Back-breaking work, 17-hour days, minimal pay: a glimpse inside the factories of Victorian Britain

Charles Dickens was not wrong. The exploitation of children in Victorian factories was truly shocking – yet, curiously, neither the children themselves nor their parents seemed to think it was wrong.

A fascinating new light has been shed on the attitudes of child workers, their parents, employers and the government's inspectors early in Queen Victoria's reign has been shed in a 900-page document posted on the internet yesterday.

It is a set of reports to the Children's Employment Commission on conditions in the textiles industry in 1841. It shows that some old political arguments just never seem to go away.

Just as today's employers and unions are divided over the extent to which the state ought to involve itself in issues such as the length of the working week, so arguments raged behind the scenes between commissioners and employers over the same question.

Thomas Tancred contributed a long report on the manufacture of calicoes and other fabrics in the west of Scotland. He discovered that children as young as nine were being made to work 24-hour shifts in bare feet and "fever" temperatures. He thought this an "evil" which should be stopped by government legislation and proposed that it should be made illegal to employ children under the age of 10, and that the working week should be limited for all employees, by law, to 58 hours.

But he warned that any legislation would be stiffly opposed by employers, because of "a natural jealousy of interference, and a fear of injury to their private interests". The discoveries which disturbed Tancred included the working conditions of "stove-girls", whose job was to hang up the newly manufactured clothes to dry.

"The temperature at which I usually found these stoves when the girls were filling them was 110F (43C) or fever heat; and the steam rising from the wet goods as they are hung up is still more suffocating and oppressive than dry heat would be. The stove girls go in and out of this great heat with bare feet and hardly any clothing," he reported. Working hours in the stove room, he added, were "very irregular and excessive".

But Tancred was careful to report the views of employers, one of whom reassured him that forcing a child to work a 24-hour shift "does not occur once in a month, and never when we can possibly avoid it".

Another warned: "If young people were prohibited from night work, that prohibition might, even in one night, prevent us from having an order executed in time for shipment."

Other commissioners interviewed children and their parents in similar factories in Ireland and the Midlands. What comes as most surprising to the modern reader is how readily the children accepted their lot and saw little reason to complain.

One report noted that factory girls in Bilston, West Midlands, were "as gross and immoral in their language and conduct as the men who first made them," but added: "Being very happy, they are certainly no objects for pity..."

Another commissioner, Frederick Roper, was impressed by how well the factory children looked, compared with those not in work – "which, doubtless, arises from the causes they mention ... that they get more food: what it is otherwise that sustains this appearance of good health I am utterly at a loss to imagine".

A 12-year-old girl, Eliza Moran, told Roper that she worked from 7am until night time, and sometimes until midnight. "I like the work I am employed at: I do not get tired before night," she added.

A co-worker, Mary Ann Smith, aged 10, who went about her work barefoot, having no shoes, and did not even know what she was paid because her mother pocketed her wages, added: "I have heard all that Eliza Moran has said. I agree with her entirely."

Philip Hughes, who earned two shillings a week, said: "I am about nine years old. I have been two years and a half at work in this factory. I am in very good health but I sometimes have a headache from the noise."

Dr Ian Galbraith, managing director of the Origins Network, which is publishing the reports, said: "You have to put this into a historical context. Very often it was better to be in the workplace where you would be warm and fed, rather than at home, where conditions where far more cramped and squalid."

The full set of reports on the attitudes at the time can be found online at www.originsnetwork.com