Cry of the Children (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Abstract

First published in August 1843 “The Cry of the Children” is one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s best known protest poems. It is a rhetorically complex and unashamedly affective appeal to the British nation to heed the iniquities of child labor in the country’s mines and factories. Written in response to one of the most important documents of industrial Britain, the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission (1842), the poem rapidly became an influential text in mid-Victorian industrial reform literature. Anticipated by Caroline Norton’s A Voice from the Factories (1836) and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), the poem presents a dystopic vision of industrialized space in contrast to an idealized world of meadows, sunshine, young animals, flowers and play, as though nature, in the Wordsworthian vein, were capable of healing the emotional, physical and spiritual violence inflicted upon young bodies and minds by the Victorian industrial complex.