EXHIBITS

An image from the popular ballad, The little chimney-sweep.  This image juxtaposes a working child with the Foundling Hospital, a home for "deserted" children, demonstrating that being a working child was not far removed from the children's charities of London. ©Trustees of the British Museum

While Chambers and Johnson are able to provide us with eighteenth-century definitions of children and childhood, they do not include the further classification of poor children by their ability or inability to work.  The children who were incapable of working because they were too young or physically incapable were considered members of the "impotent" poor class, and it was illegal to be a member of the "impotent" poor class in eighteenth-century England. Children who could work were often “bound out” in apprenticeships arranged by the local parish or charity that agreed to help them.  When apprenticeships couldn’t be found for children who could work, they were taught skills that would support them as adults or placed in workhouses until a situation could be found. However, children who belonged to the "impotent" poor class was more problematic because they either had to be taken care of until they were old enough to work or they would be reliant on charity for the rest of their lives.

Charities like the Foundling Hospital were designed to take in children from the impotent poor class and turn them into useful members of society.  However, the transition from belonging to the Foundling Hospital and being "bound out" was a difficult one for children to make.  The image to the left depicts a scene from "a favorite ballad, founded on fact" about a child who is a chimney sweep.  During the ballad, the well-dressed woman reaching out to the sweep befriends him and learns that he is her brother.  The background of the image features the Foundling Hospital, implying that being a working child was not all that different from being a child living in a charity school.  

While these two classes of children might not seem to pose a large issue, the “rapid and fertility-driven population growth of the era meant that between 1676 and 1826 the proportion of infants (aged four and under) rose from about 11 per cent to 15.5 per cent” and children aged five to 14 increased to 24 percent from 18 percent (Humphries 127).  These percentages are already divided between children capable of work and those who weren’t, helping to distinguish between who qualified as "impotent poor" and who didn't. This rapid population growth was accompanied by a high adult mortality rate. Jane Humphries notes that “something like 24 per cent of children would lose either a mother or a father… perhaps another 4 per cent would lose both” (128) and even more children would be abandoned by their families by choice or extenuating circumstances. The combination of an increasingly young population, adult mortality rates, and abandonment exacerbated the problems already associated with poor children living on crowded, dirty streets.