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The thesis challenges popular generalisations about the trades, occupations and locations to which pauper apprentices were consigned, shining the spotlight away from the familiar narrative of factory children, onto the fate of their destitute peers in port towns. A comparative investigation of Liverpool, Bristol and Southampton, it adopts a deliberately broad definition of the term pauper apprenticeship in its multi-sourced approach, using 1710 Poor Law and charity apprenticeship records and previously unexamined New Poor Law and charity correspondence to provide new insight into the chronology, mechanisms and experience of pauper apprenticeship. Not all port children were shipped out. Significantly more children than has hitherto been acknowledged were placed in traditional occupations, the dominant form of apprenticeship for port children. The survival and entrenchment of this type of work is striking, as are the locations in which children were placed; nearly half of those bound to traditional trades remained within the vicinity of the port. The thesis also sheds new light on a largely overlooked aspect of pauper apprenticeship, the binding of boys into the Merchant service. Furthermore, the availability of sea apprenticeships as well as traditional placements caused some children to be shipped in to the ports for apprenticeships. Of those who were still shipped out to the factories, the evidence shows that far from dying out, as previously thought, the practice of batch apprenticeship persisted under the New Poor Law. The most significant finding of the thesis is the survival and endurance of pauper apprenticeship as an institution involving both Poor Law and charity children. Poor children were still being apprenticed late into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Pauper apprenticeship is shown to have been a robust, resilient and resurgent institution. The evidence from port towns offers significant revision to the existing historiography of pauper apprenticeship.

Both modern and contemporary commentators have over the past 140 years written many millions of words on the subject of the abuse of child labour in factories and trades in the first half of the nineteenth century. The subject was highly charged with emotion at that time. The detailed observations of intelligent and perceptive men contrast with the partial accounts of honest and not so honest early Victorians. Together they have blurred the definition between truth and the embellishment of it. This lack of clarity on the issue of child labour has left modern historians great scope for widely differing interpretations and the evidence for believing that conditions were as bad or as good as suited their particular point of view. It is regretted that there is insufficient material in South Africa to enter fully into the often bitter arguments of the, so called, 'optimists' and 'pessimists' in respect of the improvement or deterioration of the standard of living of the labouring classes in the first half of the nineteenth century. Child labour was not one of the inventions of the Industrial Revolution. The labour of children within the domestic economy had, certainly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, been regarded as socially acceptable. The aim of this work is to trace the conditions of child labour in the early years of the Industrial Revolution as the spread of factories demanded more and more young hands and imposed an alien and sometimes inhuman discipline on the workers. As the numbers of children employed expanded not only in total but also as a proportion of the total labour force, the realisation that the labour of children was presenting a grave social problem gradually dawned upon the governments of the time. This work traces the development of legislation from the first faltering step forward of the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 to the passing of the Factory Act of 1847 which provided for a ten hours' working day. This type of legislation was an experiment which developed in efficiency by trial and error. Detailed consideration is given to the arguments of the supporters and the opponents of restrictions being placed on the complete freedom of the manufacturers. This was a battle eventually to be won by the supporters of restriction on the freedom of the masters. Nearly twenty years have passed since detail ed consideration was given to the parallel development of the awareness that the labour of children was a problem and the steps taken to alleviate it. The aim in this work is to consider the most recent publications that deal with particular aspects of the problem. The intention is to penetrate the contradictory claims made in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to attempt to clarify as accurately as possible the realities of the conditions of child labour and to trace their improvement to the middle of the century.