The Real Oliver Twist: Robert Blincoe — A Life that Illuminates an Age
By John Waller
Icon Books, 2005
468pp, $39.95 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
The beatings and tortures were cruel and constant — Robert Blincoe, a mere child, would be kicked into the air; knocked to the ground with punches; thrashed with sticks, belts and rope; pelted in the head with metal machine parts; lifted by the ears, shaken violently and tossed to the ground; forced to eat candle, tar and tobacco spittle; and had nails dug into his ear lobes and metal vices hung from his ears.
Small, crooked and horribly scarred from a childhood spent working in English cotton mills during the Industrial Revolution, Blincoe went on to belie his appearance and become an imposing upright figure in the political movement for human rights for working people. The Real Oliver Twist, by Melbourne University's John Waller, is an impressive tribute to Blincoe, whose story of appalling suffering, ill-treatment and neglect inspired Charles Dickens to write Oliver Twist.
Abandoned as an illegitimate orphan soon after his birth in 1792, Blincoe was thrown on the meagre charity of the local authorities of the parish of St Pancras on the outskirts of London. The parish workhouse which fed — and controlled — the poor, offered vermin, overcrowding, rigorous discipline and drudgery to its young inmates.
Paupers were a burden to the better-off citizens of the parish who resentfully financed the workhouse through the Poor Rates. Workhouse paupers who survived past their second birthday (and half of them didn't) were "apprenticed" to employers as soon as possible, shifting the expense of their upkeep to someone else. The parish "apprenticeships" were a mockery of learning a trade — their decade or more of unremitting toil was "no more than legalised child slavery".
The abjectly unhappy, seven-year-old Blincoe initially looked forward to the lures of "roast beef and plum pudding" from the cotton mill employers who came recruiting. It was a false prospectus. Wretched misery and terror awaited Blincoe in a Nottingham cotton mill. Five-am starts for a fourteen-hour day of overwhelming fatigue, frequent and vicious beatings, life-threatening accidents and hunger were the reality. On Sundays the child labourers were excused work, and expected to attend Church services "giving thanks to a benevolent God".
Blincoe developed knock-knees from the excessive strain placed on immature limbs and lack of adequate nutrition in a growing body. He, like many other mill children, would walk with pain and difficulty for the rest of his life. His tally of bruises only increased when economic pressures and competition from the more efficient steam-powered mills forced Blincoe's water-driven mill to close and he was signed over to a new mill in Derbyshire where the food was even worse and the tortures more bestial.
Pre-industrial England had a long history of cruelty and child exploitation in a conspicuously violent age but factory life, dictated by the rhythm of the machine, severely upped the ante from 1780.
To survive knife-edge economic competition, factory profits had to be maximised by cutting costs. Kindness imposed costs on production, and play and learning were subtractions from an unforgiving bottom-line which fed on cheap child labour. Thus did primitive capital accumulation through intensive exploitation of children help to drive the industrial revolution.
Parliamentary salvation for factory children was a chimera — among the wealthy legislators were compassionate reformers but Waller concludes that parliamentary reform was woefully inadequate and too tardy to prevent the blighting of thousands of young lives. Like most humanitarian laws, says Waller, the few, modest parliamentary attempts to reduce child labour hours were routinely ignored by magistrates and inspectors who often had money invested in cotton mills. Blincoe had to fend for himself.
Possibly because of his (mistaken) conviction that he was the son of an educated clergyman, Blincoe had a fierce sense of indignation that gave him uncommon courage and assertiveness. In 1812, he and two other mill children went on strike for shorter hours. Viciously beaten for this incipient unionism, Blincoe fled to a magistrate 18 kilometres away. Armed with a warning letter from the not unsympathetic justice, Blincoe returned to yet another ferocious horsewhipping, prompting a second escape to the magistrate and a sterner warning for his employer, which won Blincoe a reprieve from the rod until he turned 21 and was freed from his indentured servitude.
Blacklisted as a troublemaker, however, and dogged by joblessness and precarious employment, the adult Blincoe resolved to haul himself out of his desperate economic straits. Sleeping rough to save on rent, Blincoe amassed enough capital to become a waste cotton dealer, small cotton manufacturer and grocery shop owner, surviving the setbacks of fire and bankruptcy to achieve the petit-bourgeois dream of the self-made, independent proprietor.
Blincoe did not abandon his former class, however. As parliamentary liberals and conservatives toyed with mild factory reform (cautious reform might prevent violent revolution, they reasoned in an age of rebellion, protests, strikes, riots and abortive uprisings), Blincoe was committed to saving children from the horrors he had faced. He became a prominent part of the "short-time" campaign to limit hours for child-labourers.
Blincoe's entre was through John Brown, a reforming, if eccentric, writer who took up the short-hours cause through a remarkable memoir of Blincoe. As literature, it was propagandistic, melodramatic and verbose but accurate in its essentials and deeply and movingly empathetic. John Brown is to be acknowledged, writes Waller, for writing "the biography of a young man hailing from a class whose sufferings were below the notice of the vast majority of those with the freedom and education to write".
Brown's memoir of Blincoe was first serialised by the publisher, Richard Carlile, in his radical working class newspaper, The Lion, in 1828. Four years later, the secretary of Manchester's cotton workers' union, John Doherty, realising the "power of highlighting individual lives" to humanise the short-hours campaign, published Blincoe's memoir as a pamphlet. Blincoe became an icon of the factory reform movement with hundreds of banners bearing his woodcut image on display at massive demonstrations, whilst Blincoe gave testimony at parliamentary commissions into child labour.
The short-hours campaign eventually tasted success. After a laggardly procession of mild, ineffectively enforced short-hours acts of 1812, 1816, 1819, 1825 and 1833, interspersed with leisurely parliamentary enquiries, a Ten Hours Act was finally passed in 1847, limiting the hours of factory and colliery children, and adults, to a daily maximum of ten. Blincoe lived to see this victory before bronchitis took his life in 1860.
Waller is careful not to paint his portrait of Blincoe and his times in monochrome. He subjects Blincoe's memoir to critical corroboration, concluding that it is an honest account of Blincoe's life, the workhouse and factory conditions he experienced so bad as to need no embellishment or invention. True, Blincoe's experience was exceptional (he was unfortunate to cop the very worst of the abusing mill-owners) but Waller notes that this does not mitigate the debilitating experience of hard work, long hours, bullying and poor diet that were the norm in all mills, even, in lesser form, those of the more "benevolent" owners.
Nearly 200 years ago, it was something of a "minor miracle", says Waller, that the life of an obscure working man "was ever recorded at all". There was a biographical monopoly of "kings, saints, generals, admirals, statesmen" and other affluent, powerful worthies from the upper ranks of the establishment. The poor lived and died in "complete anonymity". By rescuing Blincoe's life from this political amnesia, Waller joins Blincoe's other literary champions in telling of "the horrors that are liable to be inflicted on the weak where capitalism is unrestrained by either law or human decency".
Waller's story of Blincoe is also the story of the triumph of the shorter hours campaign, demonstrating that it is working people, like Blincoe, who refuse to be passive victims, and their collective organisations, and all people of genuine humanity, which can fight the abuses of unrestrained capitalism. Robert Blincoe's life of suffering and his unbowed spirit deserves the most sensitive, respectful and honest telling. John Waller delivers it.
From Green Left Weekly, July 19, 2006.
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