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Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
Drugging, fraud, even murder – women couldn’t really commit such heinous crimes, could they? Rosalind Crone explores five audacious female-led felonies from the 18th and 19th centuries
1. The Victorian spiking crisis Female thieves took to drugging men’s drinks with opiates before cleaning out their victims’ pockets On 2 January 1865, Elizabeth Bagwell (alias Elizabeth Manning) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of “larceny from the person”, and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. It was a harsh punishment, reflecting the fact that she already had three previous convictions – but also that she was no ordinary pickpocket. Bagwell had spiked the drink of James Rintoul, a London cab driver, at her lodgings off Edgware Road, according to press reports of her committal hearing at the Marylebone Police Court. The drugged glass of gin she gave James was, he claimed, “so hot that it burnt my mouth”. He fell unconscious, and later woke to find himself “alone in the room, and in darkness. My gold watch and chain were gone… my ring also [and] 25 shillings from my pocket.” He had fallen victim to a crime commonly called ‘hocussing’, derived from ‘hocus pocus’ – the term used since the 17th century for conjuring, trickery or sleight of hand. By the late 19th century, ‘hocus’ had become shorthand for drugged liquor. Hocussing had become more prevalent by that time, likely because of the ready availability of cheap drugs including opium (in the form of laudanum), morphine and chloroform. Particularly in convivial social settings such as Victorian public houses, it was easy for thieves to slip drugs into drinks undetected. With their victims bewildered or unconscious, hocussers had time to search pockets thoroughly, remove any valuable jewellery and escape the scene of the crime, making pursuit and prosecution difficult. Poisoners in prison Hocussing was deployed by women and men against victims of both sexes. As a weapon of the weak, poison enabled female thieves to overcome stronger male victims. Men who had been lured by the promise of sex with women hocussers may have been reluctant to prosecute, for fear of reputational damage. Certainly, by 1865 Bagwell had already hocussed at least two other men – a medical student and a midshipman – both of whom declined to press charges. Following her release from prison on parole in 1869, she was convicted of theft from the person two more times. Her story suggests that there were probably many more victims of this technique – and many more female hocussers at work. 2. The counterfeit coin con Instead of stealing money from the pockets of others, some women had a go at literally making it themselves – and gambled with their lives On 3 September 1788, Elizabeth Alford went to a neighbour’s room in the lodging house she inhabited in Aldgate, London, to buy some thread. The neighbour, Christian Bowman (alias Catherine Murphy), was a single mother of three who worked as a servant in a public house and lived with a man named Hugh Murphy. On entering the room, Alford noticed “some bad money on the table”, and that Bowman and Murphy looked a bit shifty. “They wanted to shut me in,” Alford later told the court. Yet when she informed the couple that she had left her own door open, they let her go – and she went straight to her landlord, asking him to fetch an officer of the parish. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Credit-Element-Pictrures-BBC-430378-CMYK-37d46f5.jpg" width="4285" height="2855" alt="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire (Image by Element Pictures – BBC)" title="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire" /> Fatal consequences Later that day, officers caught Bowman and Murphy in the act of colouring pieces of base metal in the hope of passing them off as silver shillings. Bowman begged the officer for mercy, explaining that she had got involved in making counterfeit coins only after her husband had left her, and “never [passed] any bad money in the neighbourhood”. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. The pair were both convicted of coining at the Old Bailey court, and sentenced to death. Murphy was hanged, while Bowman was strangled and her body burned at the stake outside Newgate Gaol. Read more | Tudor angels of death: the 16th-century obsession with female killers Christian Bowman was one of 13 women burned for coining offences in England during the 18th century. It was a terrible punishment and used sparingly, but lawmakers believed it reflected the gravity of the crime, as coining was considered a form of treason. Between 1700 and 1789, 166 women were tried at the Old Bailey for coining offences. These included making, colouring or rubbing counterfeit coins; clipping or filing precious metal from legitimate coins; possessing tools to make counterfeit coins; and ‘uttering’ (trying to use) counterfeit coins. Only 65 of these women were found guilty, and about half of those were sentenced to death. Women represented around one third of those tried for coining offences in England in the 18th century, a surprisingly high proportion. Though some women, such as Bowman, made counterfeit coins with male accomplices, others worked in single-sex groups. Coining was an activity that could be done at home, and with the help of family members. Making fake coins required skill. Advances in the manufacture of legitimate coins, such as milled edges and gilding, made it harder for counterfeiters to produce convincing copies. Some women used the skills gained from other types of delicate finishing work to make coins; most almost certainly resorted to coining to supplement meagre wages. The levels of evidence required for prosecution were demanding. In addition, most ordinary people did not regard coining as a heinous offence. So there were likely many female coiners who never came to court – and simply got away with their crimes. 3. Maladies, magic and murder Fraudulent ‘wise women’ and ‘cunning folk’ scammed desperate people hoping for cures – and some resorted to poisoning their victims In March 1809, Mary Bateman was hanged at York for the murder of her client, Rebecca Perigo. Over the previous decade, Bateman, the wife of a wheelwright and the mother of four children, had been supplementing the family income by selling fortunes, charms and alternative medicines, and claimed to act as an intermediary for other ‘wise women’, including a Miss Blythe in Scarborough. Bateman’s name was often recommended to those in need of help, including Perigo, who was suffering from a “fluttering in her breast”, believed to be an “evil wish” that required the “arts of sorcery” to resolve. In May 1806 Bateman suggested that, with the help of Miss Blythe, Perigo could be cured – in time, and at some expense. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-463913393-CMYK-b6be386.jpg" width="4299" height="2864" alt="Three women sit around a burning cauldron. One is a fortune teller, who is older and bent over, with a blue headscarf. The two women visiting her are dressed in fancier clothes, with furs and hats" title="A scene such as this, showing two young women having their cards read by a fortune-teller, was a familiar one in the early 19th century" /> Over the following 12 months, Miss Blythe sent letters via Bateman to Rebecca and her husband, William, requesting money and various items – shoes, hat boxes, a tea caddy, eggs and bacon – in exchange for charms and spells to relieve Rebecca’s symptoms. Then in April 1807, Miss Blythe warned Rebecca and William that they would soon succumb to a terrible illness. To escape death, she told them, they must “eat pudding for six days and… put into it one of my powders everyday”. The powders contained poison, and Rebecca died. William continued to correspond with the ‘wise woman’ in Scarborough until October 1808, when he discovered that the charms were fake, that ‘Miss Blythe’ did not exist – and that Bateman had killed his wife. Repeat offender The unfortunate couple were the latest in a long list of ordinary and often desperate people duped by Bateman. Some lost only money and possessions; others also lost their lives. Bateman had earlier been publicly exposed as a fraud when she was caught pushing eggs, which contained the message “Christ is coming”, back up the oviduct of her supposedly prophetic hen. Yet her perfidious activities continued. The 1735 Witchcraft Act had made it a crime to pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, to tell fortunes, or to use “crafty science” to locate lost or stolen goods. Offenders were to be sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. This legislation did not stop Bateman nor, in all likelihood, others like her. Read more | Victorian murder scandals: what six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century We must not assume that all ‘cunning folk’ at the turn of the 19th century were knowingly fraudulent; some sincerely believed in their magic powers. The case of Bateman, though, exposes an unscrupulous side to this business – frauds who took advantage of ordinary people living in uncertain times, who sought explanations and remedies for misfortune and illness, and who continued to believe in the supernatural and the utility of magic. This type of criminal activity might have been far more prevalent than previously imagined. 4. Light-fingered lodgers People who rented rooms in furnished lodgings pilfered items to pawn or sell – and many probably got away with their crimes Criminal justice historians suspect that women perpetrated far more theft from private spaces than was ever prosecuted. Many domestic servants casually or even systematically appropriated or stole things from their employers. Larceny by a servant was even a specific category of offence. When the items were of relatively low (or sometimes even high) value, many masters and mistresses did not think taking such thieves to court was worthwhile. Instead, a pilfering servant was typically dismissed without a reference – a tough punishment. The case of Amelie Decuypere and her husband, Paul, sheds light on a different type of theft from the domestic space: taking goods from furnished lodgings. In July 1859, the Decuyperes were arrested in London, following a complaint made by their former landlord, David Berri. Just six days after moving into a furnished room in Berri’s house, the couple disappeared – along with a coffee pot, a clock and several paintings. To divert attention from their absence, or to indicate their intention to return, the couple left in the room a large chest that, on inspection, “turned out to be filled with straw”. The police found in the couple’s possession a pile of receipts issued by pawnbrokers for items exchanged for cash – property that “no doubt had been stolen from other lodgings”. Three landlords pressed charges, but the magistrate believed that there could have been “at least a dozen” victims in total. Amelie and Paul Decuypere got caught largely because of the impressive scale of their theft, and were sentenced to six and eight years’ penal servitude, respectively. Although Amelie remained silent during her trial, the judge and jury decided that she and her husband were equal partners in the crime. As historians have shown, women made good thieves in private spaces because they often best understood the value of domestic items. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang 5. Criminal credit crunch As retail opportunities opened up to wider society, female fraudsters abused ease of credit to take goods with no intention of paying for them For centuries, wealthy people in England purchased goods and services on credit, promising to pay at a later date. In the 19th century, as real wages were rising and the ‘retail revolution’ was under way, personal credit was extended to more people across society, including the upper working classes and women. This system relied on reputation and trust – and was increasingly open to abuse in densely populated urban environments. To gain credit, a woman needed simply to look respectable and to provide a plausible address. It was often difficult for those demanding payment to prove that unpaid debts were not bad debts but were criminal frauds. The difference hinged on whether there was ever an intention to pay: bad debt was dealt with by civil courts, while fraud ended up in the criminal courts. The popular depiction of the faux-aristocratic male swindler likely enabled many fraudulent women to escape detection simply because they didn’t fit that stereotype. One woman who did get caught was serial swindler Annie Gordon Baillie – not her real name, but one of some 40 aliases she used across her lifetime. The illegitimate daughter of a farm servant from Peterhead, Scotland, Annie harboured ambitions of wealth and fame. Her career included collecting money for fake charities and the ruthless exploitation of an aged baronet, but began and ended with the fraudulent acquisition of goods and services on credit. Annie ran up debts in cities across Britain and much farther afield: in Dundee, London and Broadstairs, but also in Rome, New York and Melbourne, Australia. In 1884, the London Association for the Protection of Trade warned about a woman using several aliases who had run up bills with piano manufacturers, chemists and other businesses. By 1888, the police in London and Edinburgh were on the case, and published a full expose in the Edinburgh Evening News. Despite this publicity, it wasn’t until four months later, on 23 June 1888, that the culprit was finally arrested. At Annie’s committal hearing, Detective Inspector Marshall said that the police had uncovered “hundreds, and probably to the extent of thousands” of frauds. “The prisoner is an extraordinary woman,” Marshall declared, “one of the greatest swindlers in the country.” Greed, and a love of attention, had led to Annie’s downfall. Had she been less flamboyant, by living more modestly and eschewing interviews about her outlandish charitable schemes, she might well have got away with it. This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
The industrial revolution caused huge growth in the urban population – and with it, a rising tide of human waste. Find out how the leaders of Victorian cities tried to cope with the excrement explosion that came hand-in-hand with the 19th century’s boom in industry
In the 1890s, Manchester’s civic leaders faced a mounting crisis. The city’s population had exploded, its industries were booming, and with them came an ever-growing tide of human waste. By the later decades of the 19th century, Victorian Britain’s sanitation revolution was well underway, but as historian Richard Jones explains in an April 2025 article from the Environment and History journal, ‘Excremental Flows: Manchester Corporation’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ and the Rampton Manor Estate, Nottinghamshire, 1892’ (available to purchase or access via a subscriber login), the transition from solid waste systems to water-borne sewage was anything but smooth. By the late Victorian era, Manchester’s “existing waste removal infrastructure – designed to deal with the much smaller volumes and narrower range of waste materials of the pre-industrial age – had begun to struggle with the prodigious quantities of polluting waste its people and factories now generated,” says Jones. The sanitary reformer Dr Southwood Smith vividly described a scene he was greeted with upon a visit to a Manchester privy in 1860: “The floor… is completely covered, several inches deep, with ashes and night-soil, so that it is impossible to get to the seat itself without being over shoes in abominable filth. The seat itself is, in every part, besmeared, and in some parts covered several inches deep, with the same filth.” By the mid-19th century, Manchester was already producing more than 100,000 tons of ‘night-soil’ (a euphemism for human excrement) annually. This waste was collected from thousands of ash-pits – an open pit into which all domestic waste and excrement was disposed, partially dried and deodorised by adding ashes from hearths and ovens – and privies. Then, it was often transported by rail to distant farming regions in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. But this system was expensive and increasingly unpopular. In one step to cope with the growing burden, Manchester introduced pail-closets, which replaced open cesspits and ash-pits with sealed containers that could be regularly emptied. By the late 1870s, the city had phased out most of its older waste systems, replacing them with 28,000 pail-closets and 10,000 water-closets. But the problem was far from solved. A deluge of waste “The total replacement, by the early 1880s, of cess-pits, ash-pits and middens by the pail-closet system represented an impressive achievement,” says Jones. “Yet still, in 1884, around 200,000 tons of waste were annually arriving at the Corporation’s depot.” Though unpleasant to deal with, this was valuable stuff – it was sold as night-soil or processed into a dry powder and marketed as concentrated manure that could be delivered to farmers up to 100 miles away in less than 24 hours. With the context of current attempts to quickly transform domestic heating systems from oil and gas boilers to air source heat pumps and solar, it’s notable that the municipal authorities of Victorian Manchester were able to drive domestic infrastructure change so rapidly. According to Dr Jones, “The Manchester authorities began with a rolling programme of improving existing infrastructure rather than replacing this with new technology. Retrofitting existing properties with water closets was more problematic but was solved by requiring landlords to do this work. Building in water closets and connecting to the sewers was much easier when planned from the outset in new builds.” However, the problems kept mounting as the population kept growing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Victorian-Poo-Alamy-DYEJHH-c2ff0ee.jpg" width="861" height="574" alt="A sketch from The Practical Magazine (1874) shows a vacuum pump used for removing night soil from cesspools (Image by Alamy)" title="A sketch from The Practical Magazine shows a vacuum pump used for removing night soil from cesspools (1874) (Image by Alamy)" /> Jones memorably describes the city authorities’ struggles to “keep their noses above the rising tide of excremental waste”. The challenge was made harder because Manchester was “water poor”, which made it difficult to implement a water-based sewer system. Plus, the 1876 Rivers Pollution Prevention Act had made it illegal to dump untreated sewage into rivers, cutting off one traditional route of disposal. Faced with these challenges, Manchester looked for new ways to rid itself of its waste. One solution was Carrington Moss, an area with 600 acres of boggy land and c500 acres of agricultural land on the city’s outskirts, purchased by the Manchester Corporation in 1886. Read more | Urban animals: the growth of city farms in 20th-century Britain Roads, drains, and a light railway were built to carry the waste there. But by the early 1890s, Carrington Moss was nearing capacity. In the five years after the purchase of the site in 1886, the population of Manchester had increased by over 150,000 people to a total of over half a million. All those people had to live somewhere – and the human waste that they produced had to go somewhere too. Water-closets were being introduced in the city, but that was a slow process, and in the meantime, Manchester was producing an extra 20,000 tons of excremental waste a year. Residents kick up a stink In 1892, Manchester’s Cleansing Committee hatched a bold plan: to purchase Rampton Manor, a large agricultural estate in Nottinghamshire, and transport 20,000 tons of waste there annually, by rail. The scheme promised to relieve pressure on the city’s depots and provide valuable manure to farmers – and handily, the estate was up for sale by its owner Colonel Henry Eyre, the MP for Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. But the proposal sparked a furious backlash. Rampton is many miles from Manchester and there were concerns about transportation of waste. Local residents, tenant farmers, and neighbouring towns like Gainsborough and Retford were horrified. As Jones explains: “When the residents of Rampton, surrounding villages and the nearby towns of Retford and Gainsborough got wind of Manchester’s intentions they were quick to kick up a stink.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Victorian-Poo-Topfoto-PAST11257-6d28efb.jpg" width="861" height="574" alt="A black and white photograph shows people in Victorian dress standing on the pavement outside their houses" title="People gather in a street in Collyhurst, Manchester, c1900. The rising urban population in urban Manchester caused a problem with sewage" /> At a public inquiry held by the Local Government Board, the Manchester Corporation tried to reassure the public. It was a robust affair: “Among the testimony heard were the views of local farmers, delivered in characteristically robust language and with a general disregard for the pseudo-legal niceties of the inquiry,” says Jones. “The chairman struggled to keep order.” The inquiry revealed a clash of worldviews. Manchester saw the scheme as a practical solution to an urban problem, while rural communities viewed it as an environmental threat and an unwanted intrusion. The efforts of the Manchester authorities to demonstrate that the “problem waste removed from one place would miraculously metamorphose into beneficial manure in another” proved a very hard sell indeed. Local concerns centred around the ability of the ground to cope with the volume of manure, the risk of water supply contamination, and the threat of disease. But also, there was the question of reciprocity and standing up for one’s own area. As the vice-chair of Nottingham County Council’s Health Committee, Mr Earp, put it, “Every town should stand on its own bottom”. Read more | Victorian daily life: what was it like for 'ordinary' Victorians? “At root, what was at stake was the right or otherwise of an urban centre to colonise distant places with its waste,” says Jones. The Local Government Board ultimately sided with the objectors. In December 1892, it refused Manchester’s request for a £60,000 loan to purchase Rampton Manor. The city was forced to abandon the scheme. But the waste problem remained. In the aftermath, Manchester turned back to an earlier idea: purchasing Chat Moss, another area of bogland closer to the city. Acquired in 1895, it became a major dumping ground, capable of absorbing 50,000 tons of waste annually. The ‘sewage question’ was a topic of national conversation through the second half of the 19th century. Manchester’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ in Rampton was just one of the solutions. Elsewhere, Joseph Bazalgette’s famous London’s embankment sewage system took the capital’s waste out to the tidal Thames, but the idea of water-borne sewage networks was not the only option. Rev. Henry Moule, for instance, patented his dry earth-closet scheme (not dissimilar to modern composting toilets) and that attracted a lot of interest. Some resolution came in the form of the main drainage system in Manchester, which was designed in the late 1880s, but its operation had to wait until the construction of the Thirlmere reservoir and aqueduct, completed in 1894. This brought much needed water from the Lake District over a distance of nearly 96 miles. Read more | Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z A wasteful legacy With the threats facing today’s water supply, and growing numbers of people advocating the use of dry systems like Moule’s, the Victorian experience has long echoes into the 21st century. “In many respects, the current sewage crisis has its origins in the decisions made by Victorian civil engineers,” notes Dr Jones. “In particular, the decision to opt for combined sewerage systems that captured and combined both industrial and domestic liquid waste and rainwater and ground water (the model designed by Joseph Bazalgette for London), generated much larger volumes of albeit highly diluted but nevertheless tainted sewage water requiring treatment.” “Had separate sewerage systems been adopted, which kept these different liquid streams apart, then the volume of sewage proper would have been much reduced, and stormwaters more easily and safely sent back into our rivers and streams.”
Test your knowledge on what daily life was like in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman on what family life was like in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our 20 question quiz! View Riddle on the source website
Victorian family life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the 19th century, men took more control at home than at any other time in history. In the final episode of our course on Victorian life, Ruth Goodman discusses the ‘male breadwinner pattern’, the employment of boys and its impact on family life, as well as how Victorians controlled the size of their families
View Green Video on the source website Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm
Living in sin: unmarried relationships in Victorian Britain
Is the idea that Victorian working-class couples often skipped marriage accurate? Rebecca Probert examines the evidence...
There is a surprisingly widespread assumption, shared by popular and academic historians alike, that cohabitation (living together in a relationship without being married) was common among the Victorian poor. The journalist Matthew Sweet suggests in his book Inventing the Victorians that working-class men and women took an “equivocal and pragmatic approach” to marriage, with many choosing to cohabit out of economic convenience. Others refer darkly to ‘unknown’ numbers of people living in ‘irregular unions’ – the implication being that those numbers, though unknown, must nevertheless have been large. Moving from the belief that the poor did not marry to the observation that the working classes made up the largest section of the population, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that marriage was a minority practice in Victorian England. Of course, individual examples of cohabiting couples can be found in all classes of Victorian society. George Eliot is a regularly cited example, and her fellow authors Mary Elizabeth Bradden and Wilkie Collins, along with the political activist Eleanor Marx, often feature alongside her on lists of Victorian cohabitants. And yes, alternatives to marriage were seriously discussed by radical thinkers such as the socialist Robert Owen in the 1830s and the early feminists of the late 19th century. But one should never confuse big names with big numbers. Newly available historical data, using recently digitised sources, clearly establishes that all but a tiny fraction of Victorian couples sharing a home had gone through a ceremony of marriage. Read more | A brief history of proposing marriage Earlier generations of researchers who have looked at the extent of cohabitation were hampered by the need to wade through thousands of pages of registers when searching for evidence that a marriage had taken place. Understandably, they often failed to trace weddings that had been held more than a few miles from a couple’s home parish, and from this failure deduced high rates of cohabitation. But as any family historian is well aware, finding a marriage depends on searching in the right place. To take an example of how digitisation has revolutionised this task, marriages could only be traced for some two-thirds of couples listed in the 1851 census for the Northamptonshire village of Kilsby when using the laborious old method of looking through the parish registers of the most likely locations. With the assistance of modern databases, though, the proportion traced rose to 100 per cent. In short, Victorian couples were both more mobile and more likely to marry than previously thought. Crime hotspot And this social conformity was not confined to rural areas: similar results were achieved for Neithrop, a poor suburb of Banbury, studied because it was notorious locally for crime and immorality. Even here, marriages have been traced for 95 per cent of the people who described themselves as married in the 1851 census, and the missing five per cent can largely be accounted for by recording errors, multiple matches and marriages overseas. Nor was there generally any reason to suspect an illicit cohabiting relationship between men and their ‘housekeepers’, or between female householders and their ‘lodgers’: one couple who looked like possible cohabitants turned out to be a brother and his married sister. Even in this impoverished ward, the picture seems to have been overwhelmingly one of marital conformity. These findings of very low levels of cohabitation are supported by the conclusions of the more measured Victorian commentators (as opposed to the hysterical polemicists who were responsible for a genre of ‘slum’ literature that makes today’s tabloids seem restrained). Charles Booth, who carried out his survey of working-class life in London between 1886 and 1903, noted that legal marriage was the general rule even among the “roughest class”. Read more | Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: was their union a marriage of misery? Tracing a ceremony of marriage, of course, is no guarantee that a couple were legally married: bigamists abounded, and there are plenty of examples of a man entering into a prohibited marriage with his deceased wife’s sister. But the relatively high incidence of bigamy only serves to underline the significance Victorians attached to marriage. If cohabitation had been acceptable, there would have been no need to risk criminal penalties to secure respectability. So did couples live together before they married, as is the norm today? Some historians have noted Booth’s comment on the frequency with which bridal couples gave the same address, and the marriage registers support his observation. But when addresses in the marriage register are checked against census returns, it turns out that the great majority who claimed to be living together were actually residing at different addresses. Here, the census is likely to be the more reliable. There was, after all, no advantage to be gained from concealing a cohabiting relationship from census-takers. And there was a very practical reason why couples might wish to appear to be living at the same address even if they were not: vicars – and even civil registrars – faced with a couple apparently living together unwed, would often waive the marriage fee. Even though Victorians married late – when compared to the mid-20th century – it was still rare for couples to set up home in advance of the wedding. Indeed, unmarried Victorians had little scope to establish a household of their own. The Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted had a particularly high level of unmarried adults in 1851, with 45 per cent of women aged between 25 and 34 still single and most of these living at home. A further third were working as servants. Only around five per cent headed their own household, and only one woman (out of over 100) appears to have been cohabiting with a man, whom she later married. Read more | How to celebrate a Victorian wedding Very occasionally, a sexual relationship between a woman and a man sharing an address can be inferred from the presence of a child and a subsequent marriage. But this was rare, and childbearing outside marriage was not generally the result of a cohabiting relationship. While some areas of Victorian England had high levels of extramarital births – over 30 per cent in the then Lancashire parish of Culcheth, for example – it is clear that most of the mothers of illegitimate babies were not living with the father. Linking digitised baptism and census records from a range of parishes confirms that such women were more likely to be living in the workhouse, or with family, than with any man who might be the father. For the Victorians, relationships outside marriage tended to be surreptitious rather than openly acknowledged. The poor, dependent upon landlords, employers, and occasionally charity, needed to maintain a good reputation just as much as the wealthy, if not more so. The diarist and clergyman Francis Kilvert wrote of one couple being evicted from their home simply because they were unmarried, and the receipt of social support could depend on showing one’s ‘marriage lines’. This was a society that drew a sharp distinction between the married and the unmarried. One writer noted that there was a public interest in knowing who was and was not married, since others’ behaviour toward them had to be regulated accordingly. For most, marriage was not a ‘choice’, any more than putting on clothes before one left the house was a ‘choice’. It was simply what one did so as not to cause trouble for oneself or offence for others. Fear of the slums So why has such a different perception of the Victorian poor proved so popular? Middle-class Victorian moralists were willing to believe the worst of the denizens of outcast London. Fear and suspicion of the poor, who were effectively seen as a race apart, meant that any claims about immorality and sexual licence met with a receptive audience. Read more | How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse? The journalist Henry Mayhew was pandering to this taste when he claimed in London Labour and the London Poor that, at most, only one in 10 of London’s costermongers (who sold food from a street barrow or stall) were married. So incensed were the costermongers at this slander that they held a public meeting to condemn Mayhew’s methods. They drew attention to the fact that Mayhew was writing “to suit the tastes and views of the upper and middle classes”, and that he had paid disreputable informants for inaccurate information. But they were only too well aware that it was Mayhew’s account that would eventually survive, given his public platform, and so it has proved. Today, Mayhew’s costermongers tend to be celebrated rather than condemned for their supposed rejection of marriage. Social commentators’ desire to find precedents for modern trends has led to the unfounded fears of Victorian moralists about the numbers ‘living in sin’ being transformed into evidence of cohabitation. Claims of high rates of cohabitation outside marriage in past centuries seem to be a comforting – but quite incorrect – riposte to modern worries about the collapse of family life. But rather than acclaiming the costermongers as the pioneers of alternative family forms, we should do them the justice of remembering them as they wanted to be remembered – as they pleaded in the name of their “poor but honest wives”. Cohabitation and the myth of the 'common-law marriage' Today, 2.8 million British couples live together outside marriage, almost 90 per cent of marrying couples have cohabited beforehand, and 47 per cent of children are born outside marriage, the majority to cohabiting couples. All this, however, is historically unprecedented. Given the rudimentary nature and general unpopularity of birth control until recent decades, most stable sexual relationships would in time produce children. As a result, the illegitimacy ratio gives us a good idea of the maximum possible frequency of cohabiting relationships in the population. But in earlier centuries births outside marriage were relatively rare, and cohabitation proportionally even rarer. Fluctuations in the illegitimacy ratio occurred within a small scale: rising from less than two per cent in 1700 to five per cent by 1800, a little under seven per cent by 1850, then falling again to four per cent by 1900. A close examination of baptism registers suggests that throughout this period cohabiting couples accounted for only a tiny proportion of illegitimate births, and thus a vanishingly small proportion of births overall. So, what changed? The causes are complex, but one factor – 'the emergence of the myth that cohabitants had a 'common-law marriage' – stands out. Contrary to popular belief, English law has never recognised cohabiting couples as having a 'common-law marriage'. It was not until the 1960s that the term even crept into popular usage, and it was not until the late 1970s that the myth emerged that cohabiting couples enjoyed the same rights as married couples, a misunderstanding generated by misleading media reporting of the limited legal reforms of the period. After the myth took hold, there was a sharp rise in births outside marriage, from 16 to 30 per cent over the course of the 1980s, with cohabiting couples accounting for the bulk of the increase. Rebecca Probert is a professor at the University of Warwick Law School. She has written widely on the history of marriage and cohabitation and appeared on programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? This article first appeared in the October 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
Week five quiz: work and labour rights in Victorian Britain
Test your knowledge on work and labour rights in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman about labour and workers' rights in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our quiz! View Riddle on the source website
Victorian working life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In week five of our course on life in Victorian Britain, Ruth Goodman explores how the 19th century saw work change for most of the population, with shift working made possible by gas light, a new adherence to fixed hours of work and a fierce concentration upon a smaller number of tasks whilst at work. She also looks at the slow movement towards protection for workers, including children
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How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?
Peter Higginbotham argues that the Victorian institutions weren’t necessarily the grim hell-holes portrayed by Charles Dickens
“Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse,” cried a Mirror headline in 2010. Workhouses were “bleak, grimly austere and oppressive”, wrote the author of a study of one local institution in 2012. Ever since Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist began publication in 1837, the establishment he described, and numerous on-screen representations of it, have become the filter through which the institution is invariably viewed. Portrayals of the workhouse habitually take it as read that it was unremittingly horrific, harsh and dehumanising. But was it really that bad? The Victorian workhouse first came about as a result of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. This act transferred the administration of poor relief from individual parishes to a coordinated national system based on new groupings of parishes, known as Poor Law Unions. Each union, run by a locally elected Board of Guardians, provided a workhouse to serve the whole union area. For the able-bodied destitute and their dependants, the workhouse was intended to be the only help on offer. The operation of the New Poor Law was overseen by a central authority – originally the Poor Law Commission (PLC), later the Poor Law Board (PLB) and then the Local Government Board (LGB). It’s often assumed that Oliver Twist was set in one of the new union workhouses, or “bastilles”, as critics such as MP and journalist William Cobbett labelled them. However, it is clear that it was actually located in one of the pre-1834 parish-run establishments, where there was no uniformity in matters such as work or diet. Everyone knows, of course, exactly what workhouse inmates had to eat: gruel. In Oliver’s workhouse, there were “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”. But, in the entire workhouse era, before or after 1834, there was never an establishment with such a diet on offer. A typical parish workhouse menu was that at Westminster St Margaret, where breakfast was bread with either broth or gruel, and supper was bread with butter or cheese. Midday dinner could be meat and broth, pease pottage, baked puddings, or hasty pudding – oatmeal boiled in milk. In the 1830s, the lucky inmates of the Brighton workhouse received six meat dinners a week, with no limits on quantity, plus two pints of beer a day for the men or one pint for women and children. The inmates were served at table, with the governor carving for the men and boys, and the matron for the women and girls. The new union workhouses had to adopt one of six standard dietaries issued by the PLC in 1835. Dietary No 1, for example, provided able-bodied men with a daily breakfast of bread and gruel, a dinner of either soup or, on three days a week, meat and potatoes, and a supper of bread and either cheese or broth. The elderly could exchange their gruel for a weekly ration of butter, tea and sugar. Although this menu compared well to that typically consumed by poor labourers living outside the workhouse, the food was not without shortcomings. Ingredients purchased by workhouses were usually low grade and often suffered from adulteration. A report in 1866 revealed huge variations in the nutritional value of the same dish at different establishments. For instance, a pint of gruel at Scarborough workhouse contained 4 ounces of oatmeal, while at Easingwold it was just 1.5 ounces. In 1883, in an effort to improve inmates’ health, the LGB suggested that workhouse inmates be given a weekly cooked fish dinner. Although the experiment was successful in some places, such as Bristol, more typical were the reactions at Ludlow, where some inmates claimed that fish “disagreed” with them. In 1897, a trial of dietary improvements at Bethnal Green workhouse hit the headlines after an inmate was said to have died from overeating. From 1901, reflecting the fact that inmates were by then mostly the elderly or sick (and therefore had more limited appetites), workhouses could compile their own weekly menu from a list of approved dishes including treats such as Irish stew, pasties, shepherd’s pie and roly-poly pudding, with an accompanying cookbook to ensure uniformity of ingredients and preparation. Listen | From daily routines to whether inmates really ate gruel, Peter Higginbotham responds to listener questions about the workhouse Vermin-infested rags Another common misconception is that the poor were “sentenced” to the workhouse. Entering a workhouse was essentially a voluntary decision, though many people’s circumstances left them little option other than to accept the offer of a place. The workhouse admission process included the issuing of workhouse clothing, which has sometimes been viewed as a deliberate strategy of dehumanisation. But for new inmates who arrived with just the clothes they stood in, possibly little more than vermin-infested rags, the provision of two sets of clean and serviceable clothes was a very practical – and often welcome – measure. The clothing did, however, provide officials with a degree of control. Although inmates could discharge themselves at any time, subject to a few hours’ notice, and have their own clothing returned to them, any unauthorised exit from the premises while wearing workhouse clothing could lead to a charge of stealing union property. For those who did decide to leave, there was no financial or other assistance in finding work or accommodation. Thus, to some degree, the workhouse could be viewed as a poverty trap. For a group known as the “ins and outs”, though, the workhouse clearly held no fear. Such individuals treated the institution like a free lodging house, staying for a few days or weeks at a time and then discharging themselves. During 1901, 81-year-old Julia Blumsun admitted herself into the City of London workhouse on 163 separate occasions. Other individuals appear to have positively preferred to live in a workhouse, such as the inmate of Leigh workhouse in Lancashire, who in 1922 was discovered to have £500 in the bank. Read more on the Victorian war on child poverty One group for whom the workhouse did attempt to provide a route out of poverty was children. Since Elizabethan times, pauper children had been placed into apprenticeships as part of the poor relief system. Although the impression given by the 1968 film Oliver! is that workhouse boys were “for sale”, this was not the case – in reality, their new masters were paid a premium for taking them on. However, by the late 1830s, there was growing evidence of apprentices being exploited or abused by tradesmen whose only interest was the premium. A report in 1842 found that the boys apprenticed as mine workers by the Dewsbury Board of Guardians included five-year-old Thomas Townend, though he was returned after 16 days. To replace apprenticeships, James Kay-Shuttleworth, an assistant poor law commissioner, proposed giving such children “a careful training in religion and industry”, with instruction in skills such as carpentry, shoe-making and tailoring or, for girls, domestic work, making them employable in adult life. The training could either be within the workhouse or, ideally, in separate accommodation, to remove children from the “contamination” of adult paupers. A number of unions set up their own separate schools or jointly operated district schools, some housing hundreds of children. In 1850, Charles Dickens visited one such school, at Norwood, and wrote that its inmates might leave the establishment “almost with the certainty of becoming good and prosperous citizens”. However, such institutions began to attract criticism as being impersonal and serving as breeding grounds for disease. From the 1870s, “cottage homes” developments became popular. These placed children in purpose-built miniature rural villages, complete with a school, chapel, hospital, laundry and workshops, with family-style groups of 10 to 20 children living in each “cottage” under the care of a house mother. From the 1890s, the family-group principle was transplanted to “scattered homes” based in ordinary houses placed around the suburbs of larger towns. Divided families? As well as the influence of Oliver Twist, the reputation of the union workhouse in its early years was assaulted by anti-Poor Law sections of the press which publicised any negative story about the institution, no matter how dubious its origins. Opponents of the New Poor Law particularly criticised the separation of husbands and wives and of parents and children required by union workhouses. In 1843, after an infant at Bethnal Green workhouse was reportedly removed from its mother except when being breastfed, Punch published a cartoon titled The “Milk” of Poor Law “Kindness”, showing a baby being torn from its mother’s arms. In fact, workhouse regulations allowed children under seven to reside in the female wards and their mothers to have access to them at all reasonable times. In theory, a parent could request a daily “interview” with their child, although a common arrangement was for parents to have time with their children on Sunday afternoons. Separation of men and women was said to be enforced for reasons of “discipline”. Since many workhouses had just two live-in staff (the master and matron), the measure no doubt assisted the management of such institutions. Husbands and wives both over 60 could request a separate sleeping apartment, but the provision of such facilities varied widely. “Unclimbable” fences Yet inmates still managed to find ways around the restrictions. In 1905, to clamp down on such activities, Steyning workhouse installed “unclimbable” fencing between the men’s and women’s yards. After it became clear that inmates were still somehow managing to arrange secret trysts, an inquiry discovered that the male and female sides of the workhouse were communicating by using the general letter post. On one occasion, some resourceful female inmates at the Ross workhouse dressed themselves in men’s clothing and got into the men’s ward. Until the 1870s, a workhouse could be an unfortunate place to fall ill. Workhouse infirmaries were often cramped and poorly ventilated, and nursing was mostly carried out by elderly female inmates who, like Mrs Gamp in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, were often illiterate and frequently drunk. Such nurses typically received a daily ration of beer and no doubt dipped into items such as brandy and porter that were often prescribed for patients. There were exceptions, though. After Dickens visited the Liverpool workhouse infirmary in 1860, he recorded that “all the arrangements of the wards were excellent. They could not have been more humane, sympathising, gentle, attentive, or wholesome.” In the 1860s, a major campaign to improve medical facilities in London’s workhouses gradually led to the widespread provision of new infirmary buildings and employment of trained nurses, something in which Florence Nightingale was influential. And from the 1880s, workhouse infirmaries increasingly provided treatment for non-inmates who couldn’t afford to pay for the services of a doctor, effectively becoming local hospitals for the poor. Taking a long view, the toughest time for workhouse inmates was probably in the first three decades of the New Poor Law, when the focus was on deterring able-bodied men from claiming poor relief. By the 1890s, however, things had changed considerably. Inmates able to work were more likely to be occupied in gardening or chopping firewood, or something related to their own trade, rather than the stone-breaking and oakum picking of earlier times. The elderly often received a weekly ration of smoking tobacco or snuff and were provided with books and newspapers. At Macclesfield workhouse, the “respectable” aged poor now had brightly decorated wards with comfortable furniture. They could wear their own clothes, retain a few of their own possessions, keep small pets, were served afternoon tea, and could go out to visit friends each day. By 1914, the older inmates at the Ross workhouse had mixed dayrooms and individual cubicles in their dormitories. Fixed mealtimes had been abandoned, and inmates even had weekly trips to the cinema. Despite popular perceptions, the regime and physical conditions in workhouses evolved enormously over the years. For many people, though, that was irrelevant. It was the overwhelming shame and stigma that had become associated with entering the workhouse that meant they would rather die than pass through its doors. Songs, semolina and Santa Claus: Two previous inmates reflected on their time in the workhouse as children “We made our own fun” In 1916, after a year in the Steyning workhouse, four-year-old John Austin began an 11-year stay in the union’s children’s home at Shoreham-by-Sea, which he called “the orphanage”. In memoirs recorded by his daughter, Pat Mathewson, he would later recall: “We made our own fun. One of the things I really enjoyed was being a member of the local church choir. Apart from the fact that I could go out of the orphanage without supervision, which was a great relief, I also got paid pocket money for singing my little head off.” He got plenty of exercise, too: “A very kind gesture was made by the two Box brothers of Brighton when they supplied a complete set of gymnastic equipment. They also spent at least one night a week teaching us. I did well and in 1926 was Sussex Junior Champion.” He reflected that some of his friends who didn’t live in the workhouse were less fortunate: “I had one school friend who didn’t come from the orphanage, and when I visited his home I began to think that perhaps the orphanage wasn’t so bad after all. His home was poor, and he often had nothing to eat all day. It was a shock to me: it was not as I imagined an ordinary family home should be.” “We were regimented like the army” In 1925, four-year-old William Golding was placed in the Southampton workhouse children’s homes at Shirley Warren. He recalled: “The first home was Oaklands children’s home. It was from age four to eight. Then you went into another home – it was a cottage-type home with about ten children. It was a lot better. You stayed there from eight till twelve.” From the ages of 12 to 16, children lived in “the Big House, where there was about 70 of us. We were regimented like the army – bugle in the morning and bugle at night.” But it had its upsides, according to William: “It wasn’t too bad. Roly-poly pudding, you know, and the only thing that didn’t go down well was semolina. We had an annual retreat into the New Forest. One year, we went to Stonehenge. We went to the local gasworks. And every year in the second home you had a trip to see Father Christmas. We got no toys, but when you saw Father Christmas you got a bottle of hair oil, or something they wanted to get rid of.” Listen to this article: Peter Higginbotham is the author of The Workhouse Encyclopedia (The History Press, 2014). He has also appeared on our podcast, as an expert on workhouses for our Everything You Wanted to Know series This content first appeared in the September 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
Emma Griffin explains how 19th-century working-class autobiographies could revise our understanding of the industrial revolution
The British industrial revolution stands out as a pivotal moment in human history. But when we think about the men, women and children who, with their strong backs and nimble fingers, did the most to power it, we tend to feel that there is less to celebrate. All of the great Victorian commentators – Engels, Dickens, Blake – painted those industrial times in a very dark hue: they lamented the introduction of new working patterns that compelled men to work at the relentless pace of the machines; children forced into factories and down mines at ever-younger ages; families squeezed into dark, disease-ridden cities; and no future but the workhouse for those who slipped through the net. Listen on the podcast | The Industrial Revolution: everything you wanted to know Their dismal litany echoed through the 20th century as a succession of pioneering social historians – Barbara and John Hammond, Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, to name a few – turned their attention to the devastating impact of the industrial revolution on the working poor. Workers’ words Yet, despite the frequency with which various versions of these bleak perspectives have been retold, their central claim – that this period was worse than anything that has gone before – has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In particular, it is remarkable that so little effort has been made to listen to what working people themselves had to say about their life and times. Of course, it is usually countered that such an effort would be futile because such people did not leave behind much in the way of written sources. But though it is certainly true that they wrote far less than their social superiors, it is not the case that they wrote nothing at all. Their legacy is a little-known but remarkable collection of autobiographies written by working people. If we listen to these, we hear a story very different from the one that we are used to. Historians have long been aware of the existence of such memoirs, but most have been sceptical about using them to study working-class life. After all, this was a period of relatively high illiteracy, so (it has been argued) there was something exceptional about the working man or woman with the ability to record their personal history. Yet this line of argument assumes that literacy was more unusual among the working class than was really the case. In the 19th century a range of very cheap avenues for developing literacy – dame schools, Sunday schools, night schools and mutual improvement societies – were available to both children and adults, so writing a memoir was within the grasp of even the very poor. Among autobiographers of the time were men such as John Hemmingway, who was put to work in a Manchester cotton mill at the age of eight and raised in poverty by his mother following the desertion of the family by his father. As an adult he turned his hand to various occupations – weaving, shop-keeping, driving a horse and cart, joining the army – but never rose above the station to which he had been born. In old age he and his wife were forced to sell their furniture and wedding rings, move into a miserable cellar dwelling and live off a small dole from the parish. So, though some of the autobiographers were exceptional in one way or another, that was far from true of all. Of course, the use of these accounts is not without its problems. One major frailty is the paucity of autobiographies written by women. Also, these writers were haunted by failures of memory, inevitably producing subjective accounts of their lives. But nearly 400 autobiographies written during the period of industrialisation provide a rich and hitherto untapped seam of evidence that we cannot afford to ignore. Furthermore, in contrast to the other sources consulted by historians interested in the lives of ordinary workers – the poor law, the census, the criminal courts – these records were freely created by the men and women we wish to study. In this sense they are unique, and an excellent resource for the study of working-class experiences of the British industrial revolution. What, then, do these personal histories tell us about how the advent of industrialisation changed workers’ lives? More than anything, the autobiographers indicate that industrialisation, and the urban growth that accompanied it, increased the amount of work available. These sources make it possible to compare descriptions of earning a living written by people in pre-industrial areas with those set in rural and industrial districts. They reveal that, in the absence of industry, most workers were not fully employed – and, as a result, lived in a state of chronic poverty. The low wages and patchy employment of agricultural workers meant that even skilled artisans in pre-industrial Britain – shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters and so forth – were rarely able to make a good living from their trade, because few of their neighbours had the means to pay for their services. As a result, many skilled workers turned to agriculture to try to make ends meet – and the resulting growth in the number of people trying to eke out a livelihood from the land helped ensure that living standards remained low. This situation, more than anything else, changed with the emergence of industrialisation. The industrial revolution increased the amount of work available – for the skilled and the unskilled, for the young and the old. As manufacturing expanded, young men and women poured into cities from the countryside to work in the new factories. Full employment But working on the factory floor was just the beginning. Coal was required to run the machines, providing an important stimulus for the mining industry. Factories needed their workers, but they also had to be built, their machines maintained, their warehouses organised – and it all amounted to a steady stream of employment for the men who flocked to the cities. One autobiographer noted that goods needed to be weighed as well as made, and found a job doing precisely that. Others made a living transporting raw material and finished goods – driving horses and carts, building railways, driving trains. Providing for the needs of a large population also created a mountain of work: the growing urban populace needed houses, furniture, bread, shoes and clothes. This demand for the staples of life provided plenty of business for skilled workers – and what’s more, unlike the rural poor, the urban workforce had the money with which to pay them. The factories’ labour needs meant that many workers were now fully employed throughout the year, which helped to drag families out of the grinding poverty that agricultural workers endured. Full employment was the single most important way of increasing a family’s prosperity, but it was also significant because it changed the balance of power in the working relationship. As long as workers outnumbered jobs, employers held the upper hand. In the industrial heartlands, though, the demand for workers was insatiable, placing them in a far stronger position to bargain over such matters as working hours and wages. Included among the autobiographers are men who gave their notice over disputes concerning the length of tea-breaks or the church they attended. One worker gave as a reason for resigning simply that he “got sick of the job”! Such actions were inconceivable in the rural context and help to remind us that full employment not only improved men’s incomes but also enhanced their working conditions and status. Read more | Your guide to the Luddite Movement Yet, though adult men generally stood to gain from industrialisation, we should not assume that these advantages were enjoyed by others in their families. The demand for labour, particularly in the factories and mines, meant that there was ever more work for children too, with the unfortunate result that those in industrial districts were being hustled into the workforce at ever younger ages. Accounts reveal that children living in rural areas and market towns did not usually enter the workplace until the age of 11 and a half. The contrast with the industrial districts is stark: on average, children in those areas started work aged eight and a half – three years younger than their peers living in areas without industrial employment. Furthermore, in contrast to young workers in rural areas, who often started part-time and whose hours were limited by the seasons and daylight hours, children in factories and mines entered a world of full employment, working very long days, day in and day out, year after year. In some respects, then, the evidence suggests that the situation for children mirrored that for adult men: industrial growth significantly improved their prospects of finding full-time employment. But whereas that enhanced living standards for men, it had the opposite effect on children. Working 13-hour days from the age of six or seven took a very serious toll on a child’s health, development and wellbeing, making their overall welfare gains highly questionable. Did they know it was a revolution? Autobiographers did not use the expression ‘the industrial revolution’, but many did display an unmistakeable awareness that times had changed during the course of their life. So what did they make of it all? In contrast to the way that historians have viewed this period, the autobiographers spoke in remarkably consistent terms of improvements and progress. Benjamin North, for instance, thought that if his parents and ancestors could “revisit the earth… and see the domestic alterations, commercial improvements, and the wonderful and astonishing activities of life” they would not be able to “believe their own eyes”. Looking back to the early 19th century, Joseph Livesey could not help “constantly exclaiming ‘What a contrast there is betwixt the present advantages of poor people and their children compared to that period!’” These writers never expressed regrets about the passing of the old days – or “the bad old times”, as they were styled by one writer. There were no fond words for the quiet or simplicity that their forefathers had known. Thomas Wood declared that he would be a “misanthrope indeed who would wish the old days or customs back again”. To a man, our writers were glad that their grandchildren would never know the life they had once lived. Mother’s ruin The outcome of industrial growth for women was different again. Though it increased the likelihood of men and children finding full-time employment, usually at better wages than the agricultural alternatives on offer, it made relatively little difference to women’s experiences in the workplace. It is true that women living in the industrial heartlands benefited from the growth of factories. But, once they were married with a family, few were able to maintain a position in a factory, and most retreated from the workplace altogether. Betty Leeming, a mill hand in the Lancashire town of Preston, was typical in this respect. Following her marriage to Benjamin Shaw she handed in her notice at the factory. Though she did make a few attempts to earn money from home following her marriage – she took in bobbin-winding and baked oatcakes to sell to her neighbours – she never returned to the factory. Autobiographies also reveal that family responsibilities were the primary reason for women giving up paid jobs. Indeed, unmarried women and those with no children almost always worked outside the home. In families with just one or two children, between 70 and 80 per cent of mothers worked. As a woman’s family grew, however, the chances of her being in work rapidly diminished. Of mothers with three or four children, the participation rate hovered around 50 per cent, a figure that steadily declined as families increased in size. Almost no women with eight or nine children did any paid work. In the absence of reliable childcare or effective means to limit family size, mothers had little choice but to stay at home and care for their families – a situation the industrial revolution did little to change. The most obvious consequence of increased work opportunities was higher family incomes; for those living close to the breadline this was a very welcome development. But the changes were not simply material. A widely recognised feature of industrialisation is the growth of great towns. Historians have often drawn attention to the fact that these could be dark, crowded and unhealthy – but cities were also places of freedom. In a city one could attend a night school or worship at whichever church one chose. It was possible to join a union or even a political association, and start to shape the society in which one lived. Men who threw themselves into city life did not view themselves as victims. William Aitken described his fellow Manchester Chartists as the “sons of freedom”. His view, shared by many other autobiographers, was that city life was liberating, not oppressive. The outcomes of the industrial revolution were, clearly, mixed. Healthy adult men stood to gain the most, enjoying more work, higher wages and opportunities for cultural and political expression. Women were almost wholly bypassed by these developments and, though children were affected by the great demand for labour, for them the results were far from beneficial. Nonetheless, this much is clear: we would do well to discard the darker interpretations of this era. The industrial revolution ushered in revolutionary social change, and working people certainly shared in the benefits. In their words Historians have long known of the existence of working-class autobiographies. A bibliography of 19th-century memoirs compiled in the 1980s listed nearly 800 items, and many more have since come to light. They go under various titles: life histories, autobiographies, memoirs, notes, sketches, recollections and adventures, as well as many other, more idiosyncratic names. The defining feature of each, though, is that writer and subject are one and the same. These are works that we would today recognise as autobiographies, though it’s worth noting that the word ‘autobiography’ only entered the English language in the late 18th/early 19th century, long after the culture of life-writing had taken root. Some of these books are well known, such as the great autobiographies of the Chartist leaders William Lovett, Thomas Cooper and Robert Lowery. A few found success in their own time. For example, James Dawson Burn’s autobiography (some editions of which were titled The Beggar Boy) was first published in 1855; by the end of the decade a fourth edition was in print. Others were published in very small numbers by obscure provincial printers, more for the writer’s satisfaction than in response to any public demand. Some of the most interesting were not written for publication at all. One such example is the Simple Naritive written by John Lincoln, now stored in the vaults of the Norfolk Record Office. The 80 pages of Lincoln’s notebook are fragile and torn, filled with the untidy hand of a self-taught writer. The closely inscribed, margin-less pages remind us that Lincoln lived at a time when paper was a precious commodity. They contain a detailed account of his life, from earliest childhood recollections to the present, and range over topics – sex before marriage, an illegitimate child, an unhappy marriage and the death of the writer’s small children – about which some of the more polished accounts were reticent. Emma Griffin is senior lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia. She has written widely on the history of working-class life in Britain This article first appeared in the March 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
A Victorian cult: inside the strange world of the Agapemone
Stuart Flinders takes listeners inside the Agapemone – a Victorian Christian cult presided over by rogue Anglican priests
In the 1840s, a strange, secretive community known as the Agapemonites set up camp in Spaxton, Somerset. Presided over by a rogue Anglican priest who believed he had a hotline to god, this religious cult attracted wealthy members in search of a deeper connection to the Lord. But once they had handed over their worldy possessions in order to join, the Agapemonites found it was rather harder to leave. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Stuart Flinders explores their story, from triple marriages and spiritual wives, to financial exploitation and suicide. Stuart Flinders is the author of A Very British Cult: Rogue Priests and the Abode of Love (Icon Books, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon Hear Stephen Talty tell the story of the 1993 Waco siege, a standoff between a religious cult and the FBI