Seeking the 'Hidden Histories' of the Victorian Child-millworker as Offspring, Worker and Pupil in Saltaire, West Yorkshire 1853-1878

This thesis seeks to illuminate aspects of the child factory-mill workers' home, work and school lives as inhabitants of Saltaire, a model factory-village built by the paternal-philanthropist and industrialist Sir Titus Salt, for the period 1853-1878. Accepting the stratified nature of Social class in Victorian England during the period, this study presents counter narratives to those often contained in the public records of the time. The study attempts to illuminate the all-pervading ideological and cultural hegemony , past and present, that has sought to own both the children and their histories, exploring structural aspects of the relationships between child, employer and teachers through a different lens to that of the dominant Eurocentric and male lens that has prevailed over the past decades. Gramsci's theories of cultural hegemony and common sense will be analysed within the context of the child mill-worker's acceptance of their position in society. The study will explore the role of the pupil millworker as Half-timer in the broader social context including what we know from other studies of social relationships of the period. A comparative analysis is made with the Utopian factory-village of New Lanark. In determining the clearly defined roles within society and in particular the working classes of whom the child labourers of Salt's Mill are a subgroup, this study will attempt to re-imagine 'his-tory' by identifying the dominant discourses of the time and the effects such dominant discourses have had on the re-telling stories of such 'others'. Their stories will be corroborated by use of primary and secondary sources from identifiable contemporaries in an attempt to give an authentic perspective of how the child labourers lived aspects of their childhoods. This study , using mixed methods, will give a bottom-up analysis of the key social and economic drivers of the period 1853-1878