Title: Broken Childhoods: Rural and Urban Non-Adult Health during the Industrial Revolution in Northern England (Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries). Authors: *Rebecca

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries England underwent a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization. The detrimental effects of urban living conditions and child factory labor on the health of children during this time has been the subject of considerable debate and investigation by historians. It is generally understood that growing up in a rural environment was more conducive to healthy growth and development than within an industrial town. This study presents the first direct comparison of the bioarchaeological evidence for non-adult health from contemporaneous urban and rural sites from the north of England. Rural skeletal assemblages from this period are rare and most published studies are biased towards urban sites in the south of the country. Contrary to expectations, results revealed equal prevalence rates of metabolic and dental disease at both sites, but skeletons from the rural site had greater evidence of growth disruption and respiratory disease. Evidence for specific infectious disease and medical care in response to trauma were also identified. Our interpretations of rural/urban health during this period must take into account the dire consequences of social inequalities and economic migration. There is a tendency for the latter to be characterized as uni-directional ‒ from country to town ‒ without due consideration of rural industry and child migrant workers. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain were a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization; from A.D. 1801 to 1901 the proportion of people living in towns increased from one-fifth to four-fifths (Wohl 1983). By the mid-nineteenth century, almost half of the total population of England was under 20 years of age: “England was awash with children” (Humphries 2013: 115). Traditionally, children from poorer families will always have had to work, either within the domestic context, or as apprentices and laborers. What changed with the industrial revolution was the nature of that work, with a dramatic increase in nondomestic labor by women and children (Goose and Honeyman 2013: 4). Children of the urban poor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have long been conceptualized as the passive, exploited, victims of an insatiable industrial machine, whose wants and needs were overlooked by a laissez-faire society focussed on economy and Empire (Gowland 2015b). In a speech to the House of Lords in 1873, Lord Shaftesbury famously described children leaving the factory gates during the earlier part of the nineteenth century as “a set of sad, dejected, cadaverous creatures. the sight was most piteous, the deformities incredible. They seemed to me, such were their crooked shapes, like a mass of crooked alphabets”. This account is borne out by numerous other descriptions of working class, urban, children at this time (e.g. Engels 1950; Gaskell 1833). By contrast the rural environment during this period was conceptualized as much healthier for children; fresh, unpolluted air, with plenty of sunshine, a more varied diet, less overcrowding and better sanitation. As Gaskell (1833: 200) observed: “A child from an agricultural district, eight or nine years old, blooming with rosy health, full of vitality, is transported to a crowded town . it is exposed to miasmatic evaporations, shut up in a narrow street, its home is damp and cold, its food poor and badly cooked: in a few months, from the force of these circumstances, the Hebe-looking child has become pallid”. These sentiments were echoed by the nineteenth century physician Francis Sharp (in the Reports from the Commissioners 1833), who moved from a rural practice near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, to work in the city of Leeds: “The general appearance of the children in Leeds immediately struck me as much more pallid, and also the firmness of the fibre as much inferior to what I had seen in Scarborough and the adjacent country. If it were not for the individuals who join the mills from the country the factory people would soon be deteriorated”. There was a general anxiety that urban childhoods, particularly when spent undertaking factory labor, would result in the eventual physiological deterioration of the nation. These concerns sparked a number of enquiries into the health of urban and factory children and a vast amount of qualitative and anthropometric data was commissioned from across the country (Reports from the Commissioners 1833). The results of these endeavors indicated that rural children were, as suspected, on average 3cm taller than their urban counterparts (Kirby 2013). It was concluded, however, that factory labor per se was not responsible for the ‘stinted’ growth and low life expectancy, but rather insalubrious urban conditions more generally, combined with the perceived lowly habits and morality of the poor (Chadwick 1842). There are numerous descriptions of the filthy, overcrowded, insanitary, polluted living conditions in many of the poorer slum areas. So-called ‘back-to-back’ housing in cities such as Bradford and Leeds also allowed very little natural light into the rooms, and this combined with severe air pollution meant that exposure to sunshine, vital for proper mineralization of the bones and immune function in growing children, was limited (Brimblecombe 1978; Hudson 1992). However, some contemporary accounts of rural life also point to inadequate and over-crowded houses, as well as polluted water supplies spreading diseases such as typhus (Wilkes 2011). The nineteenth century epidemiologist William Farr felt that there was an often “fanatical” fixation on the declining conditions of urban centers, stating that ‘epidemics desolated the country as well as towns, though to less extent. ’ (quoted in Young and Handcock 1956; 771). Rural populations were also highly susceptible to periods of food shortages and crop failures, and a series of poor harvests could result in poverty and famine (Bogin 1999). Alfred Ireson, who was born in 1856, described rural life during this period as “a time of trial and difficulty. The agricultural workers had long hours, they pay barely enough to keep body and soul together. The condition of the children in many cases was pitiable. Rough food and clothes; everything depended on the skill and character of the mother” (quoted in Burnett 1984: 83). While protective measures regarding child labor in factories were instigated, those working within agriculture and rural cottage industries were overlooked until the Education Act of 1876, which decreed that children under 10 years of age could no longer be employed in agricultural work (Burnett 1984; Pinchbeck and Hewitt 1973). The vast majority of research concerning childhood health during this period is derived from historical data and records (Kirby 2013). Whilst these are extremely valuable, some of the qualitative reports depict partisan viewpoints and political polemics rather than objective observation (e.g. Engels 1950). Recent excavations of cemeteries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have highlighted the important contribution of bioarchaeological evidence for examining the direct physiological impact of these environments on children living at the time (e.g. Brickley and Miles 1999; DeWitte et al. 2015; Geber 2016; Lewis 2002; Mays et al. 2009; Newman and Gowland 2016; Pinhasi et al. 2006). Childhood growth and morbidity is multidimensional in etiology, but is widely documented as being a sensitive indicator of socio-economic environment (Lewis 2007). Recent bioarchaeological analyses have been strongly biased towards urban population samples, because so few rural sites dating to this period have been excavated. Mays et al. (2008) provide a valuable comparison of urban Birmingham with rural Wharram Percy, but the latter site was in use for a millennium and predominantly medieval, thus lacking chronological resolution. This is important, because rural lifeways were not static and unchanging across the last millennium; rural industry also developed apace during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The aim of this study was to compare and contrast rural and urban skeletal evidence for the health and mortality of children from two sites in the north of England in order to assess the historically accepted idea that rural environments were more conducive to better childhood health. This research provides a rare insight into a rural post-medieval assemblage (now reburied) and thus also serves to enrich the existing corpus of bioarchaeological knowledge for this period, which has so far been largely confined to urban sites. This analysis of sites from the north of England also provides an important comparative data-set given the current bias towards sites from the south and midlands. The bioarchaeological data will be integrated with existing historical evidence to obtain a richer understanding of living and working conditions in both environments.