Grim Old Days: Kirstin Olsen’s Daily Life in 18th-Century England

Life just prior to industrialization was more callous, uncomfortable, and dangerous than most people today care to fathom.

Chelsea Follett — Jul 26, 2024

Summary: Kirstin Olsen’s book Daily Life in 18th-Century England captures a period of tremendous change, highlighting the stark differences in living conditions between 1700 and 1800. The 18th century saw advancements like the development of effective steam engines and profound new scientific knowledge, which led to improved comfort even for the poor by 1800. Olsen elucidates the immense hardships commonplace in English society prior to industrialization, from the evolution of marriage and childbirth to the grim realities of public entertainment, criminal justice, and healthcare.

Kirstin Olsen’s book Daily Life in 18th-Century England paints a vivid portrait of a time of immense change. “There were no really effective steam engines in 1700, no awareness that ‘air’ and ‘water’ were divisible into separate elements, no understanding of why things burned, and no knowledge of positive and negative electrical charges. The words ‘mammal’ and ‘Homo sapiens’ did not exist. No one had ever flown, and no one, since prehistory, had discovered a new planet in the sky. Weaving and spinning were still done entirely by hand. By 1800, all this would change.” Living conditions transformed so that even “the poor were much more comfortable in 1800 than in 1700.” This book provides a thorough look into everyday life just prior to the dawn of industrialization as well as during that momentous transition, which began around 1760 in Britain.

In the 18th century, people seldom traveled and lived in hyperlocal worlds. “Weights and measures still varied from one region to another. . . . Cornish was still spoken in parts of the far southwest until about 1780, and Welsh and Gaelic were still in common use in areas outside England. Most residents of the Isle of Man spoke their own language, Manx, as well.”

Given the highly limited pool of marriage partner choices that resulted from this extreme isolation, perhaps it is unsurprising that “much of the satirical literature of the 18th century . . . lampooned marriage as a hell or prison sentence for one or both partners. The most typical attitude toward marriage evinced in 18th-century literature and visual art is a sly, collegial misery.” The poem “Wedlock” by the English poet Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright (1697–1750), herself pressured into a loveless marriage with a plumber (who trekked home grime that may have been responsible for their losing many children to premature death), paints a typical picture:

Thou source of discord, pain and care,
Thou sure forerunner of despair,
Thou scorpion with a double face,
Thou lawful plague of human race,
Thou bane of freedom, ease and mirth, [. . .]
Who hopes for happiness from thee,
May search successfully as well
For truth in whores and ease in hell.

Legally “the groom could be as young as 14 and the bride as young as 12.” Many marriages turned abusive. “Domestic violence was tolerated by the courts so long as it was limited to ‘moderate physical correction,’ and a man could even commit his wife to an insane asylum against her will.” An abused woman’s best hope was often not legal recourse but the possibility that a male relative, neighbor, or sympathetic passerby might notice her plight and take action on her behalf. “Neighbors [sometimes] intervened when men beat their wives, shaming the abusers with public processions and chants, or simply stopping beating, as a saddler did in 1703, telling the abusive husband, ‘You shall not beat your wife.’” Remaining single in the 18th century brought its own challenges: “The life of a spinster could be a difficult one, with extended family using unattached female relatives as temporary live-in housekeepers when a wife died.”

Those who imagine that the people of the past unfailingly adhered to stricter standards of chastity might be alarmed at the frequency of shotgun marriages: “One-third of all brides were pregnant at their weddings.” About 20 percent of first births occurred outside marriage in 1790 in England. Such children were often subject to neglect and even infanticide. In England: “A 1624 statute criminalized concealing the death of a bastard child unless the mother (who in this was presumed guilty) could prove that it had been stillborn.”

“It was common for one parent to die before all the children had grown up.” The 18th-century “Birmingham businessman William Hutton received a straightforward appraisal of his chances when, as a child, he lost both his parents. ‘Don’t cry,’ his nanny told him. ‘You will soon go yourself.’” (He defied this prophecy: After a long life that included beginning work in a mill at age 7, he died at the ripe old age of 91).

“Childhood ailments claimed a large number of children before their fifth birthdays (60 percent in London in 1764), and those illnesses that failed to kill often scarred or attracted treatments that were even worse. A child might have to survive teething problems, tapeworms, chicken pox, whooping smallpox, lead poisoning, thrush, measles, and mumps, being bled, swaddled, and dosed with belladonna, syrup of poppies (opium), quinine, rum, gin, brandy. Laxatives, and patent medicines. Children wore amulets of such ingredients as mistletoe and elk’s horn, had hare’s brains smeared on their gums while teething, and were given enemas for worms. A particularly drastic worm remedy involved inserting a piece of pork on a string into the rectum and drawing it out slowly to lure the worms. Some diseases could be cured, it was thought, by a sudden fright, such as riding on a bear, having a gun fired nearby, or ‘giving the patient a part of some disgraceful animal, as a mouse, etc., to eat, and afterwards informing him of it; and so forth.’”

“Imagine that you are sick in the 18th century. You are running a high fever, feeling light-headed, and beginning to develop blotches on your skin. Your mother has dosed you with some cheap patent medicines. She has tried poultices and some sort of nasty-smelling broth. Time passes, and a man with a cane and a sword feeds you more bad-tasting medicines. You think you hear him say that one is made of spiders. You are dimly aware of warm water and a pain in your arm, and you turn your head to witness the sight of your blood running from a vein in your elbow into a bowl. Ah, good, you think, being an 18th-century person. Everything that can be done is being done.”

In those days, sometimes avoiding doctors altogether was better than receiving what passed for medical treatment. “Needing to do something dramatic, or for lack of anything better to do, or because they really believed it would work, doctors resorted to visible but useless or even harmful measures-bleeding, dosing with dangerous drugs, raising blisters on the skin, and inducing vomiting. [Joseph] Addison, in The Spectator, called physicians ‘a most formidable Body of Men: The Sight of them is enough to make a Man serious, for we may lay it down as a Maxim, that When a Nation abounds in Physicians it grows thin of People.’”

Folk remedies were also usually useless and often dangerous. “They ate soap for stomach troubles, touched hanged men to cure goiter and swollen glands, drank asses’ milk, made charms of babies’ amniotic sacs, drank their own urine for ague or snail tea for a sore chest, rubbed their eyes with black cats’ tails for styes, and ate eye of pike for toothaches, pigeon blood for apoplexy, tortoise blood for epilepsy, cockroach tea for kidney ailments, puppy and owl broth for bronchitis, and spiders for fever.”

Beauty products could be harmful too. “Most cosmetics were made at home” even in the 1700s, with some recipes “containing harmful chemicals like the white lead in face paint or the mercury in some rouges” and others included irritants such as quicklime or even “cat’s dung.” “Some reportedly also wore false eyebrows made of mouse skin that could, in a hot room, begin to slide down an unfortunate woman’s face.”

The state of dentistry was similarly dreadful. “If something went wrong with the teeth, dentists hand-drilled cavities as always, with no anesthetic but alcohol and filled the resulting holes with molten tin, lead, or gold. Where a dentist was unavailable, one called the farrier (the horse-doctor). False teeth were made of bone, ivory, gold, porcelain, wood, or the purchased teeth of the poor, but such dentures were expensive and, held in place by awkward spring mechanisms, sometimes fell out of the mouth. Tooth problems could also result in infections; 780 Londoners ostensibly died in 1774 from dental problems.”

Standards of sanitation were also unacceptable. London’s streets were “full of sewage and horse dung and butchers’ offal.” “The streets were atrocious in the first half of the [18th] century, full of dust in dry weather and mud in wet. These streams were augmented by dirtied water tossed by maids from the upper stories, by gutters that ran directly onto the streets and pavements, and by rainstorms, which carried into them ‘Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / Dead cats and turnip tops.’ The streets were dirtied by not only horse manure but also human waste, particularly from beggars and children who urinated and [defecated] next to buildings.” In the 1760s, just as industrialization began, so too did the condition of London’s streets start to improve.

Mental health care was appalling as well. A chief amusement of the pre-industrial world was finding entertainment in the act of gawking at anyone unusual, especially those suffering from bodily abnormalities or mental health problems. “The interior of a madhouse such as London’s Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) was a sight to behold, and many did—Bedlam was one of London’s principal tourist attractions, and until 1770, visitors could pay for admission and a tour, during which guards and visitors alike goaded the inmates to view their violent reactions. Nuts, fruit, cheesecakes, and beer were sold to the tune of ‘rattling of Chains, drumming of Doors, Ranting, Hollowing, Singing,’ and the distinctive uproar that spread like a wave through the asylum when the inmates became outraged at the treatment one of their fellows was receiving. Some inmates fought back by hurling the contents of their chamber pots. Bedlam’s occupants were lightly dressed in both summer and winter, in unheated rooms. Often with only a pile of straw for a bed.” It was somewhat unusual when in London, the rather distastefully named St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, “founded in 1751, explicitly forbade exposing ‘the patients . . . to public view.’”

Executions and other criminal punishments were another popular form of entertainment. There were about 200 capital crimes (for which the punishment was death) in England as late as 1800, including pickpocketing goods over 1 shilling in value, shoplifting 5 shillings’ worth, sheep-stealing, killing a cow, entering land with intent to kill rabbits, “associating with gypsies,” theft of a master’s goods by a servant, and vandalism of fishponds.

Lesser crimes were punished with public shame. “People exposed in the pillory were tormented by the crowd, sometimes for fun and sometimes out of genuine resentment of the crime. It was not unusual-for-the-person pilloried to suffer death or maiming as a result of being pelted with stones, food, dirt, dead animals, and trash. Those not pilloried were sometimes branded, though the brander could be bribed to use a cold iron. Another common punishment was public flogging, and it was a holiday of sorts when women, particularly prostitutes, were flogged. Crowds would gather to see these women stripped to the waist and beaten. The holiday mood only intensified when a hanging was scheduled.” Hence in the 1730s, one writer observed of England, “The Execution of Criminals here is a perfect Shew to the People, by Reason of the Courage with which most of ’em go to the fatal Tree. . . . I lately saw five carried to the Gallows, who were dressed, and seemed to be as well pleased, as if they were going to a Feast.”

A festival-like atmosphere attended public hangings, which were a major source of entertainment. “At Tyburn the crowd either stood or paid for the privilege of sitting in the wooden grandstands, called ‘Mother Proctor’s Pews.’ The cart moved beneath the gallows, and there were final speeches from the condemned, perhaps a last-minute reprieve, prayers from the chaplain, the nooses placed around necks. Then ‘away goes the Cart, and there swing my Gentlemen kicking in the Air.’ Hawkers began selling the alleged dying utterances of the hanged, which made the execution, 1 sale being far more important than factual accuracy. Sufferers from disease snatched at the bodies, believing them to possess magical powers. Entrepreneurs waited for the right moment to make off with the rope, which could be sold in pieces as a souvenir. Friends red lingered, trying either to support them long enough to cut them down (which worked on at least one occasion) or to yank their legs to shorten their suffering (since 18th-century hanging had no drop to break the neck, and death was by slow strangulation) and defending their bodies (sometimes with fierce violence) from the surgeons, who had a right to dissect 10 Tyburn corpses per year and claimed any corpse not purchased by the family. In some cases, the bodies were violated according to the nature of the crime. Jacobites’ heads were, until 1777, severed and displayed on spikes at Temple Bar. Sometimes whole bodies, often shaved, disemboweled, or coated with tar or tallow, were hung in chains near the symbolic scene of their crimes—along roads for highwaymen and near the Thames for pirates, mutineers, and deserters. Far from being shocked by such displays, the crowds positively demanded them. They sometimes rioted if denied a hanging, for example by the suicide of the condemned. In one such case, they seized the dead body and attacked it with such ferocity that virtually all its bones were shattered.”

People also commonly enjoyed violence against animals as entertainment. “The torture and killing of animals and fights between humans were a prime source of entertainment. Thus, in 1730, a showman advertised ‘a mad bull to be dressed up with fireworks and turned loose in the game place, a dog to be dressed up with fireworks over him, a bear to be let loose at the same time, and a cat to be tied to the bull’s tail.’ Some impresarios staged dog fights, or tied an owl to the back of a duck to see the duck dive in fear and half-drown the owl, or hung a goose head-down from a tree or a pair of poles, greased its neck, and gave people turns trying to pull off its head while riding underneath. Children’s games included shooting flies with small guns, sewing a string to a mayfly to keep it on a leash, and ‘conquering,’ or pressing snails against each other till one shell broke.”

“One of the most popular blood sports was cockfighting. Participants of all classes came to the cockpit with sacks holding their prize roosters, whose wings and tails had been clipped and whose legs were fitted with long sharp spurs called gaffles. Amidst a roar of betting, two cocks were placed in the ring and pushed at each other until they began to fight. ‘Then it is amazing,’ wrote one spectator, ‘to see how they peck at each other, and especially how they hack with their spurs. Their combs bleed terribly and they often slit each other’s crop and abdomen with the spurs.’ Battle continued until one of the birds stood crowing on its dead opponent’s body.” One witness to such a battle in 1728 wrote, “Cocks will sometimes fight a whole-hour before one or the other is victorious.”

“Another popular spectacle was the ‘baiting’ of an animal by tying it up and sending dogs against it. The most popular animal for such contests was a bull. In fact, in some places, it was illegal for a butcher to slaughter a bull without first making it the subject of such sport.”

World Bank | Financial Market Development

Number of Women with Financial Accounts Is Increasing

Nov 20, 2025

“Women’s financial inclusion is experiencing a remarkable transformation. The Global Findex 2025 report finds that as of 2024, 73% of women in low- and middle-income economies (LMICs) have a financial account, a 7-percentage point increase from 2021.”

From World Bank.

The Hindu | Women's Empowerment

Kazakhstan Bans Bride Kidnappings, Forced Marriages

Oct 25, 2025

“Kazakhstan has banned forced marriages and bride kidnappings through a law that came into effect on Tuesday (September 16, 2025) in the Central Asian country, where the practice persists despite new attention being paid to women’s rights.

‘Previously, a person who voluntarily released a kidnapped person could expect to be released from criminal liability. Now this possibility has been eliminated,’ the police said.”

From The Hindu.

Girls Not Brides | Child Abuse & Bullying

Burkina Faso Raises the Legal Age for Marriage to 18 Years Old

Oct 6, 2025

“Burkina Faso has adopted the bill for the new Personal and Family Code (CPF), changing the minimum legal age for marriage to 18 years old for both girls and boys.

Previously, the minimum age of marriage was 17 years old for girls and 20 years old for boys. However, girls could marry as young as 15 and boys at 18 if authorised by the courts.

This new bill harmonises the legal age of marriage at 18 for both girls and boys. It remains unclear if a judge can still grant exceptions for marriage at the age of 16 in some circumstances.”

From Girls Not Brides.

Blog Post | Human Development

Grim Old Days: Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost

Poverty and hardship long predated the factory age.

Chelsea Follett — Aug 14, 2025

Summary: Before the Industrial Revolution, life in England was marked by widespread poverty, illiteracy, and relentless labor. Even children worked from as young as three. Most people lacked education, political voice, and basic comforts, enduring hunger, disease, and harsh living conditions that kept them in constant proximity to hardship and death. Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost reveals that the deprivations often blamed on early industrialization were in fact the norm long before factories and industry.

Peter Laslett’s book The World We Have Lost is an influential history of what life was like in England before the Industrial Revolution. Laslett makes clear that the infamous problems of the industrial era were preexisting, not innovations that first arose with the construction of factories: “The coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation along with it. It was there already.” His book brings into focus the poverty and hardship faced by preindustrial people and the fact that “we now inhabit a world wealthy on a scale quite unknown before industrialization.”

Laslett describes the dearth of schooling, observing that neither Isaac Newton’s nor William Shakespeare’s parents could read. Inventories from Kentish towns between the 1560s and 1630s show a steady increase from a fifth or less owning books to nearly a quarter, although such inventories were recorded only for prosperous households and thus probably overestimate the extent of book ownership. Leicestershire wills from the 1620s to 1640s show that only 17 percent of people with wills bequeathed books to their heirs, and even among the gentry that figure was only 50 percent.

The “inability to share in literate life cut most men off from even contemplating a share in political power.” And the idea of women attaining a political voice was more absurd still. Even James Tyrrell—an associate of John Locke, a critic of absolutism, and a believer in limited political authority—noted in 1681, “There never was any government where all the promiscuous rabble of women and children had votes.”

Illiteracy often not only limited women’s ability to engage with society but also increased women’s vulnerability. “An illiterate maidservant whose place was five or ten miles from home was cut off from her parents and her brothers and sisters,” effectively unable to send them messages and alert them if her employer physically abused her or sexually assaulted her (as was, sadly, common).

Instead of learning to read, many children began work at shockingly young ages. Laslett informs the reader that, as John Locke noted in 1697, poor children were expected to start working at age three, contributing in what capacity they could, often through apprenticeships. The apprentice’s contract typically went thus: “He shall not absent himself by night or by day without his master’s leave.” Some apprentices “stayed subordinate to a master in a master’s house for the whole of their lives,” far beyond the initial terms of their contract.

Not only could children start work at age 3, but by age 12, they were considered old enough to help run businesses. In 1699, at an alehouse in Harefield, Middlesex, run by Catherine and John Baily, 6 of their 10 children still living at home “were above the age of twelve, . . . old enough to help run the family establishment.”

In England grooms could legally be as young as 14 and brides as young as 12, although Laslett notes that thankfully that was relatively rare in practice. Early marriages did occur, though. In 1623, a London parish clerk wrote disapprovingly of the wedding of a 17-year-old boy working as a threadmaker to the 14-year-old daughter of a porter, calling them a “couple of young Fooles.”

A rather offensive (to modern sensibilities) form of divorce known as “wife-selling” sometimes occurred among those who could not afford a formal dissolution of marriage. The Ipswich Journal records such a sale occurring in 1789:

Oct. 29, Samuel Balls sold his wife to Abraham Rade in the parish of Blythburgh in his county for 1 [shilling]. A halter was put around her neck and she was resigned up to this Abraham Rade.

Such bizarre episodes “reveal something of the slightly quizzical attitude of ordinary people to the official marriage code,” with local customs and practices varying wildly. Upon settling down typically, a man tilled land with the aid of his wife and children. Picture the “hard-working, needy, half-starved labourers of pre-industrial times,” who toiled nonstop and yet never produced enough to live comfortably.

Here was an economy conspicuously lacking in those devices for the saving of exertion which are so marked a feature of our own everyday life. The simplest operation needed effort; drawing the water from the well, striking steel on flint to catch the tinder alight, cutting goose-feather quills to make a pen, they all took time, trouble and energy. The working of the land, the labour in the craftsmen’s shop, were infinitely taxing. [The peasantry would] shock us with their worn hands and faces, their immeasurable fatigue.

Those who didn’t work in agriculture were often servants. The percentage of workers employed as servants in the population varied from as low as 4 percent to as high as a third of the population in relatively wealthy times and places, such as London and parts of Norwich in the 1690s. “Everywhere work of all kinds varied alarmingly with the state of the weather and of trade, so that hunger was not very far away.” Many had no employment and begged. “Wandering beggars . . . were . . . a feature of the countryside at all times.”

Any increase in the cost of food staples could prompt social discord. “Right up to the time of the French Revolution and beyond, in Europe the threat of high prices for food was the commonest and most potent cause of public disorder.” Public panic about food was often warranted, as the threat of hunger was all too real. In 1698 in Scotland, contemporary accounts say, “[m]any have died for want of bread, and have been necessitate to make use of wild-runches draff and the like for the support of nature.” A runch is a common weed.

Laslett makes clear that England, being wealthier than much of Europe, saw relatively few famines by the late early modern period. Still, England’s harvest year of 1623–1624 was devastating, and in some locations, such as Ashton, the number of recorded burials was over two-and-a-half times the typical level. Numerous burials record the cause of the death as starvation. The deaths recorded in the Register of Greystoke in England, in 1623, put names to some of these victims of starvation, including, “A poor hungerstarved beggar child, Dorothy,” and “Thomas Simpson, a poor hungerstarved beggar boy,” as well as “Leonard . . . which child died for want of food,” and 4-year-old “John, son of John Lancaster, late of Greystoke, a waller by trade, which child died for want of food and means.”

Preindustrial people also froze. Indeed, in cold climates such as those of northern and western Europe, “the necessity of gathering round fires and sharing beds, make it obvious that the privacy now regarded as indispensable, almost as a human right,” was once rare, with the masses forced to sleep next to each other and their farm animals for body heat.

If there was one thing that was better about the past, it was perhaps that people were—by necessity—tougher. London’s suicide rate circa 1660 is estimated as somewhere between 2.5 and 5 per 100,000 people, low by modern standards.¹ But on the whole, what Laslett calls “the world we have lost” is not a world we’d want back.

According to the most recent data from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, London’s suicide rate now stands at 7.3 per 100,000 people, while England and Wales have a suicide rate of 17.4 per 100,000. According to the most recent year of OECD data, only one OECD country has a suicide rate of under 5 per 100,000: Turkey, at 4.8 per 100,000. (In recent years, only two or three OECD countries typically manage to keep suicides below the upper bound of the estimated level seen in 17^th-century London).