Find six words that show life was hard.
My name's Ellen and I grew up in Manchester
in the 19th Century at the time of the Industrial
Revolution. I was born in 1853, and at that time,
Manchester had 108 cotton mills. It was called
Cottonopolis.
Life wasn't easy for children in those days, and
most children were dead by the age of five.
Some might say they were the lucky ones
because they didn't have to go to work in a mill.
By 1853, most people had moved from the countryside to the city for work, and the city was dirty and overcrowded. Three or four families often lived in the same house. We lived in one room in the basement of a house. It was damp, dark and cold and we only had one bed. The toilet was outside in the street, and we had to share it with all our neighbours. There wasn't any running water in the house either. We didn't have any clean drinking water, and many people died from typhoid fever or cholera. My eldest brother died of typhoid two months before I was born. My family had only lived in the city for a year and my mother wanted to move back to the countryside. My father decided they should stay in the city.
I was eight when I started work at the cotton mill. The noise was terrible and the air was filled with white dust from the cotton. I couldn't breathe and I wanted to run away.
The mill was a dangerous place for children. I knew that. On my first day, a little boy died. He was sitting under the machines collecting all the waste when the accident happened. The managers were supposed to stop the machines for cleaning, but they never did. Why should they? Boys like him had very little value.
One morning, after I had been working there for a few months, I had a terrible accident too. I was very tired that morning. I had been working for three hours when, for just a second, I closed my eyes and that's when it happened. A woman grabbed me and pulled me away from the machine, but it was too late, I had lost three fingers on my right hand. At the time I was pleased. 'Now I don't have to work anymore,' I thought. But no, I was wrong. They found me another job – a job where I didn't need a hand.
