The Victorian press coverage of the 1842 report on child labour. The metamorphosis of images

Abstract

This article aims to explore the Victorian press iconographic coverage of the first illustrated parliamentary report ever produced in the United Kingdom. Published in 1842, The First Report on the Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Collieries of the United Kingdom showed children and women working half-naked underground. The report on child labour has attracted the attention of social and medical historians, political economists and scholars of gender studies. Scant consideration has been given to the study of the afterlife of its images, which were widely disseminated through media outlets. This article concerns the transformative processes the original images underwent in order to be published in newspapers and periodicals of the time. It will show how the report’s engravings were retouched, cut and laid out in a selection of publications in order to enhance their marketability. I suggest that the copies of the illustrations that appeared in the Victorian press reinforced the ideological premise of the report. However, the metamorphosis of the images challenged the idea that the reality of the miners was a unique and unequivocally observable fact, and subtly disputed the role of the state as a provider of authoritative and accurate visual evidence in the form of parliamentary reports.

Keywords:

• Wood-engraving
• representation
• Victorian press
• child miners
• nakedness

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Thanks also to Maria Luisa Meneghetti, Peter Sinnema and Beatrice Barbieri for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. Victorian definitions of childhood vary. Asylum physician Thomas Clouston defined adolescence as a period from 18 to 25 with puberty starting at around 12–13. See Shuttleworth (2010). For the lack of distinction between prepubescent boys and girls see Horrell and Humphries (1995).

2. Shortly after the report’s release in 1842, the Mines and Collieries Act was passed by parliament: it banned all boys under ten years old and all women and girls from working underground in coal mines.