Social divisions in British history : childhood in Victorian Britain

Abstract EN

Victorian Britain, the heart of the famous British Empire which set on five continents, synonymous to power, glory and wealth, is a remarkable and most significant period of British social history and even of universal history.

However, despite being the pioneer of technological inventions and the industrial revolution, as well as of children and women emancipation, it was also an era of social paradoxes: poverty, crime, prostitution, striking inequalities, and most of all a shocking segregation and economic exploitation of the children.

The rigid division into three distinct classes that characterized Victorian society: the upper, middle and working- classes will be duplicated exactly in the world of children.

We had on one side, the working- class child exploited to an inhuman and unprecedented extent in mines, factories and compelled to contribute to the family budget just like adults; on the other side, the children of the middle and upper- classes, well-off, over protected and looked after by a great array of nannies and governesses.

A cross-class study of children of each social class showed economic differences as well as differences in ideologies, morality, and values regarding the children's roles and lives in the work market and within the family unit.

However, despite the variables specific to each class of children, three important dimensions in the parent-child interactions seem to have been common to all children: age and gender discrimination, as well as physical segregation.