John Brown 
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.

Robert Blincoe (c. 1792–1860) was an English author and former child labourer. He became famous during the 1830s for his popular autobiography, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an account of his childhood spent in a workhouse. However, there are some doubts about whether this detailed observation of Blincoe’s early life can be considered ‘autobiography’. According to John Waller, in his book The Real Oliver Twist, his life story was told to a John Brown, who wrote the manuscript of a biography of Blincoe before committing suicide later the same year. But Brown had given his manuscript to a friend, Robert Carlile, who published the resulting book, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, in five episodes in his magazine The Lion in 1832.

In 1832, John Doherty published A Memoir of Robert Blincoe in a pamphlet form. In an interview of Employment of Children in Manufactories Committee in 1832, he stated that he’d rather see his children transported to Australia than put them to work in factories.