Extracts from Ordinary Lives A Hundred Years Ago by Carol Adams *************************************************************** George Sims, How The Poor Live: ******************************* At the open door sits a girl of eight .. a typical "little mother" of the London doorstep .. She is nursing a heavy baby who is perhaps a year old. She talks to it, soothes it, hushes it to sleep, rocks it, dandles it when it wakes up, and kisses its poor little face again and again. But every other minute her attention is distracted by the conduct of a sister, aged four, and a brother, aged five, who are also under her guardianship ... Because she is the oldest of all that have come, all that come after are hers to tend and hers to watch. By the time she marries and has children of her own she will be a woman weary of motherhood. Mr. Forbes remembering his childhood in the early 1900s: ******************************************************** We had all the boys in one bed - six of us lined up with three at the top and three at the bottom. My four sisters shared the other bed and that filled the room. There was a curtain across the middle and when my eldest sister got bigger she slept in the living room or at my aunt’s nearby. Molly Hughes, A London Child of the 1870s: ****************************************** My father’s slogan was that boys should go everywhere and know everything and that a girl should stay at home and know nothing. The boys used to go to the theatre and music halls. Mother explained that they were not dull, only not very nice. It made no difference to me what they were like since I was never allowed to go even to a theatre. Robert Roberts, A Ragged Schooling: *********************************** We walked miles to satisfy the wants, whims and fancies of parents, and woe betide anyone who, having been ordered on a distant mission, makes his purchase from a shop nearer home. Edith Hogg, "School Children As Wage Earners In The Nineteen Century", 1897: **************************************************************************** It is unfortunately true that homework almost invariably means child-labour - chiefly girl labour - at all hours of the day and often far into the night. Little matchbox makers work habitually from the time that school closes until eleven or even midnight. London School Report, 1889: Seventy or eighty pupils in a class are common. Sometimes there is more than one class in a room ... many of the schools are in noisy thoroughfares ... the teachers soon acquire the habit of shouting or, as is frequently admitted, of screaming at their pupils. Mrs. Layton, Memories Of Seventy Years: *************************************** My fourth sister and I always stayed away from school on washing day to mind the babies. In the summer it was real sport, because so many people did their washing on the same day, and everybody had large families and generally kept the older girls, and sometimes boys, at home to mind the little ones. Mrs. Hall, a railway worker’s daughter, remembers: ************************************************** The weekly trip to the pawnbroker’s: Every Monday I had to take a parcel in and then collect it at the end of the week. It was my father’s suit, which he only wore when he went out to the pub at weekends. He didn’t know about this, but on the weeks when my mother couldn’t afford to pay to get it out she had to deliberately pick a row with him, so that they would both be in too bad a mood to go for a drink and he never knew. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: ********************************* Houseflies and bluebottles swarmed in every kitchen alive: sticky foul-smelling paper traps dangled about, dark with their writhing bodies. And the bed bugs! With the warm days they appeared in battalions, first in the hovels, then in the better class houses, where people waged campaigns against their sickening sweet-odoured presence. Through summer days one saw the "fever van" carrying off some child, who only too often would be seen no more. Home Companion, 1885 on the dangers of ladies riding a bicycle: *************************************************************** The mere act of riding a bicycle is not in itself sinful and if it is the only way of reaching the church on Sunday it may be excusable. On the other hand, if walking or riding in the usual way is discarded for the sake of exercise or exhilaration bicycle riding affords, it is clearly wrong. Grace Foakes, Between High Walls: ********************************* When a new baby arrived we would hear people ask "Has it come to stay?" Grace Foakes, My Part Of The River (on conditions in the East End of London): ***************************************************************************** Although this was a poor working-class community, people had a great sense of values regarding moral behaviour. Each woman kept to her man and would not have dreamt of doing otherwise. Sometimes the men were very cruel to their women, especially when in drink. I have heard many a woman screaming and shouting as a drunken man gave her a good hiding. The following day she would emerge with black eyes and a swollen face, yet would not utter a word against her husband - and woe betide anyone who did! Not a word would she have against him On allowing women to sit exams for entry to Oxford and Cambridge 1863: ********************************************************************** The Lancet (medical journal): Giving them a boy’s education will damage their reproductive organs. Dr. Spencer (medical doctor): Higher education will produce flat-chested women unable to suckle their babies.