author

John Brown

d. 1829

A little-known English writer from Bolton, he is remembered for early local history and for helping bring one of the first published accounts of child labor in British cotton mills to print.

1 Audiobook

A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy Sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the horrors of a cotton-mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published.

A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy Sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the horrors of a cotton-mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published.

by John Brown

About the author

John Brown was an English historian and miscellaneous writer associated with Bolton in Lancashire. In the 1820s he worked on a projected History of Great and Little Bolton, of which a number of parts were published, showing his strong interest in local history and the story of Lancashire.

He is also linked to A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, the powerful account of an orphan forced into mill labor that became an important early exposure of harsh factory conditions. Brown later went to London to press the claims of his friend Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning mule.

Sources about his life describe a difficult final period, and he died in 1829. Although not widely known today, his surviving work connects him to both regional history and one of the most striking social documents of early industrial Britain.