So, you call this life?

So, you call this life?

(Life of a working class Victorian)

 

Life (if you can call it that) of a working class Victorian was hard.

‘Oh! Tis hard, ‘tis hard to be working

The whole of the livelong day,

When all the neighbours about one

Are off to their jaunts and play.’

Manchester Song, Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell

 

“You can’t sit with us”

This famous line from Mean Girls can really be implied to the working class. They were literally outsiders to rest of society. As Engles says ‘I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie.’ (Engels 59) During the Victorian era there was a social hierarchy and this consisted of; the upper class, middle class and the lower class which was where the working class were placed. The working class made up four-fifths of the entire nation. They were made of those who did manual labour as a means of work. Their life was not easy as you will see.

“There’s no place like home”

Well, for a working class Victorian anywhere would have been better than what they had to call home. The working class had terrible living conditions. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton in which she highlights the living conditions of the working class. Her description of one of the streets really gives you a sense of how they were living as the houses were cramped together in order to fit as many in one street.

‘dingy –looking street, consisting principally of public houses, pawn-brokers’ shops, rag –and – bone warehouses and dirty provision shops… narrow  back-street , not twenty feet wide, and miserably lighted and paved.’ (Gaskell p47)

The houses the working class lived in were small and were in terrible conditions. As Engels says there were ‘slums, where the working class [were] crowded together.’ (Engels 39)  

This was a study done during the Victorian era to find out about how many people on average there were in a house. This shows how there were many people cramped into one house and often sharing the same bed as there wasn’t enough money.  

(Taken from A Social History of the English Working Classes, Eric Hopkins, p.18)

 

The description of the Davenport’s house shows the typical living conditions for a family living in these situations.

‘foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside…and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black.’ (Gaskell 57)

This description shows how rough they were living as they were not even living in a proper house the whole family were living in the basement. They could barely afford to live in a house and so many families ended up sharing houses. Their homes were not kept and became extremely dirty as they did not have the time or money to make it a pleasant place to live. As seen by the description above the children were left to play around in the dirt and as the parents were ill and on the verge of starvation there was no one to care for them. In many cases the parents often died or left their children so that they became orphans as they were not able to look after them. This can be seen in Dickens Oliver Twist, where all the boys in the workhouse were orphans. This was something that happened regularly due to the high rates of poverty.

“I can’t be asked for work today”

This is something we all say so often, but just imagine working during the Victorian era. The conditions they worked in were poor to say the least. There were lots of different types of work from selling on the streets to working as a coal miner and one of the most common types of work which was working in a factory.

 “Work insurance? Lol, what’s that?”

“If I hurt myself at work I’ll sue” Lol, try saying that during the Victorian era, if you hurt yourself then good luck to you as no one’s going to help you. Factories were not a safe place to work, there was no health and safety back then and as a result of the unsafe machinery there were a lot of accidents and in some cases death. Mines were also not a safe place to work as seen by this account of an accident in 1842.

‘The chief miners, the undergoers, were lying on their sides, and with their picks were clearing away the coal to a height a little more than two feet. Boys were employed in clearing out what the men had disengaged… mass of coal will suddenly fall and crush the men and boys engaged. Fortunately are they if they escape with their lives, but broken bones they cannot fail to have to endure.’ (Hopkins p.8)

 Despite these risks they needed the money and worked in order to provide a living for their family. In Mary Barton we see how some of the women including Mary became seamstresses. The working conditions were not any better as they had to work long hours and as seen through Margret Jennings she begins to lose her sight as a result but is in need of the money so much she has to continue working despite her lack of sight. And to think we complain about going into work for a few hours when these guys risked their lives at work and were stuck in same job since they were a kid!

Child labour

Remember when you were a kid and you were asked to do something and you didn’t really want to so you would say “Omg this is child labour, I shouldn’t have to do this!” Well … it used to be an actual thing. As many families needed money they sent off their young children to work. Children as young as 11 were sent off to work and they did all types of jobs from working in factories to becoming chimney sweepers. One of the main reasons children were so widely employed was because they could be easily exploited by those in charge. They were made to work long hours and were paid very little.  Also by employing children they could keep down the wages of male adult as if they tried to ask for higher wages they could simply hire more children. As a result children resulted in their fathers having low wages meaning that they had to work in order to help bring in money for the family and so it was an endless cycle.

In Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton she shows how many people became factory workers and many of them started from a young age as she says ‘Group of … girls, whose ages might range from twelve to twenty’ (Gaskell p.6) Compared to nowadays when the legal age you are allowed to work is sixteen and even so you are not allowed to do many jobs as you are considered too young. These factory workers were entrusted with handling large pieces of machinery and age did not matter. Again Gaskell shows how working in a factory from a young age was the norm ‘A thorough specimen of a Manchester man, born of factory workers and himself bred up in youth, and living in manhood, among the mills (Gaskell 7)

Workhouses

Workhouses were the result of the New Poor Act which was established in 1834, it was the government’s way of trying to get rid of poverty. This new law meant that the poor and those who were elderly and sick were given shelter and food in exchange for them working. The workhouse provided those who stayed there with work as seen in the extract below.

‘The small and nimble fingers of little children being far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up of procuring apprentices from the different parish workhouses…being from the age of seven to the age of thirteen or fourteen years old. The custom was for the master to clothe… and to feed and too lodge them in an apprentice house near the factory. Overseers were appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost.’ (Hopkins 10)

In Dickens Oliver Twist we are shown how young orphan boys are compelled to a life of hard labour. Dickens shows how these children were neglected and how their childhood was taken away from them due to the unfair class system.  Although the workhouses did provide them with a means of life it was not a nice place to be living. They were often given small amounts of food which prompts the famous question from Oliver of ‘Please Sir, can we have some more?’

So, you think your life’s hard?

As you can see, life was hard for a common Victorian no matter what age you were. Unless you were born into money you would always have it tough. For the majority just living another day was a blessing as death was always around the corner for anyone be it by illness, starvation or from working.

Works cited:

Dickens Charles, Oliver Twist, Penguin Classics, London, 2003, Print

Engels Friedrich , The condition of the working class in England, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, Print

Gaskell Elizabeth, Mary Barton, Wandsworth Editions Limited, Great Britain, 2012, Print

Hopkins Eric, A Social History of the English Working Classes, Edward Arnold Ltd, London, 1979, Print

Inglis Brian, Poverty and the industrial revolution, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1971, Print

Nardinelli Clark, Child labour and the industrial revolution, Indiana University Press, United States of America, 1990, Print

British Library online resource, http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/themes/poverty-and-the-working-classes , Online source

Images cited:

Fig 1. Mean Girls Gif, Google images, Digital Image, [Accessed on 27^th November 2015]

http://giphy.com/search/you-cant-sit-with-us 

 

Fig 2. Drawing of a typical working class persons house, Google Images, Digital Image, [Accessed on 27^th November 2015]

http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2014/09/16/dirty-old-london-30-days-filth-day-8/ 

 

Fig 3. Factories in London, Google Images, Digital Image, [Accessed on 27^th November 2015] https://sites.google.com/a/online.sd71.bc.ca/human-rights-morgan-rachel-rylee/the-industrial-revolution

 

Fig 4. Child Labour, Google Images, Digital Image, [Accessed on 27^th November 2015]

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~hicks22a/classweb/Childlabor/WebsiteChildlabor/History.html