Mr. Pooter and Victorians

Introduction

The Diary of a Nobody, the object of the examination of this work, is a fictitious story of a clerk living in London in the 1880’s, written by George Grossmith. It is the record of fifteen months in the life of Mr. Charles Pooter presented in a form of a diary. Every entry of the dairy is packed with details of trivial moments of his life and as the reviewer for The New York Times wrote, the book consists of “the small triumphs and minor humiliations and homely pleasures of everyday life as lived in a lower-middle- class household in the late Victorian era.”¹

According to Kate Flint, the editor to 1998 edition of The Diary: “The Pooters’ world is precisely that described by C. F. G. Masterman, slightly more sympathetically than Crosland, in The Condition ofEngland ( 1909):

It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of Respectability; and these three qualities give the key to its special characteristics. Its male population is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters. It is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness falls.

It finds itself towards evening in its own territory in the miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets, in number defying imagination. Each boasts its pleasant drawing-room, its bow-window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title--'Acacia Villa', or 'Camperdown Lodge’—attesting unconquered human aspiration. There are many interests beyond the working hours: here a greenhouse filled with chrysanthemums, a bicycle shed, a tennis lawn. The women, with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get, and so exacting when found, find time hang rather heavy on their hands. But there am excursions to shopping centres in the West End, and pious sociabilities, and occasional theatre visits, and the interests ofhome².

Although the story and the characters so vividly portrayed in the book are the figment of the author’s imagination, due to extensive references to the reality of late Victorian era the book can be treated as a valuable document of social history. This was achieved by the accumulation of little touches, called by the reviewer for The New York Times “cultural signifiers”³. These striking but easily-overlooked details will be the main concern of this thesis.

In the introduction to the Diary John Squire says that “a large area of English social life is painted in this book more faithfully and fully than anywhere else.”⁴ And indeed the life as presented in the Diary follows the trends that the Victorians of the times more or less eagerly followed too. For example, Carrie Pooter tries to follow avant-garde current fashions in interior decoration: she ties Liberty bows at the four corners of their enlarged and tinted photographs, and follows her friend Mrs. James’s lead in “writing on dark paper with white ink, and in draping the mantelpiece and putting little toy spiders, frogs, and beetles all over it.”⁵

The years 1837 to 1901 represent a part of an era in history called the Victorian age, aptly named after our Queen This time has been, and will continue to be, one of great contrasts and of major social and political reform. For the wealthy, it was a time of high living and seemingly endless parties; for the poor a daily struggle for survival.

In order to capture all the necessary changes as well as the most important facts regarding the Victorian society - these which might be of help in comparing Mr. Pooter from the Diary of a Nobody to his contemporaries, I have decided for the following division of this thesis:

Chapter One, which plays an introductory role, explains the timeline of the period and also discusses the term ‘Victorian’ itself. Apart from these, it deals with social reforms and an aspect of urbanization at that times. Above everything however, it discusses the social classes of the period in order to locate Mr. Charles Pooter on an appropriate social level - the problem which was of core importance to the Victorians.

Chapter Two, entitled The Most and Less Important Victorian Inventions and Their Influence on Everyday Life of People is centered on nineteenth-century inventions which facilitated and at the same time drastically changed the life of people. As the most important invention I have decided to describe the birth of a railway system and trains which had a great impact on Victorians’ lives. Amongst the other inventions I chose to focus on gas light and bicycle plus several other, of minor importance developments.

Feminist Perspective of Victorian Era is a title of Chapter Three which centers on the women of the times. Due to the transformation of Britain into a potent industrial nation the ways in which women were to be perceived in Victorian times changed. Nevertheless, for most of the women their times was a period of domestic obligations which they fulfilled without realizing that it could be different. The chapter pays attention to the role of a woman as mother as well as wife. It discusses the laws and it changes in favor of women which were introduced exactly in Victorian age.

The dissertation is completed with various pictures, drawings and other graphic material which I sincerely hope - will greatly enhance the visual attractiveness of my work and approximate these fascinating times.

Chapter One Introduction

The representation of the English lower middle class as either devoid of heroism or pathetic is unfortunate but not entirely surprising. Indeed these two characteristics are rather famously combined in the figure of the eponymous Mr. Pooter, master of The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. As Hosgood claims: “George and Weedon Grossmith The Diary of a Nobody has rightly become one of the minor classics of Victorian fiction, and no historian can avoid the comic glow it casts over any interpretation of suburban life.”⁶

Whether one has studied the Victorian age at school or not, he or she must have some knowledge of it. School studies tend to focus either on the political activities of such persona as Disraeli and Gladstone, with addition of the failure of the Chartists, and rarely extend beyond 1885. Sometimes schools provide bored learners with in-depth analysis of the factory system horrors and the inadequacies of public health and hygiene.

Moreover, among some adults, Victorianism is synonymous with the exploitation of the working class and the evils (or, increasingly of late, the absurdities) of Imperialism. Others see it mainly as a period of religious hypocrisy and cruelty to children. According to Mitchell:

Many of us have vivid mental pictures of Victorian England: a Charles Dickens Christmas with a large, happy family surrounding a table crammed with food; the dark and terrifying slums in other Dickens novels; Sherlock Holmes in London by gaslight; timeless country estates where laborers nodded in deference to the squire while ladies paid social calls and talked about marriage. In addition, “Victorianism” remains a living concept in social and political debates, although its meanings are contradictory: it is used to describe exploitation and class division, sexual repression, hypocrisy, values of hard work and self-help, moral certainties about family life, and a wide variety of arrangements intended to solve public problems.⁷

In The Victorians since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions, Miles Taylor states that “we are now encouraged to look back at the Victorians and admire their modernity and energy, sympathize with their moral dilemmas, and appreciate the complexity of their attitudes towards race, sex and class.”

The fact is that in 1837, when eighteen-year-old Victoria became queen, the majority of England’s people lived in the countryside and relatively few of them ever traveled more than several miles from the place where they were born. Goods and messages moved no faster than the horses that carried them. Most food was cooked over an open fireplace. Little more than half the population could read and write; children as young as five years of age worked long days underground in coal mines or tending dangerous machinery in factories.

There are many faces of Victorian Age and many aspects to be discussed in order to produce a wholly picture of the times. This chapter is going to look closely at Victorian England and at times that created very different ways of life, with special focus on the society itself, particularly at the Everyman living in the cramped town and suburbia.

Victorian England was changing to better or worse but it was inevitably developing. The social class of Mr. Pooter was only a part of the society within England; apart from his privileges and minor problems, the rest of the population, especially these who lived cramped in overcrowded districts of towns and cities, faced the actual endangerments - such as health and poverty. The government was eventually forced to take measures in order to deal with those problems.

In addition, there would be no possibility to tackle the thesis’ topic without depicting its author; therefore the chapter will also deal with a brief biography of the brothers who immortalized the lower-middle class society of England with its all ridiculousness and criticism.

It is worth to remind in this place that originally a serial that appeared in the comic magazine Punch in 1888-89, The Diary of a Nobody was the creation of the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith. George was then a star of the D’Oyly Carte opera company and took the lead role in many of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas; Weedon was a comic actor and, later, a playwright and novelist.⁸

Today The Diary is their only memorial. Curiously, the first reviews were unenthusiastic which is probably why the Grossmiths avoided any public reference to it afterwards. Although it was out of print since the book version appeared in 1892, it inspired many comic novelists, from Evelyn Waugh in the 1920s to Helen Fielding in more recent times.⁹

1.1. The Misleading Term ‘Victorian’

Ann Shepherd states that: “Queen Victoria was the first English monarch to see her name given to the period of her reign whilst still living.”¹⁰ Historians distinguish early, middle and late Victorian England, corresponding to periods of growing pains, of confidence in the 1850s, and of loss of consensus after 1880. According to Alexander, ‘Victorian’ is a term that is often extended beyond the queen’s reign (1837 - 1901) to include William IV’s reign from 1830.¹¹ Under Victoria, Britain transformed by the Industrial Revolution became the world’s leading imperial power and its most interesting country. Sanders assumes that:

A great deal of Victorian intellectual effort was spent in trying to hold together a universe which was exploding. It was an age of conflicting explanations and theories, of scientific and economic confidence and of social and spiritual pessimism, of a sharpened awareness of the inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet as to the nature of the present. Traditional solutions, universally acknowledged truths, and panaceas were generally discovered to be wanting, and the resultant philosophical and ideological tensions are evident in the literature of the period [...].¹²

The first thing to understand about the Victorian age in England is that it was enormously long and that there were significant changes in almost every aspect of politics, law, economics, and society. Furthermore, the texture of daily life - the physical and technological surroundings in which people lived, the patterns of their education and work and recreation and belief - were utterly transformed. Undoubtedly, the Victorian age was first and foremost an age of transition.

Moreover, like all ages it was an age of paradox, but the paradoxes of the mid­nineteenth century struck contemporaries as more stark and disturbing than those which had faced their ancestors, as Sanders points out¹³.

The industrial revolution completely changed the lifestyle of Victorian Britain. Suddenly, the focus was not on tilling the soil or land husbandry to make a living. Factories and commercial enterprise was the name of the perspectives.

When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, Britain had already started its transformation into a world power. In addition to the phenomenon of agriculture being slowly pushed aside for manufacturing jobs, by the end of the 1800’s, 80 percent ofEngland’s population lived in the rapidly growing cities.

Sally Mitchell also points out that by the time Queen Victoria died in 1901, the modern world was shaped:

Most of England’s people were town or city dwellers. London-the capital of an empire that covered one-fourth of the globe-had subway trains and electric streetlights; telegraph messages sped around the world in minutes; luxurious steamships plied a busy transatlantic trade. Education was compulsory; public hanging of criminals had been abolished; a man’s religion (or lack of it) no longer barred him from attending a university or serving in Parliament; and the legal and political status of women in all classes was significantly improved.¹⁴

An interesting point of view is presented by Seaman in Victorian England Aspects of English and Imperial History; in his opinion: “Victorian ideas and attitudes were in many ways symbolized by Darwin, Tennyson and Gladstone; yet all three were already twenty-eight years of age when Victoria became queen.”¹⁵ Moreover: “[i]n 1837, Dickens, Browning and Samuel Smiles were all twenty-five, John Bright twenty- six, John Stuart Mill thirty-one, John Henry Newman thirty-six and Palmerston as much as fifty-three. When the Queen died, Bernard Shaw had another fifty years to live, H.G.Wells another forty and Florence Nightingale another nine.”¹⁶

Therefore, the Victorian age cannot be perceived as wholly contained within the sixty-four years of the Queen’s reign, since men’s ideas and attitudes, once acquired, and their institutions, once established, change more slowly than history books sometimes suggest. It is obvious, that Victorianism owed many of its chiefly remembered characteristics to developments which took place in the years between 1780 and 1837; and the late-Victorian era is much of a piece with the first half of the twentieth century, so that there are respects in which England remained Victorian, and was governed and administered by Victorians, throughout the century that separated the Great Exhibition of1851 and the Festival ofBritain in 1951.

1.2. The Demography ofVictorian England

“Now, what I want is Facts.¹⁷ ”

First of all, it is worth to recall the opinion of The Demography of Victorian England and Wales’s author, Woods who points out that: “English historical demographers have been justly applauded for their ability to make bricks without straw whilst at the same time being criticized for failing to put sufficient flesh on their statistical skeletons.”¹⁸

It is to be understood that although sometimes the social historians were eager to show us the flesh and blood of real people at the same time giving up on the deeper demographic structures and generalities that give the behavior of their subjects some wider meaning, no one could accuse the nineteenth-century statisticians in this regard. For them the search for ‘true facts’ was of prime importance and without them their work would be meaninglessjust theory, as Woods claims.¹⁹

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Fig. 1. Increasing population in England and Wales and the United Kingdom between the beginning of nineteen century and 1881.²⁰

Williams provides the detailed statistics of the times:

For Britain and the peoples of Britain, the nineteenth century was a century of transformation. The population of mainland Britain rose from some 10.5 million in 1801 to over 37 million in 1901 (the population of Ireland fell in the same period from 5.2 to 4.5 million).

London grew from a city of 1,117,000 souls in 1801 to encompassing 6,586,000 by 1901; Glasgow from 77,000 to 762,000 and Liverpool from 82,000 to 685,000 in the same period.²¹

Woods assumes that any study of the demography of Victorian England and Wales must owe a substantial debt to the establishment in 1837 of a system of civil registration for births, deaths and marriages²². This new system operated alongside the old ecclesiastical registration of baptisms, burials and marriages which had been in operation for 300 years. Although far from perfect, especially in its early years, civil registration had a number of important advantages over its ecclesiastical counterpart.

First, it was concerned with the registration of vital events - births and deaths in particular - and not ecclesiastical ceremonies - baptisms and burials²³. Marriages were registered in both systems, but civil registration allowed for legal marriage outside the established church. Secondly, vital events were formally certified by the issue of birth, death and marriage certificates. Certification gave proof that the event had taken place, but it also allowed copies of the certificates to be assembled centrally, processed, filed and stored for future reference. Compared with the Anglican parish registers or the nonconformist registers, which were completed locally and retained in the parish or district, the national system of certification had very important advantages in terms of consistency of practice and ease of access.

Although the establishment of the regular decennial census took place in 1801 and the introduction of civil registration in 1837, it was not until recent decades that reliable estimates of the size of England’s population before 1801 and of trends in the major demographic numbers prior to 1837 were finally secured.

Statistics of population, occupation, and location reveal a society which was becoming extended, urbanized, and industrialized as ever before. At the 1871 census the population of England taken by itself totaled almost 21,300,000 men, women and Williams, A Companion to Nineteen Century Britain. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), p. 1. Woods, Robert, TheDemography of Victorian England and Wales, p.31. Ibid. children. The population of England and Wales taken together had grown more than two-and-a-half fold since the star of the century²⁴. With growing population and increasing needs of the betterment, Victorian Britain witnessed multiple accounts of reform. Many of these were social reforms and dealt with the following problems: public health, poverty, factory regulation, and moral and mental improvements. At the beginning of the Victorian period, these problems were emerging through reports and surveys and consequently, these reports and surveys sparked what was called a statistical movement. Originally, the movement where middle class individuals were collecting loads of information or statistics and presenting them to law-makers hoping to promote reform.

1.3. Social Reforms that Shaped Transition Period

In the beginning of the Victorian period, the biggest problem with reforms dealt with the intervention of the state. Before, the government strictly stayed out of what was called private matters. In Self-Help, Samuels Smiles gives a solid representation of this thought by saying, “Government that is ahead of the people will inevitably be dragged down to their level, as the Government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up.”²⁵

The question arises immediately whether one could easily distinguish between private and public matters. At the beginning of the period, most of any problems involving medicine, poverty or widely understood education were considered to be private and therefore the government would not take interest in them.

Such condition lasted until the need for reforms presented itself in the mid­nineteenth century. The 1830’s and 1840’s are considered to be a time of crucial breakthrough in the Victorian period, in that it was a time when “an influential group of high Whigs, most exercised by notions of noblesse oblige, succeeded in pushing through a series of social reforms against the opposition of Peelite Tories and laissez- faire Radicals²⁶.Two areas of concern that eventually become public matters were health and poverty.

1.3.1. Health Issues

Life expectancy was much shorter in the nineteenth century than it is today. In England, rural people lived longer than city dwellers, and members of the upper classes were healthier than workers. According to Mitchell: “Unlike many aspects of daily life, medical care made no dramatic advance during the century. Nutrition was poorly understood, and physicians had very few effective ways to treat illness. Epidemic diseases swept through crowded cities. Although the bacteria that caused some of them were identified by the century’s end, it would be another forty years before cures were found.”²⁷

What was inevitable, industrialization and the increase in populations created dirtier and polluted cities. These cities were becoming infested with airborne diseases, for example cholera epidemic in 1831, and accordingly the government realized that there was obvious need for sanitation improvements.

John Snow, a modest medical practitioner of Soho, London, published in 1849 his opinion that cholera was spread by the pollution of drinking water by sewage. In 1855, he investigated a London cholera epidemic which killed more than 500 people in just over a week and found that almost all the victims had drunk water from one particular source, an infected pump in Broad Street, Soho.1 The epidemic stopped as soon as the Broad Street pump was put out of action. These findings were confirmed by those of the registrar general’s statistician, William Farr, who traced the source of an outbreak in 1866 to one particular East End reservoir. It had been accidentally contaminated by sewage from premises occupied by a cholera victim²⁸.

As it could be expected, Snow’s original publication received little official attention. Historian F.B. Smith, while referring to the public health reform of the nineteenth century, states that: “towards the end of the nineteenth century veterans of the sanitary movement could look back on their work and see that it was good...their promises in Edwin Chadwick’s report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain...were being fulfilled.²⁹ ” In the beginning of the Victorian period Chadwick, a Benthamite utilitarian, was able to persuade the government with 10,000 reports on sanitation, the need for reform.³⁰

However, the real picture of this ‘ability to persuade’ was typically Victorian tirelessness, with which Chadwick and his associates produced pages of charts and statistics to justify his demand for unified sanitary control in every town, for piped water in every home and for the paving of every urban street - and for narrow-bore earthenware pipes.³¹

In order to solve such problems the Public Health Acts were created in the following years 1848, 1866, 1871, and 1875. Each one of these acts consisted of new improvements and eventually created a much healthier public welfare. They improved the methods of sewage disposal, ventilation and medical service, which in return caused the death rate to decrease and life expectancy to increase.³²

Moreover, household manuals explained that ‘bad air’ and ‘bad smells’ caused most illnesses. The assumption seemed correct: when the air smelled bad because of rotting garbage and inadequate sewers, the as-yet-undiscovered germs that caused many diseases were likely to be present. Mitchell explains that: “people who followed the advice to avoid ‘bad air’ by cleaning drains and choosing a house on high ground promoted their families’ health.³³ ” However, the common practice of locking up windows to keep the night air out of the house was in fact not healthy. Close indoor environments promoted the spread of already mentioned airborne bacteria. Accordingly, tuberculosis, in particular, was so widespread that almost any medium-sized group of people was likely to include a carrier.

1.3.2. Poverty

Poverty was another issue that called for immediate reform during the Victorian Age due to the fact that in the past, people of Britain usually blamed poverty on the rich individuals. Luckily, in this period, some people began to blame it on the state, realizing that there were much bigger forces behind their rights.

The statistical societies of the 1830s paved the way for the host of urban surveys, from Chadwick’s report on the health of the towns in the 1840s to the studies of poverty carried out by Booth and Rowntree in the last decades of the century. Here were the tools for the definition and analysis of the emergent ‘social’, a domain of specialized knowledge and expert intervention.³⁴

According to Mitchell, on wages of 1 pound a week, reasonable comfort could be achieved only if the family was very small or if more than one person was earning³⁵. About 60 percent of adult male workers averaged under 25s. a week. But although wages stayed relatively stable during most of the Victorian period, the cost of living fell dramatically during the latter part of the century. Cheap food from Australia and North America, cheap clothing and shoes owing to factory production, and cheap coal as transportation improved meant that late-Victorian workers could spend more of their income on housing and could keep their children in school longer.

Toward the end of the century, social scientist Charles Booth determined that the poverty line was 18s. a week (£45 a year).³⁶

Figure 2 presents Manchester cotton spinner’s weekly budget in 1844. Weekly income was 25 shillings; father was bringing home just over a pound, fourteen-year- old daughter contributed 4s. 6d. Family consisted of father, mother, five children.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Fig. 2. Report of Factory Commissioners, Parliamentary Papers ( 1844)³⁷

After food prices had declined, a small family that could depend on 18s. a week in regular income could make ends meet, though just barely. If earnings fell much below that amount, however, malnutrition and ill health would soon make it impossible to do a day’s hard physical labor even if work could be found.

In order to solve such problems, reformers like Nassau Senior and Chadwick pushed for the reform of the old poor law through a report called the Royal Commission of 18З2³⁸.This report blamed the old poor law as the cause of poverty. The Poor Law Act of 1834 changed this while it established a Poor Law Commission to oversee the relief of the nation and the building of workhouses to as unemployment relief.

Williams assumes that: “The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which sought to make poor relief less attractive or ‘less eligible’ to the able-bodied by tying it to the performance of a variety of irksome tasks to be carried out within workhouses, provides the most important case in point.³⁹ ” Scholars now generally agree that the New Poor Law was considerably more revolutionary on paper than it was in practice. A great many paupers continued to be aided outside their workplaces, mostly because seasonal demand for labor made it impossible for guardians to effect an absolute separation between wages and poor relief. Therefore, in many respects 1834 did not mark a radical turning-point in the administration of poor relief.

Seaman summarizes:

This was certainly in conformity with the need of the time for the replacement of uncontrolled muddle by accountability and efficient administration and was a serious attempt to deal with the major social problem which the country then faced, given that more people were then affected by rural poverty than by urban. But the attempt (it proved ultimately unsuccessful) to end all outdoor relief, together with the imposition of the bureaucratic apparatus of the guardians and the poor law commissioners, demonstrated unequivocally the essential inhumanity of the utilitarian school of thought.⁴⁰

1.4. Urbanization as the traditional ‘grand narratives’ of nineteenth-century Britain

According to Simon Gunn, “urbanization is one of the traditional ‘grand narratives’ of nineteenth-century British history, conventionally taught in tandem with, and viewed as a product of, the Industrial Revolution.”⁴¹ It may be viewed as a story that describes, in essence, the transformation of Britain from a predominantly rural and agricultural society to one that was largely town- or city-based and industrial.

Mitchell explains that:

Urbanization was the most striking phenomenon of the Victorian age.

Cities grew chiefly through migration. Entire families left their village for better jobs in factories; rural girls came into domestic service; younger sons of the gentry looked for opportunities in urban professions. Cities developed patterns of living that were segregated by income. In country towns it was still usual for shopkeepers and even bankers to live on the premises where they worked, but in cities the commercial centers were virtually deserted at night⁴².

Due to the fact that neither all employers nor all workers now had to live within walking distance of their place of employment, urbanization soon developed into suburbanization. The miraculous development of the railway, which will be discussed in the following chapter, permitted house building in less built-up areas where land was cheaper.

However, the rapid growth of industry meant equally rapid growth in manufacturing cities. As it could be expected, workers’ living conditions were miserable in the early part of the century. Developers created streets of cheap row houses built back-to-back where each dwelling had two rooms, one above the other, with only a single window in the front. As it was already mentioned, there was no indoor plumbing; water had to be carried in buckets from a pump; and a small fireplace with a grate served for both cooking and heating.

The same conditions were probably in the rural cottages from which the first generation of industrial workers migrated, however, in cities the mass of people, plus the lack of fresh air and sanitation, created public health problems that were discussed above.

[...]

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¹ Holt, Jim, “I Yield to nobody”. in New York Times July 2,2000 found at http://www.nvtimes.com/books/00/07/02/bookend/bookend.html

² Grossmith. George, Grossmith, Weedon, Flint, Kate, The Diary of a Nobody. (Oxford: University of Oxford,1998) p. xiii.

³ Holt Jim „I Yield to nobody” in New York Times July 2,2000 found at: http://www.nvtimes.com/books/00/07/02/bookend/bookend.html

⁴ Introduction to The Dairy of a Nobody" by John Squire p.5.

⁵ Grossmith. George, Grossmith, Weedon, Flint, Kate, The Diary of a Nobody. (Oxford: University of Oxford,1998) p. xi.

⁶ Hosgood in Mitchell, Sally, Daily Life in Victorian England. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 1996, p. xiii.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (eds.) The Victorians since 1901: Histories, Representatives, and Revisions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 9.

⁹ Morton, Peter, Pootering About: Peter Morton Reminds Us That, a Century before Adrian Mole, There Was Charles Pooter in History Today. Volume: 55. Issue: 10. (2005), p. 28+.

¹⁰ Shepherd, Ann, Overview of the Victorian Era. (London: The Institute of Historical Research). 2001, online http://www.historv.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/index.html (2009-07-29).

¹¹ Alexander, Michael, A History of English literature. (Basingstoke - New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 247.

¹² Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English Literature. (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 399.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitchell, Sally, DailyLife in VictorianEngland. (Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress), 1996, p. xiv.

¹⁵ Seaman, L.C.B. Victorian England Aspects of English and Imperial History. (London - New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 4.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Dickens, Charles, Hard Times (1854) in Pool, Daniel, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 15.

¹⁸ Woods, Robert, The Demography of Victorian England and Wales. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ The age of Urban democracy p.5.

²¹ Williams, A Companion to Nineteen Century Britain. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), p. 1.

²² Woods, Robert, TheDemography of Victorian England and Wales, p.31.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ The age ofUrban Democracy p.5.

²⁵ Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 19-20.

²⁶ Hoppen, К. Theodore. The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846- 1886 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 97.

²⁷ Mitchell, Sally, Daily Life in Victorian England. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 1996, p. 189.

²⁸ Seaman, L.C.B. Victorian England Aspects of English and Imperial History. (London - New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 49.

²⁹ Smith, F.B. The People’s Heath, 1830-1910 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1979), p. 195.

³⁰ Hoppen, К. Theodore. The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846- 1886 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 103.

³¹ Seaman, L.C.B. Victorian England Aspects of English and Imperial History. (London - New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 50.

³² Smith, 195-197.

³³ Mitchell, Sally, Daily Life in Victorian England. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 1996, p. 190.

³⁴ Williams, A Companion to Nineteen Century Britain. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), p. 248.

³⁵ Mitchell, Sally, Daily Life in Victorian England. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 1996, p. 38.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Brundage, Anthony. TheEnglish Poor Laws, 1700-1930 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 62-63.

³⁹ Williams, A Companion to Nineteen Century Britain. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), p. 116.

⁴⁰ Seaman, L.C.B. Victorian England Aspects of English and Imperial History. (London - New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 68.

⁴¹ Williams, A Companion to Nineteen Century Britain. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), p. 238.

⁴² Mitchell, Sally, Daily Life in Victorian England. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 1996, p. 29.