Child employment prospects in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire in perspective: varieties of childhood?

"In 1990 Hugh Cunningham published an article on ‘The employment and unemployment of children in England c. 1680-1851’ (P & P, no. 126, 1990, pp. 115-50). While Cunningham’s main purpose was to emphasise the lack of employment opportunities for children during the course of these two centuries, both his literary testimony from the eighteenth century and his analysis of the 1851 census report also highlighted the intense regional concentration of factory employment—notably in Cheshire, Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire—as well as revealing a surprisingly strong showing in terms of child employment opportunities in some more southerly agricultural counties—notably Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. From a detailed analysis of the 1851 Census Enumerators’ Books for the entire county (c. 167,000 records) this paper draws attention to the significance of child labour in one of those southerly counties not usually strongly associated with the cutting edge of industrialization: the county of Hertfordshire. Child labour in Hertfordshire is analysed by age group and gender, with particular attention to employment in the straw plait and hat trades, and consideration of the transition to agricultural labour on the part of young men, and the tension between domestic service and employment in the straw industry for girls and young women. But the analysis goes further than this, showing that even consideration at the level of the county can be misleading, for the child labour market was far more localised than that, creating markedly different circumstances for both children and families in different parts of a county which extended to a mere 632 square miles. These local and regional variations could have profound implications, impacting demographically, educationally, economically as well as socially, implications that extend well beyond the personal experience of the children concerned. In the final section of the paper, it is argued that Hertfordshire forms only one small sub-set of a larger picture, and the wider remit of this paper will be to briefly consider the broader range of factors that impacted upon child employment in the second half of the 19th century, including the rapid changes that occurred across the third quarter of the century, and it will be suggested that the Victorian era—possibly more than any period before or since—exhibited such a diversity of experience that it is more appropriate to think in terms of ‘varieties of childhood’ than it is to think in terms of a homogenous childhood experience."