A woman's place?

Women in the Victorian period suffered a number of legal disabilities. They could not vote in Parliamentary elections. They were excluded from some professions. Until 1870 married women could not own property, and they were unfavourably treated under the divorce laws.

However, it would be wrong to assume that Victorian women were passive creatures who meekly submitted to their fathers and husbands, limiting their concerns to their homes and families.

The campaign for women's suffrage began in 1867, before all men had the vote. From 1869 women could vote in local elections, and women could stand for election to local authorities such as Boards of Guardians and School Boards.

Women campaigned on a range of issues. Josephine Butler and Annie Besant worked on behalf of some of the most disadvantaged women.

Frances Buss and Emily Davies were among those who raised standards of education for girls. Barbara Bodichon demonstrated that illegitimacy did not prevent a woman from taking part in public life.

Gertrude Bell and Marianne North travelled independently in remote parts of the world and were acknowledged by men and women as experts in their fields.

These women were financially independent and had the time and money to pursue their interests. Women who had to work also found opportunities increasing in the Victorian period. Domestic service was the most common employment for women, but many more types of work were available by the end of the century.

A large proportion of the workers in cotton mills were women and girls. The new department stores employed many young women. After 1870 compulsory, state funded education brought an increasing demand for school teachers, many of whom were women.

Women also ran businesses. In one town in 1855 women were running schools, lodging houses, public houses, hotels, dining rooms, beershops and shrimp warehouses.

They were shopkeepers, bakers, grocers, greengrocers, milliners, straw hat makers, dressmakers, staymakers, haberdashers, booksellers and printers, boot and shoemakers, pawnbrokers, basket makers, dealers in eggs and fruit, stationers, whitesmiths, dealers in marine stores, furniture dealers, market gardeners, barge owners, ironmongers, leather sellers, wax modellers and glass and earthenware dealers.

There were some things that women did not do. They did not go to sea in the fishing industry, although they were often part-owners of fishing boats and in many fishing ports they were involved in handling the catch on shore. They were excluded by law from some occupations. From 1842, for example, women could not work underground in mines, although they could and did work at the surface.

However, there was a wide range of occupations that women could undertake in the Victorian period. A writer setting a novel during this period could make her heroine something other than a governess or a servant, without her necessarily appearing unusual or encountering opposition. Giving a heroine a different occupation allows the writer to explore different aspects of Victorian life and of the heroine’s own character, which can only make the story stronger.

Middling, trading and industrious people…

… was how Daniel Defoe referred to what we would call the middle classes. The merchants, tradesmen, farmers, lawyers, doctors, who were in comfortable circumstances and perhaps on the fringes of the gentry, but not part of ‘Society’.

The middle classes are sometimes unkindly presented in historical fiction, sometimes overlooked entirely.

In the ‘clog and shawl’ genre the middle classes are often represented by the cruel mill owner, oppressing and exploiting his workers. Or the uncaring landlord, evicting his tenants from their cottages.

No doubt such men existed, but not every mill owner or landlord was like that. Many were philanthropists, who sought to improve the lives of their workers or tenants.

In historical romance, set in the assembly rooms of London and Bath and the ballrooms of great houses, the middle classes are sometimes presented as dull and socially awkward figures of fun. The middle class heroine, often a clergyman’s daughter, perhaps a governess, falls in love with a nobleman.

Yes, middle class young women did and do marry dukes (and even princes!) But why are there rarely any young men of the ’middling sort’ playing the role of romantic hero?

There were increasing numbers of the middle classes in England from the sixteenth century onwards, enjoying rising standards of living.

They employed large numbers of people, on their farms, in their shops, mills and counting houses and in their homes.

They played a vital role in their communities, doing time consuming and unpaid work as parish officers and later as elected members of the many new local government bodies set up in the nineteenth century.

Their daughters benefited from the increasing opportunities for women in education and employment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their sons served in the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force and in the merchant navy.

Then, as now, most of them probably passed their whole lives without meeting a member of the aristocracy, or caring about their activities.

So can we have more historical fiction written from the point of view of the ’middling sort’, in which they do not merely play a supporting role in someone else’s story, but where their ambitions, their conflicts, their griefs are central to the plot?

'Our white hawthorn tree'

The title is from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon.

‘The hawthorn is the oldest of the English hedgerow trees, for it gets its name from the Old English word haga, ‘a hedge’ or ‘an enclosure‘, and it was used from Saxon times onwards to make impenetrable fences…. For a brief spell in early summer it is the most beautiful of all the Midland trees, with its continuous miles of white may-blossom glimmering as far as the eye can see….

'In the Midland fields on [May the eighteenth] these miles of snowy hedges reach perfection, so dense and far reaching that the entire atmosphere is saturated with the bitter-sweet smell whichever way the summer wind is blowing. From the hedgerow trees near and far come the calls of countless cuckoos, and the lesser sound of an infinite number of small birds.’

So wrote W. G. Hoskins in his seminal book, The Making of the English Landscape.

Hedgerows have always been part of the English countryside. Some are over a thousand years old, marking boundaries that were determined in the Anglo Saxon period. Today, some of those same hedgerows mark the limits of a parish or county, instead of the bounds of a thegn's estate.

Some hedgerows are recorded in charters of the eighth, ninth or tenth centuries. For others, there is no written evidence of their origin, but there are techniques that can be used to estimate their age.

Sometimes narrow strips of woodland between fields or alongside roads are all that is left of a much larger tract of woodland which was cleared at some time in the past to meet increasing demand for agricultural land.

In the Midlands, many hedgerows date from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, planted when the landscape was redrawn as a result of Parliamentary Enclosure.



In the past century, many hedgerows were removed, in order to make fields larger and farming more efficient. Now, the importance of hedgerows is recognised and they are being recorded, protected and maintained.