A new way of working

Before 1750, most people worked in their own homes. They were able to start and stop work when they wanted. Many workers kept ‘Saint Monday’ (ie they treated it as a holy day, taking the day off to get over their hangovers) and it was said that the looms worked to the rhythm ‘Plenty-o’time’ on Tuesday and Wednesday, and ‘A-day-t’late’ on Thursday and Friday.

The new factories ran to the unceasing, unchanging rhythm of the steam engine, and factory owners had to impose ‘factory discipline’.

In the past, many historians took their facts about conditions in the factories and mines from two Parliamentary investigations:

• The Sadler Report (1832)
• The Mines Report (1842) – the first report to include pictures and these reports provide the ‘traditional’ view of what it was like to work in a factory.

According to this view of factory work, not only men, but women and tiny children did physically monotonous and/or strenuous work in hot, damp, dusty and dangerous conditions for long hours, for next-to-nothing pay, under a regime of cruel overseers, punishments and fines.

A cotton factory - a child can be seen sweeping among the moving machinery