Could You Have Survived Victorian Daily Life?

At least you missed out on these miseries

A woman swats away the stork which has brought her a child. Public domain postcard. Wiki Commons.

Think your daily life is difficult? How might you have fared if the stork had deposited you in an earlier era? In his book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, author Bill Bryson shares fascinating tidbits of historical domestic trivia — most of which make me glad I wasn’t born even as relatively recently as the Victorian era, (1820–1914). If you’d landed back then, you might have endured this:

A Victorian childhood: Thumb-suckers, beware

Odds are, you’d have been born into a poor family. Child labour was the norm, so you might have died young in a mine or chimney, or perhaps been maimed in a factory accident. In 19th century Britain, the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals preceded by 60 years the founding of an organization for the protection of children!

Even if you were lucky enough to have been born to an upper-class family in Victorian Britain, you’d have endured other hardships in the name of building your character. Bryson documents that one stern father of 11 children — a “gentleman” with the misleading surname of “Smiles ”— only set out breakfast for 10 of them. No coddling of slowpokes in the Smiles household!