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With no laws to protect children, this meant they had few rights and were badly treated. Seen as simply the property of their parents, many children were abandoned, abused and even bought and sold. Thought to be born evil, children needed to be corrected, punished and made to become good citizens.
Children as young as seven years old could be found working fourteen hours a day in the region's mills. Being small and nimble, they were given dangerous jobs such as climbing underneath moving machinery to remove any cotton pieces that had fallen below - this role was called being a 'scavenger'.
Babies born today are likely to live to 100, but children living in the 19th century would be lucky to survive beyond their 30th birthday. Often working for 12 hours per day, exhausted children would return home to a poor meal in a cramped, damp house in an overcrowded slum, where outbreaks of disease were commonplace.
Boys were usually caned on their backsides and girls were either beaten on their bare legs or across their hands. A pupil could receive a caning for a whole range of different reasons, including: rudeness, leaving a room without permission, laziness, not telling the truth and playing truant (missing school).
At the beginning of the Victorian period, children could be sent to adult prison. However, in 1854, special youth prisons were introduced to deal with child offenders, called 'Reformatory Schools'. Other forms of punishment included fines, a public whipping, hard physical labour or being sent to join the army.
Corporal punishment and physical chastisement were common throughout the Middle Ages, both for children and adults. Beating and harsh words were accepted ways to teach children, but there were also debates about how severe punishments should be.
Families were most important to Victorians. They were rather large compared to families nowadays, with an average of five or six children and their organization was also very patriarchal. Victorians encouraged hard work, respectability, social deference and religious conformity.
Life for Victorian children was very different from our lives today. Children in rich households had toys to play with and did not have to work, but children in poor households often had to work long hours in difficult, dangerous jobs. They didn't have toys to play with but sometimes made their own.
Victorian parents were not known for showing affection. In fact, they believed even minimal amounts of affection would spoil a child. Victorian parents were encouraged to never kiss or hug their children, only a peck on the forehead before bed if they really couldn't help themselves.
Victorian children didn't have computers or television so they played lots of games. Board games such as Snakes and Ladders, Ludo and Draughts were popular indoor games. Outdoors, Victorian children played with toys like hoops, marbles and skipping ropes, with friends in the street, or in the school playground.
As industry grew in the period following the Civil War, children, often as young as 10 years old but sometimes much younger, labored. They worked not only in industrial settings but also in retail stores, on the streets, on farms, and in home-based industries.
Poor children often made their own toys such as rag balls or, if they were lucky, bought cheap penny toys. Wealthier children played with dolls with wax or china faces, toy soldiers and train sets.
Typhoid. Typhoid during the Victorian era was incredibly common and remains so in parts of the world where there is poor sanitation and limited access to clean water. No section of society was spared – Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria contracted typhoid and died from it.
Victorian Attitudes. Unmarried mothers and their infants were considered an affront to morality and they were spurned and ostracised often by public relief as as well charitable institutions.
They sold middle class Victorians everything from toys, shrimp and even the old clothes of smallpox victims. And these remarkable photographs reveal the daily lives of adult and child street sellers including the Old Clo' Man and Kentish Herb Woman in Greenwich, South East.
Even if they survived life was hard for children. Most did not go to school. Instead, from an early age, they had to help the family by doing some work. Both parents and teachers were very strict and beating naughty children was normal.
In wealthy homes, the father was the head of the family and his word was never questioned. His role was to go to work and provide for the family. A woman's place was in the home. Her role was that of a good wife and mother.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
By 1900 it was 45 for men and 50 for women.
Valentina Vassilyeva and her husband Feodor Vassilyev are alleged to hold the record for the most children a couple has produced. She gave birth to a total of 69 children – sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets – between 1725 and 1765, a total of 27 births.
Victorians with more money enjoyed mutton, bacon, cheese, eggs, sugar, treacle and jam as part of their meals. Breakfast may involve ham, bacon, eggs and bread. People who lived near to the sea often ate a lot of fish too. Dishes like kedgeree were very popular.
Women who married in England in the 1860s bore an average of more than six children while their granddaughters who married in the 1910s bore fewer than three children, as the national birth-rate moved towards its nadir in 1933 (Anderson, 1990, pp.
Many historians believe that children in the Medieval Times were barely noticed and treated as small adults. Boys were forced to do hard labour on the fields, to enter military training or to learn their future occupation already in the early childhood, while girls of all classes had to help their mothers in household.
Those suspected of heresy and other religious crimes received the severest punishment of all: being burned at the stake. This not only meant a gruesome death, but no less terrible was the fact that due to the total destruction of one's body, one could no longer hope to undergo resurrection.
Swearing, or oaths, were an important part of medieval society. To swear and swearing kept society together and created order and provided consequences for those who broke their oaths. Breaking an oath could end in being shunned from society and even death.