The Victorian Town Child

by Pamela Horn

As nineteenth-century Britain became increasingly urbanized and industrialized, the number of children living in towns grew rapidly. At the same time, Horn considers the increasing divisions within urban society, not only between market towns and major manufacturing and trading centers, but within individual towns, as rich and poor became more segregated.
During the Victorian period, public attitudes toward children and childhood shifted dramatically, often to the detriment of those at the lower end of the social scale--including paupers and juvenile delinquents. Drawing on original research, including anecdotes, first-hand accounts, and a wealth of photographs, The Victorian Town Child describes in detail the changing lives of all classes of Victorian town children, from those of prosperous business and professional families to working-class families, where unemployment and overcrowding were particular problems. Horn also examines the issues of juvenile labor and exploitation, how factory work and education were combined, how crime and punishment were dealt with among children, and the changes in health and infant death rates over the period.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

248 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1996

About the author

Pamela Horn is an historian specialising in Victorian social history. The author of acclaimed books on rural life, servant lives and childhood, she lectured on economic and social history at Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University, for over twenty years.

Reviews

[David Forsyth]

Horn's work, dense with insights and statistics, is an interesting study of the lives of urban nineteenth century minors with respect to their employment, education and well-being. The book explores the efforts of adults to both exploit and protect urban children amid varying conditions throughout Queen Victoria's reign. While those who read for entertainment alone may find The Victorian Town Child slightly lacking, those with a passion for histroy, particularly social history, will find this non-fiction work worthy of the investment of a few hours of reading.

[Nick]

I used this book extensively when I was researching my book on Dickens, in order to get a fuller picture of the lot of the Victorian child that Dickens wrote about so richly. So much of our modern era still derives in some way, or was begun in, the Victorian era. Pamela Horn's book is well-researched and extremely helpful in making clear what the child was up against in the era before the germ theory of disease.

[Shelley]

Read and re-read. Excellent book if you want to learn about life in the Victorian era

[Jbondandrews]

I really enjoyed this book. It told me a lot about what life was like for my Great Grandmother and her siblings at the end of the 19th century.