To be sure, the United States was a child of Great Britain. There were, of course, differences between the two, but the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Much of what Great Britain did was emulated by Americans; among the uglier of these was the exploitation of children in labor.

In the 18th century, the arrival of a newborn to a rural family was viewed by the parents as a future beneficial laborer and an insurance policy for old age, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics states. An English belief that “a quarter of the mass of mankind are children, males and females under seven years old, from whom little labor is to be expected” was supported by a BLS report, which states that already in 1575, England provided for the use of public money to employ children in order to “accustom them to labor” and “afford a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

The Industrial Revolution reduced the complexities of many jobs; machines did the complicated work and workers simply needed to control and monitor the machines, which in both the U.K. and the U.S., included the textile industry. Factory work, like farm work, provided a perfect opportunity for employing children, “to prevent the habitual idleness and degeneracy” that were destroying the community, the report says. The problem was much deeper than the idea that an idle child would destroy society. It was a justification to increase profit at the cost of labor.

While children were sent to work in factories, because they were children, they were generally paid half of what an adult doing the same job was paid. It saved employers significant sums in labor costs. At the same time, because they were children, when they received their wages, they were confiscated by the parents to increase the household income. Regarding the conditions and environment of the textile mills, E.P. Thompson described them as “places of sexual license, foul language, cruelty, violent accidents, and alien manners,” reported Lake Forest College’s Carolyn Tuttle, writing for the Economic History Association. Charles Dickens called these places of work the “dark satanic mills.”

Beyond the factory settings, young boys were often forced to work as chimney sweeps, because they were physically small enough to climb up the inside of a chimney to sweep its walls clean. Young boys, aged 5 to 10, and sometimes 4 years old, were forced into this work, which had a high rate of fatality. Boys often suffocated in the chimneys from soot inhalation, sometimes getting stuck and dying in narrow chimneys; many died from falling or were burned to death.

Then came the English Poor Law of 1834 which, as Sparknote sums up, allowed the poor to receive public assistance only if they lived and worked in established workhouses. Beggars risked imprisonment. Debtors were sent to prison, often with their entire families, which virtually ensured that they could not repay their debts. Workhouses were deliberately made to be as miserable as possible in order to deter the poor from relying on public assistance. The philosophy was that the miserable conditions would prevent able-bodied paupers from being lazy and idle bums.

In the eyes of middle-class English society, those who could not support themselves were considered immoral and evil, Sparknote says. Therefore, such individuals should enjoy no comforts or luxuries in their reliance on public assistance. In order to create the misery needed to deter immoral idleness, families were split apart upon entering the workhouse. Husbands were permitted no contact with their wives, lest they breed more paupers. Mothers were separated from children, lest they impart their immoral ways to their children. Brothers were separated from their sisters because the middle-class patrons of workhouses feared the lower class’ “natural” inclination toward incest. In short, the state undertook to become the surrogate parents of workhouse children, whether or not they were orphans. Who were the “middle class?” Small business owners and industry middle management, those who stood the most to gain by child labor.

One child who became subject to the Poor Law was a 12-year-old boy named Charles Dickens. Philip V. Allingham, faculty of Education at Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario, wrote in his article “Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens,” that when Dickens’ father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison under the Insolvent Debtors Act of 1813, Charles was forced to work in a shoe-blacking factory. The experiences Dickens underwent shaped him as a socially conscious adult and author. Dickens learned that it was not idleness and degeneracy that compelled criminality, but rather what compelled crime was poverty. It was the focus of his first novel, “Oliver Twist,” written in 1837-39.

Then, there was the mining industry.

Tuttle’s research found that in Great Britain by 1842 one-third of the underground workforce of coal mines was under the age of 18 and one-fourth of the workforce of metal mines were children and youth. That was two years before our Irish immigrant, Timothy O’Shea was born. It was common in Irish and Cornish mines for children to begin work underground as young as eight years old.

As Dickens learned firsthand, poverty was the prime motivator for crime. Laws that favored industry and capitalism made no provision for a minimum wage, nor for a reasonable length of shift. Children as young as five were expected to work the same shift as adults, which in Great Britain, ranged from 12 to 14 hours.

While Tuttle, in her examination of child labor during the Industrial Revolution, explored reasons for the gradual decline of child labor. Social historians believe it was the rise of the domestic ideology of the father as breadwinner and the mother as housewife, that was embedded in the upper and middle classes and spread to the working-class, she wrote. Economic historians argue it was the rise in the standard of living that accompanied the Industrial Revolution that allowed parents to keep their children home. However, Dickens and his contemporary social commentators must be included in these possibilities.

Dickens shined a light on the economic and social conditions of the Industrial Revolution in England. He showed society the living and working conditions of children. He brought victims of the Poor Law, like Oliver Twist, who was based on a real-life person, into the parlors of England, and the United States, and forced society to rethink its beliefs and cultures. Dickens and his contemporaries compelled society to view children as something more than indentured servants. Gradually, children would be allowed to be children, and around the turn of the 20th century, that became most apparent at Christmas.