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Social History
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Disability and political activism in industrialising
Britain, c. 1830–1850
David M. Turner & Daniel Blackie
To cite this article: David M. Turner & Daniel Blackie (2022) Disability and political
activism in industrialising Britain, c. 1830–1850, Social History, 47:2, 117-140, DOI:
10.1080/03071022.2022.2044202
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2044202
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.
Published online: 28 Apr 2022.
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Disability and political activism in industrialising Britain,
c. 1830–1850
David M. Turner
a
and Daniel Blackie
b
a
Swansea University;
b
University of Helsinki
ABSTRACT
This article examines disabled people’s political activism in
Britain before the emergence of the modern disability rights
movement (DRM). Focusing on the campaign for shorter factory
working hours in the 1830s and 1840s, it highlights the
centrality of so-called ‘factory cripples’ to the reformist cause,
both guratively and as witnesses to the consequences of
industrial labour. Drawing on a wide range of sources – from
accounts of campaign speeches and gatherings to ocial
reports and the writings and testimonies of impaired workers –
the article shows how the factory movement opened spaces for
working-class ‘maimed’ and ‘deformed’ people to talk about
their experiences in their own words. Self-proclaimed ‘factory
cripples’ engaged in the ght for shorter hours in complex and
reciprocal ways, with some using it to advance a socio-cultural
understanding of ‘disability’. Recognising this reminds us that
disabled people engaged in signicant forms of political
activism long before the twentieth century and suggests that
the analysis developed by the DRM was not as pioneering as
some studies imply.
KEYWORDS
Disability; activism; factory
reform movement; industrial
work; occupational health;
political protest; nineteenth
century; labour movement
In the Castle Yard at York on Tuesday 24 April 1832, before a crowd of 12,000
supporters of factory reform, Richard Oastler related the story of a 17-year-
old ‘cripple’ who, he claimed, ‘had had his limbs entirely distorted by the long
hours he had worked in mills, and was now unable to do any kind of work’.
1
The young man, a Huddersfield factory operative named Joseph Habergam,
had begun work at the age of seven, whereupon he had been ‘compelled to
work from five in the morning to eight in the evening’ with only 30 minutes’
rest. Within six months, Habergam’s ‘knees and ancles began to give way’.
Soon his older brother and sister had to ‘drag’ him to the mill, as he was
‘utterly unable to walk’. Moving to another establishment, Habergam endured
four more years of excessively long shifts, eventually being discharged for
attempting to run away following a vicious beating from one of the mill’s
CONTACT Daniel Blackie daniel.blackie@helsinki.fi
1
Leeds Mercury, 28 April 1832 [4]. Most newspapers consulted were not paginated when originally published.
They have been accessed using digital archives for this article. Page numbers (indicated in square brackets)
have been added where these are given in the digital archive.
SOCIAL HISTORY
2022, VOL. 47, NO. 2, 117–140
https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2044202
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
overlookers (foremen). Now under the care of Dr Walker of Huddersfield
Infirmary, his broken body marked him out as one of the ‘victims’ of the
factory ‘system’, unsupported in his ‘distress’ by those who profited from it.
He had been advised to use leg irons but could not afford the lining pads to
wear them comfortably. In this state, he had dragged himself to Oastler’s
residence at Fixby Hall where, ‘weeping’, he had told his story. ‘I know scores
and scores again of little children that are thus ground down to powder’,
concluded Oastler, ‘and this day I call upon Yorkshire to assert that on her soil
this slavery shall no more continue’.
2
In the 1830s and 1840s, the campaign for a Ten Hours Bill that would
reduce the hours of factory workers mobilised images, displays and narra-
tives of industrial deformity to highlight the conditions in northern textile
mills, weaving them into gothic tales of suffering.
3
Built on a coalition of
social-crusading Tories, such as Oastler, Michael Sadler and Lord Ashley,
campaigning medical men, clergy, conscientious employers, and worker-led
Short Time Committees, the factory movement discussed at length the
deformities and impairments of workers, placing them at the heart of an
emotive campaign to reform the pernicious factory ‘system’.
4
Oastler’s
retelling of Habergam’s story is a prime example of what James Vernon
calls the ‘melodramatic dynamic of public performance’ characterising
political culture in this period.
5
The speeches of factory reformers and visual
culture of the movement described a ‘common character of deformity’ that
represented the condition of the human body under industrial capitalism:
short in stature, crooked of limb, and ‘worn out’ like old machinery.
6
Although textile workers suffered numerous debilitating health problems,
from lung disease to hearing loss, reformers deliberately focused on the
physicality of impaired workers, presenting an emotive, yet selective, view of
industrial disablement.
7
Focusing on the visibly marked body provided
a powerful rhetorical means of emphasising the victimhood of young work-
ers, authenticating arguments for shorter hours. By September 1832, this
rhetorical strategy had been so successful that a reporter who saw a banner
of a ‘man with bent legs’ at a short-time gathering could know immediately
2
York Herald, 28 April 1832 [3]. Habergam’s name appears in various forms in the sources consulted, including
‘Habberjam’ and ‘Hebergam’. We use Habergam.
3
R. Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge, 1996), 39, 53, 79–81; K. Honeyman,
Child Workers in England, 1780–1820: Parish apprentices and the making of the early industrial labour force
(Aldershot, 2007), 188; J.A. Hargreaves and H.E.A. Haigh, Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign
against child labour in the industrial revolution (Huddersfield, 2012); B.M. Marshall, Industrial Gothic: Workers,
exploitation and urbanisation in transatlantic nineteenth-century literature (Cardiff, 2021), 114–42.
4
Gray, op. cit.
5
J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A study in English political culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), 108.
6
For example see Manchester: The Factory Commission arrived: memorial of the factory children presented
(Manchester, 1833).
7
J. Greenlees, When the Air Became Important: A social history of the New England and Lancashire textile industries
(New Brunswick, 2019), 36.
118 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
that it was there ‘to signify the effects of working in factories’.
8
While
effective, such stock imagery failed to capture the variability of impaired
workers’ bodies and experiences.
However, ‘deformed’ workers were more than mere bystanders to the
campaign for industrial reform. As Kathryn Gleadle’s work on child protesters
has shown, those held up as ‘victims’ of the factory system were not without
agency.
9
As we shall see, if the sentimental sufferings of ‘factory cripples’ were
useful for reformers, so too was the reform movement useful for impaired
workers. This article presents a new ‘disability perspective’ on the factory
movement, showing how campaigns for shorter working hours in the 1830s
and 1840s reflected and, more significantly, shaped emerging modern ideas
about disability. It explores how both supporters and opponents of reform drew
on dominant cultural modes of representing impaired bodies when making
their arguments about factory regulation. Focusing on testifying, writing and
public speaking, we examine the ways in which ‘deformed’ and maimed people
were drawn into the campaign for shorter hours, and how they used it to
highlight their circumstances – sometimes in ways that diverged from the
agenda of non-disabled reformers. In pursuing these goals, we aim to answer
the following questions: How did the factory movement use images of bodily
difference to advance the reformist case? What were the experiences of
deformed and ‘disabled’ people in campaigns for improved working condi-
tions? What risks and benefits did they derive from their involvement in the
cause and how did this involvement change over time?
In exploring these issues and emphasising physically impaired people as
actors in the industrial politics of nineteenth-century Britain, this article
addresses a significant lacuna in both labour history and disability studies.
Wary of reformers’ sensational claims regarding the causes of industrial ‘defor-
mity’, historians have tended to avoid examining the contribution of people
with impairments to the factory movement.
10
Beyond the consideration of a few
well-known examples, such as that of Robert Blincoe (a former factory operative
who gained fame following the publication in 1828 of a shocking memoir about
his life in the mills), little attention has been paid to what ‘deformed’ workers
themselves had to say about their experiences or their relationship to the wider
campaign for industrial reform and the nascent labour movement.
11
For the
8
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 1 September 1832 [4].
9
K. Gleadle, ‘“We will have it”: children and protest in the Ten Hours Movement’, in N. Goose and K. Honeyman
(eds), Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and agency, 1750–1914 (Farnham, 2013), 215–
30.
10
P.W.J. Bartrip and S.B. Burman, The Wounded Soldiers of Industry: Industrial compensation policy, 1833–1897
(Oxford, 1983), 10–13; P. Kirby, Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780–1850 (Woodbridge, 2013),
62–78.
11
J. Waller, The Real Oliver Twist: Robert Blincoe – a life that illuminates an age (Cambridge, 2005); J. Kuskey, ‘The
working body: re-forming the factory body’, Victorian Review, 42, 1 (2016), 4–9; J. Brown, ‘A memoir of Robert
Blincoe, an orphan boy’ (1832 edn), in J.R. Simmons Jr (ed.), Factory Lives: Four nineteenth-century working-class
biographies (Plymouth, 2007), 88–179; R.G. Kirby and A.E. Musson, The Voice of the People: John Doherty, 1798–
1854 – trade unionist, radical and factory reformer (Manchester, 1975), 353, 375–76.
SOCIAL HISTORY 119
most part, historians seem to have dismissed the presence of ‘deformed’ people
in the factory movement as little more than a rhetorical ploy on the part of its
leaders. This portrayal reflects a tendency in labour history to view disability as
a ‘private, ahistorical experience’, and to assume that disabled people were both
economically inactive and incapable of participating in the politics of class
struggle.
12
Disability scholars have been better at recognising disabled people’s
engagement in industrial politics, but scholarship in this area has mostly
concentrated on the twentieth century.
13
Until recently, it was commonly
believed in disability studies that the nineteenth century was an especially
bleak period in the ‘rise of disability’, when disabled people were forced
from the world of work by industrialisation and the arrival of factories.
Increasingly excluded from industrial workplaces, older, weaker or
impaired people, it is argued, had few opportunities to participate in the
new politics of labour.
14
Yet such assumptions are empirically dubious.
People with impairments continued to work in significant numbers
throughout the period.
15
As we argue below, impaired and ‘deformed’
workers also played a more significant role in the emergent labour move-
ment than has hitherto been recognised.
Furthermore, the focus of disability historians on the kind of political
activism that fed into the modern disability movement – ‘collective
political action by and for people with disabilities’ calling for the
provision of accommodations, services and access as ‘enforceable civil
rights rather than dispensations of charity’ – has meant that earlier
forms of individual or collective political action by disabled people in
support of other causes have been ignored.
16
It is anachronistic to view
the factory reform campaign as ‘disability activism’ in the modern
sense, as it was never a movement led by disabled people for disabled
people or one that demanded equality. Indeed, the impairments of
12
S.F. Rose, ‘“Crippled Hands”: disability in labor and working-class history’, Labour: Studies in working-class history
of the Americas, 2, 1 (2005), 27–54, 47; S. Bengtsson, ‘Out of the frame: disability and the body in the writings of
Karl Marx’, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 19, 2 (2017), 151–60, 158.
13
For example see A. Jennings, ‘Organized labor and disability in post–World War II United States’, in M. Rembis,
C. Kudlick and K.E. Nielsen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (New York, 2018), 247–61; C. Brigden,
‘Voice and agency: workers with a disability and trade unionism’, Labour and Industry, 29, 1 (2019), 118–31; P.K.
Longmore and D. Goldberger, ‘The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: a case
study in the new disability history’, in P.K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability
(Philadelphia, 2003), 53–102.
14
M. Oliver and C. Barnes, The New Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke, 2013), 52–73; R. Slorach, A Very Capitalist
Condition: A history and politics of disability (London, 2016), 69–92.
15
S.F. Rose, No Right to be Idle: The invention of disability, 1840s–1930s (Chapel Hill, 2017); S. De Veirman, ‘Deaf and
disabled? (Un) employment of deaf people in Belgium: a comparison of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-
century cohorts’, Disability and Society, 30, 3 (2015), 460–74; D.M. Turner and D. Blackie, Disability in the
Industrial Revolution: Physical impairment in British coalmining, 1780–1880 (Manchester, 2018).
16
C. Barnes and G. Mercer, Disability (Cambridge, 2003), 176; Longmore, Why I Burned My Book, op. cit., 114; S.N.
Barnartt, ‘Activism and advocacy’, in S. Burch (ed.), Encyclopaedia of American Disability History, 3 vols.
(New York, 2009), Vol. 1, 9–11; D.M. Nepveux, ‘Activism’, in R. Adams, B. Reiss and D. Serlin (eds), Keywords
for Disability Studies (New York, 2015), 21–25.
120 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
factory workers were not classed under the umbrella term ‘disability’ in
sources produced at the time. Men, women and children damaged by
factory work were rarely described – or saw themselves – as ‘disabled’,
even when their blighted economic prospects were discussed.
In the 1830s and 1840s, the word ‘disabled’ was most commonly
applied to people incapacitated from undertaking paid work.
17
Yet not
all those whose injured or ‘deformed’ bodies were held up as evidence
of the evils of the factory system were incapable of work. Many opera-
tives continued to work long after the onset of impairments, despite
being described as ‘cripples’ – a label often associated with helplessness
and deliberately used by reformers to evoke charitable feelings.
18
This
language helped to present the campaign for reduced hours, which
Short Time Committees intended to benefit all workers – able-bodied
adults and ‘crippled’ children alike – in non-threatening terms to
potential middle-class supporters, as something aligning with their
humanitarian instincts rather than threatening their economic interests.
However, while its sentimental undertones could not be escaped, the
popularisation of the term ‘factory cripple’ during the 1830s introduced
a common point of identity that impaired workers themselves even-
tually appropriated. Doing so enabled them to call attention to the
problems they faced as a distinctive subset of Britain’s working classes.
As such, while we are mindful of the difficulties of projecting modern
categories of disability onto the past, we argue that in mobilising
‘crippled’ operatives to demand change by articulating their lived
experiences of impairment, the factory movement deserves to be recog-
nised as an early example of disability politics. Reappraising industrial
reform from the perspective of self-proclaimed ‘factory cripples’ not
only adds depth and nuance to the political history of physical differ-
ence before the advent of modern ‘disability activism’, it also illuminates
the politics of working-class protest at this time more generally.
The moment of the ‘factory cripple’
The origins of the ‘factory cripple’ image that so dominated the cam-
paign for industrial reform in the 1830s can be traced back to the
eighteenth century. As industrialisation gathered pace, concerns about
the health effects of industrial labour, especially on children, led to the
regulation of factory work through such measures as the Factory Acts of
1802 and 1819. Evidence presented in support of this legislation
17
Turner and Blackie, op. cit., 36.
18
N. Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak shows and modern British culture (Berkeley, 2010), 18. For a detailed
account of a ‘crippled’ operative who continued working after becoming impaired see Waller, op. cit.
SOCIAL HISTORY 121
frequently linked physical traits such as stunted growth, painful legs and
‘deformity’ with child labour in factories.
19
It was out of these argu-
ments that the ‘factory cripple’ template grew.
While campaigners had highlighted the ‘deformed’ bodies of operatives
before, it was not until the 1830s that stories of worker ‘deformity’ became
central to the fight for factory reform. These stories resonated with the
public at this time for several reasons. First, this was a period when the
movement for the abolition of slavery was also gaining momentum. Anti-
slavery offered a rhetoric of moral outrage, infused with an evangelical
spirit, that centred disability as a mark of exploitation.
20
Oastler and others
in the factory movement commonly likened the situation of industrial
workers to plantation slavery and often referred to them as ‘white slaves’.
Given the popularity of abolitionism at this time, the parallel between the
‘factory system’ and the treatment of slaves in Britain’s overseas colonies
was a convenient (if dubious) one to make. For factory reformers, both
represented a ‘cruel and degrading system’ that ‘saps the strength of [a
man’s] intellectual character and makes him a cripple for life’ via unremit-
ting labour.
21
Conflating paid factory work with unfree colonial labour also
allowed reformers to counter political economists’ argument that working
in factories was a product of workers’ free agency and therefore unsuitable
for regulation. They observed that many working-class families were com-
pelled to send their children to the mills due to fears of impoverishment, and
that those who left factories because of health worries would be denied poor
relief.
22
Like anti-slavery campaigners, factory reformers emphasised dis-
ability as a mark of worker victimhood that fuelled humanitarian calls for
amelioration. If slavery in the New World warranted government interven-
tion, Oastler and others argued, so too did the slave-like existence that
factory workers in Britain had to endure.
Such arguments reflected and played on contemporary concerns about
the perceived prevalence of impairment in industrial communities, and this
is the second reason the figure of the ‘factory cripple’ gained such traction in
the 1830s. By the time Oastler made his speech at York, the urbanisation
accompanying Britain’s industrial transformation had seen thousands of
people concentrated into manufacturing towns like Leeds and Manchester.
19
‘Alfred’ (S.H.G. Kydd), The History of the Factory Movement, 2 vols in one ([1857] New York, 1966), vol. 1, 11, 51–
55; J.V. Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society: A history of hospital development in Manchester and its region,
1752–1946 (Manchester, 1985), 43; Honeyman, op. cit., 47–48; J.T. Ward, The Factory Movement, 1830–1855
(London, 1962), 19–27; Information Concerning the State of Children in Cotton Factories (Manchester, 1818), 7,
British Library Add. MS 27805, Place Papers Vol. XVII.
20
S. Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and slavery in the Caribbean (Urbana, 2020), 4–6, 138–57.
21
Gray, op. cit., 37–47; T. Jackson, Britain’s Burden: Or, the intolerable evils of colonial slavery exposed (Cambridge,
1832), 3. See also The Condition of the West India Slave Contrasted with that of the Infant Slave in our English
Factories (London, n.d. [1833]).
22
The Factory System and the Ten Hours Bill: Extracted from Fraser’s Magazine April 1833, article ‘Natural economy,
no. V’, (n.pl.) ([London], n.d. [1833]), 4.
122 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
Among their number were many with non-normative bodies who congre-
gated in the streets or were brought together in hospitals. This concentra-
tion helped make physically impaired people seem more conspicuous in
factory towns than in sparsely populated rural settings, and increasingly
troubled observers.
23
At a factory reform meeting in Leeds in January 1832,
the Reverend Richard Fawcett gave expression to this concern when he
remarked that ‘We used to be surprised on seeing a cripple in our streets, but
now, alas! we cannot pass along a single street without witnessing the
lamentable appearance of children, and, indeed, upgrown persons, labour-
ing under severe bodily affliction’. Fawcett was one of many urban clergy-
men, lawyers and doctors alarmed at the seemingly increasing number of
‘cripples’ and ‘deformed’ persons in industrial communities. At the same
meeting, surgeon Samuel Smith of Leeds Infirmary told how he first started
to notice ‘an unusual number of cases’ of deformed legs among patients sent
to him from a ‘neighbouring manufacturing town’ over a decade earlier.
Since then, the infirmary’s expenditure on orthopaedic devices for factory
workers had increased to such an extent that the hospital now had to ask
patients’ parishes to contribute to the cost of supplying these.
24
Made at
a time when growing concerns about the cost of public welfare were con-
tributing to calls for a New Poor Law (which was eventually enacted in
1834), Smith’s comments reveal how factory reformers astutely tapped into
the zeitgeist of the 1830s.
25
If campaigners’ frequent expressions of sym-
pathy for the plight of ‘deformed’ workers framed factory reform as
a humanitarian crusade, their enthusiasm for highlighting the fiscal burden
of industrial disability revealed a harder economic edge. As one operative
argued, failure to reform a system of work that ‘lays the foundation of future
debility and decrepitude’ would lead to the ‘fearful pauperisation of the
country’.
26
Comments like these were designed to strike a chord with cost-
conscious policymakers and ratepayers, and built on the idea enshrined in
the 1824 Vagrancy Act that deformed beggars were a social nuisance and
threat to public order.
27
While the primary aim of the Ten Hours Bill was to
reform the working conditions that produced deformity rather than deal
with its social consequences, concerns about welfare, public order and the
threatening visibility of the sick and deformed poor were never far away
from debates about factory labour.
While worker deformity was a major theme in the campaign for factory
reform in the early 1830s, accounts of public meetings at this time seldom
report ‘deformed’ workers talking about their own experiences of ill health
23
A.N. Bergen, ‘The Blind, the Deaf and the Halt: physical disability, the Poor Law and charity c. 1830–1890’ (PhD,
Leeds, 2004), 332–33, 377–79.
24
Leeds Intelligencer, 12 January 1832 [3].
25
A. Digby, The Poor Law in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales (London, 1982), 9.
26
British Labourer’s Protector and Factory Child’s Friend (Reprint Edition, New York, 1969), 22 March 1833, 210.
27
5 George IV c.83, An Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, 21 June 1824, article IV.
SOCIAL HISTORY 123
or disablement or the physical impact of industrial labour on their lives.
28
As the Calderdale operative George Crabtree observed of a meeting he
attended near Halifax, although several speakers recounted in ‘feeling and
pathetic terms their Factory experience’, when specific cases of disablement
were mentioned, the ‘factory cripples’ concerned did not get to speak for
themselves, but were merely described by others.
29
In such circumstances,
bereft of a voice, impaired workers had little control over the narratives
about their bodies and experiences developed at reform gatherings.
Verbal descriptions of ‘crippled’ workers like the ones heard by Crabtree
were just one of several ways factory reformers made deformity visible at
public events. Other methods included the display of visual imagery depicting
operatives with ‘deformed’ bodies and the occasional carefully staged appear-
ance of ‘factory cripples’ themselves. The ‘politics of sight’ was a key compo-
nent of all political movements in the early nineteenth century, and such
visualisations were deployed to provide unambiguous proof of the evils of the
factory system and establish the moral worthiness of the Ten Hours cause.
30
They were also intended to provoke a powerful emotional response in those
who saw them – something Samuel Smith achieved at the York Castle meet-
ing in April 1832 when he held up a picture of a ‘poor deformed man, about
thirty years of age’, which ‘caused a great sensation in the meeting’. This effect
deeply impressed Oastler. Writing to the Manchester labour leader John
Doherty, Oastler reported that, on seeing the picture, ‘the whole mass of
people silently and reverently uncovered their heads’ in a ‘spontaneous move-
ment of sorrow, pity, and respect, towards the unhappy victim of slavery,
whose mangled and deformed limbs were pencilled before them’.
31
What Oastler neglected to say was that the ‘deformed’ man himself played
an important role in the production of the image displayed at York. Struck
by the former operative’s appearance after a chance encounter in the street,
Smith had asked the man ‘to call upon me in the afternoon’, and it was
during the man’s visit later in the day that the ‘sketch’ displayed at York was
made.
32
In deciding to visit Smith and allowing himself to be drawn, the
unnamed man effectively lent his visibly different body to the reformist
cause, becoming an active contributor to the campaign for shorter hours in
the process. Contrary to Oastler’s characterisation of him, the ‘deformed’
man was not quite the helpless person the great orator implied.
28
For rare exceptions to this characterisation: Anon., Report of the Proceedings of the Huddersfield and Bradford
Meetings, Held on 26th and 27th of December, 1831 (Leeds, n.d. [1831?]), 3; Anon., The Ten Hour Bill. Keighley
meeting, Monday 30 January 1832 (Leeds, n.d. [1832]), 2.
29
G. Crabtree, A Brief Description of a Tour through Calder Dale, being a letter to Richard Oastler, surnamed by Baines
‘King of the Factory Children’ (Huddersfield, 1833), 20.
30
Vernon, op. cit., 107–16.
31
Leeds Intelligencer, 26 April 1832 [3]; Richard Oastler to John Doherty, 17 May 1832, Poor Man’s Advocate (Reprint
Edition, New York, 1969), 26 May 1832, 146. For a later example of an image of a deformed worker being
displayed at a meeting see British Labourer’s Protector, 1 March 1833, 190.
32
Leeds Intelligencer, 26 April 1832 [3].
124 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
Similar images found their way onto banners displayed at short-time
parades. Perhaps the most well-known of these was the ‘triumphant proces-
sion’ that took place in Manchester in late August 1832. Comprising some-
where between ‘several hundreds’ and ‘thousands’ of factory workers, this
‘was headed by two men, bearing a flag with the representation of
a deformed man’ on it and the appropriated abolitionist slogan ‘“Am I not
a Man and a Brother?”’. Following this was a ‘long line of Factory Children’
carrying ‘a great variety of banners’ which included other images of workers
described variously as ‘deformed’, a ‘cripple’ or ‘knock-kneed’, at least one
of which was said to be inscribed with the exclamation ‘Excessive toil is the
burden of my soul’.
33
Like the drawings at York, many of the banners
depicted real-life ‘factory cripples’, such as Robert Blincoe whose portrait
had appeared in the Poor Man’s Advocate two months earlier and later
graced the title page of his reprinted memoir (Figure 1).
34
These processions
and images helped to bond protesters together in a shared sense of self,
claiming disablement as a collective working-class experience.
35
By lending their bodies to the factory movement in this way and appear-
ing figuratively at public events, real-life ‘stunted’, ‘crippled’ and ‘deformed’
workers engaged in a form of indirect activism that gave the campaign for
shorter hours a powerful moral force. As the campaign progressed, opera-
tives with non-normative bodies slowly began to take part in more direct
forms of activism. For example, in April 1833, the Manchester Times
reported that John Doherty ‘produced two persons dreadfully crippled by
factory labour’ at a reform meeting in the city.
36
According to the
Manchester Guardian’s account of the event, these ‘two deformed persons
[,] named Wilson and Woolley’, were ‘placed on a sort of stage’ by Doherty
‘to state that their crookedness arose from factory labour’.
37
By appearing in
person like this and agreeing to show themselves as living proof of the
physical effects of industrial labour, Wilson and Woolley gave the figure of
the ‘factory cripple’ a flesh-and-bone quality difficult to represent fully in
words or pictures. Workers exhibiting ‘stunted growth’ and a ‘sickly appear-
ance’ who were placed on stage at reform meetings in other places fulfilled
a similar purpose.
38
Such public displays of ‘deformed’ workers reached their peak in protests
against the Royal Commission on Factories in the spring of 1833. Fearful that
the Commission was favourable to millowners, Short Time Committees
33
Leeds Intelligencer, 30 August 1832 [3]; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 1 September 1832
[5]; Guardian and Public Ledger, 3 September 1832 [4]; Manchester Guardian, 1 September 1832 [2]. For another
example of a banner featuring ‘crippled manufacturers’ at a pro-reform rally see Leeds Times, 4 July 1833 [4].
34
Kirby and Musson, op. cit., 376; Waller, op. cit., 311; Anon., ‘Robert Blinco [sic.]’, The Poor Man’s Advocate,
9 June 1832, 161.
35
K. Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2016), 130.
36
Manchester Times and Gazette, 27 April 1833 [2].
37
Manchester Guardian, 27 April 1833 [3].
38
For example, British Labourer’s Protector, 12 October 1832, 32.
SOCIAL HISTORY 125
staged mass demonstrations of child workers to greet the commissioners at
towns across Lancashire and Yorkshire. In Bradford ‘a deputation of factory
cripples, attended by thousands of factory children’, presented a letter to the
Commissioners that asserted their desire for a Ten Hours Act, declaring that
‘we will have it, and that’s all we have to say’.
39
Similar ‘memorials’ were
presented in Leeds and Manchester.
40
Although carefully stage-managed by
the committees, the vibrant spectacle of child protesters, including ‘hundreds
of factory-made cripples’, and the wording of petitions acknowledged the
agency of those commonly cast as ‘victims’ in reform rhetoric. Opponents of
Figure 1. Title page of ‘A memoir of Robert Blincoe, an orphan boy’ by John Brown (Manchester,
1832).
39
The Standard, 10 June 1833 [4].
40
Anon., The Commission for Perpetuating Factory Infanticide (London, n.d. [1833]); Anon., Public Protest against the
Factory Commission, Meeting in the Free Market, Leeds, 22 May 1833 (Leeds, n.d. [1833]).
126 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
reform attempted to discredit the short-time cause by using the time-worn
tactic of alleging ‘fraudulent’ disability and suggesting that campaigners
selected the sickest-looking children for these spectacles, dressing them up
in rags for effect. For supporters, however, the display of impairments pro-
vided powerful ‘ocular corroboration’ of the sufferings of young workers that
could not be dismissed.
41
The speeches of leading reformers, and the banners unfurled on proces-
sions, made factory deformity more visible but did little to elevate the
voices of impaired workers. However, as the campaign for shorter hours
gathered momentum, other sites of activism opened to them, providing
more effective forums in which to talk about their lives in their own words.
Of these, the one that gave the greatest number of ‘factory cripples’ an
opportunity to have their say was undoubtedly the official inquiries into
the factory question of the 1830s. The most famous of these was the
Parliamentary Select Committee called in 1832 to consider the merits of
a Ten Hours Bill, chaired by Michael Sadler. Over time, ‘factory cripples’
used such opportunities to discuss their experiences in ways that were
framed by, but diverged from, conventional descriptions of the effects of
long hours on their health and appearance. The remainder of this article
explores how these testimonies constitute an emergent politics of indus-
trial disablement.
Testifying: ‘disabled’ witnesses and ocial inquiries
The Sadler Committee of 1832, and the Royal Commission established
a year later, prompted significant data gathering on the part of the Short
Time Committees, both to provide quantifiable evidence of the extent of
deformity in particular worker populations, and to select individuals who
might provide evidence of the impact of factory work on their own lives,
both verbally and (in some cases) by displaying their crooked limbs to
committee members.
42
Of the 87 witnesses who appeared before the
Sadler Committee, 29 (a third of the total, and nearly half of all the worker
witnesses) were people who testified to experiencing significant health
41
(Kydd), op. cit., vol. 2, 43. Gleadle, op. cit.; A. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London, 1835), 299.
G. Higginbottom and G.S. Bull, Instructions to the Short Time Committees of England and Scotland, with
Reference to the Commission (Manchester, n.d. signed ’24 April 1833); D.M. Turner, ‘“Fraudulent” disability in
historical perspective’, History and Policy, February 2012, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers
/papers/fraudulent-disability-in-historical-perspective, accessed 11 December 2020.
42
‘CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM used by the Short Time Committees in the preparation of their evidence for the
Parliamentary Select Committee, 1832’, in C. Driver, Tory Radical: The Life of Richard Oastler (New York, 1946),
550–53; Higginbottom and Bull, op. cit.; BPP, Factories Inquiry Commission: First Report of the Central Board,
House of Commons, 28 June 1833, https://parlipapers.proquest.com/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1833-
014207?accountid=14680, accessed 11 December 2020 [hereafter Factories Inquiry Commission: First Report].
BPP, Report from the Committee on the ‘Bill to regulate the Labour of Children in Mills and Factories of the United
Kingdom:’ With the Minutes of evidence, Appendix and Index (1832), 157, https://parlipapers.proquest.com/
parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1831-013421?accountid=14680, accessed 11 December 2020 (hereafter Sadler
Report).
SOCIAL HISTORY 127
impacts as a result of factory work.
43
Aged between 14 and 56, many attested
to the crookedness of knees that distinguished ‘factory cripples’, but testi-
monies reveal a wider range of impairments including fatigue, asthma and,
in one case, an ‘extreme state of lowness and depression of mind’.
44
Despite the opinion of medical men that lower limb deformity was more
prevalent in women and girls owing to their greater ‘delicacy’, only three
‘deformed’ female witnesses appeared before the Sadler Committee.
45
This
may have been a consequence of female operatives’ widely reported (and
possibly well-founded) fear that revealing their crooked limbs would
damage their marriage prospects.
46
Whatever the reason, the relative
absence of women among Sadler Committee witnesses reflected (and per-
haps even propelled) the gendering of the ‘factory cripple’ image. Despite
constituting the majority (58%) of workers employed in cotton factories and
a significant proportion (41%) of those working in woollen mills in the early
1830s, female operatives were far less likely than males to appear in refor-
mist or official discourse about the factory system as ‘factory cripples’.
47
Modesty dictated that of the 13 witnesses asked to ‘show’ their ‘deformed’ or
damaged limbs to the Committee, none were female.
48
By focusing on male
bodies and operatives with non-normative limbs in this way, the Sadler
Committee helped flatten out the experiences of impaired industrial work-
ers and promote the image of the (male) ‘factory cripple’ that would come to
dominate discussions about industrial disablement in the debate over fac-
tory reform.
Among the witnesses who ‘showed’ their ‘deformities’ to the
Committee was Joseph Habergam, the young operative whose story
Oastler had told so sensationally at York Castle. Habergam’s appearance
on 1 June 1832 is worth examining in depth, as it suggests how far his
own statements about his life confirmed or challenged those expressed
by Oastler at York. It also reveals the kind of details impaired workers
wanted, or were able, to introduce to the debate over factory reform
when they got a chance to speak for themselves. The pressure on
operatives to tailor their narratives to conform to the competing agen-
das of those present was quite considerable. Although opponents of the
Ten Hours Bill accused Sadler’s committee of pro-reform bias at the
time, the atmosphere awaiting witnesses was far from friendly or
43
Driver, op. cit., 170; Sadler Report.
44
Sadler, Report 471.
45
ibid., 503–04.
46
For example see J. Fielden, The Curse of the Factory System, 2nd ed. ([1836] London, 1969), 21; W. Dodd, The
Factory System Illustrated In a Series of Letters to the Right Hon. Lord Ashley ([1842] London, 1968), 200; Turner
and Blackie, op. cit., 147.
47
J. Burnette, ‘Women workers in the British industrial revolution’, Table 2 in R. Whaples (ed.), EH.Net
Encyclopaedia, March 2008, https://eh.net/encyclopaedia/women-workers-in-the-british-industrial-revolution,
accessed 11 December 2020.
48
Sadler Report, 148–53, 195–99, 229–31.
128 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
comforting.
49
Recounting his experiences in front of Sadler’s Committee
to an official the following year, Habergam remembered a chaotic and
noisy scene. Committee members constantly conversed with each other
before quizzing him and, when they did, they all started ‘asking me
questions at once’. Amidst such disorder, Habergam told the official, it
was difficult ‘saying what I meant’.
50
Habergam probably found the tone of some committee members’ ques-
tioning hostile, too. As with Oastler’s telling of his story at York, his work
history, physical impairment, and bodily appearance were major themes in
Habergam’s testimony, and he confirmed much of what Oastler had said
about him. Unlike at York, however, these details did not go unchallenged.
Oastler had revealed that Habergam had run away from Mr Brook’s mill
following an attack by an overlooker to ‘[l]oud cries of “Shame, shame”’.
51
In Westminster, by contrast, opponents of reform seized upon Habergam’s
account of the incident to cast doubt on the extent of his physical impair-
ment. One sceptical legislator asked: ‘Did you not say that at 14 you ran
away from the overlooker’? To which Habergam replied: ‘I said he turned
me away’, but, fearing more violence, ‘I got up the stairs before him, and ran
round the machine’ to avoid the man. Sensing a chance to undermine the
teenager’s credibility, Habergam’s interrogator shot back accusingly: ‘Then
your limbs were not much injured then’?
52
In such circumstances, it took
courage and resilience to provide testimony.
Witnesses seem to have been coached in what to say by the Short Time
Committees that sent them to London, and supporters of reform asked
many leading questions to ensure that operatives stayed ‘on message’.
53
This
led to exchanges that reinforced the helpless and pitiable image of ‘factory
cripples’ propagated by orators such as Oastler. For example, one legislator
asked Habergam:
have you found that, on the whole, you have been rendered ill, deformed and
miserable, by the factory system, as at present pursued? – Yes; oh! if I had
a thousand pounds, I would give them to have the use of my limbs again.
54
How far the 17-year-old Habergam truly believed this grim assessment of
his situation is difficult to assess, as it is likely that he was eager to please his
factory movement sponsors. Yet, if some of his comments were influenced
by his relationships with reformers, Habergam’s evidence offers a more
rounded portrait of his life than the simplistic rhetoric adopted by Oastler
and other Short Time leaders. For a start, Habergam presented a much fuller
49
Ward, op. cit., 61.
50
Factories Inquiry Commission: First Report, C1, 136.
51
Poor Man’s Advocate, 12 May 1832, 130.
52
Sadler Report, 164.
53
Waller, op. cit., 301.
54
Sadler Report, 164.
SOCIAL HISTORY 129
picture of his family circumstances than Oastler did. The older brother and
sister mentioned by Oastler feature in Habergam’s story, as does the anec-
dote about them helping him get to work each morning. In Oastler’s telling,
the brother and sister were, quite literally, props to his story, used by Oastler
to emphasise the young operative’s dependence and passivity. When
Habergam discussed his siblings, he humanised them, revealing their
names: John and Charlotte.
His brother and sister were more than mere living mobility aids to
Habergam: they were allies bound together in a struggle for mutual survival.
By the time Habergam gave his evidence, moreover, brother John was dead,
as was his father who died in 1826, while Habergam was still working. This
knowledge invites a more nuanced understanding of the young worker’s
circumstances. In addition to John and Charlotte, Habergam also stated that
he had two younger brothers who were working in the mills in 1832. With
two or three siblings and a widowed mother presumably living with him in
the same household, it is easy to imagine the financial strain Habergam’s
family was under – something Habergam himself suggested when he
revealed that his mother had frequently approached the parish for help.
Seen in this light, Habergam’s determination to keep working and his
family’s effort to get him to the factory each morning suggests a level of
interdependence characteristic of many other disabled people’s family lives
in the early nineteenth century.
55
By admitting that his mother, ‘being
a widow and having but little, could not afford’ to let him stop working,
and that he felt it was his ‘duty to go to those mills . . . to maintain’ her,
Habergam revealed explicitly her reliance on his labour.
56
Other witnesses
told similar stories.
57
These statements reveal the complex family relations
and economic responsibilities of impaired working people, while simulta-
neously establishing their good character by emphasising their ‘industrious-
ness’ and willingness to work. This borrowed a technique used on other
occasions when impaired people addressed authority, such as in applying
for poor relief.
58
Habergam’s experience also reveals the interdependence between ‘factory
cripples’ and the leaders of the factory reform movement. At York, Oastler
had described Habergam’s first visit to him in emotional terms in a way that
enhanced his messianic self-image as a saviour of poor ‘white slaves’.
Habergam, in contrast, stressed his own agency when he recalled the
encounter for the Sadler Committee, pointing out that he had approached
Oastler in the hope of obtaining the linings for his leg irons. Habergam also
55
ibid., 157–59, 164; D. Blackie, ‘Disability, dependency, and the family in the early United States’, in S. Burch and
M. Rembis (eds), Disability Histories (Urbana, 2014), 17–34.
56
Sadler Report, 159, 164.
57
ibid., 150–53.
58
Kuskey, op. cit., 7; S. King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s to 1830s (Montreal, 2019), 127, 230.
130 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
revealed that Oastler’s patronage enabled him to receive treatment at Leeds
Infirmary as an inpatient. However, this came at a cost. Following Oastler’s
York speech, Habergam and his brothers were threatened with dismissal by
their employer.
59
And a month after testifying before Sadler, Habergam –
now unable to work – found his poor relief withdrawn, allegedly because of
his determination to speak out against his former employers. In a dramatic
gesture that challenged Habergam’s right to speak as an injured victim of the
factory system, the overseer – a man ‘profitably connected’ to the mill-
owning interest – had thrown Habergam’s medical certificate proving that
his condition ‘disable[d]’ him from factory work in his face.
60
Such intimi-
dation was followed by public accusations about the reliability of his
testimony.
61
By mid-April 1833, after another perceived slight on his char-
acter, Habergam finally fought back. The target of his ire was John Wilson-
Patten, Member of Parliament (MP).
Like other opponents of the Ten Hours Bill, Wilson-Patten attempted to
undermine reformers’ arguments by using the long-established strategy of
blaming ‘disabled’ people for their own impairments. In a speech to the
Commons on 3 April 1833 calling for ‘further inquiry’ into the factory
question, Wilson-Patten referred to an unnamed Sadler witness whose
testimony, in his view, ‘had made the greatest impression upon the public’.
This witness stated he had become ‘crooked’ as the result of factory work.
Yet Wilson-Patten claimed he had ‘incontrovertible evidence, that the
deformity of this man had nothing to do with his work in the factories
but was the result of injuries received . . . in a wrestling match’.
62
In doing so,
he attempted to undermine a central pillar of reformers’ arguments without
denying the seeming ubiquity of ‘deformity’ in Britain’s industrial districts.
Somehow Habergam learnt of Wilson-Patten’s comments and assumed
(mistakenly, according to the MP) that they referred to him. Upset by the
perceived attack on his character, Habergam, who had recently become
a pupil at the Lancasterian School in Leeds supported by his local factory
movement ‘guardians’, composed a letter addressed to his ‘accuser’ three
days later.
63
Sent to The Times by Short Time campaigner Cavie Richardson,
who saw an opportunity to discredit an opponent, the letter was written in
a deferential tone. ‘I am sorry that you have been stating things falsely about
me’, Habergam wrote, and he reaffirmed that his ‘deformity came on in the
factory’. However, he also asserted that his experience of disablement gave
him the right to express his views publicly: ‘I have got very much crippled,
and seen many of my comrades much injured in their health’. The education
59
Sadler Report, 162–64.
60
London Evening Standard, 19 July 1832 [1].
61
Leeds Mercury, 26 January 1833, 5.
62
Hansard, HC Deb 3 April 1833, vol. 17 cc79–115. For another example of this line of argument see Ure, op. cit.,
401.
63
Leeds Intelligencer, 7 February 1833 [4].
SOCIAL HISTORY 131
provided by his supporters in the movement had given him the literacy skills
that allowed him to ‘read his testimony’ and stand by it. Framed as a modest
defence of his ‘character’, Habergam nevertheless adopted the role of
defender of all those injured by the factory system, expressing his hope
that Wilson-Patten ‘will not say any more to oppress the poor factory
children when you have read my letter: they are oppressed enough by
their masters and overlookers’. By describing himself in abject terms as
a ‘poor boy . . . a cripple, in bad health’, Habergam attempted to shame
Wilson-Patten by implying his comments were ‘ungentlemanly’ and insuffi-
ciently protective of an object of compassion – which the MP was forced to
deny. Here we see how Habergam and his supporters were able to manip-
ulate the ‘pitiable’ subjectivity of the ‘factory cripple’ to speak truth to
power.
64
‘We deserve something better’: factory activism in the 1840s
Testifying before official inquiries such as the Sadler Committee was clearly
a bruising experience that could have ramifications for witnesses long after
they had given evidence. Indeed, Joseph Habergam would face a similar
ordeal again when he, along with other Sadler witnesses, was called to give
evidence to the Royal Commission on Factories in the spring of 1833.
Questioned rigorously on the accuracy of his statements to the Sadler
Committee and confronted with testimony from other operatives disputing
many of his claims, Habergam was simultaneously cajoled by supporters of
reform to maintain the general picture of factory life he had presented to
Sadler. Unsurprisingly, the teenaged Habergam found such conditions dis-
concerting, confessing to feeling ‘frightened’ when he heard there ‘were so
many [who] spoke against me’.
65
Despite the young worker’s best efforts,
Commissioner John Elliot Drinkwater was unconvinced, reporting, in
June 1833, that he ‘had reason to disbelieve the whole of H[a]bergam’s
evidence’.
66
Once more, then, Habergam’s credibility was being called into
question when he spoke about his experiences of industrial labour and ill
health.
Although the Royal Commission recognised that factory work caused
health problems for young workers, the resulting Factory Act of 1833 was
regarded as a defeat by supporters of the Ten Hours Bill. While it created an
inspectorate, banned children under nine from working in factories, and
reduced the working hours of children aged nine to thirteen to eight hours
64
The Times, 12 April 1833, 3; Lancaster Gazette, 27 April 1833 [3]. See also Gleadle, op. cit., 224.
65
Factories Inquiry Commission: First Report, C1, 135–44 (quoting at 144).
66
ibid., 158. For a highly polemical account of Habergam’s ordeal before Drinkwater see R. Oastler, Speech
delivered at a public meeting held in . . . Huddersfield on . . . 18 June 1833 to petition the House of Commons against
the report of the Factory Commissioners being received (Leeds, 1833), 7.
132 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
a day, the law fell far short of campaigners’ calls for a 10-hour day for all
workers.
67
After this setback, the factory movement lost its momentum for
a time, as its leaders turned their attention to new controversies, most
notably the implementation of the New Poor Law, which they feared
would allow mass migration of unemployed rural workers to factory dis-
tricts, driving down wages and producing even more exploitative working
conditions.
68
By the end of the decade, images of the deformed factory child
appeared to belong to a bygone era.
69
However, industrial disablement was put back in the spotlight in the early
1840s in the writings of William Dodd. Born in Kendal in 1804, Dodd
claimed to have spent 25 years from the age of six working in a factory,
suffering damage in his knees and losing an arm as a result of industrial
labour.
70
During the autumn of 1841 he had been sponsored by Lord Ashley
to tour the Midlands and north of England to gather evidence in support of
a new Ten Hours Bill. These letters were published as The Factory System
Illustrated (1842), and they describe Dodd’s conversations with the disabled
poor, revealing not just familiar tropes of industrial deformity, but also the
ongoing struggles of those ‘cast off as useless lumber’ from employment.
71
Dodd viewed his own experiences as a ‘decided cripple’ as validating his
work, enabling him both to ‘speak feelingly’ about the situation of his ‘fellow
cripples’ and to win their trust so that they would share their stories.
72
Dodd
repeatedly drew attention to the impoverishment of impaired factory work-
ers, stemming not just from the inability to earn the same wages as others,
but also from the higher medical costs they faced.
73
The issue of compensation for ‘deformed’ or maimed workers had been
raised by some witnesses before official inquiries in the early 1830s, but
Dodd made the issue central to his writing, as a ‘question of the utmost
importance to factory cripples’.
74
He drew attention to inequality of treat-
ment fostered by a system of redress which, since workers as ‘free agents’
largely accepted any risks that came with their employment, was largely at
the discretion of employers. Dodd also highlighted how accident victims
were more likely to be supported than those who became ‘crippled by inches
with long hours’ of labour.
75
He challenged the complacency of employers
on this issue. When the Bolton industrialist Edmund Ashworth told him
67
Ward, op. cit, 101–06.
68
ibid., chap. 7; N.C. Edsall, The Anti-Poor Law Movement, 1834–44 (Manchester, 1971), 57.
69
S. Walton, ‘Industrial sightseeing and Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy’, Women’s Writing,
18, 2 (2011), 273–92, 282.
70
W. Dodd, ‘A narrative of the experience and sufferings of William Dodd, a factory cripple’, in Simmons Jr (ed.),
Factory Lives (1841), 181–222.
71
Dodd, Factory System, op. cit., 106–07.
72
ibid., iv, 33.
73
Dodd, ‘Narrative’, op. cit., 215.
74
Sadler Report, 396, 475; Factories Inquiry Commission: First Report, 31; Dodd, Factory System, op. cit., 119.
75
J.L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace accidents and injured workers in nineteenth-century Britain
(Stanford, 2008), 29 and chap. 4; Dodd, Factory System, op. cit., 79, 211.
SOCIAL HISTORY 133
that impaired workers could always fall back on the Poor Law for support,
Dodd retorted that he thought ‘we deserved something better, after seeing
all our prospects in life blasted’.
76
For Dodd, support was bound up with
dignity. In May 1841, he had petitioned parliament for ‘reparation’ for those
‘maimed, mutilated, and crippled for life’ by factory work in a fashion that
honoured the sacrifices they had made in the cause of national prosperity.
77
Two years later, Dodd suggested another scheme for the benefit of those
‘who have been “worked up” in the factories’ when he responded to propo-
sals to improve the education of child workers. Thwarted in his own efforts
to take up a career in teaching because of the discrimination he faced due to
his ‘deformity’, Dodd proposed that ‘factory cripples’ should be encouraged
and trained to become teachers in manufacturing areas. Employment of
people incapacitated from other work as teachers was relatively common in
this period, but the practice was coming under increasing attack from
supporters of professionalisation. Amidst such cultural currents, Dodd’s
scheme underscored the value of education and teaching as a means for
injured workers to maintain independence and dignity.
78
Dodd’s reports of his encounters with fellow ‘cripples’ in The Factory
System Illustrated humanised the victims of industrial exploitation and
advocated on their behalf. In a letter from Bradford he described taking
tea with two brothers ‘both factory cripples, and both presenting to the eye
of the observer, a sad spectacle of factory suffering’, remarking that ‘I do not
remember to have spent a more pleasant evening in the whole course of my
existence, than I did . . . with these simple, kind-hearted people’.
79
The
‘isolated state’ in which many lived, he argued, served to ‘deter’ them from
challenging the difficulties facing them.
80
By identifying ‘factory cripples’ as
a distinctive ‘unfortunate class of beings’ and by adopting the collective ‘we’
when advocating for them, Dodd imagined a community united by their
common experiences of impairment and injustice.
81
While he was not the
first nineteenth-century writer to describe impaired people as a ‘class’ shar-
ing experiences and interests, Dodd’s work was pioneering in its articulation
of common grievance in the context of a wider political struggle.
82
For Dodd, political activism was a survival strategy. The Hull Packet
recommended The Factory System Illustrated not just for the ‘correct and
forcible view it gives of the factory system’ but also because ‘the author
depends on the sale’ of the book to make a living, being ‘incapacitated’ from
76
Dodd, Factory System, op. cit., 87.
77
The Standard, 27 May 1841 [3].
78
The Fleet Papers, 16 September 1843, 4; J. Franklin, ‘Disability panic: the making of the normal school teacher’,
Victorian Studies, 62, 4 (2020), 644–67.
79
Dodd, Factory System, op. cit., 49.
80
Fleet Papers, 16 September 1843, 4.
81
ibid., authors’ emphasis.
82
For an earlier example see J. Wilson, Biography of the Blind, 4th ed. ([1820] Birmingham, 1838), v.
134 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
manual labour.
83
Like Habergam, Dodd benefited from the patronage of
powerful reformers. Yet this laid him open to accusations that he was willing
to change his opinions to serve the highest bidder – a point raised forcefully
by the mill owner MP John Bright in parliament on 15 March 1844 when he
revealed letters allegedly written by Dodd suggesting the self-styled ‘Factory
Cripple’ was willing to switch sides in the factory debate for a price. As
opponents of reform had done to Sadler Committee witnesses a decade
earlier, Bright also cast doubt on the truth of Dodd’s ‘statements respecting
the manufactories of the north’ and the causes of his ‘deformity’.
84
Bright’s
accusations were echoed by another opponent of factory regulation,
William Cooke Taylor, who similarly recognised Dodd’s striking bodily
differences, but disputed their origins, claiming they ‘were in no way derived
from the mill or the factory’.
85
This was exactly the same tactic Wilson-
Patten had used in the speech that so upset Habergam, and, once again, the
ploy enabled opponents of reform to counter arguments about the harmful
effects of factory work without denying the prevalence of ‘deformity’ in
industrial communities.
By the time Bright unleashed his character assassination of Dodd, Ashley
had already distanced himself from his former employee, and others in the
short-time camp soon followed.
86
Abandoned by reformers, Dodd emi-
grated to the United States, where he attempted to resurrect his career as
a writer by publishing The Labouring Classes of England in 1847.
Interestingly, the book was published under the pseudonym ‘an
Englishman’ – a sign perhaps that Dodd feared his damaged reputation
might follow him to America, hampering his efforts to make a living there,
and a reminder of the potential risks attending activism at this time.
87
Despite the controversy surrounding Dodd, his work stands out for how
it highlights the issue of financial redress for disabled workers – an issue that
would not be addressed legislatively until the Employer’s Liability Act,
40 years later.
88
The factory movement gave Dodd a platform to go beyond
sentimental framings of worker deformity and highlight the socio-economic
origins of disablement. Others similarly used the campaign for industrial
regulation to present more rounded portrayals of impaired people and the
challenges they faced. In February 1846, speakers at a meeting of Preston
operatives took aim at Dodd’s persecutor, John Bright, directly. Bright had
recently cast doubt on reformers’ claims regarding an experiment with
83
Hull Packet, 17 June 1842 [3].
84
J. Bright, Speech of Mr Bright, M.P. in the House of Commons on Lord Ashley’s amendment to Sir J. Graham’s
Factory Bill, 15 March 1844 (London, 1844), 29–30, 35–38, 40–45.
85
W. Cooke Taylor, Factories and the Factory System (London, 1844), 71–72.
86
Bright, op. cit., 39, 41; The Standard, 11 April 1844 [4]; The Times, 4 May 1844, 8.
87
W. Dodd, The Labouring Classes of England, Especially those Engaged in Agriculture and Manufactures (Boston,
1847).
88
ibid.; Bartrip and Burman, op. cit., chap. 5.
SOCIAL HISTORY 135
reduced hours at a factory in the town and made more disparaging com-
ments about ‘crippled’ workers. Speakers at the meeting attacked Bright on
both counts. For William Hyam, though, it was Bright’s dismissive attitude
towards ‘factory cripples’ like himself that particularly irked. He ‘was not
ashamed of his picture’, Hyam told the audience, ‘but why should he be
scoffed and scorned and made a jest of, for what to him was a misfortune
that he could not help? It was galling enough to be pointed at and laughed at
in the streets without being taunted by Mr. Bright’.
89
While the purpose of
the meeting was to defend the Ten Hours cause against the barbs of one of
its most prominent parliamentary opponents, Hyam’s feelings of frustra-
tion, anger and hurt at people’s treatment of him as a ‘factory cripple’ are
palpable. The focus of Hyam’s criticism, then, was not simply the hated
‘factory system’, but society more generally. Anticipating the sentiments
expressed by subsequent generations of disabled activists, Hyam pointed out
that his biggest problem as a ‘factory cripple’ was not his bodily capacities,
but the way others reacted to his physical difference. Following Dodd, Hyam
seized the opportunity provided to him by the fight for industrial reform to
advance a broader social critique – one that centred the experiences of
‘factory cripples’ and emphasised the socio-cultural origins of ‘disability’.
Ashley’s treatment of Dodd indicates just how precarious impaired peo-
ple’s position within the factory movement could be. Yet other prominent
‘factory cripples’ enjoyed longer and more harmonious associations with the
campaign, and their deeds suggest that more balanced and enduring rela-
tionships with short-time leaders were possible. Joseph Habergam may have
approached Oastler for help acquiring linings for his leg irons in the early
1830s, but, a decade later, it was Oastler who stood in need of assistance.
When Oastler was imprisoned for debt for more than three years in the
1840s (seemingly for political reasons as much as financial ones), Habergam
soon became a ‘regular visitor’, providing food as well as company for the
incarcerated agitator.
90
More significantly, Habergam also played an active
role in efforts to secure Oastler’s release. After learning of a proposal to raise
funds to pay off Oastler’s debts in October 1843, Habergam quickly set
about trying to drum up support for the idea. Writing to ‘a gentleman in
Huddersfield’ on 14 October, Habergam urged him to help establish
a subscription for Oastler, declaring that factory workers would surely
‘give a penny’ or more to see ‘so good a man (who has sacrificed his all
for the working classes)’ set free. Keen to set an example, Habergam even
pledged ‘a sovereign’ of his own money – a promise he made good on and
89
Preston Chronicle, 7 February 1846 [3]. For Bright’s speech that prompted the Preston meeting see Hansard,
HC Deb 29 January 1846, vol. 83 cc408–412.
90
Driver, op. cit., 413–14; Ward, op. cit., 219; Fleet Papers, 24 April 1841, 132, 24 August 1844, 479,
7 September 1844, 499.
136 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
bettered when an Oastler ‘Liberty Fund’ was officially launched later in
the year.
91
Not content with sending his own money, he also collected and
transmitted donations from others to the fund.
92
Other ‘factory cripples’ similarly aided short-time leaders engulfed in
legal troubles and maintained close ties with the movement for over a
decade.
93
Such examples challenge the idea that impaired workers were
simply pawns in the struggle for industrial reform, deployed or discarded
at the whim of manipulative reformers. Habergam and others clearly had
a deep and enduring personal commitment to the campaign for shorter
hours, which they demonstrated through numerous voluntary acts of sup-
port for its leaders. Far from mere ‘objects of compassion’, then, some
deformed or maimed workers became highly engaged activists whose long-
standing dedication to the Ten Hours cause often matched that of more
illustrious figures.
Conclusion
In 1847 a law was passed limiting the working day to 10 hours for all women
and for children under 18 employed in textile mills. While this disappointed
those hoping for a 10-hour day for all factory workers, the law effectively
marked the end of the political moment of the ‘factory cripple’. Apart from
an occasional appearance at Chartist meetings, ‘factory cripples’ never again
received the same level of attention from reformers.
94
Even before the
passage of the 1847 act, prominent advocates of the short-time cause were
heralding the demise of the ‘factory cripple’ as a significant political concern.
Indeed, by the time the Sadler Committee began hearing testimony in 1832,
factory conditions in large towns and cities, where widespread abuse was
more difficult to hide, were already much improved on those in the earlier
and more remote rural manufactories described by many witnesses. The
inspectorate created by the 1833 Factory Act, together with the fencing of
machinery, and changing labour patterns that restricted child workers to
less dangerous ancillary roles, further reduced instances of maiming.
95
When Lord Ashley addressed a short-time meeting at Bradford in
March 1846, he could claim that it was thanks to the reform movement
that factory children ‘no longer presented those distorted and crippled
forms, which . . . he had witnessed in different mills’ a decade earlier.
96
By
91
Halifax Guardian and Huddersfield and Bradford Advertiser, 21 October 1843, 5; Halifax Guardian and Huddersfield
and Bradford Advertiser, 16 December 1843, 4; Driver, op. cit., 441–42.
92
Fleet Papers, 27 January 1844, 84.
93
Waller, op. cit., 304–07; Manchester Guardian, 20 March 1844, 6.
94
Manchester Times and Gazette, 11 April 1848, 5.
95
Waller, op. cit., 302; J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge,
2010), 217.
96
Leeds Times, 14 March 1846, 3.
SOCIAL HISTORY 137
1850, reformers like Ashley were moving on to champion other causes, and
‘factory cripples’ faded from their sight. However, the belief that industrial
workers were particularly vulnerable to disablement due to their exploita-
tion by ruthless capitalists persisted, animating calls for working-class unity
from Chartism to trade unionism.
97
The image of the vulnerable ‘factory cripple’, worn down by hours of long
work, helped shape ideas about disability and able-bodiedness in Victorian
England. Building on earlier philanthropic precedents, the factory move-
ment contributed to the enduring idea that ‘deformed’ or ‘damaged’ bodies –
particularly those of children – were objects of pity, deserving of sympathy,
support and protection.
98
It seems no coincidence that Dickens’s Tiny Tim
character, the archetype for subsequent depictions of disabled people as
‘sweet innocents’, first appeared in 1843 after the campaign for factory
reform had been raging for over a decade.
99
By deploying ‘cripples’ to elicit
sympathy for their cause, reformers in the 1830s and 1840s contributed to
the solidification of a sentimental discourse of disability that still informs
popular culture today.
100
At the same time, campaigners’ calls for the
standardisation of working hours based on what a ‘typical’ labourer could
perform in a day inadvertently helped promote the abstract ideal of the
‘normal’ working body. This had longer-term implications for measuring
performance and affected the position of people whose bodies were con-
sidered incapable of meeting these standards.
101
Rather than the helpless victims of reformist propaganda, ‘factory cripples’
were invested in the movement in complex, reciprocal ways. Held up as
a pitiful symbol of factory ‘slavery’ by Oastler in 1832, Joseph Habergam
recognised the value of his story to the Ten Hours cause, exchanging it for
medical care and access to education, and ultimately repaying the support he
received by helping to secure Oastler’s freedom in the 1840s. The campaign
for shorter hours created spaces for ‘maimed’ and ‘crooked’ workers to
participate actively in labour politics. By allowing themselves to be depicted
on banners, presented at meetings or ‘exhibited’ before officials, ‘factory
cripples’ invited people to stare at their visibly different bodies and consider
the effects of industrial labour. In doing so, they engaged in a similar type of
‘visual activism’ to the kind outlined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and
practised by people with non-normative bodies at other times and places. This
‘structured self-disclosure’ was governed by gendered rules of propriety and
carried risks.
102
In the face of ridicule, accusations of dishonesty, and
97
Turner and Blackie, op. cit., 170.
98
D.M. Turner, ‘Impaired children in eighteenth-century England’, Social History of Medicine, 30, 4, (2017), 788–
806.
99
M.F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A history of physical disability in the movies (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), 33.
100
P.K. Longmore, Telethons: Spectacle, disability and the business of charity (Oxford, 2016), chap. 7.
101
Kuskey, op. cit., 7.
102
R. Garland-Thomson, Staring: How we look (Oxford, 2009), 193.
138 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
intimidation, many were too ‘shy’ to speak out.
103
Combined with the ‘isola-
tion’ that Dodd identified, this ensured that factory reform never became
a fully fledged ‘disability movement’ in the modern sense. When disabled
people came together to advocate for change later in the century, it required
the institutional setting of blind and deaf schools to create a stronger sense of
community.
104
Nevertheless, the history of the factory movement challenges the present-
ism that characterises most portrayals of disabled people’s political activism.
In historical materialist accounts of disability, the rise of industrial capitalism
is presented as ruthlessly disempowering those who through ‘weak constitu-
tion’, age or impairment were unable to fit the ideal of the interchangeable
able-bodied worker.
105
This argument was also made by nineteenth-century
opponents of the ‘factory system’, but it is not the whole story. By making the
‘disabled’ body central to its critique of industrialisation, the nascent labour
movement presented some impaired workers with an opportunity to speak
out for themselves, which they seized. In doing so, figures like Habergam,
Dodd and Hyam railed against perceived injustices, highlighting the specific
problems they faced as ‘factory cripples’. While they may have echoed non-
disabled reformers’ portrayal of impairment as an individual misfortune,
‘crippled’ activists frequently advanced more nuanced analyses of their cir-
cumstances by emphasising that the real source of their ‘misery’ was not their
visibly different bodies, but the way society treated them. In asserting this,
they presaged modern disability activists’ insistence that it is society that
‘disables’ people, not impairment. This view is often regarded as the corner-
stone of the emergent disability rights movement (DRM) of the 1970s and
1980s. Consequently, our findings challenge the idea that the analysis
advanced by the DRM was as pioneering as some studies imply.
106
Self-
proclaimed ‘factory cripples’ developed and promoted a socio-cultural under-
standing of ‘disability’ long before the twentieth century. Recognising this
reminds us that disabled people have a much richer history of activism than
they are usually given credit for. Until that history is better known, the long
path to disability justice will remain dimly lit.
Acknowledgements
Daniel Blackie worked on this article as part of the ‘Doing Disability Activism’ project,
funded by the Kone Foundation. He thanks the Foundation and the project team (Reetta
Mietola, Pekka Koskinen, Aarno Kauppila and Amu Urhonen) for all their support.
103
Dodd, Factory System, op. cit., 10, 200.
104
Barnartt, op. cit., 9.
105
Oliver and Barnes, op. cit., 52–73.
106
T. Shakespeare, ‘The social model of disability’, in L.J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader: Fifth edition
(New York, 2017), 195–97.
SOCIAL HISTORY 139
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
David M. Turner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5400-1864
Daniel Blackie http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7992-7954
140 D. M. TURNER AND D. BLACKIE
