The Industrial Revolution brought, as everyone can infer, new inventions in the agricultural, manufacturing and industrial sector which allowed to improve productive system, even if precarious labour conditions better witnessed how it didn’t bring wellness as well as it produced wealth.

Indeed, as the intelligent reader can evince from the present extract, people, particularly children, working in bad conditions were identified as the “fuel” of the first industrial revolution in the world. To make an idea of the figures of the time let’s report the chief statistics of Jane Humphries’ research: more than a million children (15% of the total labour force) were employed, or better, exploited in factories during the period 1791-1820; 55-60% of them were made up of 10-11 years old children, the average age at which they left schools and started working.

Children weren’t considered as salaried workers (their wage was only “room and board”) and so they suited for industrial production, also thanks to their versatility and fast-learning competences. Their condition of “child slaves” definitely made them more mature, they could get married much younger and start a family; furthermore the removal of social restrictions allowed to create larger and larger family units, which implied, despite of a high death rate, a large-scale growth of population all around England.

Moreover, until they became fathers, there were many reasons like wars, empire-building and labour mobility which compelled them to abandon their families, left under women’s responsibility (in this period the “profession” of the housewife begins to widely spread).

In my opinion the use of law of averages in Humphries’ research is very useful to make today’s readers, and in future today’s children, aware of how much important is the social context in which people is born in. These poor children were plunged into the difficult reality of the time and paid the costs of an Industrial Revolution whose consequences are still visible.

Similar labour conditions today would be unacceptable in Western world, even if in the Third World they still persist: even now, unfortunately, multinational corporations are powered by juvenile exploitment. Many people does not even know how just lucky they are of their situation.