Well researched and an interesting look into life in Victorian Britain.

I enjoyed reading this, it is a must for those interested in the time period.

I want to thank Netgalley and the author for gifting me the ebook. Wow this book was a really eye opener! Highly recommend for history buffs out there.

A thoroughly researched record of life in Victorian England and the difficulties faced by children of the time. This is exceptionally hard to read at times, full of tragedy. I’d recommend reading in short bursts to avoid becoming overwhelmed. It would be a useful resource for writers setting a story in Victorian England.

This book was really interesting and had moments of being truly fascinating! I am interesting in studying further into the idea of childhood mortality in literature and thought this was a great starting point to access some of those ideas!

This is a difficult book to read, but is also very informative. Victorian childhood was difficult and way too many didn’t survive it. I’m honestly surprised anyone did.

One of my favorite historical novels, about my favorite historical topics - childhood in the Victorian era. This book may sound macabre and grim, but it's really very informative and a good read. I highly reccommend

This is not a fun read as the topic is as grim as the title suggests. Victorian England was a very dangerous place to live, especially if you were young and poor. Surviving infancy and childhood was basically a matter of pure luck. The author addresses a dark subject but one that definitely needs to be addressed. This book may not be for everyone but I am really glad that I read it, even though I had to take many breaks.

OOOOF! I felt like I needed a drink while reading this.

Childhood and Death in Victorian England by Sarah Seaton is a hard read. That isn’t to say its not insanely informative and well-written, but I still had to take breaks reading comics or watching TV periodically while reading this due to the absolutely soul-wrenching subject matter. If you get squeamish reading about kids being hurt, absolutely DO NOT READ THIS, as it is basically nothing but that for over 200 pages. This is the sort of book that makes one want to travel back in time to The Victorian Era and become a vigilante hero or something. If it wasn’t for the absolute tragedy of dying by simply living back then, most kids were lucky to ever see their teenage years for a multitude of reasons. Neglect, poverty, medical negligence, murder, school discipline, and much more awaited children on a day-to-day basis, and none of that even mentions the horrors brought on by The Poor Law of 1834.

“In this fascinating book, the reader is taken on a journey of real life accounts of Victorian children, how they lived, worked, played and ultimately died. Many of these stories have remained hidden for over 100 years. They are now unearthed to reveal the hardship and cruel conditions experienced by many youngsters, such as a travelling fair child, an apprentice at sea and a trapper. The lives of the children of prostitutes, servant girls, debutantes and married women all intermingle, unified by one common factor – death. Drawing on actual instances of Infanticide and baby farming the reader is taken into a world of unmarried mothers, whose shame at being pregnant drove them to carry out horrendous crimes yet walk free from court, without consequence. For others, they were not so lucky. The Victorian children in this publication lived in the rapidly changing world of the Industrial Revolution. With the introduction of the New Poor Law in 1834 the future for some pauper children changed – but not for the better.”

The aforementioned “Poor Law” was a reactionary law attempting to stop beggars and curb people “taking advantage of social safety nets” (hmmm sounds like many modern politicians would love this) by creating a system of workhouses that would shelter and feed the poor in exchange for an honest days work. Sounds great right? In reality, these so-called “debtor’s prisons” were an easy way for rich Capitalists to make an insane amount of profit with a slave labor class at their disposal. The biggest tragedy of all was forced labor by children as young as four years old, many of which were maimed or killed by huge industrial machines on a daily basis. You will leave this book thinking that The Industrial Revolution was a bad idea, and basically hate all adults (LOL). All kidding aside each page was frustrating, especially the sections about the conduct of fishing boat crews and how they treated their apprenticed child laborers.

If you don’t mind the subject matter, and are prepared to be bewildered and enraged in a true test of cultural relativism, this is a solid book. As I stated before, it is well-researched and has an incredible amount of information on the subject. Whenever I feel like life is hard, I will try to ground myself thinking of how bad it was at literally any time in the past, and especially in Victorian England. I have another book by Pen & Sword publishing about Workhouses that I still need to read, but I think I’ll give it a few weeks. I need to rebuild my tolerance for this sort of thing.

In this hard to read yet fascinating book, you can find tales that have been hidden, tales about the life of Victorian children, how they lived and died. This book uncover the hardship experienced by children as apprentices at sea. (Which interested me as although not a Victorian my grandfather had to go in as a cabin bot at 12 years old in 1928) It also covers the cruelty and hardship that children suffered as prostitutes, servants and trappers. This is hard to read not only for natural mortality of children in the Victorian age (due to lack of medicine, general health and conditions at the time) but also the cruel murder of children, often as throwaway a life, the accidents, and deaths of infants too. An interesting and heartbreaking read, but worth the heartache

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

I'll be honest here and say that I'm normally not that interested in history but the title of the book and THAT cover practically forced me to read it ha ha ha..... Seriously though, how creepy is that cover! Fab job done by the designer. Anyway, now that moment of cover appreciation has passed I'll get on to my review of the book.
As I said, I'm normally not a lover of history books so whilst I did find parts incredibly interesting, I did also find some parts a bit dry. I was super interested in the different ways children died, what led to their deaths, their home circumstances, how autopsies were undertaken, and in some cases, how the criminal trials were held. Some of the deaths were absolutely shocking and would likely never happen in modern day society, especially as a lot of the deaths were either a direct result of or compounded by the child being left alone by the parents for long periods at an age where they couldn't keep themselves safe. It was good to take a moment to sit back after each chapter and compare what happened in Victorian times to what would happen now, especially in the cases of suspicious deaths or murder. The dry parts came in the form of lists and facts. I prefer to be shown rather than told and so was more than happy with the more in depth look at specific cases / incidents rather than being given a list of names and causes of death to read.
That being said, I think that for a book to even partly entertain and interest someone who is most definitely not the target audience it must mean that the author did a great job. I'm confident that someone who is more comfortable with this type of book would love it.

Interesting but harrowing read about what childhood was like for the Victorian children. If you're into this period & love social history, this is the book for you.

An excellent book that I highly recommend. A great resource for the historian. This book discusses how horrible life was for children in Victorian England. I

This book is exactly what the title says it is, an in depth look into the main causes of death for children during the Victorian Era. It was incredibly well researched and well written, and because of that it was sometimes difficult to read. I wouldn’t recommend this one if graphic descriptions of injuries, death, and abuse are things you don’t want to read about. It painted a very vivid picture of the time, but again, difficult to stomach at times.

I enjoyed the way that the book was broken into different sections depending on the different causes of death that the author was going to be talking about. It also made it easy to know what I was getting myself into and if I had to be extra careful about some of the descriptions while reading certain sections. I also liked that the author didn’t shy away from showing how horrible life was for children during this time, especially lower class ones. They didn’t try to lighten what happened or make it easier to stomach, and I respect that choice.

It’s so obvious how much research went into this book, even from the first page you can just tell how much time the author spent making sure that they got everything right and that they got as much detail as possible. This was just a really well written book and I hope to read more from the author in the future.

The history of this book was very interesting because you really don't think about how many child passed in Victorian England. I did learn a lot and I will be telling all my history loving family and friends to pick up this book. I had me hooked from page one and I couldn't put it down. The writing style was very easy to read and it didn't read like a history book which I loved. I will be reading more from Sarah Seaton.

Sarah Seaton's book Childhood and Death in Victorian England is not an easy read at all, nor is it for everyone, but the knowledge and insights gained are utterly powerful. As a teacher, it is painful to read about children suffering when they are the age of the students in my classroom. Learning about the laws, society, and culture of Victorian England has always fascinated me, and this book provided a stark difference to the novels written during that time period because these topics are often not written about or taught.

In this fascinating book, you can find stories that have remained hidden for over 100 years. The stories are about the life of Victorian children, how they lived, worked, played, and died. They uncover the cruelty, and hardship experienced by children as apprentices at sea and trappers. It describes the lives of the children of prostitutes, servant girls, debutantes, and married women all intermingle, unified by one common factor, which is death. Moreover, it illustrates the cruel murders of children, poverty, accidents, and deaths of infants. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social history of the Victorian period.

Book Review

I think it was one of the hardest books to read for me this year. The book illustrates the deaths and childhood of the children in Victorian England with such a clear story that you cannot stop yourself from picturing it in your head. It’s terrifying how far people went with bad treatment of their apprentices, but also kids or neighbors. This book brought so many tears, I cannot count how many times I couldn’t stop myself from crying. I think the main factor why it had such a big impact on me is that the stories of the kids were precisely explained, one by one. I think not many people know what was happening at this time to children. There is this basic knowledge that it was a bad time for women and kids, however, we don’t know the specifics. This book gives specifics that I don’t think anyone is ready to hear. However, I think it is eye-opening to see what was actually happening in the past, and how lucky we are now.

I would like to thank NetGalley, Sarah Seaton, and Pen & Sword for providing me with the ARC copy of this book!

Seaton's book won't be for everyone. She has meticulously delved into the tragic short lives of MANY children in Victorian England. You think that nothing could be worse than the chapter you are reading...then you turn the page. It is amazing that enough children survived to continue populating the country.

*Kleenex alert*
You are going to want a box of kleenex with you as you read through this heartbreaking book. As a mother, it was very difficult to read, but as a historian, it was full of great information!
I ran through the gambit of emotions on this one - anger, sadness, righteous indignation. Now, taking all that aside, I had to put it in the context of the times. Things were different, and I tell my students that we have to be careful to not place the strictures of today on the past.
Reading through stories of children watching other children, it was common place. Childhood work laws are not what they are today, and so sending a child to work in the factories, apprenticing them to work on ships, or other trades was the norm.
What was not the norm was the horrid abuse that some of these children went through. Reading through some of the stories and learning that some stood by and did nothing - why!? Was it out of fear, or cowardice? We don't know, and we won't ever know.
As I stated, you are going to want kleenex on this book - but the information it contained was very well done, and documented very well. It was not a hard read in context, but it is hard on the heartstrings.

I really enjoyed this! It sounds morbid to say I enjoyed a book about dead children, but as a death historian, I study stuff like this and am always fascinated to find new books that center a macabre topic and treat it as something natural the way this one does. Sarah Seaton does a great job of respectfully telling these children's stories while also keeping it interesting and genuine. I can only imagine what her research process was like and how she made the choices to tell the stories she was going to. Also, I enjoyed that this was about Victorian England. I'm American and tend to mainly focus on American history as well as American relationships with death, so I enjoyed seeing just how closely intertwined a lot of these death histories are. Great read and one to go on my death positivity shelf!

What a fascinating subject and I was interested from the start. Something that isn’t spoke about much nor taught and I definitely had my eyes opened to the more macabre nature of Victorian era