When I Was a Childorder this book
Charles Shaw
Price £20.00 paperback.

"I get so used to seeing the old publishers' names on the spines of books that it came as a surprise to see an entirely new one. Who or what are Caliban Books with their mysterious address? I don't know, even if I ought to, but what I do know is that they have covered themselves with glory by re-issuing a small masterpiece.

When I Was a Child by Charles Shaw was apparently first published anonymously in 1903. It is a first-hand account of life as a child worker in the Potteries during the 1830s and 1840s, and describes this traumatic experience with great eloquence and sensitivity . . . I cannot recommend this book too highly both as a fascinating autobiography and as a social history that still, amazingly, seems relevant even now."

Margaret Forster, Evening Standard

From Chapter 5, "My Native Town - Some Other Social Aspects":

"All the great events of the town took place, as I have intimated, in this lower half of the marketplace. During the severity of winter I have seen one of its sides nearly filled with stacked coals. The other side was stacked with loaves of bread, and such bread. I feel the taste of it even yet, as if made of ground straw, and alum, and plaster of Paris.

These things were stacked there by the parish authorities to relieve the destitution of the poor. Destitution, for the many, was a chronic condition in those days, but when winter came with its stoppage of work, this destitution became acute, and special measures had to be taken to relieve it.

The crowd in the marketplace on such a day formed a ghastly sight. Pinched faces of men, with a stern, cold silence of manner. Moaning women, with crying children in their arms, loudly proclaiming their sufferings and wrongs. Men and women with loaves or coals, rapidly departing on all sides to carry some relief to their wretched homes - homes, well, called such. Twenty people of any other time would have made more noise than this hungry crowd did. The silence froze your heart, as the despair and want suffered had frozen the hearts of those who formed this pale crowd. This relief, wretched as it was, just kept back the latent desperation in the hearts of these people. In contrast with the silent patience of the poor recipients was the noisy fussiness and brutal insolence of Bumbledom's officials. This crowd might have been ordained from all eternity to be pale, and pinched, and hungry, so that these pampered blusterers might display their fat paunches and their overblown importance."

ISBN 0904573427. Paperback, 256 pages.

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