I'm very proud to welcome the fabulous
Jen Newby, editor of Family History Monthly, to my blog this week! I've often written about how hard life was for working class women, but what was life like if you couldn't earn your own living, and were doomed to a life of cosy domesticity?
Jen takes up the thread of their lives:
"If I could travel back in time to the 19th century I would rather have been anything but a middle class woman – chimney sweep, scullery maid or even a factory worker. While researching Women’s Lives, my new book on women’s social history during the 19th and early 20th century, I discovered that many relatively well-off women lived lives of quiet desperation, boredom and, frustration.
While female educational opportunities were gradually improving, and their peers were heading off to become teachers, doctors and political activists, ordinarily young ladies were stuck at home with some needlework or improving reading, waiting for marriage and the chance to escape to a house of their own. The conventional view was that women should aspire to marriage and motherhood. Even as late as 1895, novelist Grant Allen got away with writing, ‘A woman ought to be ashamed to say that she has no desire to become a wife and mother’.
So throughout the long 19th century, thousands of carefully-dressed young ladies vegetated on chaise longue. ‘Women’s business’, as novelist Sarah Stephens described in, Passages From the Life of a Daughter at Home, in 1845, was finding ‘something to pass the time…in drawing or in music or literature or worsted work…reading aloud’. Every Girl’s Book (1860) lists uninspiring entertainments open to young middle-class girls: spillikins, fancy work, embroidery, silk work, making wax flowers. For older women there were card games, bridge and sewing.
Lacking suitors and balls, jaded young women devoured romantic novels of adventure and excitement, like Edwardian bestsellers, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Blue Lagoon. The market for women’s magazines rocketed during the second half of the 19th century, with Isabella Beeton and her husband churning out The Queen and The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.
Not all meekly accepted a life of flower arranging and trips to church. Remembering her youth, Florence Nightingale complained: ‘Oh, weary days – Oh evenings that never seem to end – for how many years have I watched that drawing room clock and thought it would never reach the ten’. Some were pushed by their comfortable, stultifying upbringings to aspire to something more, escaping into the world to make their mark. Their stories are still capable of inspiring women today".
Jen’s wonderful new book, Women’s Lives: researching women’s social history 1800–1939 is published by
Pen & Sword. You can find out more about Jen's books
here.
All images from Jen Newby's collection.
Educational writers such as Sarah Trimmer (1741-1810) and Hannah More (1745-1833) advocated work for young children as a good way of preventing them falling into lazy habits. Trimmer thought that schools of industry, such as the one at Lewisham (1796) which taught knitting and spinning, were a good way of setting poor children on the right path. People were more willing to take children on as apprentices if they already had some training. 
My new book Tracing Your Canal Ancestors for Pen & Sword explores the history of the canals and the boatmen’s way of life, and explains how to trace canal workers, whether they worked on the waterways or on the land. 
Images: Canal engineer James Brindley (1716 – 1772). Lives of the Engineers: Brindley and the Early Engineers, (John Murray, 1874.)
In the ‘thin’ seams in Lancashire, the West Riding, Derbyshire and North Wales, children dragged heavy tubs of coal on their hands and knees, using a belt and chain. Perhaps the worst conditions were in Scotland, where children and young women (bearers) carried loads of coal to the surface in baskets on their backs. 
This CBBC Horrible Histories video graphically illustrates the plight of Britain’s child chimney sweeps or ‘climbing boys’. Girls were used to clean chimneys as well as boys, but most of the child sweeps interviewed by the Children's Employment Commissions of Queen Victoria’s reign were boys.
Machine-made lace came off the machine in sections joined by threads, and ‘drawing’ meant removing these joining threads with a needle. An investigator in the 1840s found one Nottingham mother forcing her two year old child to work at ‘drawing’. This little girl’s older sisters worked at lace-drawing from six in the morning until darkness fell during the summer months. The machine-made lace industry was based in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, the West Country and the Isle of Wight. 
These child workers had little time to go to school. Charles Sidwell (age 11), when shown a picture of a bird’s nest with eggs, said he didn’t ‘know what that picture is’. He was also shown a picture of a cow being milked: ‘ that’s a lion’, he said. (Children’s Employment Commission, 3rd report, 1864, XXII, 3414-I). 
Children born into poverty were expected to earn a living from as early an age as possible, like these ‘mudlarks’ scavenging along the banks of the Thames. They collected and sold bits of coal, scrap metal or rope to try to earn a few pennies. The only schools likely to be available to them were Sunday schools, or missions like this one.
