The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ may eat it.’ Was the stranger within the gates a second-class citizen?

      Possibly not: but the expression does reinforce the shift that has occurred over the past 150 years, from a parent-centred universe to our own child-centred one. In earlier centuries households were run by adults for adults. Children were an integral part of a functioning economic unit – whether as providers of labour in less prosperous families or as potential items of value in the business and marriage markets for the wealthier. Children were to be trained and disciplined, both to promote their own well-being and to promote the well-being of the family unit. In addition, various of the more fundamentalist versions of Christianity had said that to spare the rod was not simply to spoil the child in practical matters, but to spoil his soul. Original sin, thought the Evangelicals, meant that all children were born needing to find salvation.

      In less religious houses this developed into a sense of authority for authority’s sake. Samuel Butler wrote of his father’s childhood early in the century, as well as his own, in his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1873–80):

      If his children did anything which Mr. Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father. In this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to take. It consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while his children were too young to offer serious resistance. If their wills were ‘well broken’ in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would not venture to break through … ¹⁴

      As the century progressed, improved standards of living meant that many children who would earlier have gone out to work now had a childhood. Further, Rousseau’s theories of child education, promoting the ideal of individual development in natural surroundings, struck a chord, and converged with the Romantic movement’s eloquence on the innocence and purity of childhood. Many books agreed with the Revd T. V. Moore in his ‘The Family as Government’ in The British Mothers’ Journal, when he advised parents that ‘The great agent in executing family law is love.’¹⁵

      Yet while physical coercion was used less as the century progressed, and persuasion more, there was little doubt about the virtues of authority and obedience. Frances Power Cobbe, a philanthropist and worker for women’s rights, outlined in her Duties of Women what was to be expected from a child by way of obedience:

      1st. The obedience which must be exacted from a child for its own physical, intellectual, and moral welfare.

      2nd. The obedience which the parent may exact for his (the parent’s) welfare or convenience.

      3rd. The obedience which parent and child alike owe to the moral law, and which it is the parent’s duty to teach the child to pay.¹⁶

      Moral law was to many synonymous with religious law. It enshrined the duty of obedience owed to God. The head of the family derived his authority from God; the wife of the head derived hers from the head; and so on. Any disobedience subverted this notion of order. Therefore disobedience was, of itself, subversive, and it was the idea of rebellion that needed to be punished, not whatever the act of disobedience itself was. Laura Forster, a clergyman’s daughter (and later the aunt of E. M. Forster), noted that ‘We were expected to be obedient without any reason being given’, but she tried to give extenuating circumstances: ‘we shared our mother’s confidence as soon as we were of a suitable age, and I think this helped to give us the conviction that we all had that nothing was forbidden us capriciously, and that some day we should know, if we did not understand at the time, why this or that was forbidden’.¹⁷

      Most parents felt that discipline could not begin too early. A mother or nurse’s refusal to feed her infants except at stated hours taught the infants the benefits of ‘order and punctuality’.¹⁸ Having their crying ignored taught babies self-restraint: Mrs Warren said that, if a child cried for something, on principle it should never be given – ‘even a babe of three months, when I held up my finger and put on a grave look, knew that such was the language of reproof.’ Instead of beatings, which children earlier in the century might have routinely expected, children were told of the disappointment they caused, to their parents and to God. Mrs Warren suggested that children who were disobedient should be told they were breaking the Fifth Commandment, by not honouring their fathers and mothers;¹⁹ Mary Jane Bradley, wife of a master at Rugby School, told her son that ‘God was looking at him with great sorrow and saying “that little boy has been in a wicked passion, he cannot come up and live with me unless he is good”.’²⁰

      Corporal punishment, although lessened in force and frequency, vanished only slowly over the next hundred years. When Mary Jane Bradley’s son Arthur (nicknamed ‘Wa’) was three, ‘He was not good yesterday and surprised me by saying, “Wa was naughty in London Town and Papa and Mama did whip Wa very hard” – I did not believe he could have remembered anything so long ago [three months before]. This whipping certainly had its effect. It was the first and last.’²¹ Louise Creighton, who said that in her own childhood she was never beaten, but put in a dark cupboard that induced only boredom, punished her own children in a way she acknowledged ‘may be considered brutal by some people. Cuthbert was a very mischievous boy, & used to play with fire & cut things with knives, so when he played with fire I held his finger on the bar of the grate for a minute that he might feel how fire burnt, & when he cut woodwork with his knife I gave his fingers a little cut.’ Despite what might today be described as savagery, she thought it important to end, ‘I never whipt any child.’²² What seemed harsh changed over time. A guide to the sickroom advised, almost in passing, that if a child refused medicine, ‘at once fasten the child’s hand behind him, throw him on his back, pinch his nose to force his mouth apart, and … pour [the liquid] down his throat with a medicine spoon’. This is called acting with ‘firmness’.²³

      It was still, however, a different world to the one in which Mr Pontifex had ruled. Children were moving to the centre of their parents’ lives. This was displayed in graphic form over the century by the pattern books that furniture-makers and shops produced to advertise their wares. In the early part of the nineteenth century there was no furniture made specifically for children; then in 1833 Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (which, despite its name, was a very metropolitan, bourgeois publication) had a short section for children’s furniture, most of it miniaturized versions of adult objects. By the end of the century every shop and every catalogue had a full range of furniture designed specially for children’s needs.²⁴

      Different families adapted to this new ethos more or less quickly and comfortably: how quickly and comfortably was based on character and on personal and social background. Many remained convinced that the marital relationship was the primary one: Louise Creighton reported that Walter Pater’s sister had once said to her about the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward and her husband that ‘she always preferred Mary [Ward]’s company when Humphry was present, because if he was absent Mary was always wondering where he could be; but she preferred me without Max, for when he was there I was so occupied with him & with what he was saying that I was no use to anyone else … I think this was true all my life.’ She did not make the connection with her own mother’s behaviour in her childhood: when Mr von Glehn was due back from London in the evenings ‘My mother always grew expectant some time before his train arrived & was very fidgety & anxious.’ СКАЧАТЬ