FRANCESCO FLORITTO VB

Children’s conditions

Surely, one of the worst plagues of the Industrial Revolution is the hard involvement of children in the everyday factory’s work. They represent a real business for the masters of these factories because they could be paid not very much and they worked for a very long time. These children “survived” in very prohibitive conditions. They had a very little of food.

In general, they usually came from poor families that had no money to sustain them and to send them to school. They became things or even less important than them. The masters based their profits on them, which were able to work longer and faster than adults were. Besides their physical structure allowed them to work in places in which adults cannot.

Obviously, living in these terrible places, they became adults very faster and they immediately forgot fun, imagination, fantasy, which should be the only things on which a child had to base his life. Very significant is Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Oliver Twist, which in my opinion perfectly reflects, with all the cruelty and the pain of the case, the terrifying conditions in which these children were forced to live in order to survive. In addition, in this opera it is very important to notice to strong attack of Dickens against the institutions and the politics who did not care at all of workhouse children’s condition.

Finally, I would like to conclude, saying that this was the price England accepted to pay in order to develop itself on an industrial level and point of view.