In
1839 Frances Trollope decided to write
a novel on young factory workers. She had become interested in the
subject after reading a copy of the book on the life of Robert
Blincoe published by John Doherty
in 1832. Before writing the novel she carried out a fact-finding mission
to Manchester. Frances Trollope was
accompanied by the French artist, Augustre Hervieu, who had been commissioned
to produce illustrations for the book. Francis Trollope and Augustre
Hervieu spent several weeks in Manchester
and Bradford visiting factories and having
meeting with people involved in the campaign for factory reform. This
included Richard Oastler, Joseph
Raynor Stephens and John Doherty,
the editor of The Poor Man's Advocate.
The first part of Michael Armstrong: Factory
Boy, was published in 1840. Frances
Trollope was the first woman to issue her novels in monthly parts.
Costing one shilling a month, Michael
Armstrong: Factory Boy was also the first industrial
novel to be published in Britain.
The novel tells the story of Sir Matthew Dowling, a wealthy businessman,
who adopts Michael Armstrong, a factory child. Dowling uses the boy
to illustrate his willingness to help those in need. However, Dowling
gets bored with Michael and decides to get rid of him by apprenticing
him to an establishment for unwanted pauper children. Michael escapes
and after many dangerous adventures is reunited with the factory girl
who he loved as a child. The main message of the novel is that individual
philanthropy is an inadequate solution to the problems of industrialisation.
Several of the passages in Michael Armstrong:
Factory Boy are based on events described in A
Memoir of Robert Blincoe. Some of the novel's critics pointed
out that this was a book about conditions in the early days of the
century. Frances Trollope was also attacked for producing a book that
could be purchased in parts and therefore available to the working
class. One writer suggested that the book would result in the "burning
of factories" and that the author deserved to be sent to prison.
One critic suggested that books like this should be left to male writers
as "women are more at home in the flower garden and by the domestic
hearth."
Illustration
of scavengers and piecers at work
that
appeared in Trollope's Michael Armstrong
(1840)
Child
Labour Debate Activity (International School of Toulouse)
Child
Labour Simulation (Spartacus Educational)
(1)
In his autobiography, What I Remember, Thomas Adolphus Trollope
described his mother and himself meeting a group of men in Manchester
campaigning against child labour.
Nearly
all of them, men a little raised above the position of the factory
hands, to the righting of whose wrongs they devoted their lives. They
had been at some period of their lives, in almost every case, factory
workers themselves, but had by various circumstances, native talent,
industry and energy managed to raise themselves out of the slough
of despond in which their fellows were overwhelmed. John Doherty came
to dine but his excitement in talking was so great and continuous
that he could eat next to nothing.
(2)
R. H. Hone, A New Spirit of the Age (1844)
Mrs
Trollope takes a strange delight in the hideous and revolting. Nothing
can exceed the vulgarity of Mrs Trollope's mob of characters. We have
heard it urged on behalf of Mrs. Trollope that her novels are, at
all events, drawn from life. So are sign paintings.
(3)
The Athenaeum (1839)
The
most probable immediate effect of her pennings and her pencillings
will be the burning of factories and the plunder of property of all
kinds. The Rev. James Raynor Stephens has recently been sentenced
to eighteen months imprisonment for using seditious and inflammatory
language. The author of Michael Armstrong deserves as richly
to have eighteen months in Chester Gaol. But if the text be bad, still
worse are the plates that illustrate it. What, for instance, must
be the effect of the first picture in No. V1 (mill children competing
with pigs for food), on the heated imaginations of our great manufacturing
towns, figuring as they do in every book-seller's window.
Illustration VI from Michael Armstrong:
Factory Boy
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