ABSTRACT
The various Education Acts described at the end of the last chapter had their effect on the proportion of boys at work in Colyton in 1891, but the resultant change was much less marked than it had been for the girls. Although the total population of Colyton declined by 14 percent between 1851 and 1891, the actual number of seven- to twenty-year-old boys in the three most prosperous classes of landowners and professional men, farmers, and business owners increased in real terms and remained almost static in the wage-earning class. To have described the working lives of Colyton’s girls before those of its boys is not to have shown a greater interest in one sex than the other. Colyton’s working boys in 1851, then, were divided almost equally between those on the land and those in other occupations. Living-in service, whether on farms or elsewhere, accounted for only three out of ten of the working boys.
