This map contains locations pivotal to the creation, publication, and influence of "The Cry of the Children" (1843) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB). Please see the related COVE timeline titled "The Ongoing War: 'The Cry of the Children' in Time." Both this map and that timeline were created as part of a student exhibition on "The Cry of the Children" by Dr. Joshua King's Victorian Poetry undergraduate seminar at Baylor University in spring of 2018. This exhibition, staged at Baylor's Armstrong Browning Library in the fall of 2018, combines these digital tools with interactive videos and physical displays of manuscripts and other rare items.
Cry of the Children Exhibition Dashboard
Participants
Description
In spring 2018, Dr. Joshua King's Victorian Poetry seminar (ENG 4362) created an exhibition on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's (EBB from now on) "Cry of the Children" (1843), a poem that protested the injustice of child labor in Britain's mines and factories. Titled "'Orphans of earthly woe': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Protest for Working Children," the exhibition is divided into several selections. Each of the students created one section, and two of the students created COVE components to accompany the exhibition: a digital timeline and a geospatial map. The exhibition will form a central component of an international series of events from Oct. 4-5, 2018 in celebration of the poem's 175th anniversary. Participants will be Baylor and local community members and scholars representing universities in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. They will be invited to compare EBB's portrayal of working-class life and labor to the ways working-class poets—especially women—themselves represented their situations. In addition to the exhibition, activities will include a series of scholarly talks, digital interactions with EBB's poem and its contexts, a film inspired by the poem, and live performance of nineteenth-century working-class ballads.
Galleries, Timelines, and Maps
This timeline outlines events surrounding the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) entitled "The Cry of the Children." Please see the related COVE geospatial map titled "'The Cry of the Children' in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's World and Our Own." Both the timeline and that map were created as part of a student exhibition on "The Cry of the Children" by Dr. Joshua King's Victorian Poetry undergraduate seminar at Baylor University in Spring 2018. This exhibition, staged at Baylor's Armstrong Browning LIbrary in Fall 2018, combines these digital tools with videos and physical displays of manuscripts and other items.
Individual Entries
Although "The Cry of the Children" was written and published in the nineteenth century, its message is still very applicable in our modern world. Pictured is a child laborer in present-day Indonesia.
"The Cry of the Children" was first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in Edinburgh, Scotland in August of 1843. This is interesting, given that EBB held liberal political views and the magazine was known for typically conservative positions.
![Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Cry of the Children' as first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine [page: facing p. 138]](https://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/dl%20romantics%20and%20victorians/collection-item-images/b/l/a/blackwoods%20elizabeth%20b20088%2083.jpg?w=608&h=342)
Hitting closer to home where this timeline was created at Baylor University (Waco, Texas), this image shows a girl working at Brazos Valley Cotton Mill in West, Texas. Factories in West employed child laborers as late as 1913.
On 7 August 1843, EBB wrote a letter to her friend R.H. Horne, who had been involved in a Parliamentary commission to investigate factory conditions in Wolverhampton. In this letter, EBB said that "The Cry of the Children" "owes its utterance to your exciting causations," referring to Horne's work as one of the investigators of the factories. Click here to see two student-created videos about what it was like to be a child working in nineteenth-century British mines and factories.
In December of 1847, EBB's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," a poem also calling for social justice, was published in The Liberty Bell in Boston, Massachusetts. The Liberty Bell was sold by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to raise money for abolitionist causes, and EBB was invited to contribute partly because of the reputation for bold protest that she had attained through "Cry of the Children." Just as "The Cry of the Children" influenced British society and law in regards to child labor, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgirm's Point" combatted slavery. EBB later made this connection by publishing "The Cry of the Children" next to "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" in the 1850 edition of her collected Poems.
EBB died in Florence, Italy on 29 June 1861 when she was fifty-five. Her husband, poet Robert Browning, said that she died in his arms with "a smile on her face." Her grave is at The English Protestant Cemetery in Florence.
EBB lived at 50 Wimpole St. in London from 1838 -1846, meaning that she lived here when "The Cry of the Children" was published in 1843.
EBB was born in Coxhoe Hall in Durham, England on 6 March 1806. She was the oldest of twelve children born to Edward and Mary Barrett Moulton Barrett.
