Victoria's Children of the Dark

Life and Death Underground in Victorian England

Victoria's Children of the Dark tells the story of Queen Victoria's invisible subjects—women and children who labored beneath her "green and pleasant land" harvesting the coal to fuel the furnaces of the industrial revolution. Following the real fortunes of seven-year-old Joey Burkinshaw and his family, Alan Gallop recreates the events surrounding the 1838 Husker Pit disaster at Silkstone, Yorkshire—a tragedy which led to better working conditions for miners. Chained to carts and toiling half-naked for 18-hour shifts in near darkness, children as young as four were employed by mine owners. Yet it was not until the catastrophe at Silkstone, when 26 children were drowned in a mineshaft, that Victoria and her subjects realized that many Britons were existing in virtual slavery. This powerful and dramatic account exposes the real lives and working conditions on nineteenth-century miners. This gripping human story brings history, particularly the history of childhood, to life.