Growing Up in Victorian Britain

Victorian Britain was a world of overcrowded cities, intensive industrialization, mounting fortunes, and shameful poverty. Yet it was also a world of exciting new discoveries. It was a world of callous indifference to the plight of the working class, but also of far-reaching social and legal reforms. How did the lifestyles of the rich and the poor child differ in Victorian times? Sheila Ferguson looks at their homes and schools, their family life, the books they read, the games they played. She describes the child of the upper classes, his life secure but strictly disciplined; and the poor child at work -- in the mills, down the mines, sweeping the chimneys, and "below stairs."