IT IS a sad quirk of history that the life and deeds of Richard Oastler (1788-1861), a powerful Christian critic of the Industrial Revolution’s cruelties to children, have been largely ignored by the Church of England. Less culpably, perhaps, he has been ignored by Methodists too — although John Wesley blessed the infant Oastler during his last visit to Yorkshire.

Oastler insisted that while the political world was devoted to the Reform Bill and the religious world to evangelism, Tractarianism and the abolition of slavery, the tragic lives of children working more than 19 hours a day in the mills should not be forgotten. He wrote to Dr Harcourt, Archbishop of York: “The factory question is, my Lord, a soul question; it is souls against the pounds, shillings and pence.” The Archbishop made no reply.

When a young girl, arriving late at the mill gates to start her 14-hour shift, was strapped by an attendant, Oastler held a meeting of hundreds at Huddersfield to protest and brought a large leather strap crashing down on the platform to arouse the conscience of the crowd.

Many politicians protested against such religious criticism. Palmerston argued that to legislate for working hours was “vicious and wrong in principle”. The children had to wait for 40 years until a radical Tory government under Disraeli passed an effective Factory Act that compelled magistrates to protect children from the worst abuses of the Industrial Revolution. By this time Oastler had spent three years in prison for threatening to incite children to push their grandmothers’ knitting needles into the spinning machinery.

During his years in London prisons (1841-44) his weekly Fleet Papers (written in the Fleet Prison) became famous. Each copy was headed with the motto: “The Altar, The Throne and the Cottage”. He publicised the harsh elements of the industrial system: and printed a series of verdicts by Petty Sessions in South Wiltshire to illustrate how magistrates penalised farm labourers. He published hymns on the sufferings of factory children.

The Fleet Papers, widely distributed, were filled with examples of injustices in the system from all over England. My own set of copies went first from London to a pharmacist in Sunderland, and from there were forwarded to a fell parson in Cumberland. They sound an apocalyptic note. “These are not common times — our institutions have been shaken, the rights of the poor have been violated.” He wrote of the “horrible system of selling agricultural labourers and their families to the mill owners”: “All our manufacturing towns have become military stations — they are garrisoned to protect an antisocial power against an industrious, loyal people!” On his release The Times carried a leading article entitled “The ransomed patriot”. It claimed: “Mr Oastler is the providential organ of the oppressed and suffering poor. Those who do not see and know and feel what he does are not competent judges.”

Returning in triumph to Yorkshire, he was met by hundreds of factory children carrying small white flags inscribed with the jingle:

The King is released, the captive is free,
Long may he live, and blessed may he be.

They marched from Brighouse to Huddersfield and bands played to crowds of several thousand. It mattered to the whole northern community that a respectable, established citizen, notable for arguing for the abolition of slavery abroad, should back humanity for children at home. Country people, accustomed to the charities of rural parishes, had moved north to the factories where they found no parish relief, only workhouses where husband and wife were often separated.

Oastler was an orator and a prophet who insisted that Christianity was relevant to industrial society. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was sure that the Bible was on the side of the poor. A 19th-century Amos, he believed that policy ought to be made “not according to the market, but by estimating God’s intuition to create a caring, compassionate human community”.

He protested against Malthus’s pessimistic population doctrines. He denounced some of the bishops as believers in a doctrine of devils to produce a legal code of atrocious laws “at variance with every precept of our holy religion”. He recruited a few MPs and the Scottish reformer Dr Zicoras Chalmers in his campaign to restore Britain’s social conscience.

Oastler made a sustained attack on the injustice of the Establishment. “If the Church, the Throne and the aristocracy are determined to rob the poor man of his liberty, of his wife and of his children, then is the Church no longer that of Christ — the Throne no longer that of England — then are the nobles no longer safeguards of the people . . . Then with their bitterest foes would I cry ‘Down with them, down with them all to the ground’.” Oastler’s courage helped to save England from revolution in the hungry Forties.

Today the protests about worldwide hunger from Christian Aid, Oxfam, Cafod and Amnesty International are sometimes criticised for being “political” and “not religious”. But the prophetic within religion, so desperately needed during the Industrial Revolution, remains as vital in our days of disaster and famine.

Alan Webster is Dean Emeritus, St Paul’s Cathedral