Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... The Real Oliver Twist: Robert Blincoe - A Life That Illuminates an Agepor John Waller
Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. A good, if occasionally over the top history of mill children in "Merrie Olde England". Could use some redacting. How many pages of children suffering under the hands of cruel masters are necessary for the reader to understand the concept. This book proves one thing - Nothing has changed - the rich still beat on the poor any way they can to maximize their profits. Highly readable rewrite of the rather unreadable biography of Robert Blincoe, a workhouse boy sold as an apprentice to the 'white slavery' of a cotton mill where he was severely abused and exploited. John Waller explains the background of parish politics, the rise of the cotton trade very clearly and is able to help people understand the period as well as sympathise with the tribulations of Robert Blincoe himself who, amazingly, became a small businessman himself and was an influential figure for the reform of factory work. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
From a parish workhouse to the heart of the industrial revolution, from debtors' jail to Cambridge University and a prestigious London church, Robert Blincoe's political, personal and turbulent story illuminates the Dickensian age like never before.In 1792 as revolution, riot and sedition spread across Europe, Robert Blincoe was born in the calm of rural St Pancras parish. At four he was abandoned to a workhouse, never to see his family again. At seven, he was sent 200 miles north to work in one of the cotton mills of the dawning industrial age. He suffered years of unrelenting abuse, a life dictated by the inhuman rhythm of machines.Like Dickens' most famous character, Blincoe rebelled after years of servitude. He fought back against the mill owners, earning beatings but gaining self-respect. He joined the campaign to protect children, gave evidence to a Royal Commission into factory conditions and worked with extraordinary tenacity to keep his own children from the factories. His life was immortalised in one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe.Renowned popular historian John Waller tells the true story of a parish boy's progress with passion and in enthralling detail. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)362.708694092Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Social problems of & services to groups of people Child welfareClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
The book contains accounts of the lives and actions of a wide range of personalities involved in the campaign to better the lives of children working in factories in the early industrial revolution, including radical journalists like John Brown, early trades unionists such as John Doherty, benign factory owners such as Robert Owen, and, within Parliament, figures like the Tory Lord Ashley (future Earl of Shaftesbury) who led many successful parliamentary campaigns for progressive social causes. One noteworthy point at the political level was how quite often it was Tories who were in the forefront of the campaigns for progressive legislation in Parliament, rather than Whigs (future Liberals), as one might expect from a modern viewpoint. Whigs were more closely identified with the rising class of industrialists like the mill owners, whereas there was a strain of paternalistic and romantic Toryism that saw the industrialists as upstarts interfering with the old fashioned relationship where a benevolent landowner at least decently looked after the workers and peasants on his estate, despite the huge gulf between them.
The title of the book stems from the possibility that the young Charles Dickens had read Blincoe's memoir before he wrote Oliver Twist; at the time he was also a Parliamentary reporter so would have been well aware of the debates around factory reform legislation. There is no direct evidence, but the events in Oliver's early life do match quite closely to those of Blincoe's. A closer literary link is with Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which we know for a fact draws for its dramatic incidents on many features of the memoir - a pity that this novel has not achieved the fame of Dickens's masterpiece.
This is a great read about a key turning point in Britain's history, and one man's involvement in it as a victim but who also overcame adversity and made a decent life for himself and his family. ( )