Culture Shock

I am reading Janet Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin.

I am in culture shock. My ideas of life and culture from this time period all come from Jane Austen's and Charles Dicken's books/movies. Well now that I think of it Bronte too.

We see women left without means regularly in all of these author's books. It was not uncommon. Tomalin recalls this very thing happening to Jane's own grand-mother and great grand-mother.

I thought the state of respect people have for one another was bad now. Well, it was just as bad two hundred years ago. It's all so complicated as I think about it.

I imagined things to be much better in the past.

The children in the Austen family were nursed by their own mother for three months and then sent away to live in the village with a wet-nurse for the next year and a half. Now that is outrageous to me.

I thought women leaving their children when they were babies was a new custom.

Turns out children have been treated poorly for centuries. (of course they didn't think it was treating them poorly)

Now think of this---the children in our generation are being treated more fairly and with more concern, love, books, advantages then any generation ever before.

And well, it seems children have just gotten wilder.

Is it the lack of a Christian Worldview?
A lack of those boundaries which were standard in previous generations?

I know we are a world full of sinners but perhaps there is nothing to reign in our society now. Whereas there was a least a moral standard of right and wrong that permeated most of society in the past.

Well where am I going with this?

Nowhere really.

I'm just finding it all very eye-opening.

Did you ever read that in the Middle ages they hung the children up on hooks to keep them out of trouble?

What a world.

Better get back to minding my own business. The business of loving those around me and keeping my hands busy.

"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands...." 1 Thessalonians 4:11

Encourage one another,
Donna