Defective drafting meant that a subsequent Factory Act in 1850 imposing tighter restrictions on the hours within which women and young persons could work was needed to bring this about.

[clarification needed] The act of 1847 was the culmination of a campaign lasting almost fifteen years to bring in a 'Ten Hours Bill'; a great Radical cause of the period.

Karl Marx, speaking at the International Workingmen's Association meeting in November 1864 said of it "This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labour raged more fiercely since; apart from avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, a social production subjected to a foreseeing social control which forms the political economy of the working class.

A short-time movement in the textile districts sought a ten-hour day for all millworkers, which it believed would be effectively secured by reducing the working hours for young persons: Lord Ashley supported their cause.

It had found much of concern in their habits and language, but the greatest concern was that "the means of secular and religious instruction.. are so grievously defective, that, in all the districts, great numbers of Children and Young Persons are growing up without any religious, moral, or intellectual training; nothing being done to form them to habits of order, sobriety, honesty, and forethought, or even to restrain them from vice and crime.

Such an outcome would not be unwelcome to Dissenters; to avert it, churchmen had founded a rival organisation: the exclusively Anglican National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales.

[14] (He does not appear to have tried to similarly involve local non-conformist clergy, or the British Society, whose schools and approach to the religious instruction he considered inferior.

[14] In December 1840, the National Society sought his advice on how the central organisation could best supplement local efforts for the education of factory children in the district.

[17] There was considerable opposition to the composition of the trustees, both as giving no voice to the ratepayers and as handing control of the school (and hence its children) to the Established Church with no provision for a Dissenter member of the trust to see fair play.

[18] A crowded meeting at Leeds was told the bill was "..nothing more nor less than a new Test Act; it was virtually an attempt to impose, not merely Catholic, but also Protestant disabilities; and to exalt the Church at the expense of all classes of Dissenters ...

These schools were designed, not to teach, but to throw them back into the middle ages, and to undo all that had been done by the advances of education during the last three centuries"[19] Similar meetings were held throughout the country, and their resolutions condemning the bill and calling for its withdrawal were supported by a campaign of organised petitions: that session Parliament received 13,369 petitions against the bill as drafted with a total of 2,069,058 signatures.

The Government have brought forward their measure in a very positive way, and have clung to it with great tenacity; rejecting all compromise, they have been abandoned by nearly half their supporters, and nothing can exceed their chagrin and soreness at being so forsaken.

[36] Faced with these contradictory votes, and having considered and rejected the option of compromising on some intermediate time such as eleven hours,[e] Graham withdrew the Bill, preferring to replace it by a new one which amended, rather than repealed, the 1833 Act.

[38] The 1833 definition of night time being unaltered the revised Bill gave no opportunity to redefine 'night' and Lord Ashley's amendment to limit the working day for women and young persons to ten hours was defeated heavily (295 against, 198 for),[39] it having been made clear that the Ministers would resign if they lost the vote.

Ashley was a member of the aristocracy (he became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury on the death of his father), had sat for an agricultural constituency (Dorsetshire), and had resigned because he could no longer support the Corn Laws.

Fielden came from a very different background; he was MP for Oldham a Lancashire 'cotton town' and was described by John Bright, opposing the Bill as the senior partner in the greatest cotton concern in England.

[42] He spoke from practical experience; as he explained in his 1836 pamphlet The Curse of The Factory System: I well remember being set to work in my father's mill when I was a little more than ten years old; my associates, too, in the labour and in recreation are fresh in my memory.

Against the strongly held view of most of the Conservative party that the Corn Laws were vital to the prosperity of British agriculture, they had been repealed by Peel as a result of Free Trade agitation led by Northern millowners .

With very few exceptions, the Conservative supporters of the Ten Hour Bill in 1847 had -like Bentinck and Lord John Manners voted for the 1846 Bill and with slightly more exceptions (including Bentinck)[h] for 10 hours in 1844; although not all claimed – like Manners – to have "the gratifying conviction that they, the Tory Gentlemen of England, had maintained their just and historical position; that, consistently with the character they had ever aspired to, they had fought the fight of the poor against the rich, and had been fellow-soldiers with the weak and defenceless against the mighty and the strong, and to the best of their ability, had wielded the power which the Constitution reposed in them, to protect and defend the working-people of this country.".

[46] However the Corn Laws may have had some effect: on the analysis of the Standard fifty-one Protectionist Conservatives had voted with Peel in 1846, but he no longer had any call on their loyalty and the argument that a Ten-Hour Act should be opposed because it would ruin Northern millowners now had less force; many abstained in 1847, only four of the fifty-one named by the Standard voting against the Bill's Second Reading;[47] six against the Bill being considered in Committee.

[54] They had succeeded in establishing a strong feeling among millworkers for a Ten Hour Act, and in gaining supporters in all classes of society My Lords, the measures now proposed for your acceptance have originated in far different quarters than in the mind of one so little entitled to your Lordships' attention as myself.

They have originated in the crowded receptacles of human labour—they have been elaborated in the factory and the alley, amid the whirl of machinery, and in those long rows of lodging houses which grow up around the giant chimneys of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Crucially, a deluge of petitions to Parliament and a series of large public meetings in the manufacturing districts passing resolutions in favour of a Ten-Hour Act were organised.

[i] These both nullified arguments that the Bill was against the interests and the wishes of (the better sort of) millworkers and established a strong moral pressure on Parliament: The people deserved this measure.

They had for many years besought Parliament to grant them a Ten Hours Bill; and he thought that the manner in which they had agitated the question entitled them to the most favourable consideration of the Legislature.

[59] "At a General Meeting of the Lancashire Central Short Time Committee, held at the house of Mr Thomas Wilkinson, Red Lion Inn, Manchester, on Tuesday evening, 8 June 1847, the following resolutions were unanimously adopted.

John Fielden was born a Quaker but had become a Unitarian and was a cotton mill owner from Todmorden who fought tirelessly for the passage of the Factory Act of 1847.

[68] Thereafter the use of child labour certainly declined in Victorian Britain, though historians divide on whether this was the result of the law in action, as the Factory Prosecutions Returns would seem to suggest, or merely a by-product of technological change.

[69] "A numerous meeting of the factory operatives and other inhabitants of" Manchester " was held in the large room of the Town Hall, for the purpose of petitioning parliament in favour of the Ten Hours Bill.

The meeting was called for eight o’clock, but long before that hour the room was crowded, and the whole street in front of the hall was also filled with people, anxious to gain admission.