The Industrial Revolution was not just a technological reform, but a profound social change. But the people at the bottom at that time were not necessarily better off. The English writer Dickens' famous book "The Orphan of the Mist" in 1838 was describing the scene at that time. At that time, child labor in England was a very serious social problem in British history. Before the Industrial Revolution, child labor, mainly in handicrafts and agriculture, but with the advent of industrialization, child labor was widely used in factory production. Child laborers usually worked sixteen hours a day, with the most popular humanitarian limit being twelve hours. The reason child labor was chosen was that Victorian factories were all over the British mainland, which created a high demand for labor, and workers tended to rally for a higher wage package if they tried to squeeze labor. Therefore, child laborers who were still underage were the best choice. Factory owners tend to recruit child laborers in large numbers to replace them, as this can significantly squeeze the workers' wages. If some of the workers were unable to take care of their families, this would result in women and children in their families having to be forced into the factories. This leaves factory owners with a constant supply of labor.
Britain grew rapidly after the first industrial revolution and the domestic demand for coal increased dramatically. As a result, many coal mines, large and small, appeared throughout England.
Because the mining equipment at that time was not advanced, and there were more small and medium-sized coal mines in England. Therefore, the work of digging and transporting coal underground was mainly manual. There were two reasons for the emergence of child labor in coal mines: the deeper and narrower the tunnels were dug, the thinner and thinner they needed to be to get in; the wages of male adult workers were generally higher, and coal mine owners hired child laborers for up to one-third of what they paid adults in order to save money. So, a large number of children and women came to the mines. Their job was to drill into the dark underground to dig up the coal and transport it out. Another reason companies liked to hire child laborers was because they were paid so little. In many cases, the children were not paid anything at all, but worked for their room and board. When they do earn a wage, the child usually makes 10 to 20 percent of what an adult would earn for the same job.