Sources for the early 20th Century material
From the webmaster
The pages on the early 20th Century material are based on a number of sources:
- The memoirs of my mother, Florence Edith Clarke (born Cole) 1906-2002 in which she recorded what she saw around her as a child in a working class family on a working class Victorian-style terraced housing estate. These comprised the seven substantial and closely written volumes shown in the following photo.
- Contributions from other family members and visitors to the website. All written contributors are acknowledged on the pages concerned.
- Old documents filed away by my father.
- Information that my mother talked about but which she omitted from her memoirs.
- Original research which has involved me in numerous visits to museums and re-enactments, studying books and records and informally interviewing older people.
- Editorial work by me, her daughter, the webmaster. This has been considerable:
My mother, like most children of the time from similar estates, left school when she was 14 and received no formal education afterwards. Although her excellent powers of observation and memory are without doubt, as is her obvious enjoyment and satisfaction in writing her memoirs, her punctuation and spelling were not all that they might have been. She also had the habit of taking her recollections off along sidetracks as thoughts occurred to her. So not only was I faced with transcribing volumes of the spidery writing of her generation and social class, I also had to identify recurring themes and edit them together into topics which I thought would be interesting as web pages. The work took over a year, but I regarded it as worthwhile because although quite a lot is known about life above and below stairs in the big houses of Victorian and Edwardian England, very little, as far as I know, encapsulates so comprehensively the lives and emotions of the working classes who lived on Victorian and Edwardian housing estates without paid help. The reasons are not difficult to see because anyone with such knowledge would be an unlikely author.
To find your way around the topics, either use the search box or the menus which link to further menus.
See also the sources for the pages on everyday life on the WW2 home front and other material
sources: early 20th century material
sources: ww2 home front and other material
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