A brief statistical sketch of the child labour market in mid-nineteenth-century London

2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER KIRBY

The profusion of small trades and services that characterized the nineteenth-century London labour market makes it extremely difficult to arrive at any general understanding of the work of children and juveniles. This brief study employs published statistical materials and compares children's occupations in the metropolis with the national picture. It argues that London contained exceptionally low levels of children's employment compared with the rest of England and Wales. The preoccupation of metropolitan social observers with working children may have resulted from the fact that child employment in mid-nineteenth-century London was a marginal activity associated chiefly with the very poor.

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Nabeela Begum ◽  
Javed Iqbal ◽  
Hina

This study examines the determinants of child labour in Mardan and Nowshera districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Primary data on socioeconomic characteristics of children engaged and did not engage in child labour were obtained from Labour Education Organization Mardan. Age of the children and family size are positively and education is negatively and significantly associated with the probability of children participation in labour market. The probability of child labour is more with the household income although with a very low coefficient value which is contrary to our expectations and may ne indicative that child labour could be a major source of household income. This study suggests that subsidies may be provided to families for their children education. Family size is also positively related to the child labour, therefore steps may be taken towards encouraging small family sizes and thereby reducing the child labour.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Okechukwu Stephen Chukwudeh ◽  
Akpovire Oduaran

Background: Liminality brings confusion among children as they cannot progress to the next stage of life, neither could they regress to their previous state of events. The situation is precarious for socioeconomic deprived children in Africa as it cast aspersion on their career, health and well-being. The study, therefore, examines the experiences’ of children who were supposed to be in school but were observed working at the informal market space in Africa. Methods: Qualitative data was collected through referral and non-discriminative snowballing. Fourty-eight participants (48-KII 2, IDI 10, FGD 6–6 person per group, total 36) from Aleshinloye and Bodija markets in Southwest Nigeria were included in the study. Results: Parental poverty, poor education facilities, peer influence, and the frequent strike by education institutions (pre-tertiary and tertiary) were implicated for the prevalence of child labour in the informal market space in Southwest Nigeria. Conclusions: The negative consequences of the liminality stage far outweigh the positive. Therefore, there is a need for conscientious efforts by community leaders, parents, and relevant stakeholders in the society to eradicate snags within the liminality of children’s education in order to curb child labour. This is necessary to achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030.


1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Clarke

SynopsisIn the mid-nineteenth century opium and its derivatives, such as laudanum and morphine, were the most common poisons in suicides in England and Wales. With legislative restrictions on these ‘dangerous drugs’ such a use declined. This study attempts to show this trend and indicates the large variety of these opium-related suicides.


Bread Winner ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 62-85
Author(s):  
Emma Griffin

This chapter reveals the significance for work to male identity. Here, it shows how the centrality of work dominates men's autobiographies. Work was the key feature of a man's life and it was very often the motif by which male writers structured the story of their life. For most working-class men, work was equated with manhood — ‘I was a man and I knew it’. The chapter goes on to discuss how many Victorian children commenced their working lives at a considerably young age, particularly early in the reign when the place of children in the labour market was much more loosely regulated. Furthermore, to a far greater extent than girls, boys' experiences of work were shaped by the legislative framework as child labour laws became increasingly restrictive over time. This changing legal framework for child labour is clearly visible in the male autobiographies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 1210-1247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy E. Bailey ◽  
Timothy J. Hatton ◽  
Kris Inwood

In nineteenth century Britain atmospheric pollution from coal-fired industrialization was on the order of 50 times higher than today. We examine the effects of these emissions on child development by analysing the heights on enlistment during WWI of men born in England and Wales in the 1890s. We find a strong negative relationship between adult heights and the coal intensity of the districts in which these men were observed as children in the 1901 census. The subsequent decline in atmospheric pollution likely contributed to the long-term improvement in health and increase in height.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Edwards

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Sheila M. Kidd

This article examines the linguistic landscape of the nineteenth-century Highlands through the lens of the labour market. It analyses a corpus of over 600 job advertisements seeking Gaelic speakers which appeared in the Inverness Courier between 1817 and 1899 and draws on a further 200 from selected years of the Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman. It examines the range of roles in which an ability to speak Gaelic, alongside English, was seen as either a necessity or advantageous by employers, considering in turn, education, health and social welfare, commerce, domestic service, law and order, estate and land, and the church. Some of the factors behind growing opportunities for skilled and semi-skilled Gaelic speakers are explored, such as the expansion of the health and welfare system in the wake of the 1845 Poor Law (Scotland) Act, and the accommodations made for the needs of Gaelic speakers when new roles were created. The continuing utility of Gaelic in Highland commerce also emerges as a counter to contemporary views of the language as unsuited for such transactional contexts. The evidence from these advertisements underlines the complexity of language usage in the Highlands in the nineteenth century as well as the need for further research to extend our understanding of the use of Gaelic in both public and private spheres.


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