The following passage comes from page 189 of Hard Times: Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution, by E. Royston Pike, published by Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1966. As Pike writes, “All the documents quoted are original documents, prepared and written and set down in print when the Revolution was actually going on”. (7)
Hard times indeed.
WTF? Why are reading this?
Glad to see you are online Bear.
They threw it out at the library. It is (as you can see from the above) a fairly harrowing account of the times. What gets me though is the way the various “documents” are written. They’ve all got this sensationalistic, bad taste jokeyness to them. Like the bit, “the boy made good nails ever since”. And the whole thing at the end. “Times are better now. We don’t nails the boys ears to the counters anymore. We just put them on the hook and winch em’ up to the ceiling.”
I’ve only flipped through the book randomly and about 99% of it feels like stuff from a bad Monty Python sketch. Father and sons named “Lump” (for no apparent reason), young girls getting kicked in their rumps and parents deciding to send their children to school after the child’s factory bosses literally break their limbs at work. There’s something very British about that last one. “Oh, William… Your factory boss broke your leg? Well at least you can use the time off now to learn to read.”
Man I want to add this book to the libraridum. It sounds like you guys are throwing out pure gold over there with your “weeding”.
They sure do weed some strange stuff. I think one of the reasons why a lot stranger stuff gets thrown out here is because it is a fairly specialized library. If it isn’t music related, it is questionable whether we retain it. Like I’ve seen the things that the other library throws out (Westminster is a part of Rider University; so there are in effect 2 libraries that either campus has access too) and it is usually pretty drab stuff… like old textbooks.