“A Partisan in Defence of Children”? Kingsley's<i>The Water-Babies</i>Re-Contextualized

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See the collected papers of the Society, dating from 1803 to 1837, in Carpenter. John Harthover comments that he lives “under good Queen Victoria”, i.e., after 1837. The 1834 Act for the Better Regulation of Chimney Sweepers and their Apprentices stipulated that no child under 10 should be employed as a sweep (An Act 257), so any Victorian householder hiring a boy would have been in breach of the law, even before the 1840 act. See Terasaki for the full history of this episode.