Rural England in the 1830s

Go read 'Cranford' by Mrs Gaskell
or look at the TV series if you can find it on DVD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranford_(TV_series)

Yeah, you need to read some books set in the time and place.

Attitude would be determined by the social class the woman belonged to.

You may find the following of use:
Family Ties English Families 1540-1920,
Mary Abbott, Routledge, 1993, 0 415 09109 8

Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: studies in Social Stratification
Edited by M.L.Bush, Longman, 1992, 0 582 08344 3

The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800,
Lawrence Stone. Not sure of the details but you can probably find it on Amazon, which will probably give a list of books in the same sort of topic.

What genre is your book? That may affect what your future readers expect, as well - romance novels have a pretty concrete set of assumptions about these things, which may or may not be based in reality, but will definitely determine whether readers feel your book gets the details "right" or not. Sometimes it's more important to go with what readers expect rather than what's historically accurate. (Obvious example: those sexy medieval romances would be a lot less sexy if the authors included a realistic depiction of how often the characters actually bathed.)

Your protagonist would be ruined as a "good woman" by this; if she stayed in the village people would shun her, and probably anyone she associated with. More likely she'd go somewhere she wasn't known and make up some lies to try and cover her disgrace, but she'd be going without references and find it difficult to get work unless she got v lucky/took something beneath her current station. When did the Work House start? She'd end up there if nobody would take her on.

Have a look in Dove's Guide for bell towers in the sort of area you're thinking of from the right period. Ringers (would have been exclusively male at this time) would have come from a reasonably broad spread of classes. The church would have been the centre of village life. There may well have been a bell foundry in the area during the period, probably doing other metal casting work as well.

A farmer is going to have strong connections to the blacksmith. Depending on what they're farming, connections with the miller/local shops/the railway when it arrived. Check out the Victorian Farm. It's 50 years after your period, but not a bad place to start to understand what the farmer gets up to.

It's a terrible place to start because Victorian farmers introduced a lot of new machinery to their farms that didn't exist in 1830.

Shakesbear is right: it depends on her social class. It wouldn't have been outside the norm for a working-class couple to wait for the woman to become pregnant before they married. That way, they knew they *could* have children together and wouldn't be stuck in a childless marriage that would lead to poverty, especially in old age.

And often the social mores of the city wouldn't apply to rural life in many other ways.

mirandashell said:

It's a terrible place to start because Victorian farmers introduced a lot of new machinery to their farms that didn't exist in 1830.

Click to expand...

Exactly. Agricultural revolution is still very much in progress in 1830 and farming then is totally different from farming in 1890. And whatever Mr Coke of Norfolk was doing on his experimental farms, your average tenant farmer would be decades behind. Which actually is a huge point - is the character a tenant farmer or a landowner? If he's a landowner, he's in a completely different situation from a tenant farmer.

mirandashell said:

It's a terrible place to start because Victorian farmers introduced a lot of new machinery to their farms that didn't exist in 1830.

Click to expand...

My bad! I was thinking from the work that needs doing on a farm more than the technology.

I understand. Funnily enough, farm work didn't change much for centuries before the 19th century so what you said would have been true at any other time.

Well in that case ! Tales from the Green Valley, 1620?

Lark Rise to Candleford might be worth a look. The book, that is, not the tv series. Definitely not the tv series.

Good lord no. Load of honey-coloured old hogwash, the TV series.

Although literature of the times may give an insight into general society, sexual behaviour and 'lose women' were not a popular subject. Oliver Twist has as the basis of its' plot a woman giving birth in a work house. Many authors shunned the negative morality of sex outside of marriage. There may be some religious tracts that spell out the horrors of pregnancy out side of wedlock, but these may be hard to come by. That sex was not written about openly says much for the attitude of society in the early nineteenth century. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte has a young woman escaping from a drunken and violent husband - and this, in some parts of Victorian society was considered scandalous. The woman escaping, not the husbands behaviour.

May Sinclair, in 1913, said that the slamming of Helen's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England. In escaping her husband, Helen violates not only social conventions, but also English law.

Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall The law was stacked against women until the Married Women's Property Act 1870. In some ways single women had more rights over their property than married women. Society was multi layered and women had to tread a very slippery path to stay accepted by their peers. The higher a woman was on the social scale the less censorious society was - money and social position often meant a woman could get away with all sorts of immoral acts that would condemn a woman who was lower down.

Yeah, it would be the landowners. Remember, the machinery meant the landowner paying less in wages. One thresher = loads of people treshing.

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/

Take your time and get to know this website thoroughly: there are some incredible primary sources listed here (and available for online reading), including the Victoria County History series--the link below is the Victoria County History of Wiltshire, but there are others.

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/period.aspx?period=8&gid=36

Go to the Periods tab and select Centuries, then the century you want to check sources for--as well as the one before and after, since some sources cover more than one century. You'll find a lot of lovely stuff.

As someone who often does a lot of research into historical periods (including a WIP set in 1838), here is my advice for what it is worth:

To get a feel for periods like this it helps to look at many sources, some of them not very direct. There's a very good BBC series hosted by Tony Robinson for example called The Worst Jobs in History that gives a good feel for the day to day work that made up most people's lives. That is one example. Another is to look up local legends and/or criminal cases in the region. Far too much literature and sources of these periods dwell on London and/or the Upper Classes. At least IMHO.

Keep in mind circa 1830 most folks were still living a lifestyle that might as well be called Regency or Georgian. Only the best homes had coal stoves, for example. Most people still cooked and heated the home with wood.

This was a time of enormous social change. Roman Catholics would soon be given the vote, sparking furious riots all over Britain. Land-owners in the notoriously corrupt Parliament had restricted access to what had once been public lands, making it a criminal offense to (for example) gather firewood or fish in streams or even catch squirrels in lands everyone had used for centuries! There weren't any police, either!

Generally, the more isolated a community, the more rigid it would be in its own rules but the less bound it would feel by the norms elsewhere. Keep in mind also folks like the Puritans had left the UK because they weren't welcome. So the Brits in general were more laissez-faire than the gentry or the very religious.

You might like to look at the lives of the Brontes, daughters of an impoverished Curate who nevertheless made do.

Must agree that in the lower classes illegitimacy did not carry such a taboo as for the middle or upper.

Good luck!

Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles has a description of the use of a threshing machine from the workers' point of view.

As well as Thomas Hardy I would suggest George Eliot, eg Silas Marner. They're set in the Midlands rather than Dorset and written a few decades later but she liked setting her novels in the 1830s.

One book that has a lot of information about rural life in general is Food In England by Dorothy Hartley. I'd heartily recommend that.

If some of your characters are middle class (your wealthier farmers?), Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, by Davidoff and Hall, is fascinating. (The most memorable thought I got from that was that if you were a young woman of the 1820s your grandmother would probably swear more than you did.)