A Colourful Victorian Childhood

I found a small card today that was being used as a bookmark in a rather dull memoir by a Victorian clergyman. It was between pages 26 and 27, suggesting that the reader hadn't progressed any further.

One side contained this cheerful image:

The other had this appeal for donations to the 'Incorporated Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays':

Emigration seems a rather extreme measure, but the average Victorian orphan would have probably fared better in the colonies than the damp, smog-ridden streets of the East End. 

The memoir with the Waifs and Strays slip turned out to be the first of a batch of Victorian books that included a selection of 'penny dreadfuls', a couple of titles by John Ruskin and a battered copy of a children's poetry collection from 1868.

As I picked it up, the poetry book fell apart in my hands. I tried to reassemble the pages and found these appealing colour illustrations:

(I'm not sure why there's a sinister-looking stranger in the background)

As for the poems themselves, they covered cheerful subjects like death, deformity and poverty. Take this, for example:

Not something you'd want to read to your child at bedtime. But in an age in which infant mortality was a common experience, poems like these sought to bring comfort, albeit in a rather maudlin, sentimental fashion.

The poems also hark back to a pre-industrial rural idyll, evoking a world that still exists in the popular imagination: cottages with roses around the door, the hum of bees on a summer's afternoon, the church spire of a distant village, a babbling woodland stream and a carpet of bluebells.

There are no factory chimneys or back to back houses. Young readers may have been deemed able to cope with the grim realities of death and disease, but some subjects were clearly beyond the pale.