Engels's Condition of the Working Class, which projected the image of the ...

Engels's Condition of the Working Class, which projected the image of the exploiting capitalist on the mind of the European proletariat, appeared in 185: it was based on the English Blue Books.

So was the legislation of 1847. History, which sometimes condescends to be ironic, had chosen her dates with meaning.

From 1832 to 1847 the student of Victorian history finds himself the bewildered spectator of a warfare between Radicals who upheld Factories and Workhouses, Tories and Chartists who abhorred them

both, infidel Benthamites leagued with

Conservative Anglicans against dissenting manufacturers, landowners denouncing the oppressions of Lancashire, and cotton masters yearning over the sorrows of Dorset. The movement for Factory Reform and against the New Poor Law, against Protection and for the Charter, are mixed in an inextricable confusion of agitation, of which, nevertheless, the main pattern is clear.

The Factory Act of 1833 introduced, in all textile factories, the ten-hour day for young persons under eighteen and a forty-eight-hour week for children under thirteen, with the obligation to attend for two hours every day at a school which often did not exist.

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