“For more than a century, children as young as seven would be sold to work in sweat-shop factories for no pay or in the coal mines because those children were the right size to drag sleds loaded with coal up narrow bore tunnels that a full sized man couldn’t fit in”.
Er… no, to that last part. In the mines the children were used to go into the ventilation shafts to open and close the shutters at the beginning and end of shifts (because they were the right size to fit in). It was comparatively light work. Disraeli described this in some of the background to his novel “Sybil”. Think about it; the shafts to the coal were dug by miners following seams, often using undercutting to get at the coal, and had to be big enough for men strong enough to dig them in the days before remote digging machinery.
