Hi! I’m going to attempt to address your first question by arguing that 1) a freezing climate was a significant problem in 19th century Europe; 2) this affected children; and 3) climate and their societal effects made their way into literature and art.

Starting around 1250, the world experienced a “Little Ice Age” (LIA); scholars have varied on where they place the end date, but some say around 1900. In addition to overall colder temperatures, this period saw heightened climatic variability. It was particularly devastating because it occurred after a relatively warm period known as the “Medieval Warm Period” (MWP) / “Medieval Climate Anomaly.” Reconstructions of decadal temperatures based on proxy records (which scientists have aggregated from tree rings, ice cores, coral, and sediment) suggest that the temperature was about 0.16 or 0.24°C colder in the LIA than in the MWP on average, with the greatest cooling over the Northern Hemisphere north of the tropics (Mann et al. 2004). Between 1408 and 1814, the Thames River in London was recorded as having frozen 24 times. And yes, people did freeze to death. In 1640, in August, a soldier traveling in Germany wrote in his diary how “on the the road, three people did freeze to death: a cavalry-man, a woman, and a boy.” In England in the 18th century, many people died of “accident hypothermia,” which could kill people when the temperature dropped below 8°C. This condition affected mostly the elderly and very young, and people were especially susceptible under conditions of fatigue or malnutrition. Newspapers in 1740-41 have many stories of deaths from the “Severity of the Cold” (Post 1985).

In addition, after three volcanic eruptions in 1812-1817, culminating in the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia, volcanic dust in the atmosphere caused haze and decreased solar warming of the Earth, leading to lower surface temperatures and strong climatic anomalies the following year, which became known as the Year Without a Summer (with massive impacts to global agriculture). Furthermore, more eruptions in 1835 and 1841 also produced volcanic dust veils.

The LIA likely had many short- and long-term implications for human society as well as culture. Paintings from across Europe in the 17th-19th centuries illustrated cold and freezing conditions. During a “wet, ungenial summer” getaway on Lake Geneva during the Year Without a Summer, Lord Byron challenged his friends for who could write the scariest story. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and Byron wrote “A Fragment,” which inspired fellow guest John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, and by extension arguably Dracula. Some scholars argue that Charles Dickens’s writing was influenced by his upbringing during some of Europe’s coldest years (Fagan 2002).

There were secondary effects. Cold climatic change and resulting crop failures provoked numerous famines; in the Great Famine of 1315-1317, the rural poor were reported by contemporary sources to have eaten grass, the raw dead bodies of cattle, bodies they exhumed from cemeteries, and even their own children (Rosen 2014). A famine provides the necessity for a family to sell off their children in the folktale Hansel and Gretel, published by the Grimm Brothers in 1812. Although the folktale may originate from around 1250-1500, which is of course long before the time period you ask about, I use this to demonstrate that there were unique deadly perils that children faced (or were seen to face) during the LIA, and that this made its way into the stories and literature of Europe, including to a large 19th-century audience.

Thanks for your patience with this answer; it is not in my field of study, but I TA’d for a class on climate and society. I hope others have a chance to add more depth.

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References cited:

Fagan, Brian M. 2002. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850. New York: Basic Books.

Mann, et al. 2009. Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age andMedieval Climate Anomaly. Science. 326: 1256-1260.

Post, John D. 1985. Food Shortage, Climatic Variability, and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Rosen, William. 2014. The third horseman: climate change and the Great Famine of the 14th century.