Childhood in Slavery as Depicted in Selected Slave Narratives

Abstract

This bachelor thesis is analysing childhood of Afro-American children who were living in slavery during the 18th and 19th century. This thesis focuses on issues that influenced their lives from the very beginning such as marriages of parents, pregnancy and birth of slave babies, the growth of children, separation of black families, and realisation of child's slave status. Furthermore, it also examines housing, diet, clothing, education, leisure time, and early labour duties of children. To illustrate various ideas and experience of former slaves and to support them, three slave narratives were chosen for this thesis, namely Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Harriet A. Jacobs' Incidents in a Life of a Slave Girl and John Brown's Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England together with selected resources of scholarly literature.