Samuel Davy, a young man, now employed in the Westminster Gas Works, has called on the Publisher of BLINCOE’S MEMOIR, and has said, that his own experience is a confirmation of the general statement in the Memoir. Samuel Davy, when a child of 7 years of age, with 13 others, about the year 1805, was sent from the poorhouse of the parish of St. George’s, in the Borough of Southwark, to Mr. Watson’s mill, at Penny Dam, near Preston, in Lancashire; and successively turned over to Mr. Burch’s mill, at Backborough, near Castmill, and to Messrs. David and Thomas Ainsworth’s mill, near Preston. The cruelty towards the children increased at each of those places, and though not quite so bad as that described by Blincoe, approached very near to it. One Richard Goodall, he describes, as entirely beaten to death! Irons were used, as with felons, in gaols, and these were often fastened on young women, in the most indecent manner from the ancles to the waist! It was common to punish the children, by keeping them nearly in a state of nudity, in the depth of winter, for several days together. Davy says, that he often thought of stealing, from the desire of getting released from such a wretched condition, by imprisonment or transportation; and, at last, at nineteen years of age, though followed by men on horseback and on foot, he successfully ran away and got to London. For ten years, this child and his brother were kept without knowing any thing of their parents, and without the parents knowing where the children were. All applications to the Parish Officers for information were vain. The supposed loss of her children, so preyed upon the mind of Davy’s mother, that, with other troubles, it brought on insanity, and she died in a state of madness! No savageness in human nature, that has existed on earth, has been paralleled by that which has been associated with the English Cotton-spinning mills.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy, by John Brown
