Child Labor During the Industrial Revolution

Me at Work 

       My name is Emily Young, I am 8 years old, and I’ve been working in this factory for a very long time now. My day normally goes the same way every day. I only sleep from about 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Once I wake up I have 2 hours, until 6 a.m., to eat and get to work. Any time left over from that is spare time. Once work starts, at 6 a.m., I worked up until 8 a.m. and then I get a 45 minute break to eat breakfast, which lasts until 8:45 a.m. I then return to the tiring work for 3 hours and 15 minutes. At noon I am given 2 hours to eat, travel, and whatever time is left is my spare time. I then continue work for another 6 hours. After these 6 hours of enduring painful and energy consuming labor I am given another 2 hours to eat, travel, and the remaining time is spare time. After this harsh day of labor I then fall asleep and continue life in the same schedule the next day. Life was much easier before me and my family moved to the city.
       Before we moved I worked at home helping my mother cook, clean, and sew clothes for my family. Sometimes I was even given special jobs at harvest time like collecting firewood, bringing water from the well, scaring away bids from our crops, catching rats and mice, gathering wild fruit and flowers for making wine, and gathering acorns to feed the pigs. Even though life was hard we had fresh air and a field to play in. It would have been nice to continue to live in this way but once these factories were made my family began needing more money to survive. With the money that I would make our family could make it. So I began working in this terrible factory.

       Right now I work as a piecer. This job involves having to lean over the spinning-machine to fix the broken threads. I have to piece the threads while the wheel is coming out, which doesn’t give me much time to do this. This job may not sound so hard but doing it for 6 hours straight and with so many broken threads needing fixing it can get very tiring. This job is even harder considering the conditions that I am forced to work in. The buildings were dirty, low-roofed, poorly ventilated, and ill drained. There was constantly dust everywhere.

I have seen many terrible things while on the job. If we were ever drowsy the overlooker would dip us in water head first, and even sometimes hit us. One day the drawing frame was stopped by a little boy. The overlooker walked up to a girl and asked why it had stopped and she said she didn’t know. He then began beating her with a stick. When he was finished she said that she would let her mother know. He fetched the master and she was once again beaten with a stick over the heads until it was full of lumps and bleeding. That was probably the most violent punishment I had seen while working. In other instances the children were just beat but not as much as the other little girl. My wage was about 4 shillings every 3 days. The money really helped my family out. Without I don't think we could make it. 
       Many people were against child labor so the government passed various acts to improve the labor for us including: 1802 Health and Morals Factory Act, 1819 Factory Act, 1833 Althrop’s Factory Act, 1833 Factory Act, 1844 Graham’s Factory Act, 1844 Factory Act, 1847 Fielder’s Factory Act, Factory Act 1847, 1847 Factory Act, and the 1874 Factory Act. These acts did various things such as improving working conditions but most of the restricted the amount of hours children could work a day and a week. I had basically no education. I knew simple things like what 1+1 was but I never really got an education. My mother taught me how to cook and do things around the house but that was about it. 

Macbeth

This reinterpretation of Macbeth was very easy to be understood by modern audiences. The directors stray away from tradition when portraying the witches. The way the directors reinterpreted it really brought out the emotions of the audience. 
There was more than one scene in Rupert Goold’s film adaptation of Macbeth that I found shocking and unsettling. They were Act III, scene 4, and Act IV, scene 2, and Act V, scene 7 In Act IV, scene 2 Banquo’s ghost appears at the banquet Macbeth is hosting. The reason why this scene was shocking is because the ghost actually had blood from when he was killed. The fact that the scene looks so realistic was also shocking. In Act 4, scene 2 assassins are shown about to kill Lady Macduff and her children. The reason why this scene was so shocking, and even more unsettling, is because one of the assassins had a hand saw with them which made me think that they were going to do wrong and cruel things to them (besides killing them). Another reason this scene was unsettling is because of the fact that they were killed for, basically, no reason. The thought of someone even killing a child is disturbing to me, and probably to any audience member. The way the man warned them was very full of emotion and you could feel his concern for Lady Macduff and the children. Act 5, scene 7 was unsettling because of the way that Macduff walks in with all the blood on him and with Macbeth’s head in his hands and the way that Malcolm held Macbeth’s head. When Macduff walks in with Macbeth's head he is covered in Macbeth’s blood. It was unsettling to picture the way that he beheaded him because, by the looks of it, it was done very cruelly. When Malcolm held Macbeth’s head he seemed very calm and not startled at all. When he lifted the head is the part that I found the most unsettling because the head look extremely realistic.

Some of the scenes looked similar to the popular modern movies like The Last Exorcism (the chanting of the witches seem as thought it was inspired by this horror movie). The director definitely modernized this film. The clothes, time period, and the equipment are much more modern than the way they were meant to be. I think that the way that directors didn’t make the witches look like the traditional image was a good thing because if they would have made them look that way the movie would be less realistic. The extra parts that the directors added like in the beginning where the witches ripped some organ of the man out and hangs it on the rack along with a jacket. That scene adds more horror to the film.

Galileo Galilei

On February 15 of 1564, I, Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in the Duchy of Florence, Italy. I was the first born of six. My father was Vincenzo Galilei, a well-known musician and music theorist, and my mother was Giulia Ammannati. In 1583, I began studying medicine in the University of Pisa. I soon became fascinated with mathematics and physics. I was on my way to becoming a university professor but, I unfortunately had to leave the university in 1585 before earning my degree. I continued to study mathematics.  During that time I began my study on objects in motion and published The Little Balance which described the hydrostatic principle of weighing small quantities. When I received a teaching job at the University of Pisa in 1589, I conducted experiments with falling objects and produced my book Du Motion (On Motion), which went against the Aristotelian views about motion and falling objects.  In 1592, I lost my job at the University of Pisa. I then began teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy at the University of Padua. When my father died in 1591, I was entrusted with the care of my little brother Michelagnolo. In 1604, I published The Operations of the Geometrical Military Compass. I also made a hydrostatic balance for measuring small objects. The same year I developed the Universal Law of Acceleration. Sometime close to 1609 I developed a simple telescope of my own. In the fall of 1609 I began observing the sky with my telescope. In March 1610, I published The Starry Messenger which said that the moon was not flat and smoother, but a sphere with mountains and craters. In 1612, I published my Discourse on Bodies in Water, which went against the Aristotelian explanation of why objects floated. In 1613, I published my observations of sunspots, which further contradicted the Aristotelian doctrine that the sun was perfect. In 1616, I was ordered to stop holding, teaching, or defending the Copernican theory regarding the motion of Earth. In 1623, a friend of mine was selected as Pope Urban VIII. He allowed me to pursue my work and even encouraged me to publish it, but it could not advocate the Copernican theory. So, in 1632, I published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Though he claimed Dialogues was neutral, it was clearly not. The Church was against the book and summoned me to Rome. I was never imprisoned, but when I was threatened with torture I finally admitted that I supported the Copernican theory. I was then put under house arrest for the remainder of my life. While under house arrest I wrote Two New Sciences which was basically a summary of my life's work on the science of motion and strength of materials. Sadly I died on January 8, 1642.
Without my work and evidence proving the Copernican theory people of today may still believe the Earth is the center of the universe and the church may have never dropped its opposition of heliocentrism in 1835. My studies have altered the way that modern scientists study, and their beliefs.

Sources:

"Galileo." The Columbia Encyclopedia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Credo Reference. Web. 21 January 2013

"Galileo." Galileo. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 2011. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

"Galileo." 2013. The Biography Channel website. Jan 21 2013.