Hello historians! Thank you so much for looking at my question! I'm attempting to write a short story about a woman born in the 1880s in Cornwall and rising from poverty to live in London by 1940. While it's easy to find what England was like in the late Victorian era and pre-World war II I'm having lots of trouble finding information on life in growing up in Cornwall specifically. Ideally the character in question had a hard life before turning to the arts sometime in the twenties, going deaf around that time, and having a Moll Flanders-esque string of marriages landing her in comfortable living by 1940. I just can't seem to find anything on society's treatment of deaf people at that time, how courtship shifted from 1905 to 1940, or exactly what kind of conditions she would have grown up in if she was born of penniless Cornish parents. Cornwall appeared to be a very heavy piracy and smuggling laden region for quite some time, too: how and when did that change? Thank you again so much for reading! Please answer what you can. Edit. Should add that I'm aiming for a criminal background but it's not a priority. Edit 2. A couple of people have commented on this post but for some reason I can't see what those comments were??????
Answers were likely removed because they didn't rise to the standards of the subreddit.
The best book you could read is by the famed Tudor historian, A. L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood, originally published in 1942, but reprinted in numerous editions. Rowse's memoire is full of observations about turn of the century Cornwall. I don't recall if he addresses the hearing impaired (but that would not likely have been different from elsewhere in Britain). He does address courtship.
I also recommend any of the several books by A. K. Hamilton Jenkin: ----------, The Cornish Miner: An Account of his Life above and underground from Early Times (London: Allen and Urwin, 1962 [1927]). ----------, Cornwall and the Cornish: Story, Religion, and Folk-Lore of ‘The Western Land’ (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1933). ----------, Cornish Homes and Customs (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1934).
Cornwall was famous for its "wrecking" - pillaging ships that were ruined on its long, rocky coastline. Sometimes Cornish wreckers intentionally misdirected ships, using faux lighthouses to misdirect ships. Occasionally, this apparently graduated to actual, classic piracy, but the great era of all this activity was a thing of the past by 1880. There is still an active culture around salvaging along the coast.
Smuggling has always been attracted to the long and complex Cornish coast. It doesn't define the region, which has always found itself resting on the three legs of the stool - mining, farming, and maritime industries. Most people made their living in legitimate ways with one or more of these three activities, but smuggling and salvage was something that was limited to a few.