As every parent knows, infancy and childhood can be fraught with peril. From Sudden Infant Death Syndrome to suffocation, the list of dangers to infants is extensive. But the risks today pale in comparison to those that children faced in the past.

Judith Flanders’ exhaustively detailed book, Inside the Victorian Home: a Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, offers a disturbing glimpse of early childhood in the Victorian era. It should fill everyone with gratitude for the sheer scale of medical advancement in the last century or so.

The benefits of vaccines and proper sanitation are, of course, well-known. However, the sheer extent of their positive impact on the lives of children bears repeating. Before the age of five, 35 out of every 45 Victorian children had experienced either smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus or enteric fever — or some combination of those illnesses — and many of them did not survive.

As late as 1899, more than 16 percent of children died before their first birthday; today in the United Kingdom that figure is 0.35 percent.

What is less well known is that it was not just disease, but also primitive medicine that killed infants.

Consider teething and one of its alleged cures. Today, teething is accepted as a routine stage of development. In Victorian England, it was not. According to the common wisdom of the age, teething was a potentially deadly disorder, sometimes involving convulsions, and should be treated with opium.

Giving opium to an infant is a very bad idea, causing — you guessed it — convulsions and often death. A shocking 16 percent of child deaths in Victorian England were the result of well-meaning attempts to treat teething with opium. Parents attributed these opium-induced deaths to teething and blamed themselves for failing to have administered a high enough dose of the opium “cure”.

Childhood ailments, real and imagined, were often treated with hard liquor, such as brandy, or milder alcoholic drinks, like wine. Patent medicines were also popular. John Collis Browne’s Cholodyne, for example, which was supposed to have cured everything from colds and coughs to stomach aches and sleeplessness, contained cannabis and a hypnotic drug called chloral hydrate in addition to opium.

Other common cures included ipecacuanha, a powdered root that induces vomiting; and the laxative calomel, made of mercury chloride, which is highly toxic. Newborns were also routinely given castor oil (a laxative later famously force-fed to prisoners in Mussolini’s Italy) shortly after birth.

It should be noted that, as horrid as Victorian medical practices were, child mortality rates fell dramatically as better urban sanitation and scientific understanding of disease spread. Medical practices weren’t the only part of Victorian childhoods that might today be considered abusive, or at least troubling. Childhood discipline practices, it turns out, have also evolved quite a bit since the Victorian era.

As Flanders writes, our understanding of “what seemed harsh changed over time”. Some Victorian parents held their children’s fingers against hot fireplace grates and cut them with knives, to teach them the dangers of fire and sharp objects. Corporal punishment, even including whipping, was still common, although it gradually vanished over the course of a century.

Children were denied any food that they enjoyed. Food that tasted good enough to be consumed because of desire rather than hunger was considered morally damaging to the young. Eggs, bacon, and other flavorful foods were thought to be the gateway drugs to a life of hedonism and sin.

Even children from prosperous families grew up on a Spartan diet of bread, porridge and watered-down milk. The wealthy Gwen Raveat née Darwin, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and the daughter of a Cambridge University don, recalled that during her childhood, twice a week she was allowed toast “spread with a thin layer of that dangerous luxury, jam. But of course, not butter too. Butter and jam on the same bit of bread would have been an unheard-of indulgence — a disgraceful orgy.”

Many children had to contend with actual hunger rather than just bland diets, and child labor, often in dangerous conditions, was common. Child labor is not a practice unique to the Victorian era—however linked the two may be in the popular imagination.

It had been ubiquitous since time immemorial and finally began to come under scrutiny during the Victorian age. As the wealth generated by industrialisation started to improve working conditions and wages began to rise, fewer and fewer children worked compared to the past.

None of this is to deny the existence of things worth worrying about today. But parents shouldn’t forget that their kids are growing up in a far safer and gentler world than they would have been just a few generations ago.

This first appeared in CapX.

Today, most people see their dog as a companion and friend. Yet in the 1600s, the turnspit dog was solely bred to be a kitchen device. The poor creatures, described by historians as “long-bodied” with “short crooked legs,” had to run constantly in a giant hamster wheel to spin meat over an open fire. 

Roasting large hunks of meat took anywhere between 40 and 80 minutes per kilo (2.2 lb). Thus, to cook the meat evenly, it had to be spiked on a long roasting spit and then rotated via hand crank for several hours. 

The lowliest kitchen staff, usually children, performed this task. It was tough work. The boys would stand next to the fire place, protected from the heat only by a bale of wet hay—naturally, burns and blisters became commonplace. Hence when the turnspit came into use, households quickly adopted the new cooking tool. 

The animals were treated appallingly. Forced to run in the enclosed wheels for hours, the dogs found no respite and could not escape.  

The cooks even put hot coals in the wheels to make the dogs move their paws faster, and left the dogs without water, regardless of the heat from the fire pits. It was such an arduous task that the dogs had to work in shifts to cook the meat thoroughly, trading places every few hours.  

The cruel treatment of dogs motivated Henry Bergh to start the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), which fights animal abuse to this day. However, it was technological advancements that finally ended the work dogs’ terrible plight. The turnspits were replaced by steam-powered machines in the late 1700s. H.D. Richard wrote in 1847 that “Fortunately for humanity, mechanical contrivances have, in these countries at least, superseded the necessity of thus torturing a poor dog; and accordingly the Turnspit, his occupation being gone, is himself rapidly passing into oblivion.”

In my beginner’s guide to socialist economics I noted that communism, which was supposed to lead to greater equality, has in fact led to a return of feudalism.

Like feudal societies, communist societies have an aristocracy composed of the communist party members.

Like feudal societies, communist societies have a population of serfs with limited or no rights and little possibility of social mobility.

Like feudal societies, communist societies are held together by brute force.

As if to prove me right, The Daily Mirror, has just released footage from North Korea’s northeast province of Ryanggang, where hundreds of children can be seen breaking and carrying rocks during construction of a local railway.

The children are eight or nine years old and work up to 10 hours a day in the heat of the blazing sun. Neither they nor their parents are compensated for this back-breaking labor.

[The image is provided courtesy of The Daily Mirror]

As the newspaper points out, these are the children of North Korea’s working class. Familiar class stratification has emerged in North Korea, with the communist party and the government employees at the top, and the underclass at the bottom.

The children of the former attend newly-constructed schools and enjoy, as much as they can in the Hermit Kingdom, a semblance of a normal life. The latter are barely surviving in a state of abject poverty and servitude. So much, then, for the communist commitment to equality.

In the Daily Mirror footage:

“In one film … a forlorn lad of around eight or nine, wearing an England football shirt, is ordered to break rocks at a cliff face. Girls pair up as they struggle to lift heavy loads into piles. One young boy winces under the strain of his work. Teachers shielding their faces from the glaring midday sun bark orders at other youngsters bent double from lugging sacks as big as their bodies. Mounds of massive sandstone broken up by the dusty child slaves can be seen piled high.” It is worth noting that child labour was once a completely unobjectionable part of human existence. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which started in Great Britain in the late 18th century, no society thought twice of eschewing child labour. As Johan Norberg noted in his book Progress, “Prior to the mid-19th century it was common for working-class children to start working from seven years of age.”

It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that child labor should come to be so closely associated with the process of industrialization – a topic well worth exploring in greater depth below.

As the chart above illustrates, people did not write about child labor prior to the 19th century, because working children were so ubiquitous. Prior to industrialization, which massively increased productivity of the farm, there were no food “surpluses.” All of the food that the farm produced was consumed by the peasant families and their beasts of burden.

An idle child or, for that matter, an idle man, woman or donkey, was a waste of precious resources. “The survival of the family demanded that everybody contributed,” writes Norberg.

Bemoaning child labor, in other words, made about as much sense as complaining about a lack of plans for the weekend—since most people worked at least six days a week. It was industrialization that changed all that.

As farm productivity increased, people no longer had to stay on the farm and grow their food. They moved to the cities in search of a better life. At first, living conditions were dire. Medieval cities were not prepared for the influx of millions of people from the countryside. Slums arose and disease spread.

By the mid-19th century, however, living and working conditions started to improve. Economic expansion led to an increased competition for labor and wages grew. That, in turn, enabled more parents to forego their children’s labor and send them to school instead.

It is crucial to remember that it was only after a critical mass of children stopped working that people realized that life without child labor was possible. Legislation limiting child labor got more stringent as the 19th century progressed, but it was not until the Factory and Workshop Act of 1878 that the British Parliament banned labor for children less than 10 years of age and required that all children under 10 receive compulsory education.

Prosperity brought about by trade and industrialization in particular made child labor in the West obsolete.

Over the course of the 20th century, prosperity spread to other parts of the world. Today, child labor in Asia and Latin America are at an all-time low. It remains a problem in Africa, large parts of which remain stuck in the subsistence economy.

It flourishes in North Korea – a modern slave-state that, in the pursuit of communism, has returned its children to an impoverished, servile working class.

This article first appeared in CapX.