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Victorian Factory Life

Trevor May

Victorian Factory Life explores the lives of the men, women and children who toiled in the factories of Victorian Britain, manufacturing everything from hats, cloth and dinner-plates to beer and locomotives. It was a grim and often perilous existence of long hours, of meager pay and of exhausting labour - and one into which many children were plunged at a young age. Generously illustrated with old photographs, artwork and pieces of ephemera, this book is a powerful evocation of the social iniquities that enabled the prodigious growth of British industry, a historical account of the great injustices with which many are familiar only through the works of Charles Dickens.

• Contents
• Industrialisation and the Factory System
• The Early Cotton Mills
• The Range of Factory Work
• Health and Safety
• Women in the Factories
• The Factory Worker at Home and at Play
• Out of Work
• Factory Life at the end of the Victorian Period