Charley’s Labor—Lily Caswell

 In Chapter 15, we see Charley (Charlotte), Emma, and Tom Neckett. They are orphans and have to stay with Mrs. Blinder. Charley, the oldest, has to work to support her siblings by being a clothes washer. “The three children close together, and two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the childish figure.” (Dickens, p 188) Charley is described as “a very little girl, childish in figure but shrewd and older-looking in the face—pretty-faced too—wearing a womanly story of bonnet much too large for her, and drying her bare arms on a womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and wrinkled with washing, and the soap-suds were yet smoking which she wiped off her arms. But for this, she might have been a child, playing at washing, and imitating a poor working-woman with a quick observation of the truth.”

Child labor laws were almost nonexistent in the days of Charles Dickens. Children worked very long hours, usually 12 to 16 in oftentimes extremely dangerous factories. The youngest and smallest children in cotton and textiles factories were often put to the task of picking up loose cotton or fabric under the machinery while the machines were still working. Accidents were very common; children were often scalped, crushed and/or killed if they fell asleep at the machines or if they had to crawl under machinery, their hair would get caught, which meant that many girls tied their hair up into something like a turban. It wasn’t until 1833 that the first Factory Act was passed to establish a 15-hour workday, but many more laws were to be passed over the next 30 years. 

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