What Would Charles Dickens Do About the Toy Sweatshops in China?

I love Charles Dickens as a writer for a variety of reasons. I own the full collection of all his books, have read nine of his novels so far and jump at the chance to watch every BBC "Masterpiece Theater" special based on his books. This sounds like I am about to recite poetry to him, "How do I love Charles Dickens, let me count the ways," or stand on my desk like those students in "Dead Poets' Society," reciting, "Oh Captain, My Captain."

I know worship belongs only to God, but I admire Dickens very much, perhaps because some of Dickens' thoughts and feelings seem akin to the thoughts and feelings of God.

Dickens had a pronounced sense of social injustice. He wrote with much sympathy about the hardships of the poor and downtrodden, pointing out some of the flaws of his society, and even inspiring change. In "Nicholas Nickleby," the cruel schoolmaster of Dotheby's Hall, Wackford Squeers, is based on William Shaw of Bowes Academy in Yorkshire, a school Dickens had visited. Shaw's school is said to have gone bankrupt as a result of the novel's publication. Shaw was prosecuted in 1823 when two of his students went blind, allegedly because of the poor conditions in the school.

Below, Jim Broadbent as Wackford Squeers in the 2002 movie, "Nicholas Nickleby"

Dickens knew some of the hardships that inspired his writing firsthand. Dickens' father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea Prison just like the father of his character Little (Amy) Dorrit.

Photo from the 2008 "Masterpiece Theater" version of "Little Dorrit"

At twelve years old, with his father in prison, Dickens was put to work in Warren's Blacking Factory. It was a shoe polish factory. Young Dickens would stand in a little window, pasting labels onto bottles, where the passersby could watch him. Dickens wrote of this part of his life, "My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of [the experience] that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time in my life."

Warren's Blacking Factory

Similarly, some of the boy characters in Dickens' novels were also introduced to oppressive work conditions in childhood. Oliver is almost apprenticed to a cruel chimney sweep called Gamfield. Gamfield "happened to labor under the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to their death already." A board member of the workhouse where Oliver Twist lives tells Gamfield that boys have been smothered in chimneys.

From "Oliver Twist:"

"'That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley to make 'em come down again,' said Gamfield; 'that's all smoke, and no blaze; vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he likes. Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy gen'l'men, and there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down with a run. It's humane too, gen'l'men, acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to hextricate themselves.'"

What a different picture this presents than the jolly dancing chimney sweeps in a favorite movie of mine, "Mary Poppins."

I prefer the idea of the jolly chimney sweep with the roofs of London as his playground, but you wonder how jolly you could be breathing in soot and crawling into tight spaces, with or without a cruel Gamfield to give you additional grief. The poet, William Blake, also wrote with sympathy about the child as chimney sweep.

In Oliver's case, his fate was saved from chimney sweeping. The magistrate, seeing Oliver's terrified face, does not sign the indentures. Oliver is later sold into service with an undertaker.

"Boy For Sale" from the 1969 musical "Oliver!"



In "David Copperfield," life changes for the title character when his mother remarries, a Mr. Murdstone.

David's stepfather, who has no affection for him, eventually sends him out to make his own way in the world.

"Murdstone and Grinby's Warehouse was at the waterside. It was down in Blackfriars. Modern improvements have altered the place: but it was the last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat. It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and shuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness of the place; are things, not of many years ago, in my mind, but at the present instant. They are all before me, just as they were in the evil hour when I went among them for the first time, with my trembling hand in Mr. Quinion's.

Murdstone and Grinby's trade was among a good many kinds of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or finished bottles to be put in casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed to it, I was one."

Dickens novels may be fiction, but some real people lived a life that resembled that fiction. David Cody, associate professor of English at Hartwick College, writes on www.Victorianweb.org,

"Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819. After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when "Short Time Committees" organized largely by Evangelicals began to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 be permitted to work a maximum of twelve hours per day; children 9-11 were allowed to work 8 hour days; and children under 9 were no longer permitted to work at all (children as young as 3 had been put to work previously). This act applied only to the textile industry, where children were put to work at the age of 5, and not to a host of other industries and occupations."

Cody added that both boys and girls started work in coal and iron mines at age five and generally died by age 25.

Children working in a 19th century textile mill

But sweatshop labor did not die out with the 19th century or the making of Dickens novels. I have been vaguely aware of this for some time, hearing, at times, that we should boycott certain products made in China. The issue became more real to me recently when I delved into research, with my fictional mystery story in mind, on the toy industry. (My main character is a toy inventor.) I learned a lot from reading "The Real Toy Story" by Eric Clark, (who is, as far as I know, no relation to me.)

A staggering 80 percent of America's toys are made in Chinese factories. There are 8000 toy factories, employing 3 million workers, in China. These include Barbie dolls, Bratz dolls, G.I. Joe, Etch a Sketch and many others.

China does have labor laws in place, but they are routinely violated. The China Business Journal states, "Labor rights violations are so widespread in China that violations can be presumed to exist in every factory until proven otherwise."

In 1997, Mattel, the maker of Barbie, announced that all plants would have to comply with a code of conduct regarding hours, wages, conditions and minimum age of workers. Mattel, to their credit, has run routine inspections on their Chinese plants, but the situation is almost impossible to police. The plants will put on a good front for the sake of inspection while operating differently the majority of the time.

Chinese workers in a Mattel plant

Clark describes the conditions in these Chinese toy plants, the unbearable work conditions and living conditions for workers in the dormitories, unbelievably low wages, as well as the unfair contracts in which workers are essentially held in slavery, by systems of fines and deductions, with no options to go elsewhere. Most moving to me personally is the testimony of a particular individual, gained from clandestine interviews away from the factory.

From "The Real Toy Story" by Eric Clark:

"Li Mei is worn out, so she looks older than her 18 years. Her hair is in a smooth black ponytail, but her skin is bad from too little daylight, and she has many healing and still-open cuts on her hands. Her neck, chest and forearms are heavily mottled with the raised red patches of allergy caused by toxic chemicals, which she scratches as she speaks. She coughs a lot and has chronic aches and pains, frequent headaches and sometimes blurred vision. All these ailments appeared during the last two years: Li Mei works in a Dongguan toy factory.

She is a rural migrant from Xiaoshan, a remote mountain hamlet in the rural province of western Sichuan. Li Mei was thrilled to be one of the dagongmei, the working girls, to quit the hamlet where there are no roads, one telephone, and only limited electricity. She was also frightened because she knew that Dongguan has a reputation as a sweatshop. Many young people returned from the factories with disfigurements and strange illnesses. And then there was the fate of Li Chunmei, who was born in her village. She had been a runner in the Hainan Toy Factory in Songgang near Shenzhen, rushing stuffed animals swiftly from one worker to the next for each step in production. They said in the village that she ran all the time, 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for two solid months, without a day off. She was paid the equivalent of 12 cents an hour. She collapsed one night, bleeding from the nose and mouth on the bathroom floor, and was found hours later. She died before the ambulance arrived; she was just 19."

Bratz dolls in Chinese plant

Later, I read about Li Mei's own experience in the factory.

"The air in the coloring and spraying department was filled with paint dust and smelled sourly of chemicals -- acetone, ethylene, trichloride, benzene -- and hurt her throat. The windows were filled with heavy wire mesh, the exits locked to prevent pilfering. Noisy ventilators added to the din of the spraying machines, so the team leader had to shout at Li Mei to be heard. She was given a blue chef's apron to wear and shown how to paint eyes of the dolls with four pens of different sizes: fussy work, she thought, easy enough. But she had to paint one every 7.2 seconds -- 4000 a day. She was warned to check the chemical labels on the tins of paint and thinner she was to use but not asked if she could read. One of the girls -- some were only 12 o 13 -- told her no one understood the labels or even if they were correct, and some were labeled in English anyway. Li Mei's cotton mask and gloves were thin, and by the end of the second day, they were thick with paint particles and useless. She asked for new ones but was refused; they were replaced just once a week. Her hands were stained with the chemical paint, which plain water would not remove. The girls would show her how to clean them with solvents that irritated the skin and whose hazards they are ignorant of. During the first few days, she found the overpowering heat, combined with the smell of chemicals, repulsive. She felt she was going to throw up and she had stomachaches and felt dizzy. Once she fainted; her section leader told her to have a rest, rub on some herbal ointment, and go back to work."

I am not a parent. My niece and nephews are grown. I don't have great need to buy toys for the people in my family, with the exception, perhaps, of some more sophisticated toys such as board games, computer and video games. I buy toys once a year to benefit poor children around the world, through Operation Christmas Child, an aspect of Franklin Graham's organization, Samaritan's Purse. Many, many others also get involved with this organization as well as other organizations such as Toys for Tots that do toy drives around Christmas time. I now have mixed feelings about giving toys to benefit one poor child when another (perhaps) child was exploited in the making of that toy.

And the particulars of the suffering is much more than I can share in so few words. So, what do we do? What would Charles Dickens do about the toy sweatshops in China? Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, stated, "You can't call for boycotts. It is true that in this global economy, it is better to be exploited than to have no job at all." But a team of faculty and students at MIT said, "While accepting that a bad job may be better than nothing, we should continue to fight the abuse of human lives...If we justify abuse under the premise that is better than the worst alternative, we create a slippery slope, leading down to the complete devaluation of human life."

Would Charles Dickens boycott? Would he buy from only the 20 percent of toys not made in China? Perhaps. I'm sure that, even if he felt he could do very little else for such a complex problem, he would pick up his pen and write. And, so I hope I have begun to do my part by sharing information.