Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy was published by Henry Colburn in 1840, initially in monthly parts (the Dickensian serial format) and then as a three-volume novel. It is one of the earliest English “industrial novels” — preceding Disraeli’s Sybil, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and Dickens’s Hard Times — and it draws on Trollope’s personal visits to Manchester factories to depict the conditions of child labor in the textile industry.
Trollope had traveled to Manchester specifically to research factory conditions, and her descriptions of child workers — the long hours, the dangerous machinery, the physical deformity caused by years of labor, the cruelty of overseers — have the force of documentary evidence. The novel’s protagonist, Michael Armstrong, is a factory child rescued by a benevolent woman, but the real subject is the system rather than the individual: Trollope attacks the factory owners, the political economists who justify exploitation, and the social indifference that permits children to be worked to death.
The novel was published alongside illustrations by Auguste Hervieu (who had accompanied Trollope to America and illustrated Domestic Manners), and it was explicitly allied with the reformist movement that would produce the Factory Acts. Its impact was immediate: it contributed to the public outcry that led to further regulation of child labor, and it established the factory novel as a form that would dominate English social fiction in the 1840s and 1850s.
Collecting Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy
First edition in parts (Henry Colburn, London, 1839–1840): Monthly parts with wrappers, illustrated.
Market values:
- First edition in parts (complete): $400–$1000
- First edition (3 vols, cloth): $300–$700
- Later Victorian reprints: $50–$100