The issue of whether the plight of child workers improved or deteriorated with industrial development was hotly disputed in the nineteenth century. The general drift of opinion has always been that their work became more onerous, with the long, gruelling hours of the early textile mills firmly implanted in the popular view of the Industrial Revolution. The oft-quoted passage from Villermé, describing conditions in the cotton and woollen industries of Alsace during the 1830s, has set the tone for much subsequent discussion:

Although no enemy of the factory system in general, Villermé concluded that excessive working hours were one of its major drawbacks, which could only be changed by administrative decree or by law. The industrialists, for their part, took a more optimistic view. Without necessarily denying that life for the proletariat in the towns was becoming increasingly miserable, they argued from the 1830s onwards that the extension of the factories was the most likely source of benefits for employer and employee alike.