It Isn't Just a Boo-Boo

Can you imagine waking up your five-year-old brother before the sun rose to go work in a factory? Nowadays, children get to keep the carefreeness of childhood. In the Victorian era, kids did not possess this luxury. Child labor was a huge problem that treated kids of all ages inhumanely. Children as young as four were sent to the factories to work from dawn till dusk, doing hard labor and earning next to nothing. The horrifying part of the situation is that it was considered normal. Elizabeth Browning, a popular poet of the time, knew that the children of England did not deserve a fate as horrible as this. She fights for their voice to be heard in her poem, “The Cry of the Children”. Using compelling imagery, allusions, and title, Elizabeth Browning struggles to awaken to the world to the truth that child labor is horrifying and should be ended.

Before “The Cry of the Children” begins, Elizabeth Browning alludes to the evils of child labor with a quote from an ancient Greek story. “Alas, alas, why do you gaze at me with your eyes, my children,” she writes, quoting Medea. To those who do not know the story, these words mean nothing. Yet to the educated higher class, she has already painted a horrifying picture, as these are the words Medea utters before murdering every one of her children. Thus, Browning draws a terrifying parallel for the upper class to reflect upon. For does the parent not also gaze into their child’s eyes when they send them to the factories? Using this line, Browning alludes to the daunting fact that in the same way, parents murder their children when they send them to work. With this haunting parallel, Browning forces the world to realize that child labor is inhumane and should be ended.

Elizabeth Browning also uses the title to reveal her idea. The title, "The Cry of Children", to show that the children in this story were pained by something, which caused their “crying”. When we think of children crying, our ethical response is to feel empathy, and to feel sorry for them. This is exactly why the author chose this title: for us to feel empathy. After reading the poem, we realize that this pain of the children comes from their forced labor, which is the main problem in the story. Therefore, through the message hidden in the title, we can see that Browning wanted us to feel empathy for these children, so that ultimately, she could send out the message that child labor (the problem in the story) is a horrible thing and it should be stopped completely.

In her work, Elizabeth Browning uses imagery and dialogue to portray her odium of child labor. She depicts a vivid picture of the children in pain and sorrow using imagery, and the characters’ dialogues. In stanza 6, the author illustrates the suffering of the children to appeal to our emotional sense of sympathy, and our ethical sense that something like this should not happen to children: ““For oh,” say the children, "We are weary, And we cannot run or leap — If we cared for any meadows, it were merely To drop down in them and sleep. Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping”” (Browning 6). When the children say this, they say it out of pain and agony of the hard toil they are forced to endure. From this piece of evidence, we can infer that Elizabeth wanted to communicate that child labor is atrocious and should be abolished.

The final way that Elizabeth Browning uses imagery to show us the horrors of child labor, is by her words to create horrible scenes in the minds of the readers. One of the many pieces of proof that we see of this comes from the first stanza, when she uses these words: “They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free” (Browning 6). What she wants to show us with these words is that it is unfair for our children to weep, as the free children are enjoying their freedom. This unfairness, which makes the children so bitter and heartbroken, shows us that child labor is bad, and the only logical solution to this is for the practice of child labor to be abolished.

In conclusion, it can be seen through the title, dialogue, displays of imagery, and word usage that Elizabeth Browning wanted to exclaim to the world the horrific nature of child labor. Through these multiple factors, she makes known the essentialness for the abolishment of the inhumane treatment of children. Throughout the poem, she displays the images of children being broken both physically and spiritually by their hard toil. By showing us that this labor does nothing but debilitate the children, Elizabeth Browning sends out the message to the world that child labor is atrocious and should be abolished.

-B. Lit. Group Six