What was life like for rich people in olden days?

Answer 1

Different people throughout history have had very different lives. The one of the most important things to remember is that people have only been able to use electricity for a couple of hundred years, but humans have been around for thousands of years. So for most of that time there was no TV, no internet, no lights.

Life was much harder for people in the past. They had to get up as soon as the sun came up and go to work (that included a lot of children - before school was compulsory) and they would work until the sun went down (because they didn't have electric lights).

But there are lots of differences between the way different people lived - cave men lived in caves, but Victorians lived in houses, and the Romans even had under floor heating!Life was very different in the "olden days." Most children had a full complement of chores and other responsibilities and quite a lot was expected of the youngsters in a family. Life without electricity, especially the electric light at night we all take for granted, is difficult for young children to fathom. One of the biggest family jobs in the olden days, especially before oil lamps became popular, was to make candles. In the past, candle wax was derived from beeswax or boiling animal fat into tallow, and it was a greasy, messy job disliked by most children. Before people were cholesterol- and fat-conscious, butter was a common condiment on every table. Today's children have no idea of where many foods come from, and its fun to watch their amazement as something as basic as butter forms right before their eyes. People lived in a regular common family house, floorboards with no carpets or rugs, no plaster or wall paper on the walls, the toilet was in a hut in the garden. Had some fruit for Christmas maybe some little toy soldier figures. Kids back then started work at age 15 (England). There was no electricity only coal, wood, gas and oil. Only the very rich, and emergencies had telephones, mobile phones wasn't invented, about 1-2 people per street had a car. Kids would play in the streets and in the parks with no children playing areas just a stream they used to go swimming in, was no computers/consoles.