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Friday 5 December 2008

Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood, 1600-1914

Selective breeding

Victoria Glendinning on Anthony Fletcher's account of growing up in England

The extracts from letters, memoirs and diaries are interesting and entertaining. Apart from a section on advice books, the core material is mostly testimony from parents, letters between parents and children, and the teenage journals of girls. This makes for a good read, even though Fletcher’s ‘no change’ thesis allows him to jump about chronologically between decades and more than decades, which is a bit unnerving for anyone trying to follow a thread. But there is indeed an apparent striking continuity, over 300 years and beyond, in the upbringing of upper-class children. The boys have traditionally been removed from women’s influence at around seven years old. In the early period the significant moment was ‘breeching’, when little boys were put into trousers instead of frocks, after which, then as now, they were packed off to school to learn manly behaviour and Latin, the ‘male elite’s secret language’. Mothers sighed, and told their sons it was their duty to be happy at school, and occasionally protested — like the Lady Filmer who wrote to a headmaster accusing him of ‘inspiring slavish awe’ in her little boys. We meet a precocious late-17th-century child who asked for a periwig for his sixth birthday — an expensive item equivalent to a modern moppet demanding state-of-the-art trainers. Friction over hairstyles is nothing new: a mid-18th-century father writes to his son at Eton irritably urging him to get his hair cut ‘to a reasonable and gentlemanlike shortness’. There is a lot about Eton, and about the birchings and swishings — at their most vigorous from the 1880s — because ‘Etonians documented their defining experience almost obsessively’.

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