ABSTRACT
In this chapter and the two that follow, we turn from a general analysis of Victorian middle-class girlhood to an account of the girlhood experiences of individual Victorian women. In this chapter it is the early-Victorian period with which we will be concerned. The women selected for inclusion here were all born between 1819 and 1834. During their girlhoods, the ideals of femininity, and the specific advice about childrearing that have been discussed in the preceding chapters were in their early stages of development. The idealisation of feminine girlhood had begun to have an influence, and concrete advice about the rearing of their daughters would have been available to the parents of these women. But any woman born before 1835 would have reached maturity well before she could have been influenced in girlhood by the changes in opportunities for middle-class girls, and in ideas about them, that characterised the last decades of the century.
