It used to be fashionable amongst some writers to lament the passing of the Edwardian Age, that short period between the death of the old Queen and almost the start of the Great War.
It can still be paraded as an elegant and almost innocent time which would soon be shattered by the horrors of a continental war which accounted for the deaths of ten million people.
And of course it all makes good telly from costume dramas to high budget films, from those images of sophisticated Edwardian men and women gliding past us to the protests of the suffragettes and a wave of industrial unrest which saw troops dispatched to many of our major cities.
Rarely do the dramas go out of the fine houses and even when they descend to those who lived downstairs we are rarely confronted with the full range of social inequality where in the words of Robert Roberts, “poverty busied itself.”*
The life expectancy of a manual worker was just 50 while for women it was only a little better.
Life could be an uncertain struggle where illness, unemployment or the death of a wage earner could push a family into poverty and the workhouse.
And even while in gainful employment that family found it increasingly hard to manage as prices rose steadily from the 1890s but wages failed to keep pace.
Manual earnings amounted to sixteen or seventeen shillings a week compared to that of someone in the middle classes who might earn £340 a year.
So some at least surrendered to the option of allowing their children to start work at 10 and while this might not have surprised their grandparents it was shocking enough.
A full 9% of our young people between the ages of 10 and 14 were at work in the middle of 1911 which in the case of boys rose from just 1% of those aged 10-12 to 30% of those who had reached their fourteenth birthday.**
Against this we should perhaps pitch that simple statistic that the richest one percent held 70 percent of the wealth of the country.
Now in time I am going to explore in detail just what these young Mancunians did for a living and draw not only on the official records but the words of the young people themselves.
*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum page 18
**Occupations, Manchester 1911 Census Vol 10 page 230
And of course it all makes good telly from costume dramas to high budget films, from those images of sophisticated Edwardian men and women gliding past us to the protests of the suffragettes and a wave of industrial unrest which saw troops dispatched to many of our major cities.
Rarely do the dramas go out of the fine houses and even when they descend to those who lived downstairs we are rarely confronted with the full range of social inequality where in the words of Robert Roberts, “poverty busied itself.”*
The life expectancy of a manual worker was just 50 while for women it was only a little better.
Life could be an uncertain struggle where illness, unemployment or the death of a wage earner could push a family into poverty and the workhouse.
And even while in gainful employment that family found it increasingly hard to manage as prices rose steadily from the 1890s but wages failed to keep pace.
Manual earnings amounted to sixteen or seventeen shillings a week compared to that of someone in the middle classes who might earn £340 a year.
So some at least surrendered to the option of allowing their children to start work at 10 and while this might not have surprised their grandparents it was shocking enough.
A full 9% of our young people between the ages of 10 and 14 were at work in the middle of 1911 which in the case of boys rose from just 1% of those aged 10-12 to 30% of those who had reached their fourteenth birthday.**
Against this we should perhaps pitch that simple statistic that the richest one percent held 70 percent of the wealth of the country.
Now in time I am going to explore in detail just what these young Mancunians did for a living and draw not only on the official records but the words of the young people themselves.
*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum page 18
**Occupations, Manchester 1911 Census Vol 10 page 230
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