Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

And indeed, the conversation about the dangers of silver-work had fared better in the court of public opinion than did the conversation about China. Here was an issue that was close to home, that affected the average Briton in ways he could understand. The silver industrial revolution had decimated both the textile and agricultural industries. The papers ran piece after piece exposing the horrific working conditions inside silver-powered factories (although these had their rebuttals, including one refutation by Andrew Ure, who argued that factory workers would feel a good deal better if they only consumed less gin and tobacco). In 1833, the surgeon Peter Gaskell had published a thoroughly researched manuscript entitled The Manufacturing Population of England, focusing chiefly on the moral, social, and physical toll of silver-working machinery on British labourers. It had gone largely unheeded at the time, except by the Radicals, who were known to exaggerate everything. Now, the antiwar papers ran excerpts from it every day, reporting in grisly detail the coal dust inhaled by small children forced to wriggle into tunnels that adults could not, the fingers and toes lost to silver-powered machines working at inhuman speeds, the girls who’d been strangled by their own hair caught in whirring spindles and looms.

The Spectator printed a cartoon illustration of emaciated children being crushed to death under the wheels of some nebulous contraption, which they captioned WHITE SLAVES OF THE SILVER REVOLUTION. In the tower, they laughed themselves silly over this comparison, but the general public seemed genuinely horrified. Someone asked a member of the House of Lords why he supported exploiting children in factories; he replied quite flippantly that employing children under the age of nine had been outlawed in 1833, which led to more general outcry over the suffering of ten- and eleven-year-olds in the country.

‘Is it really as bad as all that?’ Robin asked Abel. ‘The factories, I mean.’

‘Worse,’ said Abel. ‘Those are just the freak accidents they’re reporting on. But they don’t say what it’s like to work day after day on those cramped floors. Rising before dawn and working until nine with few breaks in between. And those are the conditions we covet. The jobs we wish we could get back. I imagine they don’t make you work half as hard at university, do they?’

‘No,’ said Robin, feeling embarrassed. ‘They don’t.’

The Spectator story seemed to greatly affect Professor Craft in particular. Robin found her sitting with it at the tea table, red in the eyes, long after the others had finished their breakfast. She hastily wiped her eyes with a handkerchief when she saw him approach.

He sat down beside her. ‘Are you all right, Professor?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She cleared her throat, paused, then nudged the paper. ‘It’s just . . . it’s a side of the story we don’t often think about, isn’t it?’

‘I think we all got good at choosing not to think about certain things.’

She seemed not to hear him. She stared out of the window at the green below, where the strikers’ protest grounds had been turned into what looked like a military camp. ‘My first patented match-pair improved the efficiency of equipment at a mine in Tyneshire,’ she said. ‘It kept coal-laden trolleys firmly on their tracks. The mine owners were so impressed they invited me up for a visit, and of course I went; I was so excited about contributing something to the country. I remember being shocked at all the little children in the pits. When I asked, the miners said that they were completely safe, and that helping out in the mines kept them from trouble when their parents were at work.’

She took a shaky breath. ‘Later they told me that the silver-work made the trolleys impossible to move off the tracks, even when there were people in the way. There was an accident. One little boy lost both his legs. They stopped using the match-pair when they couldn’t figure out a workaround, but I didn’t give it a second thought. By then I’d received my fellowship. I had a professorship in sight, and I’d moved on to other, bigger projects. I didn’t think about it. I simply didn’t think about it, for years, and years and years.’

She turned back towards him. Her eyes were wet. ‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Robin.

Victoire glanced up. ‘What is it?’