The Working Class in England 1875-1914

John Benson, John Benson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317268796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

First published in 1985. Too often aspects of working-class life have been treated as distinct and separate. The contributors to this volume are aware of the dangers of such atomisation and have attempted to bring together a collection of studies which add to our knowledge of life in that time. The examinations of family, health, work, leisure and criminal trends form the basis of this work, and suggest that the everyday lives and values of the working-class were even more varied, creative and complex than is generally believed. This title will be of interest to students of history.

Chapter One The Family

Elizabeth Roberts

DOI: 10.4324/9781315637693-1

I

This chapter will concentrate on certain aspects of working class family life, notably the socialisation of children and young people, and the interaction in their lives of home, work and school. It is almost impossible to define in terms of age who exactly was a late Victorian or Edwardian child. There were no recognised rites of passage between childhood and adulthood; on the one hand, quite young children adopted heavy responsibilities; on the other, young people of twenty could be very much under their parents’ control. James Walvin in A Child’s World also had some problem in defining a child and finally settled on the age limit of fourteen. ‘Yet the age of fourteen, particularly at the end of our period, has a more than arbitrary importance, it was the predominant school leaving age and the limit of childhood criminality.’¹ For many reasons which will become apparent in the chapter, no precise definition of children and young people by age has been attempted, although most of the evidence relates to the under twenties.

The evidence used is drawn not only from secondary documentary sources but also from oral ones, and selections are used from an extensive archive of oral evidence collected from 170 old people in south Cumbria and Lancashire. This evidence is particularly useful in an analysis of family life because so many facets of that life are not recorded in official documents.² it must also be apparent that the bulk of the oral evidence will relate most directly to the last 25 years of the period 1875–1914.

It has been suggested, both during the period itself and subsequently, that the family was the most important socialising agent in a child’s life. Helen Bosanquet, a prominent member of the Charity Organisation Society, wrote in 1906, ‘Apart from the fact that no one has ever devised an adequate substitute for a parent, the further fact remains that the family with its mingled diversity and identity of interests is the best, if not indeed, the only school of life of its citizens.’³ Philip McCann wrote in 1977 that ‘The moderate functionalist definition of socialisation is usually on the lines of the transmission of culture, the process whereby men learn rules and practices of social groups? the family is considered as the primary agency and the school or other formal educational institutions as secondary in transmitting skills, values and social norms.’⁴ (Ironically, but possibly inevitably, because of the difficulty of finding evidence about socialisation within the family, other than from oral sources, the book then concentrates on the provision of education and the process of socialisation by formal educational agencies). Stephen Humphries has written: ‘It is difficult ... to establish the precise significance of schooling as an agency of socialisation ... legislators ... severely underestimated the extent and intensity of resistance to provided education. This opposition was rooted in the values and modes of behaviour that were learned from the family, the neighbourhood and street culture. Indeed it is likely that agencies of socialisation operating outside the school exercised a much more profound influence upon the morals and manners of the working class child than the school teacher in the classroom.’⁵ While one might wish to question the existence of widespread active resistance to provided schooling, there can be little question of the paramount importance of the family in the socialisation of the working class child and youth throughout the period under discussion.

It is of course obvious that no working class family existed in either an economic, social, or moral vacuum. It can be argued that virtually all aspects of a family’s background had some influence on their behaviour whether as parents or as children. There is much truth in this but an attempt has to be made to analyse the more obvious influences and constraints on the ways in which working class parents consciously socialised their children.

Firstly the economic standing of working class families was very important. The studies of Victorian and Edwardian poverty are well known and demonstrate the extent of the problem.⁶ Charles Booth in his survey of life and labour in London in the 1880s and Seebohm Rowntree’s later study of York showed that many working class people had their basic needs unprovided for. Seebohm Rowntree developed the concept of a poverty line. He suggested that any family of four or five persons with an income of less than 21s 8d a week was below the poverty line and unable to afford the basic essentials of life.⁸ There are no comparable data available for Lancashire, but in the north of the county no unskilled man earned as much as 21s 8d before 1914, and many of course, had families larger than four to five persons. From the oral evidence it is clear that these families might not have been quite as poor as Rowntree’s hypothesis would suggest but it is also clear that their poverty and ways of making it less acute were one of their chief preoccupations.⁹ Questions of budgeting and of making ends meet affected many aspects of the working class child’s upbringing. Nor should it be presumed that the spectre of poverty only haunted the families of the lower paid. Skilled men and those in a supervisory capacity could earn nearly twice as much as a labourer in Edwardian England but that did not make them and their families comfortably off. Many men and women in this group remembered poverty very clearly, either as children or as young adults, before improved wages were achieved, and these memories influenced the ways in which their children were brought up.

Working class people were not simply economic pawns, with all aspects of their lives dominated by financial considerations. They acted according to a complex set of moral and ethical rules handed down from generation to generation. (These were obviously modified to some extent by each generation and each family but there is a strong impression of continuity and conformity in the late Victorian and Edwardian period). The original sources for these mores are of course difficult to ascertain. Much of the moral philosophy of the working class can be traced to the Bible, and the teaching of the churches. Religion, throughout this period, continued to play an important part in working class life.¹⁰ Working class people did not however tend to be concerned with theological debates, but followed what was widely considered to be the basic Christian teaching of loving your neighbour? added to which was a widespread belief in judgement and punishment for wrong doing and this sometimes resulted in an observable (but unrecognised by those holding them) ambivalence in attitudes to, and in relationships with, others. Added to these basic moral standards was an overwhelming devotion to respectability.¹¹ Some observers have divided the working class into the respectable majority and the rough minority, but it is clear from oral evidence that while the rough might not have followed or accepted all the standards of the truly respectable (they tended to swear and fight for example!), they also had their own pretensions to some respectability.

The characteristics of respectability are well known: a devotion to the work ethic and to apparent cleanliness; an avoidance of swearing, fighting and discussion of sexual matters; and a respect for other people and their property. Although the features and existence of respectability are easy to observe, their origin is difficult to establish. E.P. Thompson saw Methodism as contributing to the rationalisation of work through self-discipline, whereby the labourer must be turned into his own slave driver.¹² Many examples of a passionate devotion to the work ethic can be found in both documentary and oral evidence but by the end of the nineteenth century it was certainly not confined to members of any particular religious sect but could be found in them all. The other elements of respectability can probably also be traced to religious sources so that from the Bible and especially the Ten Commandments came the rejection of stealing, swearing and adultery; from the Pauline tradition came the suppression of sexuality and from the Methodist tradition the idea of cleanliness being next to godliness. From the by now well established industrial discipline there flowed the virtues of punctuality, obeying authority and self-discipline. Some historians have suggested that these standards were somehow imposed on the working class child by external agencies, particularly schools, Stephen Humphries argued that one of the purposes of state education in the last decades of the nineteenth century was the amelioration of certain working class social problems ‘through an infusion of the bourgeois values such as hard work discipline and thought’.¹³ It is obvious that schools, churches and the work place did reinforce these values but it must be emphasised that these standards had become, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, internalised within the working class and were transmitted from generation to generation principally through the family. This chapter examines how these values were transmitted and some of the effects they had on the individual and on family and working class life in general.

II

The ways in which children learned their standards were complex and varied to some extent from family to family. They learned through a mixture of precept, example, exhortation, reward and punishment, and through the absorbing of unspoken but powerful assumptions. Virtually all working class children were expected to do as they were told by parents (no exceptions have been found to this generalisation), and to conform to the parents’ externally imposed standards and rules. Obedience was the prime virtue to be encouraged among the young.¹⁴ (This tradition did not disappear with the arrival of the twentieth century and was much discussed by sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s).¹⁵ There appears to have been no difference within the working class between the skilled and unskilled in their belief in the importance of child obedience. Some contemporary observers and later historians believed that there was. Alexander Paterson wrote, ‘Parental discipline is in fact a sure sign of prosperity or respectability.’¹⁶ John Gillis accepted this judgement: ‘Obedience on the part of the children was regarded as an especially important status symbol.’¹⁷ Standish Meacham wrote ‘Segregation was implied in the strict disciplinary standards imposed upon working class children in all but the most disreputable households.’¹⁸ It is not easy to define ‘most disreputable’ but it is clear from the oral evidence (which included that of some very rough families) that child obedience was always expected and child disobedience invariably punished.

Children were not of course angels and from time to time either wilfully or unintentionally transgressed their parents’ rules or fell below the expected standard of behaviour. The ways the misdemeanours were dealt with varied depending on the perceived seriousness of the offence and on the severity of the parents. Some children were never physically chastised at all. Mrs W. came from a family of fifteen and she said: ‘I don’t think any of us ever got hit ... He just used to speak to us and that was all.’¹⁹ Unlike Mrs W., Mr S. was more afraid of his mother than his father, ‘Odd times we might have been a bit thoughtless. She should say, “Now that wasn’t a wise thing to do. You want to think a bit more.” and she would point at you just like that and that was enough. If you merited a thick ear you got it. It wasn’t half measure, it was full weight’.²⁰ This reliance on the reprimand, supported by an occasional blow, was the most usual pattern. Some children were physically beaten frequently but these were a minority. Mr T.’s father was a soldier and later a docker, and in reply to a question about his strictness replied, ‘Very strict, there’s many a time he’s kicked me under the table’.²¹ (Robert Roberts claimed that ex-regulars from the army or navy had a bad reputation for the treatm...