The rise of urban society saw a great majority of people living in towns at the end of the 19th century and, in industrial centres, the proportion of children was well above the national average. Horn examines their lifestyles and attitudes to them.

'A totally fascinating account of Victorian country life' -- The Good Book Guide This book describes the varied aspects of country life in the last century from a child's point of view. The author discusses all aspects of their day-to-day experiences, including living conditions, food, school life, work on the land, agricultural policies and how they affected children, local and cottage industries, the Church and its influence, and crime and punishment.

The rise of urban society saw a great majority of people living in towns at the end of the 19th century and, in industrial centres, the proportion of children was well above the national average. Horn examines their lifestyles and attitudes to them.

The experiences of children growing up in Britain during Victorian times are often misunderstood to be either idyllic or wretched. Yet, the reality was more wide-ranging than most imagine. Here, in colorful detail and with firsthand accounts, Frost paints a complete picture of Victorian childhood that illustrates both the difficulties and pleasures of growing up during this period. Differences of class, gender, region, and time varied the lives of children tremendously. Boys had more freedom than girls, while poor children had less schooling and longer working lives than their better-off peers. Yet some experiences were common to almost all children, including parental oversight, physical development, and age-based transitions. This compelling work concentrates on marking out the strands of life that both separated and united children throughout the Victorian period. Most historians of Victorian children have concentrated on one class or gender or region, or have centered on arguments about how much better off children were by 1900 than 1830. Though this work touches on these themes, it covers all children and focuses on the experience of childhood rather than arguments about it. Many people hold myths about Victorian families. The happy myth is that childhood was simpler and happier in the past, and that families took care of each other and supported each other far more than in contemporary times. In contrast, the unhappy myth insists that childhood in the past was brutal—full of indifferent parents, high child mortality, and severe discipline at home and school. Both myths had elements of truth, but the reality was both more complex and more interesting. Here, the author uses memoirs and other writings of Victorian children themselves to challenge and refine those myths.

US scholars of literature explore how illustrated books became a cultural form of great importance in England and Scotland from the 1830s and 1840s to the end of the century. Some of them consider particular authors or editions, but others look at general themes such as illustrations of time, maps and metaphors, literal illustration, and city scenes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology—railways, street-lighting, and sewers—transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expanded in every direction. Now Judith Flanders, one of Britain's foremost social historians, explores the world portrayed so vividly in Dickens' novels, showing life on the streets of London in colorful, fascinating detail.From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved English novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, with him, Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses and the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's meticulously researched, captivatingly written The Victorian City will ever view London in the same light again.