Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600-1914
by Anthony Fletcher
Yale £25, pp434
Anthony Fletcher reckons nothing much changed in the upbringing of children during the 300 years covered by his book, and he might as well have included the 20th century too when it comes to the cut-throat ambition of parents competing with one another through their daughters' accomplishments (extra tuition in French, dancing, drawing or music was the Georgian mother's answer to every teenage trouble) or, for that matter, the hooliganism of their sons. Coaches heading for Windsor or Slough in the 1820s regularly stopped to watch boys beating one another to a pulp at Eton. The whole school turned out for the funeral when an 11-year-old killed an older boy in one of these unsupervised after-school punch-ups.
By the end of the 19th century, boys were officially beaten more savagely and more often than at any other time in history. One of them left a sickening account of watching a flogging on the wooden block ('six cuts that sounded like the splashings of so many buckets of water') comparable in brutality only to a public execution. The aim was for the spectators to grow so hardened that by the end of their time at school, the bloodiest violence left them indifferent or, better still, amused.
Gladstone described a toast proposed at an old Etonian dinner to the school's notoriously sadistic headmaster Dr Keate, who was universally hated by every old boy present: 'The scene was indescribable. The roar of cheering ... never knew satiety or end ... we seemed all to have lost our self-possession and to be hardly able to keep our seats.'
According to Fletcher, Gladstone was the only boy ever to keep a diary (and even then for only one year) that recorded more or less fully and frankly what happened to him at school. The pain of stunting or blocking all emotional development was literally unspeakable. So was the collusive coercion that made grown men greet the master who inflicted it with hysterical applause. The process began early. Boys were no longer brought up by their mothers once they stopped wearing baby clothes ('Alfie is in high frocks,' wrote one wistful mother, 'and wishing for cloth trousers') round about the age of five or six.
Both the pride and the humiliation of this second weaning could be extreme. Fletcher quotes a mother who punished her five-year-old son Richard for being unable to tie his apron strings by starving him until he produced 'a double and single bow in the strings'. When she found out that Richard was afraid of the dark, she sent him to bed early, upstairs alone without a candle. A boy had to cut or be cut free of maternal dependence even before he reached a prep school that was often more brutal than the public school scheduled to follow. 'Tis here he begins to understand the world, the misery, falseness and deceitfulness of it,' wrote John Aubrey in the 1670s. 'Tis here he begins to understand himself. '
Girls went through the opposite process. They were strictly monitored, shielded, shut up and kept under close surveillance. So far as they were concerned, the outside world was beyond bounds and sex did not exist. The ideal they studied and struggled to achieve was muteness, inferiority and helpless dependence. 'Remember that thou art a maid,' one of Aubrey's contemporaries wrote to her daughter, 'and such ought thy modesty to be that thou shouldest scarce speak but when thou answerest.'
Girls' education was expressly designed to infantilise its recipients by repressing initiative, self-reliance, moral courage and intellectual curiosity ('With a few years, maidenly timidity may replace the childish forwardness and confidence which are painful for me to observe,' wrote a hopeful mother, packing her nine-year-old off to boarding school in 1842). Reading was censored and physical exercise discouraged. The core curriculum taught in schoolrooms boiled down for most girls much of the time to needlework and how to paste scrapbooks.
Daughters who were considered by themselves or their mothers to be as capable as boys risked paying a heavy price as more or less grotesque social misfits. Comprehensive catastrophe overtook Hester Thrale, who taught her daughters the alphabet at the age of two and started them on Latin grammar at four. Eight of her 12 children died young, including an adored only son. Of the survivors, only one managed to give anything like satisfaction.
Queenie, the beautiful and precociously brilliant eldest child, began by trying to please her insatiably demanding mother and ended up unable to stand being in the same room. Unhappiness made another daughter, Susanna, so peevish and ugly to look at that she had to be sent away from home at three to have her spirit broken ('I do not choose to undertake the breaking,' her mother wrote grimly, 'as I am not partial to her person and might be too rough with her perhaps'). After 12 years, Mrs Thrale gave up 'battling with babies' as a bad job and switched to looking after Dr Johnson instead.
Her efforts to overcompensate for universal female subjugation were cruel and her dream of sexual equality far ahead of its time. It is beyond the scope of this book to ask why society needed to polarise male toughness and female vulnerability by forcing each to extremes for well over 300 years. Nor does it confront, except by implication, the staggering reversal in contemporary educational assumptions that has transformed girls' lives out of all recognition. Parts of this book read like an anthropological report on an alien species. Growing up in England is a model academic survey, scrupulous, exhaustive, fearsomely footnoted and based on a wide range of often unpublished personal documents, a method that inevitably restricts its attentions to the sort of people who could and did leave letters and journals, namely a tiny upper- and middle-class elite. The vast bulk of the population gets no mention here.
The second problem is the limited nature of first-hand testimony from children whose letters, nearly always written to parents or others in authority, tend to be placatory, formal and emotionally reticent. Fletcher's other prime source consists of do-it-yourself parenting manuals, then, as now, bland, reassuring and relentlessly upbeat in tone. His book could have painted a very different picture if it had widened its scope to draw on plays, poems, novels or even the practical handbooks produced at least until the Industrial Revolution by upper-class women who managed and supplied households of 50 people or more with services that ranged from brewing beer and baking bread to the manufacture of basic necessities like ink, soap, toothpaste, cosmetics, weedkiller, insecticide and standard medicines.