Life in Victorian England by Christopher Hibbert

Author:Christopher Hibbert
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Royalty, 20th Century, Great Britain, 19th Century, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781640193239
Publisher: New Word City
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

It was not easy in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century. The laborer “comes home weary from his out-of-door work,” one recorder of Victorian country life observed, “having eaten his dinner under hedge or tree . . . then turns into a rude bed, standing perhaps on the farther side of his only room, and out again, before daylight if it be winter. . . . He is as simple, as ignorant and as laborious as the wagon-horses that he drives. From his childhood he had learned nothing but his work and had grown up into a tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ankle-booted fellow with a gait as graceful as one of his own plough-bullocks.” He never saw a newspaper, and if he had, he would not have been able to read it. He thought of little but food.

Some laborers, particularly those who had worked in the north, remembered being contented and well-fed with “any amount of bread and bacon, and plenty of home-brewed beer, and in the winter a sure, drowsy place by the kitchen fire . . . the open hearth with its chimney corner, the fire-shine glowing out dim and ruddy upon flitches of bacon hung around the room, and reddening upon the faces of sleepy boys.” But most recalled less happy times:

When I was ten I left school to work on a farm for £3 a year and my keep. . . . As a carter’s lad I helped to drive the horses and when there were two I had to walk between them while leading and often got trodden on. . . . Before bridges were built we often had difficulty in getting our horses and wagons across flooded streams. Often my clothes were quite wet when I took them off at night and still wet when I put them on again next morning. On Sundays I walked ten miles home to have dinner with my parents, and then walked ten miles back to start milking. . . . I was always hungry in that place.

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