In the 19th century, Victorian England’s cities were places of squalor, where many people suffered from malnutrition and ill health, hopelessly mired in poverty and despair. Children were not safe from hardship, and were in fact more vulnerable than adults, who at least could fend for themselves in some way. There were many orphans who were left at the mercy of unscrupulous masters, who exploited them for financial gain, as their tiny workers starved and often died at their hands.
One true-life example is that of the poor chimney sweep Valentine Gray. He was orphaned as a baby, and was bought from an orphanage by a man named Benjamin Davies in 1812. Davies used him as an unpaid employee to clean chimneys on the Isle of Wight. As if the life of a chimney sweep wasn’t hard enough, Davies treated Valentine particularly cruelly, barely feeding him, providing no roof over his head at night, and beating him regularly.
All this culminated in little Valentine Gray, aged nine years old, being found dead in an alleyway one cold January morning in 1822, from a combination of malnutrition, exposure and physical abuse. Davies was arrested and charged with manslaughter for delivering the cruel blows to Valentine Gray that left his little body bloodied and bruised, and for neglecting him with such abject heartlessness.
The British public was outraged by this terrible story of neglect and cruelty towards a child. A monument was erected in the middle of the town on the Isle of Wight where Gray’s body was found, and shortly after, due to public pressure, a new law was enacted called “The Climbing Boys Act”, which meant that it became illegal to send boys up chimneys to clean them.
One hundred and sixty-seven years after Valentine Gray had died, a more comprehensive document was drawn up by the United Nations to protect children all over the world from cruelty that had still not been eradicated.
In 1989, world leaders adopted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – an international agreement on childhood rights and protection.
Our students in Year 8 used the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to find in which areas Davies would have been found accountable today. They researched the case online, cross-referencing information, then consulted the UN Convention to draw up an arrest warrant for his apprehension.
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It was a valuable exercise in allowing the children to see how such measures needed to be implemented to improve our society in the past, and to think about how they are still needed today to safeguard and improve the lives of vulnerable children now.
Over Christmas, they will be reading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a piece of Victorian literature that touches upon the suffering of children. They will also be better informed when the time comes in Year 9 to study William Blake, and his poetry that addresses issues of child cruelty, including the 1789 poem ‘The Chimney Sweeper’.