‘Real drudgery’

This chapter argues that the work of the house — the ‘housework’ — was not simply about cleaning, enhancing, and generally improving the domestic environment. Before 1914, it involved the performance of more fundamental tasks necessary to sustain life. The home called for a daily round of collecting water, purchasing and preparing food, lighting and clearing fires, cleaning and repairing clothes, and looking after children. In rural areas, firewood needed to be collected as well. The home could not function without water, fuel, and food, and obtaining these things involved hard, physical work and took many hours daily. Marriage and housekeeping might be an exciting prospect, but the reality of running a house was not.

‘A man’s work was a man’s life’

This chapter reveals the significance for work to male identity. Here, it shows how the centrality of work dominates men's autobiographies. Work was the key feature of a man's life and it was very often the motif by which male writers structured the story of their life. For most working-class men, work was equated with manhood — ‘I was a man and I knew it’. The chapter goes on to discuss how many Victorian children commenced their working lives at a considerably young age, particularly early in the reign when the place of children in the labour market was much more loosely regulated. Furthermore, to a far greater extent than girls, boys' experiences of work were shaped by the legislative framework as child labour laws became increasingly restrictive over time. This changing legal framework for child labour is clearly visible in the male autobiographies.

‘Toil in the factory, toil in the home’

This chapter takes a look at the kind of options which were available to married women without a reliable breadwinner for support, and how they were able to navigate their way through these options. It emphasises the remarkably stable nature of the married women's participation in the workplace. A wide range of economic measures have indicated that the economy underwent unprecedented growth and restructuring after 1830, yet none of these changes appear to have made much of an impact on the likelihood of married women participating in the labour market. Equally, the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the breadwinning family model — the ideological justification for higher male wages, a wage sufficient to support the male breadwinner and his dependent wife and children at home. Yet this too had very little impact on women's experiences, failing to raise male wages to a level at which paid work for married women became unnecessary in most families. Indeed, as the autobiographies in this chapter show, it becomes evident that married women's working patterns do not fit into our usual ways of conceiving work at all.

‘The meal-ticket’

This chapter shows that the foundation of the working-class family was the male wage, and a recurring memory in the autobiographies was the weekly tradition of father handing his earnings over to mother. Family life involved a complex web of rights and responsibilities. The father's place in this matrix was simple: he was responsible for providing for his wife and children and his execution of this duty outside the home earned him special rights — with respect to food, service, and sex — within it. Provision lay at the heart of working-class conceptions of fatherhood, and time and again, writers used this as the benchmark with which to evaluate their fathers. The chapter thus considers how well the autobiographers' fathers provided for their families. This question is analysed with respect to an individual man's skills and capacity for earning. Furthermore, the answer to this turned upon two related factors: how regularly a father worked, and — crucially — how much of his earnings he actually shared with his family.