It would be perfectly acceptable for Tom to have been at his post 12 hours, and not unheard of for trappers to have shifts lasting 15 or even 18 hours. Unsurprisingly a lot of children fell asleep on the job. Never a good thing in a dangerous environment.
One of the saddest bits of research I did for this comic was to read the 1842 parliamentary report on child welfare in mines, which features accounts of the mines from mine workers, girls and boys, in their own words. They all sound very lonely and very scared.
The report inspired a certain Charles Dickens (hmm, I might have heard of him) to begin to write a pamphlet to call for change in the lives of the poor. He scrapped it half way through, figuring that stories were what he was famous for and that the message was probably going to be spread better through the medium of narrative.
I'm guessing he was right, since the result was A Christmas Carol. If you've ever wondered about the context of the bit where the Ghost of Christmas Present introduces the terrifying children Ignorance and Want to Scrooge, there you go!
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A mining community in the mid-19th century: dark, dangerous and dirty. On his first day working underground, a young boy is faced with demons in the dark and the possibility that his father might not love him anymore.
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