Home Life

Family life and how big families fitted into small houses

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Context and local history are in purple.

Thirteenth century

Economic growth meant that peasant families could manage their small holdings and earn some funds on the side, by spinning or brewing ale etc. This meant that they could marry earlier and they started to buy furniture, clothes, utensils, pottery etc and to eat puddings and pies and drink ale.

People of this period tended to be taller than at the start of the nineteenth century. There is no sign that girls were undervalued at this time.

Victorian Period

Home Life in the towns and cities

Folk in London and the larger cities escaped the noise, crowds and impure air into their homes. By the 1850s, people were spending more on domestic comforts and started to keep their parlour or front room for special occasions.

Late Victorian period

Life at home

Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter VI, the Besieged Generation: In their houses the good, solid, hand-made furniture of their forefathers had given place to the cheap and ugly products of the early machine age. A deal table, the top ribbed and softened by much scrubbing; four or five windsor chairs with the varnish blistered and flaking; a side table for the family photographs and ornaments, and a few stools for fireside seats, together with the beds upstairs, made up the collection spoken of by its owners as 'our few sticks of furniture'. If the father had a special chair in which to rest after his day's work was done, it would be but a rather larger replica of the hard windsors with wooden arms added.

As ornaments for their mantelpieces and side tables the women liked gaudy glass vases, pottery images of animals, shell-covered boxes and plush photograph frames.

Those who could find the necessary cash covered their walls with wall-paper in big, sprawling, brightly coloured flower designs. Those who could not, used whitewash or pasted up newspaper sheets.

Monday was washing-day, and then the place fairly hummed with activity.

After their meagre midday meal, the women allowed themselves a little leisure. In summer, some of them would take out their sewing and do it in company with others in the shade of one of the houses. Others would sew or read indoors, or carry their babies out in the garden for an airing. A few who had no very young children liked to have what they called 'a bit of a lay down' on the bed.

There is an In Our Time podcast on the Victorian reformer Octavia Hill, pioneer of social housing and campaigner for public open spaces.

Small houses, big families

The Rev J C Atkinson, a local historian, describes visiting local cottages at Skelton in 1841: ‘We then went to two cottage dwellings in the main street. As entering from the street or roadside, we had to bow our heads, even although some of the yard-thick thatch had been cut away about and above the upper part of the door, in order to obtain an entrance. We entered on a totally dark and unflagged passage. On our left was an enclosure partitioned off from the passage by a boarded screen between four and five feet high, and which no long time before had served the purpose originally intended, namely that of a calves’ pen. Farther still on the same side was another dark enclosure similarly constructed, which even yet served the purpose of a henhouse. On the other side of the passage opposite this was a door, which on being opened gave admission to the living room, the only one in the dwelling. The floor was of clay and in holes, and around on two sides were the cubicles, or sleeping boxes – even less desirable than the box beds of Berwickshire as I knew them fifty years ago – for the entire family. There was no loft above, much less any attempt at a ‘chamber’ ; only odds and ends of old garments, bundles of fodder and things of that sort and in this den the occupants of the house were living’.

Of the sleeping arrangements at a farm near Kilton Castle: ‘What I found was one long low room, partitioned off into four compartments nearly equal in size. But the partitions were in their construction and character merely such as those between the stalls in a stable, except that no gentleman who cared for his horses would have tolerated them in his hunting or coaching stable. These four partitioned spaces were no more closed in the rear than the stalls in an ordinary stable, and the partitions were not seven feet, hardly six and a half in height, while the general gangway for all the occupants was along the open back. The poor woman said to me, as she showed me the first partition, allotted to her husband and herself and their two youngest children, the next to their children growing rapidly up to puberty, the third to the farm girls, and the fourth to the man and farm lad, “How can I keep even my children clean when I can only lodge them so ?.”

Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter X, Daughters of the Hamlet: Then there was the sleeping problem. None of the cottages had more than two bedrooms, and when children of both sexes were entering their teens it was difficult to arrange matters, and the departure of even one small girl of twelve made a little more room for those remaining. When the older boys of a family began to grow up, the second bedroom became the boys' room. Boys, big and little, were packed into it, and the girls still at home had to sleep in the parents' room. They had their own standard of decency; a screen was placed or a curtain was drawn to form a partition between the parents' and children's beds; but it was, at best, a poor makeshift arrangement, irritating, cramped, and inconvenient. If there happened to be one big boy, with several girls following him in age, he would sleep downstairs on a bed made up every night and the second bedroom would be the girls' room. When the girls came home from service for their summer holiday, it was the custom for the father to sleep downstairs that the girl might share her mother's bed. It is common now to hear people say, when looking at some little old cottage, 'And they brought up ten children there. Where on earth did they sleep?' And the answer is, or should be, that they did not all sleep there at the same time. Obviously they could not. By the time the youngest of such a family was born, the eldest would probably be twenty and have been out in the world for years, as would those who came immediately after in age. The overcrowding was bad enough; but not quite as bad as people imagine.