Was Victorian childhood always a miserable existence of constant toil, hardship and disease? Not for all. With guest contribution from Professor Anna Barton.
Victorian toys and games
Historians paint a grim picture of childhood in Victorian times, and indeed it bears little resemblance to the cherished and well-provided-for childhood that we expect for children today. Today the market for children’s toys, games and films is vast and competitive as well as hugely creative. The emphasis from all angles, even in marketing educational toys, is to promote ‘fun’. Childhood is fun. In Victorian times, there was little mention of fun.
That doesn’t mean that children didn’t have any time to play, even in the dark period of the Industrial Revolution. A visit to the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall (now known as the Children’s Country House) shows that for many children, except for the very poor, life was not all hard work and school. Things to play with were widely manufactured. There were metal hoops to send clattering over the cobbles, skittles, wooden cups and balls (like diabolo), marbles and skipping ropes. There were girl dolls with wax heads, tin soldiers, jigsaws, toy trains, and of course, books, though they would largely be moral tales to make children into better people.
How many books do you know that are about childhood in Victorian times? David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas NIckleby, The Old Cusiosity Shop? Black Beauty, Treasure Island, Little Women, The Water Babies. There are many, many more, still in print and widely read, televised and made into films and plays. Interestingly, few of them were actually written for children! And not many children had the leisure time to sit and read. Many children couldn’t read at all.
One of the great sources of entertainment was the puppet show, usually with hand puppets, where children could invent their own plays to perform for their family.
Or there were lifelike models of familiar characters, adorned with dozens of tiny objects, like Dorothy Trudge, a doll pedlar exhibiting her wares, to be wondered at and treasured. What does Dorothy have to sell? What might a pedlar carry around today?
Automata
Another favourite toy that the Victorians developed with great skill was the toy that could move. These automata could be figures, or sometimes whole scenes from the Bible, or battles, or railways, and sometimes on a huge scale.
Autoperipatetikos
And, here’s a wonderful word to add to your vocabulary. Autoperipatetikos were figures that moved their feet and could propel themselves forwards as if they were walking or dancing. They lasted even in to my childhood – I had a clockwork Cinderella whose little feet danced under her metal gown and took her swirling round the kitchen floor.
And if you have a robot, of course, you have the 21st century version of a toy that was loved by thousands of lucky children in the middle-class homes of the 1800s.
The children of the poor
But life for poor children was very different. If you were poor, you might have had hoops and skittles, rag dolls and balls and other toys, but little time to play with them. You had no schooling because it had to be paid for. You were often one of many siblings in a crowded house, and you had to help to find food and clothing. If you found work in a factory, you were lucky to have a job, but you worked very long hours, had little food, and the conditions were dangerous.
Factories and mills
In my novel Far From Home, Lizzie and Emily eventually work in a cotton mill. Lizzie, being small, is a scavenger, and has to crawl under moving machinery to scoop up scraps of cotton. Wherever factories sprang up, children were used as cheap labourers with no health safeguards, and if they were injured there was little medical help available or affordable.
Workhouses
Children like Jim Jarvis in my novel Street Child lived on the streets, in all weathers; homeless, penniless and starving. Imagine it, no home to live in, no regular food, rags for clothes, nothing on your feet. If you fell ill, there was no-one to care for you. Some children were taken to the workhouse, and you might think this was a lucky alternative to life on the streets. But food was poor and there was no comfort, no rest.
Disease
Disease was rife. Drinking water was contaminated with factory filth, and caused a devastating outbreak of cholera. Poor nutrition, stale, bad food and dirty, damp, dangerous conditions everywhere caused sickness. One in every three babies died.
And I am writing now about my own grandparents’ time, not situations from centuries ago. When I wrote Street Child and Far From Home I closely researched the period to give as accurate an account as I could, within the context of storytelling.
Professor Anna Barton on Victorian childhood and children’s literature
I asked Anna Barton, an expert on Victorian literature and childhood to talk about her own research into this period, based on her knowledge of actual novels written at the time.
Victorian childhood – dependent on circumstances
In Street Child, Jim Jarvis encounters great hardship and danger when his mother dies and he is left without parents to care for him. His story illustrates how risky life could be for poor and working-class children in the Victorian period, when what it meant to be a child differed hugely depending on the circumstances into which you were born.
Children like Jim, born into poverty and without a family to care for him, would often end up in a workhouse. Workhouses, set up by John Peele in 1834, were the first attempt to provide state support to people who were unable to support or care for themselves. Workhouses were harsh environments: inmates were segregated on the basis of sex and ability and were required to work long days in exchange for very little food and cramped, unsanitary shelter.
Victorian childhood in books
Dickens
Charles Dickens, whose novels are often concerned with the experiences of children, begins his early novel, Oliver Twist with an angrily satirical description of Oliver’s early life in a workhouse, where he is fed ‘three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll of Sundays’, and is harshly punished when he asks for ‘more’.
For working-class children with families to support them, childhood often meant a life of strenuous labour. The nineteenth century was a time of rapid industrial growth as new technologies made it possible to produce goods more quickly and cheaply. Textile, mining and metalwork industries brought great wealth to cities like Sheffield, Birmingham and Manchester. But these new methods of production relied on backbreaking, unregulated labour.
Some of the most dangerous work was carried out by children, whose small bodies could fit under or between bits of moving machinery. The working conditions for children became a matter of public concern as people gradually became aware of the human cost of industrial expansion.
Browning
In 1834 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the most popular poets of the day, published a poem called ‘The Cry of the Children’, which gave voice to the plight of these young factory workers:
All day, we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal-dark, underground –
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
Charlotte Brontë
Because children were sent out to work to contribute to the family income, childhood education was a luxury that many families could not afford. In 1833 the Factory Act legislated that factory employers were to provide some education for children under the age of thirteen, but this was difficult to enforce and often meant as little as two hours a day in the classroom. The state education system was just getting started and for much of the nineteenth century educational provision relied on the church, charitable institutions and the private system. If they did not work in a factory, a child might attend a ragged school, a parish school or a church school.
In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, Jane is sent by her aunt to Lowood School, a charity school run by the terrifying Mr Brocklehurst. Jane’s narrative describes the school as a place of strict discipline, religious hypocrisy, deprivation and punishment. In 1870 the Education Act made the first steps towards a state-funded school system, requiring children to attend school up to the age of ten: even by the end of the century childhood was over very quickly for the majority of working-class children.
George Eliot
For families that could afford it, education was seen as a route to social advancement. Middle-class children whose parents could pay for full-time education might be sent to a small privately-run institution, or educated at home by a governess or tutor. In these cases the kind of education a child received depended on whether they were a boy or a girl. For boys, education might be seen as the first step towards a profession, or (more rarely) preparation for university.
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot follows the fortunes of brother and sister, Tom and Maggie Tuliver, the children of a prosperous mill owner. The novel points out the arbitrary nature of gendered education. Tom, a boy without any interest in intellectual pursuits is sent away to learn Latin and Greek, while Maggie, who loves to read, is sent to a boarding school for girls, where she is taught middle-class manners and feminine accomplishments, things that will make her an attractive prospect as a wife. The story does not end happily for brother or sister.
The invention of children’s literature
All this makes Victorian childhood sound pretty grim, but the nineteenth century was also a time of great invention and development for children’s leisure and play. A child in a wealthy family would grow up in a nursery furnished with toys such as dolls’ houses and rocking horses. Board games like snakes and ladders and ludo originated in India, and became part of British culture as a result of imperial expansion. The Victorian period also saw the invention of children’s literature: stories and poetry written for the entertainment of children.
Nonsense verse
Because of the Industrial Revolution, it was also quicker and cheaper to produce books and so a market for children’s literature grew. Before the nineteenth century, literature for children tended to contain a strong religious or moral message; whereas in the Victorian period, writers like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear produced work that made fun of moral tales and delighted in silliness and nonsense. It is fascinating to think that Street Child, a book about a Victorian child, and Berlie’s other books, are part of a tradition of children’s literature that began with the Victorians!
Anna Barton
Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature
School of English
University of Sheffield
I co-edited, with James Williams, the Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense.
My own books set in Victorian England
As well as my books below, you will also find more information on Victorian childhood and conditions in Victorian England in my earlier blog post Jim Jarvis meets Dr Barnardo.
My novel Street Child is widely used in KS2 History and KS2 English lessons. It is my fictionalised account of the life of a Jim Jarvis up to the time of his meeting with Dr Barnardo.
Published by HarperCollins Essential Modern Classics, 2009, ISBN 978-0007311255. Available from Amazon. Also published by HarperCollins as an unabridged audio book, read by Antonia Beamish.
It was also available in a hardback edition, as well as a Collins playscript (see my Plays page), a Chivers audiocassette, read by Christian Rodska, a Chivers large print edition and also a Heinemann Windmill schools’ edition. These are all unavailable, although you may be able to find secondhand copies.
What if Jim Jarvis had sisters? What would happen to them? Far From Home is also used frequently in KS2 History and English lessons.
It describes the working life of mill girls in a north of England cotton mill in Victorian times. It takes us up to the time when the sisters, Emily and Lizzie, find one of the pamphlets that Dr Barnardo sends to wealthy families to raise money to found a Home for Destitute Boys. The title of the pamphlet is My First Arab, and it is about their brother, Jim Jarvis.
Published HarperCollins, January 2015. ISBN 978 000757 8825. Available from Amazon. Also published by HarperCollins as an unabridged audio book, read by Karina Fernandez.
My picture books Old Father Christmas and Our Field are closely based on stories by the Victorian author Juliana Horatio Ewing.
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