My father often quoted an anecdote about Count de Sain-Simon. As a boy , Saint Simon was awakened every morning by a servant who said to him: “Wake up, Count, there are important things for you to do.”
Were our ancestors inspired by those same words, though spoken by their inner voice? This blog is about the problem of how people managed to cope with poverty, grief and other, perhaps even worse hardships, and still live a more or less joyful life. We know that our ancestors managed to do that, otherwise there wouldn’t have been so many of us around.
So the question is in what ways these hardships were overcome. One possibility may be the role of religion: were people more religious in the past? In this respect, I am reminded of a statement by the Dutch author Godfried Bomans: “In the past people used to think of an old person as someone who was on the threshold to heaven. Now, people think of an old person as someone who is about to die.”
But there are other possibilities. Did people deal with grief in a better way? Did people feel closer to death? What about the notion we often come across: were people better accustomed to the miseries of life? Did people, as a result, experience less grief when a loved one died? Was there consequently less grief to cope with?
In an attempt to find answers to these questions, many aspects of everyday life of the past are discussed in this blog. The blogs are about poverty, death and sorrow, but also about the moments of happiness that people experienced.
Important sources of everyday life are the diaries, letters and memoirs that were written. These personal words constitute the best possible way to interpret the emotions and mentalities of past ages. Furthermore, much has been written about these problems, and of course these opinions will also be discussed.
The history of everyday life in the Western world (i.e. Western Europe and North America) can be roughly divided into two periods. The first period is the ‘pastoral’ period, characterized by a dependence on agriculture, by very high mortality rates and by mass-poverty. In the second period, mortality rates are much lower, especially those of children, and in large parts of the Western World welfare states began to emerge together with the capitalist system as we know it today. The dividing line between the two periods is found at the end of the 19th century.
Translated by Ite Wierenga
(c) by Paul Th Kok, Groningen, The Netherlands
