My Story - Mill Girl by Sue Reid

A Victorian Girl's diary 1842 - 1843

The book is set in the mid 1800's.  The main character is Eliza Helstead, who is from Manchester, England.    It was her dream to become a teacher.


She is shocked when she has to leave school and is sent to work in the noisy, suffocating Manchester cotton mills.  


In her diary she vividly describes the horrors of mills, the injustice, the cruelty and the dangerous, backbreaking work.


She sees sickness, strikes, unrest and destroyed lives.


Eliza realizes she must escape this life of a mill girl and change her fate...
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Working in a Mill

Children as young as 5- 7, were employed in some of the mills. They were working 14 - 16 hours a day, with short breaks for meals. The reports also showed that there was a lot of cruelty, with children being whipped and badly treated. Some of the children were deformed by the work – the long hours would make them tired and clumsy and there would be accidents as they were caught up in the machinery.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was common practice for mill owners to get orphans and children from the parish ...

In industrialized cotton mills there was no health and safety - machinery was not always fenced off and workers were exposed to moving parts of machines while they worked. Children were often employed to move between these dangerous machines, as they were small enough to fit between the tightly packed machinery. This led to them being put in a great deal of danger.  Deaths/mortality rates were quite high in factories.


Some people thought that working long hours was good for children – that poverty was natural and that it would be a bad thing to improve conditions for the working class as they would then live longer.


Today children work around six hours a day - at school.


Read more here:  http://www.powerinthelandscape.co.uk/education/index.html, http://www.cottontimes.co.uk/wheelgateo.htm, Var. Mills in Scotlandhttp://www.eastrenfrewshire.gov.uk/heritage/heritage_community_life/heritage_work/heritage_mills_working.htm, http://www.schoolshistory.org.uk/IndustrialRevolution/workingconditions.htm