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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:

Books showing the scale of my mother's memoirs

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.

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See also the sources for the pages on everyday life on the WW2 home front and other material

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