It is widely held that Victorian children started to work at a very tender age and that, in factories and mines, they endured dreadful working conditions, at least until effective legislative controls were implemented during the 1830s and 1840s. However, these considerations need to be viewed in context, bearing in mind that children entered a wide range of occupations and that they commonly attended school. In investigating these matters, evidence taken from early Victorian census schedules is highly revealing.

Children will need familiarising with census enumerators’ schedules and how they were compiled. Details can be found on the BBC History Trails: Victorian Britain website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/victorian_britain/. The essay Working Life and the First Modern Census gives details of how the schedules were used to collect information in 1851. For information about the censuses of England and Wales more generally, see the National Archives web site at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census/.

This exercise draws on the 1851 census enumerators’ schedules for Tockholes, a rural district to the south of Blackburn in Lancashire. The settlement then comprised scattered farms and short terraces of small houses, most of them built with loomshops for handloom weaving. There was also a cotton factory, in which cotton cloth was woven on powerlooms, and some small-scale coal mining.

Details of three Tockholes families noted in the 1851 census are copied below.

Points for children to note from these entries are:

• The use of abbreviations such 'do' for 'ditto', so that enumerator could increase the speed at which he copied the householders’ forms into his enumerator's book. (Not all abbreviations used by the enumerator have been noted in the extract.)
• Some of the occupation’s given are not very precise. Cases in point are the designations 'farmer's son' or 'farmer's daughter', which the enumerators were instructed to use for sons and daughters employed on farms. Some very young children are described in this way, though it is debatable as to how much work they would have been physically capable of doing.
• All the places of birth noted in the entries are in Lancashire, those outside Tockholes mostly being no more than a few miles away.

The 1851 census enumerators were told that sons and daughters employed at home or on the farm might be returned as 'Farmer's son' or 'Farmer's daughter'. They were instructed to 'distinctly' record the occupations of women, young persons and young persons who were regularly employed from home or at home. Children daily attending school who were above five year's old, or receiving regular tuition at home from a master or mistress were to described as 'Scholar', with ‘at home’ added in the latter case. One problem with these designations is that they do not tell us how fully women and children were occupied as workers, nor children as scholars.

Several possibilities arise, with much depending on whether or not the children go beyond using the Tockholes material.

1. Initial ideas: the Tockholes census extract

Class discussion using small amounts of census schedule data should enable children to formulate questions or hypotheses as a focus for further investigation. Possibilities are:

• How old were Tockholes children when the started school?
• How old were the oldest scholars?
• What types of jobs did children have?
• Did boys have different jobs that girls?
• Did boys stay on longer at school than girls?

2. Using the spreadsheet

The results of the Tockholes investigation are presented in the form of spreadsheet-generated graphs. Accordingly, children may need guidance on inputting the data into a spreadsheet and creating the graphs

(a) Inputting data

The records of 200 children at Tockholes were used, though half the number would probably suffice. As the spreadsheet extract given below reveals, four fields were created, to which filters were added so that the data in each field could be sorted. The inputting task could be lessened by using abbreviations, of course. Entries 30 and 31 are the two youngest children recorded in the Guest household.

Tockholes children, 1851

The analysis is partly based on standard five-year age groups - 0-4, 5-9 and 10-14, to which the children can be introduced. Only those aged 14 and under are included on the spreadsheet, therefore. They all fall into one of three categories, namely scholars, those working and those with on occupational description.

The 200 Tockholes entries in spreadsheet form are given at the end of this exercise. They can be copied and pasted directly into an excel spreadsheet. The column width with need adjusting and filters added for sorting purposes

(b) Creating the graphs

Sorting the data using the filters enables the following spreadsheet table to be produced. This table can be copied and pasted into an excel spreadsheet and the chart wizard deployed to create the graph below.

However, analyzing the results may be more straightforward if the figures in the table are calculated as percentages, as in the chart below, before the chart wizard is deployed.

The graph that results is shown below.

3. Analysing the results

Children might work from the chart above, which captures all the spreadsheet data, but graphs relating to each age group and each occupational group could be created instead. They could analyse each age group in turn, with a view to making, and writing down, the following types of observation:

1. None of the 0-4 age group were recorded as working, though nearly one in five were described as scholars.
2. Amongst the 5 to 9 year olds, the great majority - 80 per cent - were scholars, with fewer than 10 per cent being described as working.
3. All 10 to 14 year olds were either scholars or working, with a clear majority – 63 per cent - working.

The results could be further refined by more detailed sorting of the data. Points that might emerge include:

1. All 13 and 14 year olds had left school and were working.
2. Those working in the 5 to 9 age group were at the older end of the range.
3. The youngest child to work away from home was a 9 year-old collier.
4. The youngest factory worker was a 9 year-old powerloom weaver tenter (assistant).

Relatively few children under the age of 10 were at work, therefore, and quite a number stayed at school beyond that age.

• There are dangers in taking the census evidence too literally, since some inaccuracy on the part of the enumerators may have occurred and part-time work undertaken by the children might not have been recorded. Additionally, children’s attendance at school may have been reduced by part-time work opportunities that arose periodically, as at harvest time, or when domestic demands had to be met (probably by girls) such as caring for sick people.
• The Tockholes findings mirror those more generally at the time, though clearly the type of jobs children undertook varied between localities. That so few young children found employment reflects their limited strength and ability to concentrate; the effects of the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1844, together with the Mines’ Act of 1842, which constrained child labour in textile factories and coal mines; and the reluctance of some parents to allow their children to go into factory work.
• The same sort of exercise can be undertaken using census schedule data from the late 19th or early 20th century, so that change over time in relation to child labour and schooling can be assessed.
• Useful reading on child labour and schooling in the Victorian period can be found in Michael Winstanley (ed), Working Children in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Preston, 1995), especially chapter 1 and Geoffrey Timmins, Made in Lancashire (Manchester, 1998), pp.132-6).

Tockholes children, 1851