Victorian Factory Life explores the lives of the men, women and children who toiled in the factories of Victorian Britain, manufacturing everything from hats, cloth and dinner-plates to beer and locomotives. It was a grim and often perilous existence of long hours, of meager pay and of exhausting labour and one into which many children were plunged at a young age. Generously illustrated with old photographs, artwork and pieces of ephemera, this book is a powerful evocation of the social iniquities that enabled the prodigious growth of British industry, a historical account of the great injustices with which many are familiar only through the works of Charles Dickens.