The story was told like nobody else by Charles Dickens in works like Oliver Twist either Big hopes: an orphan boy who grows up in an environment as hostile as that of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in 19th century England, spurred by hunger and misery. Now, a group of scientists has analyzed the remains of dozens of children using modern forensic techniques, confirming the story told by the writer. Most of them grew up and died malnourished. The development of those who were 12 years old corresponded to that of eight-year-olds. There are several with bone injuries compatible with physical punishment. The reality was even harsher than the one narrated by the master of social realism. While his characters grow older and have a relatively happy ending, many of this study published in the scientific magazine PLOS ONE They didn’t make it past adolescence.
A few years ago, the construction of a local museum next to Fewston church (in the Washburn region, in central England) made it necessary to unearth a large part of the old cemetery. For this they hired a company specialized in archaeological excavations. They had no idea what they were going to find. “My company, York Osteoarchaeology, undertook the osteological analysis of the skeletons, determining the age, sex and pathologies of the people buried at Fewston,” says Malin Holst, an archaeologist at the University of York and co-author of the study. “It was during this initial skeletal analysis that it became clear that there were a lot of teenagers, who are not very common in cemeteries,” she adds. In current necropolises, most of the burials are of older people. In the past, before the advances in modern medicine and social protection, the pattern was different: along with the elderly, there were also many graves of newborns and young children who had been swept away by illness. But in Fewston, 54 of the 154 bodies recovered from the first half of the 19th century were boys and girls between the ages of seven and 20. Such an anomalous pattern forced one to delve into this story.
The osteological study allowed scientists to determine how much these children suffered. Most of them had an age (determined by the teeth) that did not correspond to that estimated according to the length and state of development of their bones (which is used today, for example, to put the age of immigrants). For example, the individual identified as SK 331 would be between 12 and 14 years old according to his teeth, but the bones correspond to those of a child no more than eight years old. The SK 262 girl died between the ages of 16 and 18, but her bones, without the characteristic that indicates the end of bone growth (epiphyseal fusion), correspond to those of a 10-year-old girl if her development had been normal. Her malnutrition was confirmed by the scant growth (hypoplasia) found in her teeth. This pathology of the enamel, characterized by its incomplete development, generally occurs in childhood caused by a poor diet and accumulation of diseases. This type of stress at an early age also affects brain development, as studies with children from orphanages in Romania under the dictator Ceaucescu have shown.
“Some of the children suffered from rickets and scurvy. We can diagnose these conditions because they leave traces in the bones,” says Durham University bioarchaeologist and first author of the study, Rebecca Gowland. One of these traces is the lack of vitamins, so essential in this phase of child development. “For vitamin D deficiency, it involves some bowing of the long bones and other changes. For vitamin C, it usually manifests itself in the form of porous lesions in certain parts of the skeleton, ”she adds.
poor diet
To confirm malnutrition, the researchers went back to isotopes, but this time those of carbon and nitrogen. The differences in the proportion of the isotope nitrogen-15 and carbon-13 allow us to know the relative weight of the proteins of animal and vegetable origin in the diet. The low levels of this ratio that they found in almost all the youngsters contrast with the higher levels observed in the buried identified as local. This would indicate that they died after many years of a diet with little or no meat or animal-derived foods, such as dairy products.
York archaeologists brought the remains to the bioarchaeology laboratory of their colleagues at Durham University. Between them, they used sophisticated forensic techniques to analyze all the bodies. Many of the elderly buried and one young child were identified thanks to their tombstones or the plaques that were placed on the coffins. But the young were in unmarked graves. They were able to determine their age at death thanks to the development of their teeth, but another thing was to know who they were and where they came from. One of the few tools to know the origin of a person of unknown origin is to extract the proteins present in dental enamel and analyze the ratio of different chemical elements present. Two of the most fruitful are the isotopes (variations of the same element according to the number of neutrons) of strontium and oxygen.
“As we develop our teeth, the chemical ratios of strontium and oxygen within them reflect the local geology and the water we drink,” says Gowland. “We knew that the skeletons were not local because the strontium and oxygen isotope values were very different from those observed in the teeth of individuals known to hail from the region. Instead, for many of the children they were coincident with the London and surrounding area,” she adds.
transferred orphans
During the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, at the end of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th century, there was a great migration from the countryside to industrial cities such as Leeds or Manchester. But it also occurred in the opposite direction, from the poorest neighborhoods of London or Liverpool, especially for children, to rural areas where many factories were located, especially the textile industry. In the environs of Fewston, there were five, with the largest, the West House Mill, engaged in spinning linen and cotton.
In the archives of the town several indenture, some contracts between the employers of West House and orphaned children (or abandoned by their parents) from London hospices. These documents forced the little ones to work in exchange for a bed, food and education until they were 21 years old or, in the case of girls, until they were married. These asylums were what in the Anglo-Saxon world they called workhouse. These were not Hispanic-style orphanages, which provided shelter. Actually they did it in exchange for work. Oliver Twist begins his story in one of these workhouse.
The picture this research paints coincides with the memoirs of the Reverend Robert Collyer, the son of orphans who were also apprentices, who worked at West House between the ages of 8 and 14: “They called at 6 in the morning and we left at 8 in the morning. the night with an hour to eat and rest. And if we had the opportunity to sit for a few moments when the supervisor was not in front of him to punish our little shoulders with his leather strap […] and the result of all this was that the weakest children were left so crippled that the memory of their twisted limbs still casts a rather sinister light on the Holy Scriptures for me,” he recalls in a fragment recovered by the authors of this research.
“Fewston’s remains have been the only ones excavated from a rural cemetery in the north of England and are therefore unusual,” Gowland replies when asked if the story of these children is anecdotal or representative of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. . “But there are many rural cemeteries like Fewston. However, they are rarely excavated because this only happens if it is to be developed”, he adds. Two pieces of information can frame the scope of the drama: official statistics mentioned in the study estimate 195,000 children between the ages of 5 and 14 who passed through one of the parish hospices in 1803. And in 1845, in the cotton sector, 45% of the workers were under 18 years of age. As for the Fewston children, once the children’s bones told scientists what they had suffered, they were duly reburied, and their story is preserved in the Washburn Heritage Center.
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