Competition Winner is Announced!

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to enter my competition. I was very impressed by the standard of all the entries and the ingenuity you displayed. Most people who entered the competition preferred the option of factory work, and I think I would have preferred that too. I can’t imagine what it would have been like spending hours crawling along a mine shaft dragging heavy coal waggons, or climbing up a chimney which was still suffocatingly hot from use.

In reality, you wouldn’t have had much ‘choice’ about where you worked if you were a child growing up in Victorian Britain. It would have depended on what work was available. And children’s parents were often  primarily interested in how much wages they could bring home; they couldn’t afford to be choosy about working conditions.

Sadly, there can only be one winner, and it gives me great pleasure to announce that the competition winner is: Jacqueline Pye!
Congratulations, Jacqueline! I loved your poem. If you could please send me your address (my email address is at the bottom of this page), I’ll pop a signed copy of The Children History Forgot in the post to you.

Images:
A cotton factory girl. Engraving, Lancashire by Grindon, Leo H., (Seeley & Co., 1892.)
Lord Shaftesbury visits a coal mine in the Black Country in 1842. Engraving by unknown artist, Rev. Edward Lightwood’s The Good Earl, (London, 1886).
A child chimney sweep of the 1860s. John Leech, ‘Pictures of Life and Character’, Punch (Bradbury & Evans, 1863).