We went for a family trip around Quarry Bank Mill yesterday. As part of the trip, we went around the Apprentice House. This was the house, up the lane from the mill, in which children were taken from the Work House and brought into work at the mill. The mill owner wanted children in and around 10 years old, who were old enough to work but small enough to clamber under appropriate machinery.
As is typically the case when you go around these places, it is a reminder of the brutal life many Victorian children faced. They were sent away from their homes due to abject poverty, boarded in an unknown area with dozens of others and made to work 12 hour days for a pittance. For many of them, this was a preferable state of affairs to remaining at home or, worse, being sent to the Work House. Many were, indeed, taken from the Work House to work in the mill and this was considered a preferable state of affairs for them.
Three things struck me about all this. First, history is neither a progressive march to sunny uplands nor an incrementally worsening terminal decline. Whilst I don’t believe that time is cyclical, it is the case that history is often cyclical and every aspect of human existence is on a cylical up or down turn. There are times and places where certain some things may appear to be on the upturn whilst others seem to be heading down and, later, entirely the opposite. It is undeniable that our approach more broadly to child labour laws is eminently better in the modern West than it ever was in Victorian England. No doubt we can find plenty of examples where the Victorians were better than us. Such has it always been – history is neither an upward trajectory of increasing progress or steady downward decline, but is always in some area on an upswing and a downswing.
Second, this ought to put paid to any claims that the past was glorious whilst the modern age is bogus. In any time and place, there will be good and bad, positive and negative, things better and things worse. Those who hark back to a golden age, whatever age that may be, are almost always looking at certain matters in isolation and inevitably looking back at the whole with rose-tinted spectacles. We don’t have to have an undying optimism nor a eeyorish pesimism about the time and place in which we live. We don’t need to hark back to the past as though it was nothing but wonderful. The truth is typically somewhere between these poles.
Third, this is a potent reminder of what the Bible says:
10 Don’t say, ‘Why were the former days better than these? ’
since it is not wise of you to ask this.
11 Wisdom is as good as an inheritance
and an advantage to those who see the sun,
12 because wisdom is protection as silver is protection;
but the advantage of knowledge
is that wisdom preserves the life of its owner.
It is not wise to hark back to the old days and constantly insist they are better. I take it that it is not wise because it is often not true and, even when it might be true, they aren’t coming back. There is good in the current days and it is wise to recognise it, it helps nobody to hark back to the good old days as though they might be recaptured. It is not life-enhancing to anyone to hear the moans of those who insist things were better in my day. Older generations would also be wise not to keep harking on this way – even if they genuinely believe it to be true – because they might just find a resentful younger generation who take them at their word and seek to level the playing field to their detriment!
Certainly, walking around Quarry Bank Mill, few would come away with the belief that the former days were better than these. For the children in the mill, the former days were much harder, the work was harder, the life was harder, the support was worse, there was little better about it for them than for young people today. Perhaps this would serve our own thankfulness to the Lord for the age in which he placed us and help us assess our own time a least a little more objectively.