The Victorian Era

What Was Life Like for a Victorian Child?

Article · History & Overview · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The experience of childhood in the Victorian era varied enormously by class, by region, by gender, and by the period in which the child was born. The children of the upper and middle classes enjoyed a long childhood of education, play, and dependence, in a private home with nurseries, governesses, and nannies. The children of the working class had a much shorter childhood, and they were often sent out to work at a very early age. The contrast between the two experiences was one of the central facts of Victorian life, and it was a major cause of the reform movements of the mid and late Victorian period. Between 15 and 20 per cent of infants died before their first birthday, and roughly a third of all children died before their fifth. The history of childhood in the period is examined in Victorian Daily Life and Society and in Victorian Society, Class, and Daily Life. The broader historical context is set out in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

The Idea of Childhood

The Victorian era was the period in which the modern idea of childhood was formed. The children of the upper and middle classes were seen as innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection, and they were kept in a separate world of the nursery, the schoolroom, the playground, and the seaside holiday. The children of the working class were seen very differently, especially in the early part of the period, and they were often put to work as soon as they were physically able to contribute. The contrast between the two views of childhood was one of the great moral issues of the Victorian era, and it was eventually resolved by the education acts, the factory acts, and the children’s welfare legislation of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

The new idea of childhood was associated with the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the poetry of William Wordsworth, with the novels of Charles Dickens, and with the work of the kindergarten reformer Friedrich Froebel. The Victorian middle-class child was dressed in special clothes, was given special toys, was given special books, and was surrounded by special adults whose task was to protect and to educate. The material culture of Victorian childhood is examined in Victorian Children’s Clothing.

The Working-Class Child

The working-class child of the early Victorian period had a very different experience. The children of the rural poor worked in the fields from an early age, scaring birds, gathering stones, weeding, and tending animals. The children of the industrial towns worked in the factories, in the mines, and in the workshops. The 1841 census reported that, in some districts, a quarter of the children under the age of ten were at work. The children worked long hours, in dangerous conditions, for very low pay, and they received little or no education. The Factory Act of 1833 had limited the working hours of children under nine in textile mills to eight hours a day, and the Mines Act of 1842 had restricted the employment of women and children underground, but the laws were poorly enforced and the abuses continued for some decades. Chimney sweeps, often small boys as young as five, were sent up the narrow chimneys of the new industrial cities, and the practice was not effectively regulated until the Chimney Sweepers Act of 1875. The reform of child labour is examined in the page on the Industrial Revolution.

The reform of child labour was one of the great moral campaigns of the Victorian era. Lord Shaftesbury, the most important of the reformers, used the testimony of the children themselves to bring the issue to public attention. The report of the Children’s Employment Commission of 1842, in which the young Matthew Hindley described his work in a coal mine, was a landmark in the history of the campaign. The campaign led to a long series of acts that gradually restricted the employment of children, that required the children to attend school, and that protected the children from the worst abuses. The Ten Hours Act of 1847, which limited the working day of women and children in factories, was a particular landmark. The political history of the period is examined in Victorian Political History.

The Middle-Class Child

The middle-class child of the Victorian era had a very different experience. The middle-class child was born into a comfortable home, was cared for in infancy by the mother, the nurse, the nanny, or the monthly nurse, and was weaned onto a diet of bread and milk and rusks. The middle-class child was dressed in special clothes, including the famous pinafore of the period, and was photographed regularly by the family photographer. The middle-class child was introduced to the alphabet, to the prayer book, to the catechism, and to the stories of the Bible from an early age. The cultural history of the middle-class child is examined in Children’s Literature in the Victorian Era.

The middle-class child was educated. The boys were sent to a preparatory school, often a boarding school, at the age of eight or ten, and then on to a public school such as Eton, Rugby, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury, or Marlborough. The girls were educated at home, by a governess, until the second half of the century, when the girls’ public school movement gathered pace. The curriculum of the boys’ schools was dominated by the classics, the curriculum of the girls’ schools by the accomplishments, including music, drawing, French, and domestic economy. The history of Victorian education is examined in the page on Victorian education.

The Education Acts

The education of Victorian children was transformed by a series of statutes. The Factory Act of 1833 had required the children in textile mills to be given two hours of schooling a day. The Mines Act of 1842 had made provision for the schooling of children in mining communities. The Education Act of 1870, the work of William Forster, had established a system of school boards with the power to build and to maintain elementary schools. The Mundella Act of 1880 had made school attendance compulsory for children between the ages of five and ten. The Free Education Act of 1891 had made elementary schooling free. The Balfour Act of 1902 had established the system of local authority secondary schools that would dominate the twentieth century. By the end of the Victorian period, elementary education was effectively universal, and the school attendance officer had become a familiar figure in every town. The political history of the education acts is examined in Victorian Political History.

The Children of the Poor

The children of the very poor, the children of the slum, and the children of the streets had the most difficult experience of all. The slum children of London, of Manchester, of Glasgow, and of Dublin lived in conditions of extreme poverty, and they were often malnourished, ill-clothed, and sick. The slum children were a source of considerable anxiety to the Victorian middle class, and they were the subject of a long series of reform efforts, including the ragged schools, the boarding-out system, the industrial schools, and the reformatories. The ragged school movement began with John Pounds, a Portsmouth shoemaker, who took in poor children from 1819 onwards. Thomas Barnardo opened his first home for destitute boys at 18 Stepney Causeway in 1870, and by 1900 the Dr Barnardo’s homes were caring for over 8,000 children. The history of social reform is examined in Victorian Morality and Social Reform.

The children of the streets were also the subject of literary and artistic attention. Charles Dickens, the novelist of the period, used the street child in several of his novels, including Oliver Twist (1837 to 1839) and David Copperfield (1849 to 1850), and the figure of the orphan, the street Arab, and the deserving poor child became one of the central figures of the Victorian imagination. The literary treatment of the child is examined in Children’s Literature in the Victorian Era.

The Cult of Childhood

The late Victorian period saw the rise of what historians call the “cult of childhood”, in which the family, the school, and the new children’s literature all combined to produce a new ideal of the child. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) inaugurated a new era of imaginative writing for children. George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) extended the form. Beatrix Potter, whose first Peter Rabbit story was privately printed in 1901, opened the Edwardian era with a new blend of naturalism and fantasy. The “Children’s Hour” of family readings, the nursery rhyme book, and the board game all flourished. The combination of protection, education, and imaginative play that we now think of as the modern childhood was, in large part, a Victorian invention.

The Children of the Empire

The Victorian era was the period in which the children of the British Empire came to form a significant proportion of the British population in the world. The emigration of British families to the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the posting of British officials to India, the Caribbean, and Africa, and the work of missionaries and educators in every part of the empire all created a global childhood. The children of the empire grew up with the new media of the period, including the illustrated magazine, the photograph, the toy soldier, and the board game, and they were exposed to the imperial ideology of the period. The history of childhood in the empire is examined in British Empire in the Victorian Era.