Workshops - Victorian Values
VICTORIAN VALUES (1 ½ hr.)
This workshop is available signed
Our victorian children are taken to visit a match factory and learn all about 'fossy jaw' and the long hours the children are expected to work. Will the factory owner allow them to have breaks in the morning and afternoon, are they provided with food? What happens when they are ill? We then visit a coal mine and find out how the entire family would work down the pit, some as young as four. The children are asked to pull their sacks of coal through the long, dark coal mine and experience how awkward and difficult it was. We find out why ending up at the workhouse was a very last resort and why people struggled on to avoid the workhouse, by sending their children out to work.
Were schools encouraging, fun places to be, or were the punishments harsh and cruel. Who attended these schools and did the children benefit from attending?
We enter the market place to see what the children are selling on the streets and the jobs they provide like shoe shine and delivering messages for individuals and shops. There are various people who try to improve the lives of the children and their circumstances such as Dr Thomas Barnado, Elizabeth Fry, Lord Shaftsbury and Charles Dickens through his writing. Through scenarios the students act out, we learn how 'ragged schools' provided nourishment, though food, learning and love from Dr Barnado and his wife Syrie Elmslie who set up various schools and accommodation for boys and girls.
On entering the Crystal Palace exhibition, set up by Prince Albert, the students exhibit the inventions that have come about during the victorian period. We learn how medicines, machinery and the empire have changed and grown in a very short space of time and how that came about.
