Uncle Tom Was There, in Crockery’: Material Culture and a Victorian Working-Class Childhood

This is a repository copy of ‘Uncle Tom was there, in crockery’: Material Culture and a Victorian Working-class Childhood. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/115087/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Crewe, V. and Hadley, D.M. (2013) ‘Uncle Tom was there, in crockery’: Material Culture and a Victorian Working-class Childhood. Childhood in the Past, 6 (2). pp. 89-105. ISSN 1758-5716 https://doi.org/10.1179/1758571613Z.0000000008 Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version - refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher’s website. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ ‘Uncle Tom was there, in crockery’: material culture and a Victorian working-class childhood V. A. Crewe and D. M. Hadley Abstract British archaeologists have long recognised the potential for the archaeology of working-class neighbourhoods to illuminate communities that typically left few direct traces of their own in the written record. They have also emphasised that the ‘rich and diverse material culture’ from such sites provides alternative perspectives to the textual evidence, which is often moralizing and condemnatory (Giles and Rees Jones 2011, 545-6). Drawing on a case-study from Sheffield (Yorkshire), this paper explores what material culture can reveal about working-class childhoods. It argues that childhood was depicted and experienced at the intersections of the chapel, mine and pub, and that competing conceptions of childhood and family were pivotal to the struggle for working-class identity. Keywords: working-class; Methodism; temperance; ceramics; work; nineteenth century Childhood among the British working-classes of the nineteenth century has been extensively researched by historians and literary scholars. Approaches adopted range from broad surveys of social and economic conditions, based on governmental records and other institutional sources, such as those of charitable and educational bodies (e.g. Tuttle 1999; Heathorn 2000; Humphries 2010), to analyses of individual life stories, as recorded in autobiographies (e.g. Vincent 1982) and interviews conducted by social reformers (e.g. Shore 1999). The literature published for children (e.g. Bottigheimer 1996; McGeorge 1998; Shuttleworth 2004) and paintings and photographs of children have been shown to have both reflected and shaped lived experience (e.g. Cunningham 1991; Arscott 2004; Rose 2009). Yet, childhood has largely been overlooked by archaeologists, despite a growing body of work exploring the domestic archaeology of nineteenth-century Britain, which has nuanced the study of industrialisation (e.g. Casella and Croucher 2010; Owens et al. 2010). Childhood did not feature, for instance, in a 2011 volume of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology dedicated to the archaeology of poverty since the eighteenth century, and is similarly neglected in recent reviews of historical archaeology (e.g. Hicks and Beaudry 2006), unlike in studies of earlier periods where the archaeology of childhood is now well established (e.g. 1 Kamp 2001). In contrast, in their analyses of nineteenth-century domestic assemblages, North American and Australian archaeologists have long endeavoured to uncover the experiences of children, and their influence upon the archaeological record (e.g. Praetzelis and Praetzelis 1992; Wilkie 2000; Mayne and Murray 2001; Yamin 2002; Baxter 2005). Taking a lead from such pioneering approaches, this paper draws on material culture produced for children, and interweaves it with documentary evidence, in order to investigate the conceptualisation of childhood within one working-class community living on the outskirts of nineteenth-century Sheffield (Yorkshire). The ways in which this may have contributed to, but also conflicted with, the realities of daily life are also explored. The nineteenth-century community of Sheffield Manor The community at Sheffield Manor lived in cottages built among the remains of a Tudor hunting lodge, c. 2km to the east of the nineteenth-century industrial centre of Sheffield, internationally famed for its steel industry (Hey 2005, 19, 32, 34). From the eighteenth century, the landowners, the dukes of Norfolk, sought to exploit the economic potential of the lodge and the surrounding parkland, and, consequently, the banqueting tower (‘Turret House’) was leased as a farmstead and enveloped in a complex of barns and outbuildings. The deer park was divided out among other farmsteads, pits for coal extraction were dug across the park and coke burning ovens were constructed (Scurfield 1986, 168), while houses for the mine workers were built in the ruins of the hunting lodge (Crewe 2012, 333-4) (fig. 1). A Methodist chapel and school were founded there c. 1810, and a pub, the Norfolk Arms, was opened in 1819 (Graham 1914, 42-4; Crewe 2012, 334). However, by the end of the nineteenth century the priorities of the dukes had changed, and Henry Fitzalan-Howard, the fifteenth duke, commissioned architect Charles Hadfield to restore the Turret House and remove the attached farm buildings (Leader 1874; Hadfield 1875). In the following years, the other post-Tudor buildings were cleared away, and the community was evicted and the ruins fenced off (Crewe 2012, 333). Prior to its demise, the nineteenth-century census records suggest that Sheffield Manor was occupied by around twenty households, typically comprising parents and their children, although members of the wider family and lodgers are occasionally recorded. The working- class nature of the community is emphasized by the occupations listed in the census returns for 1861: miner, coke burner, colliery engine tenter, labourer, blacksmith, white metal smith, table knife cutler, shoe maker and blade joiner (PRO RG 9/3491). Children aged between four and twelve/thirteen years are described by the censuses as ‘scholars’, and presumably 2 attended the local Methodist school (see below, p. 00). The censuses also reveal the heterogeneous origins of the inhabitants, some of whom had been born as far away as Cornwall, Dorset, London and Scotland. Some families had evidently moved around the country, probably in pursuit of work. For example, the 1851 census reveals that the eldest child of the Butson family had been born in Sheffield, but was followed by children born in Manchester and then Liverpool, with the three youngest children born in Sheffield (PRO HO 107/2341). Contemporary commentary suggests that childhood must have been lived amid squalor and immorality at Sheffield Manor, which had a reputation as a place occupied by ‘wicked people’ who engaged in such vices as ‘Sabbath-breaking, swearing, drunkenness and cock-fighting’ (Staniforth 1858, 48). The antiquarian John Leader (1874, 42) bemoaned the stench of the site, and contrasted its ‘ancient luxury’ with the ‘modern filth’ of the current inhabitants, while architect Charles Hadfield (1875, 110) complained that ‘squalid and rickety cottages, like parasites, have fastened themselves about the tottering walls’ of the Tudor remains. He was pleased to discover that the cottages and their inhabitants were only there ‘on sufferance’, until they could be removed and the ruins closed off and protected from further destruction. However, despite the impression that emerges from these contemporary commentaries, excavation has revealed that householders decorated their allegedly ‘squalid’ homes with ceramic ornaments, many with religious or political significance, and they had keepsakes and souvenirs of places visited (such as the Great Exhibition of 1851). They also owned items intended for children, such as cups and plates depicting nursery rhymes, the alphabet, or children’s games, as well as toys (figs 2 and 5) (for similar evidence from other working-class sites, see Owen et al. 2010; Casella and Croucher 2010, 116-21).1 Hence, while the written record is unpromising for understanding childhood at Sheffield Manor, material culture offers an alternative perspective, and one under-exploited by scholars of British nineteenth-century working-class communities. Methodism, temperance and childhood at Sheffield Manor The Methodist chapel had an immense impact at Sheffield Manor, albeit, as we shall see, one that came in to conflict with other aspects of community identity. Methodist preaching at Sheffield Manor was led from 1810 by William Cowlishaw, a penknife-blade forger who was a recent convert from a life of criminal activity, who also founded a school for the community (Staniforth 1858, 48; Tyerman 1896, 5-11; Graham 1914, 42-3). According to a biography of Cowlishaw published in 1856 by a fellow Methodist minister, upon his arrival among the 3 community Cowlishaw organised a prayer meeting in a cottage ‘turned into a Sabbath-school’ to oppose ‘the Manor cock-pit filled with a godless

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