Tag Archives: children
Giving birth: Confinements, Lying-in and Churching
Unlike women today who often give birth in hospitals or birthing centers, women of Jane Austen’s day almost exclusively gave birth at home. Preparation for confinement fell almost exclusively to the mother.
Continue reading →Games of Jane Austen’s World: Bilboquet
Family letters and remembrances tell us that Jane Austen played a variety of games with her young nieces an nephews, and was quite good at many of them, including bilboquet.
Continue reading →Public Schools in Jane Austen’s Day
Most gentlemen were sent to public boarding schools to prepare them for university. These schools bore little resemblance to public schools today. Public schools were public in the sense that boys were taught in groups outside of their private homes, not in the sense that these institutions were funded by public funds. A number of public schools existed, but the landed elite in particular chose to send their sons to a select number of these … Continue reading →
A Gentleman’s Education: the early years
A gentleman’s education set him apart from lesser men, even in his early life. What did that education look like? In all well-regulated states, the two principal points in view in the education of youth, ought to be, first, to make them good men, good members of the universal society of mankind; and in the next place to frame their minds in such a manner, as to make them most useful to that society to … Continue reading →