The role that children play in society, and peoples' perceptions of children and childhood alter over time. These pages consider these themes in relation to children in the parish of Stogumber in West Somerset, focussing on the nineteenth century or what we might broadly call Victorian Stogumber.
This page sets out some general observations about the context of children's lives in Stogumber at that time. Subsequent pages consider four aspects of childhood in the period drawing on information found in court cases, apprentice registers, and the school log book, as well as in published material such as The Victoria County History.
This information was given in a talk to Stogumber History Society in March 2010.
Number
If we were able to travel back in time and visit Stogumber in the 1800s, one of the things we would notice would be how many children there were. There would have been kids everywhere. This wasn’t peculiar to Stogumber, but was true of England more generally. In the 40 years between 1810 and 1850 the population of England doubled and as a result a very large proportion of the population were young: by mid century a half of the population were aged under 15 (compared with less than 1/5th now); and fully a third of the population were aged under 10. At the other end of the scale just over 1/10th were aged over 65 compared to just over a quarter of the parish now aged. So it was a much younger population with many more children.
Death
The second feature which might strike a visitor from the present travelling back to Nineteenth Century Stogumber would be the high number of children that died. Whilst a large proportion of the population were under 15, so too were a large number of those who died. Around half of the funerals in the first half of the century in Stogumber were for those aged under 20. Four out of ten funerals were for those aged under 10. In some years the figure could be even higher. In 1841 six out of ten funerals in the parish were for children aged under 10. If we think of this another way, around a half of all the bones which have been laid to rest in the churchyard will be those of children.
The Pinn family for instance – William a shoemaker and his wife Mary had 8 children but they lost their first born, John; their fourth, Mathew; and their sixth, William – all of whom perished in their first year of life.
Or the Stephens family from Kingswood – the father an agricultural labourer who lost Sarah, James and Charles in their infancy leaving them with only two surviving children.
Or William and Ann Ware, who had six children but lost two of them, Jane and John, in the first year of life.
These families were not at all untypical. Childhood and death walked hand in hand. Around 1 in 5 children died before their first birthday; between a quarter and a half of all children died before the age of 10.
These figures started to improve after 1860 with childhood mortality, but not infant mortality falling markedly. Whereas a half of all deaths in the parish were for children under 15 in the early decades of the 1800s, by the end of the century this figure had itself halved, to around a quarter of all deaths. And of these a half were for children under one year old, a figure which would remain stubbornly high until medical advances in the following century. Nevertheless it is still sobering stuff and mercifully marks a significant difference from the present.
Poverty
A third and final general point is that while childhood and death were companions, so too were childhood and poverty. We might think back to Victorian Stogumber and imagine scenes of rosy faced children dancing around the Maypole, or playing happily outside the cottage door, or some other sentimental rural image that you see on chocolate boxes and birthday cards –but the reality was of course very different.
It’s funny that this idea of a rural Victorian idyll persists because we think the exact opposite of towns during the period: these were the haunt of Oliver Twist and Fagan, and boys going up chimneys and children working in monstrous conditions in factories and so on. But when we think of the countryside we revert to a sort of Lark Rise to Candleford version of history, an altogether more wholesome and rose tinted view. But the reality of course was that the degree of poverty and the scrabble for existence was if anything even worse in rural areas than it was in towns, and this became increasingly true as the century progressed.
To get some idea of the scale of the problem in 1834 - at the time when the parish poor relief was terminated the parish had a population of around 1300 – 117 adults received poor relief but a further 329 children were also in receipt of poor relief. Perhaps a half of all the children in the parish were living in poverty at this stage. Poverty in this context would be lacking the means to be able to have sufficient food, or clothes or fuel for warmth. But poverty got worse not better after the loss of the of the relatively generous system of parish relief and by the later decades of the century perhaps somewhere around two thirds of children in the parish would have been living in poverty.
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Families
Although the birth rate was much higher in Victorian England, family life experienced by children was not too dissimilar from the present day. If we take a family as being people with the same surname who live under the same roof, then by far the most common family size in the parish was four people – that is to say two parents and two children living together; three quarters of families had less than five people.
The reason for this anomoly was the high rate of child mortality and the young age at which children left home.
There were some larger families, but these were a minority – less than one in ten had more than eight family members living together.
Also – and perhaps contrary to popular belief – two generations per household was the norm – that is to say parents lived with their children in nuclear families as they do nowadays, rather than three generations living under the same roof in extended family structures.
Another similarity to the present is that the proportion of children who lived with step parents was also much the same as it is now. The difference is that now the prevalence of step parents is largely due to divorce or marriage breakdown, but then it was due to the death of one of the parents.
So for instance a typical Stogumber family would have been that of John Branchflower, a thatcher who in 1851 was aged 24 and lived with his 23 year old wife and their new baby;
Or William Wood 29, a solicitors clerk who lived with his wife Eliza, a milliner and their three children who were 6,5 and 3.
Or John and Sarah Maddock. John was an agricultural labourer aged 37 who along with Sarah lived with their three sons, aged 14, 12 and 4
The family unit then was not that different to what we might expect to find today.
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