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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

Girls had no such defining experiences other than the onset of menstruation, which is barely touched upon. Child-rearing across the whole period was, as Fletcher puts it, ‘pervasively gendered’, as were the spheres of influence of the parents. The construction of femininity was about submission and domestic usefulness, and about inherent female weakness of body and mind. Perfect femininity, according to one of the Lennox girls, meant laughing at a dirty joke ‘but never making one’. Fletcher is good on the primacy of maternity, and the grief — to both parents — of the frequent death of children, but I could have done with something about stepmothers. Death in childbirth followed by the father’s remarriage, followed sometimes by another death and another marriage, were surely as common a family catastrophe in the period under discussion as divorce and remarriage is in ours. (No, I don’t have the statistics.)

Fletcher, a retired professor of history, whose book is entirely premised on the division between the sexes, is alert to the importance of ‘gender studies’. We read with sympathy about a young nephew of George III who was terrified of riding and shooting, always ‘dreadfully ashamed’, and dreading being called a coward. But Fletcher could perhaps have made more of young female deviants. He might have quoted the young Florence Nightingale, who fits socially and chronologically within his remit, and who railed about a system ‘which dooms some minds to incurable infancy, others to silent misery’. He doesn’t really ‘get it’ about girls. There is a chapter on ‘Boys at University’, while the equivalent chapter for girls is entitled ‘Training for Society’ — which means entering the marriage market. There is no mention of aristocratic runaways, nor of those who fought to enter the professions, nor of Girton and Newnham, founded well within Fletcher’s timescale. This must be because none of the gels in the families he studied did anything after leaving school except train for society, in its narrowest sense.

There’s nothing wrong with this book except the unfulfilled promise of its title. It is actually a selective demonstration of the amazingly consistent rearing of English toffs over three centuries and beyond, and as such extremely interesting and illuminating. Never ask again what ‘conservatism’ really means.

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