The quickest though not the easiest guarantee of a life of ease and comfort, free from financial worries, is still to be born rich. Nonetheless, education offers a theoretical route to social mobility. This wasn’t an option for the great majority of children in the Victorian Lives database. For them rudimentary learning went little further … Continue reading St Issey: going up in the world
Category: social history
St Hilary: managing without men
Much has been written about women in Victorian Cornwall who survived without the presence of men. Emigration and early death of a spouse employed in dangerous occupations such as mining or fishing meant that the likelihood of a woman spending part of her life without a father or husband around was hardly rare. During these … Continue reading St Hilary: managing without men
St Gluvias: return migration at Penryn
As we saw in the previous blog in the case of Eliza Bennett, short stays overseas were by no means unknown in Victorian Cornwall. Temporary sojourns in North America seem to have been particularly prevalent in the Penryn district. Often these involved stonemasons and quarrymen, presumably taking advantage of higher wages in American quarries when … Continue reading St Gluvias: return migration at Penryn
St Gluvias: marital strife at Penryn
Eliza Elizabeth Jane Bennett grew up in the back streets of Penryn. She got married at 18 in the town’s Wesleyan Methodist chapel to Richard Datson, a journeyman stonemason. A child was soon born but died within days. Richard had emigrated to Richmond, Virginia before 1871, to be shortly followed by Eliza, who bore him … Continue reading St Gluvias: marital strife at Penryn
St Germans: London links by servants and main lines
The parish of St Germans was dominated by Port Eliot, the stately home the Eliots had built on the remains of buildings attached to the medieval priory they had bought when it was closed in the 1500s. The impressive church next door had served as Cornwall’s first cathedral in the tenth and eleventh centuries and … Continue reading St Germans: London links by servants and main lines
St Gennys: scattered to the four winds
St Gennys is a farming parish on the north coast of Cornwall. It’s best known for its spectacular cliff scenery and is where we can find Cornwall’s highest cliff - the unimaginatively named if eponymous 735 foot (223m) High Cliff a mile or so south of Crackington Haven. Here in 1836 plans were mooted to … Continue reading St Gennys: scattered to the four winds
St Ewe man murdered! Two arrested
In September 1906 the peace of the small town of Auburn, Nebraska was shattered by news of the murder of a ‘prominent farmer’ a few miles east near the even smaller settlement of Brownville. The farmer, Isaac Cock Williams, had been born in the Cornish parish of St Ewe, west of St Austell, in 1850. … Continue reading St Ewe man murdered! Two arrested
St Eval: a Scottish sojourn and some sad deaths
In 1938 St Eval's churchtown was demolished to make way for an airfield as part of the re-armament programme. The church was left intact and used as a navigational aid. The airfield closed in 1959 but the church remains. Of the 12 children in our database who were living in the parishes of St Ervan … Continue reading St Eval: a Scottish sojourn and some sad deaths
St Ervan: farriers, farming and traffic
The two neighbouring farming parishes of St Ervan and St Eval north of St Columb managed to avoid the trouble and turmoil that periodically scorched through Cornish rural parishes dependent on mining. Nonetheless, their populations slowly drifted downwards in the 1800s, the exodus gaining force in the final decades of the century as farmers reduced … Continue reading St Ervan: farriers, farming and traffic
St Erth: two emigrants to Australia
St Erth was a parish that in the 1800s included part of the industrial town of Hayle. Near the northern limits of the parish could be found Hayle Foundry, Cornwall’s biggest engineering foundry in the 1800s. By the middle of the nineteenth century around one in seven of St Erth’s men were foundry workers or … Continue reading St Erth: two emigrants to Australia
Cornish studies resources 