Published in 1968: This book is a narrative of the authors experiences and sufferings during his time working in a Factory. It describes the life of workers in factories in a series of letters to The Right Hon. Lord Ashley.

Published in 1968: This book is a narrative of the authors experiences and sufferings during his time working in a Factory. It describes the life of workers in factories in a series of letters to The Right Hon. Lord Ashley.

First Published in 1968. This a reprint of the account of William Dodd, who in 1841 had published a 46-page pamphlet entitled A Narrative of the Experience and Bufferings of William Dodd, a factory cripple, written by himself, and includes letters to Lord Ashley, soon to be Shaftesbury (1851). Dodd was a warehouseman and packer, with Isaac and William Wilson, Quaker woollen manufacturers in the ancient Lake District textile centre of Kendal.

Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd; Ellen Johnston’s “Autobiography”; and James Myles’s Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy. This Broadview edition also includes a remarkably rich selection of historical documents that provide context for these works. Appendices include contemporary responses to the autobiographies, debates on factory legislation, transcripts of testimony given before parliamentary committees on child labour, and excerpts from literary works on factory life by Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.