SOURCE: Parr, Joy. “British Working Children,” “The Promised Land.” In Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924, pp. 14-26, 45-61. London: Croom Helm, 1980.

In the following excerpt, Parr examines the working conditions in late nineteenth-century Britain that led poor parents to send their children to Canada as agricultural apprentices. Parr also discusses the conditions encountered by the children when they arrived in Canada.

England does not know what childhood is.¹

There were visitors who came away from Salford, East London and East Glasgow eighty years ago claiming that in those crowded streets and lanes there were no children. School Board inspectors declared that there was no childhood among the poor, that there was only labour. European travellers reported that the labouring boys and girls of England were treated like men. Mission workers protested that their youngest clients were always pondering over things, apparently unable to play, unaware...