ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the family groupings and households to be found in Colyton in 1851, from the point of view of all the children of less than ten years of age who were living in the parish in that year. Although the children of well-to-do and middle-class parents were spared the degree of deprivation experienced by the majority of Colyton’s girls and boys, the different classes lived together in close proximity, so that the effects of poverty were visible to the whole community. Relatives were more numerous than either servants or lodgers in the households in which Colyton’s children lived, and were to be found in all the social groups. All Colyton’s children were from an early age familiar with death, either of their own brothers and sisters, or of their friends, and were faced with the personal insecurity that such an experience carries with it.
