A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy

A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy, by John Brown, tells of a boy sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the horrors of a cotton-mill. The title page promises a minute detail of his sufferings and calls the work the first memoir of the kind published. The preface says that the various Acts of Parliament passed to regulate the treatment of children in the Cotton Spinning Manufactories betoken the previous existence of some treatment, so glaringly wrong.

The account says that Robert Blincoe commenced his melancholy narrative by stating that he was a parish orphan and knew not either his father or mother. Blincoe is quoted as saying that from the age of four years till he had completed his seventh he was supported in Saint Pancras poorhouse, near London. The account says the medical gentlemen who sometimes attended the sick used to say that it is not drugs but kitchen physic they want, and gives the general prescription as plenty of good bread, beef, soup and mutton broth.