The Victorian Child - A Family Story (Part 1)

The idealised view of victorian children

Introduction

Recently I was just browsing through an 1851 census return for one of my ancestors, and was struck by something that took me a little by surprise. There was my 4 x great grandfather, a stone miner, and his elder sons all in their twenties – also stone miners. Nothing particularly interesting there. But then the youngest son, Benjamin, who was only 12 was also a stone miner. And I thought, hang on a minute, did I, or did I not learn in school that the 1842 Mines Act prohibited children and women from working in mines? So I quickly googled it, and found that I had only half remembered the details. The law did indeed prevent children from working below ground in mines – but only if they were under ten. So, Benjamin being a 12 year old stone miner in 1851 was perfectly legal.

Child miners pre-1842

And so this got me thinking. I have to teach attitudes towards children during the industrial revolution next year for A-Level anyway and so I was curious to know, how many other children in my and Levi’s families were working during the Victorian era? What kind of jobs were they doing? How much schooling did they receive? Was there an urban/rural divide? And how and why did attitudes to children and childhood change over the period 1841-1911 for which I have census data to work with?

A victorian school

Even trying to define childhood in order to embark on this project seemed highly problematic. I am no sociologist after all or even a social historian - just a curious genealogist trying to make sense of a big issue. Does childhood end in adolescence? Or the age of legal majority? And when collecting my data from the censuses should I be picking out whom modern society considers to be children (i.e. under 18s) or what contemporary Victorians considered to be children? I mean did they even have a concept of childhood, or were all children just mini adults? So many tricky questions.

Children working in a cotton mill

For the purposes of this blog post and my research, I have decided to look at the data from a modern perspective using the definition stated by the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child – that a child is everyone under 18. This definition still irks me in the context of what I’m trying to look at – after all, I’m sure the majority of the 13-17 year old Victorians I will be counting as children, would have not have considered themselves as such. But in the absence of anything better at the moment, it’s almost certainly an imperfect criteria which will simply have to do.

Inevitably I will have missed off some children by accident, and may on occasion have got the wrong end of the stick (this is after all not a dissertation!). If you spot any glaring errors be in touch and I will happily consider amendments. Equally, if you have any good articles that you would like to recommend that I can use next year with my A-Level girls, I would very much welcome them.

Illustration of children playing

And finally, like any good Victorian novel, my investigation on the family's children will be split into three parts:

Part 1 - 1841 and 1851 censuses
Part 2 - 1861 and 1871 censuses
Part 3 - 1881 and 1891 censuses

And so with much ado, I present to you Part 1 of The Victorian Child: A Family Story

1841 Census

Admittedly, the 1841 wasn’t terribly useful for finding out about the family children. In fact it was downright frustrating. As a general rule it is by far the least comprehensive of the surviving censuses – it doesn’t even tell you the relationships between the different individuals living in the same household. For the most part, it seems that only the head of the household has an occupation listed. For example, Jonathan Cooper (80) is listed as a farmer in Kirby Moorside, North Yorkshire. His son, Mark (40) and his large family were living with him, but if you take the census at face value apparently do nothing (which I doubt very much was the case). In some cases no occupation is given at all, though I suspect family members such as Sylvanus Brooks (40) living in Bedlington, Co. Durham with his wife and children was doing some kind of work. Even the ages given on the census are not straightforward. All adults were meant their ages rounded down to the nearest multiple of five. So a man of 63, might be recorded in the census as being 60. But even then, some enumerators didn't follow the instructions with care and in some cases the accurate age was given.

A prime example of the age thing - Thomas Goddard and his wife, Mary, here give their ages as being 30. They were actually 34 at the time.

That said, all children and young people aged 15 and younger had their ages recorded accurately. Is this already an indication that these were considered children and not adults? There are indeed a lot of children in this census in our family, but information about what they’re doing is frustratingly scarce. There is no sign of schooling, though it is likely that several of them would have received some form of education, perhaps in the Ragged Schools or National Schools that had been set up over the previous decades. Even the 1833 Factory Act, from seven years before, included a stipulation that children should receive some kind of schooling. No child under the age of 9 was to work in the factories, no child was to work at night full-stop, and children were to receive two hours of school a day.

A very typical 1841 census return for our family. The father, Charles King gives his age (rounded the 30) and his occupation (Bricklayer). No occupations were given for the rest of the family. All the family were born within Leicester judging by all the Ys in the penultimate column.

Doubtless to say, a number of the children in this census were probably working, either in the domestic woollen industry, or helping their parents on the farm. There is a tantalising glimpse of this in the 1841 census record for Thomas Elliot (40) and his family living in Oadby, Leicestershire. He gives his occupation as being a ‘woollen hosiery worker’ and writes that the same (ditto/do) underneath for the rest of the family bar the youngest child (Jane, aged 4). The older children were clearly working with their parents in the home: Elizabeth (15) and twins, Mary (10) and Thomas (10). I very much doubt, that the Elliot's were atypical in having their children in work. Rather, they were atypical for the census in recording it.

The Elliot Family, 1841, showing the older children to be working in the Woolen Industry in Oadby, Leicestershire. Note the N in the birth column. Thomas was born in Dingley, Northamptonshire.

Other than this, there is little of note child-wise to be found in the 1841 census return, beyond a few snippets.

These include:

 A 13 year old agricultural labourer, John Haswell, working and living with John Littlefair (a farmer) in Hamsterly, Co. Durham

A 15 year old Linen Handloom Weaver, Janet Grant was living with Joseph Kinnear and his family in South Halkerton, Forfarshire

And finally, a 3 year old girl, Jane Adamson, living with Francis Jefferson (50) and family in Lythe, North Yorkshire. She doesn’t share a surname with any of the other people in the household – not even Francis’ brother-in-law, John Corner (50), who is also residing there. It is possible that she is a granddaughter of one of the three adults in the house (Francis’ wife Elizabeth is also living there). But for all we know, Elizabeth was baby farming for extra income. Without any of the relationships of the householders recorded, we simply just don’t know.

Jefferson census return in Lythe, 1841

So, all-in-all, the 1841 was not terribly enlightening. Luckily, the 1851 census, with all it’s additional details, proved to be far more informative.

1851 Census

Already the 1851 census was a big improvement in terms of the information provided. You have the names and ages of the householders. You have their marital status; relationship to the head of the household; occupation; birthplace and whether they suffered from a disability.

In the 1851 census, there were 82 children and adolescents in our families. It is clear, that although education was neither free nor compulsory, it was something that was generally valued by our particular families. That said, one cannot guarantee that all these ‘scholars’ were in fact children in school. Some of them may be put down as such to hide the fact that they were working illegally. Unfortunately, I cannot tell when and where this was the case.

In the previous decade there had been a large focus on children in the workplace. Two important reports had been published in the ten years before the 1851 census. The first, focusing on the distressing conditions suffered by children working down the pits, had led in part to the 1842 Mines Act alluded to above - No child under 10 could work underground. The Second report focused on children working in the textile industry. It led to the 1844 Factory Act in which children 9-13 could only work a 9 hour day with a lunch break and were prohibited from cleaning moving machinery. Middle class Victorians had been shocked to read accounts of children as young as five, working as trappers underground or of the horrific accidents suffered by children working in the textile factories which led one German visitor to Manchester in 1842 to note that he had seen so many armless and legless people, that it was like "living in the midst of the army just returned from a campaign."

Victorian children in the mill

 If we take the data at face value, it suggests that 38% of the family's children were in education of some kind (bearing in mind that 20% of them were under 4 years old). The average age of the ‘scholars’ was 8.2 years, which fits nicely with the group’s mode which was 8. For the most part their education would have probably been fairly rudimentary in the 3 Rs of, Reading, Writing and Reckoning.

The Children of Robert Bell, a wealthy farmer of Sandhutton, Yorkshire. All those under 14 are scholars

A victorian school from 1851

That said, there were a couple of notably older children still in education in the group. One is the 14 year old Ann Kinnear, the daughter of a small time farmer in Forfarshire, Scotland. There cannot have been much money in farming 5 acres, yet for reasons unknown, her parents were still willing to pay for a girl’s education at this age. I would be very curious to know what Ann did with this education afterwards. Her younger sister, who was also educated until quite late, used her skills to support her husband’s business as a tax collector. Another girl, who was educated to a relatively old age, was Louisa Wyatt. Aged 12, she was the daughter of the landlord of the Nightingale Public House in Wanstead, East London. Again, it was clearly thought that paying for her education was not a waste. However, like Ann, Louisa frustratingly disappears from the census returns after this date so I can’t see what use her education was put to afterwards.

The children of James Wyatt, Landlord of the Nightingale Pub in Wanstead

The Nightingale Pub, Wanstead

A final older scholar was Brian Bell, aged 14, the son of a fairly well to do farmer of 152 acres in Yorkshire. Indeed, his father, Robert, put all his children through school from the age of 5. Although just under half of my scholars had parents who were farmers or in related occupations, the parents in rural areas appeared to keep their offspring in school on average a year longer than their urban contemporaries.

Farm boy - print by Walter Hunt

There were indeed a few children of what we would now consider prime school age, not in education. For example, Caroline Brooks, aged 7, the daughter of a chain maker in Co. Durham. This contrasts, with her contemporary Edward Matthews, also aged 7, the son of framework knitters in Oadby who was still being paid for to go to school (though clearly not for much longer - his ten year old sister was working). There were a number of fairly young children apparently in education (notably, Mary Goddard aged 3 and Elizabeth Heighton aged 4, both daughters of framework knitters). Could this be the 1851 version of child care? Or were they actually at home, working? Mary Goddard’s tender age does strike warning bells for me here.

Goddard family in 1851

Framework Knitters - note the number of small children helping in the home

Interestingly, Henry Atkinson (10) and his brother Thomas (6) were apparently still in education, despite their widowed mother being ‘a pauper’ on outdoor relief.  It is tempting to think that education helped to give the boys a step out of poverty. Both of her sons later went on to become very successful tenant farmers – this blip in the family fortunes, a distant memory. In this case, I don’t think their education is hiding child labour. Their elder brothers (who had left home by 1851) had clearly been educated – one of them was the parish clerk in later censuses. That said, the family were also living next door to Hannah's brother, Mark Cooper, a fairly successful farmer - and perhaps this gave the boys some of the skills and contacts needed as adults to lease their own farms.

Hannah Atkinson, a widow, and her two sons living in Farndale, Yorkshire. (click to expand)

Surprisingly, perhaps, there were not that many children in work (but then again, who knows how many of the so called ‘scholars’ were in fact child labourers?). Only 11% of my children were recorded as being in employment in 1851 (over half of which were 14 or over).  For the most part, they had taken on their parents’ trades. Thomas Goddard (15) and John Heighton (16) had become framework knitters, Benjamin Flavell (12) a stone miner and Samuel Mills (16) a glover – these were all the jobs of their parents and elder siblings. David Kinnear (16) broke the mould a bit by becoming a stone mason. His father, had been the one to educate his children highly, despite being a lowly small time farmer. His willingness to keep all his children in education until around 15/16, is suggestive that he had ambitions for them and perhaps wanted to give them the leg up. Indeed, his son’s skilled job as a mason served him well, allowing him to emigrate to Australia and gain good employment building the new university in Melbourne in the mid-1850s. 

Samuel Mills, aged 16 the glover, with his glove making parents (click to expand)

Tools of the Victorian Glove Making Trade

The James boys, Jacob and Isaiah (7 and 11 respectively) were not in school, but helping their father, a blacksmith. This was considered their education, if you like, in their father’s trade. Indeed, Jacob worked as a farrier and blacksmith in London for the rest of his life based on this training. Most surprising to the modern eye, perhaps, is little Ann Heighton, who at just 10 was already in work as a stitcher. The Factory Act of 1847, allowed for children like Ann to work up to ten hours a day and like the James boys, this would have been her education in her future trade, learning from her parents and older siblings. It is hardly surprising, that ten years later, she was herself a framework knitter.

James James, the blacksmith and his sons in Snetterton, Norfolk.

Children assisting their father in his work as a tinsmith

And finally, there is also a relatively large number of adolescent girls, not in work or education, but just in the home. 12% of my group of 1851 children come under this category. Indeed, two of them, Sarah Goddard (12) and Mary Storey (15) actually have ‘at home’ given as their occupation – clearly indicating that as girls of a working age, their lack of trade or occupation was deliberate and that their job, if you like, was to be at home, and assist in domestic life there.

Girls helping with chores

A last group that warrant a very brief mention are the family's servants. The majority are unsurprisingly male, average around 15 1/2 years old and work in agriculture, supporting the various farmers in the family, in particular the Littlefair and Bell families in North Yorkshire and Co. Durham.

Labouring on the Farm

Next time....

In the next post, I would like to find out about the family's children in the 1860s and 1870s. Preliminary reading has made me curious to find out a bit more about the Factory Acts of the 1860s and 70s, the Elementary Education Act (1870) and the influence of books like Kingsley's Water Babies (1863) on the fortunes of the family's children.

As stated above, do point me in the direction of any good articles or books. This project is very much work in progress! If you've got this far - thanks for reading! :)