Under Any Circumstances?

How about these, reported by J. P. Kay in his pamphlet mentioned above?:

The operatives are congregated in rooms and workshops during twelve hours in the day, in an enervating, heated atmosphere, which is frequently loaded with dust or filaments of cotton, or impure from constant respiration, or from other causes. They are engaged in an employment which absorbs their attention, and unremittingly employs their physical energies. They are drudges who watch the movements, and assist the operations, of a mighty material force, which toils with an energy ever unconscious of fatigue. The persevering labour of the operative must rival the mathematical precision, in incessant motion, and the exhaustless power of the machine.

Well, maybe those working conditions don't sound so bad after all compared to the living conditions of the cotton workers Kay reported in his autobiography:

Manchester had then a very imperfect municipal organization. Scarcely the first steps had been taken for the sanitary regulation of those parts of the town which were inhabited by the working classes. Consequently many thousands of the population lived in basement or cellar dwellings below the level of the street. These were often so imperfectly drained that the floors were either damp or covered with water, and I have had to make my way to the bedside of patients by stepping on bricks placed in the water of the flooded floors. The houses were often built back to back, and therefore without thorough ventilation, or yards, or proper conveniences. The streets throughout Ancoats were, for the most part, unpaved. Many of them were raised by accumulated cinders, rubbish, and offal considerably above the sills of the doors of the cottages. These roads were often ploughed by deep ruts in which water and filth stagnated, and they generally constituted the ‘middin’ on to which all the ejecta of the hou8es were thrown. There were few or no drains of any kind, and absolutely no arterial system of sewerage. To these parts of the town there was no systematic supply of water, and the wells and other similar sources must have been to a great extent contaminated by sewage. No municipal regulations interfered with the position of slaughter—houses, size— manufactories, tanneries and other foul or noxious trades. There were many courts from which ventilation was excluded, except through a narrow entry or from the top of lofty houses. I remember some of these which descended the steep banks of the Irk or Irwell, and were surrounded by all kinds of nuisances of noxious manufactories, and which consequently became the most fatal scenes of the ravages of epidemic cholera. At that time the labour of women and children in factories was not limited. The sanitary arrangements of the factories themselves were extremely imperfect; the hot air was often foul with odours, and obscured with dust and the ‘fluff’ of the cotton. The hours of labour were injuriously extended to twelve, and in some of the inferior mills even to fourteen hours a -day. Very few schools were open except on Sunday. The discipline of the mill, which was as strict as that of a military battalion, and the long hours of labour were, I think, the most effectual restraints on the population, which might otherwise have been driven to greater excesses of sensual indulgence, for their homes had few attractions, and the municipality had done little to promote their health or comfort.

to be continued...