺织厂的教区工厂学徒的样本，探讨了1820年至1880年期间儿童在制造业劳动力中的质量和数量意义的问题。人们认识到，纺织制造业并不代表所有行业；事实上，它可能是例外。这当然是一个充满活力的行业。然而，现有证据为探索特定儿童群体提供了机会，因为他们与商业活动互动。这项研究从教区和商业记录中确定的4000名个人和他们最初接受过学徒的50家公司中挑选出来，整合了广泛的来源，探索了三个主题。其中第一个包括工厂学徒最初成为成年工人后的就业模式。通过从商业记录、人口普查报告、信件、定居审查和议会报告中提取的两个或两个以上来源的联系来追踪这些个人，以制定一系列详细的生活史。这些都为劳动力的代际再创造提供了证据。第二个主题是接受过这一群体培训的公司的长期表现。大约40%的被选中企业没有生存下来，但其余的企业至少存活了一代人。收集到的证据既表明雇主倾向于留住在自己或邻近公司接受培训的儿童，也表明盈利能力与学徒的适当待遇之间的关系。第三个主题考虑了中央和地方政府制定的青年就业战略及其对区域和国家劳动力市场需求的影响，并通过对教区和议会报告的密切调查得出结论，直到十九世纪末，儿童就业仍然是贫穷法律实践、国家优先事项、商业成功和家庭生存的核心。

British industrialisation was founded on the expansion of factory textile production. This growth required large quantities of labour. Historians have generated surprisingly little detail about how this labour was mobilised and deployed. It is, however, quite well known that many of the first factory workers were women and children, and that some factories especially in the countryside made sustained use of young children workers, a substantial proportion of whom were parish apprentices. Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in parish apprenticeship has focused on the way in which poor children were disposed of by parishes and exploited by manufacturers. It is conventionally believed that parish apprenticeships were 'fictive', serving the parishes' short term goal of removing an unwanted burden but failing to bring any longer term benefits to either the child or the employer. But the study which forms the basis of this application provides evidence to demonstrate that a significant proportion of these children formed the core of the 'new' manufacturing workforce as they moved into adulthood. Factory apprentices were important because they were exposed to and acquired new ways of working; and they comprised a substantial component of the workforce of many factories for at least half a century. Many were given the opportunity to stay on at the factory where they had trained; or to use their skills in a similar enterprise, or indeed to seek employment in a different branch of manufacture. What they had learned as apprentices appears to have been valuable both for the individual child as s/he negotiated the vagaries of industrial England, and for the economy as a whole.The question of the qualitative and quantitative significance of children in the manufacturing labour force between 1820 and 1880 is explored in this project using a sample of parish factory apprentices who were supplied to textile mills from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. It is recognised that textile manufacturing was not representative of all industry; indeed it may have been exceptional. It was certainly a dynamic sector. Yet the available evidence provides an opportunity to explore a particular group of children as they interacted with business activity. This study takes a selection of the 4000 named individuals identified from parish and business records and fifty of the firms to which they were originally apprenticed and, integrating a wide range of sources explores three themes. The first of these comprises the employment patterns of the initial cohort of factory apprentices as they became adult workers. The individuals are traced through the linkage of two or more sources drawn from business records, census returns, letters, settlement examinations and parliamentary reports, to develop a series of detailed life histories. These provide evidence of generational re-creation of labour. The longer term performance of the firms in which this cohort had been trained forms the second theme. Approximately forty per cent of the businesses selected did not endure but the remainder survived for a least a further generation. The evidence collected demonstrates both employer preference for retaining children trained in their own or a neighbouring firm, and the relationship between profitability and the proper treatment of apprentices. The third theme considers the development of central and local government strategies towards the employment of young people and their influence on regional and national labour market requirements and concludes, through close investigation of parish and parliamentary reports, that until late in the nineteenth century the employment of children remained central to Poor Law practices, to State priorities, to commercial success and to family survival.