Selective breeding

The ‘entirely fresh view’ of childhood in England presented by Anthony Fletcher in 414 pages of text and apparatus may come to some as a bit of an anti-climax. Although material conditions changed enormously, and children by the end of his period had more toys and books and birthday presents, his 12 years of research have ‘not revealed any grounds for supposing that anything of fundamental importance changed, between 1600 and 1914, in the dynamic of the relationships between English parents and their children’. Not so much ‘entirely fresh’, then, as deep-frozen.

He may well be right, at least in relation to his samples, which are made up entirely of families from the landed gentry and the upper professional classes. Even though Lawrence Stone is not mentioned in the text, this book may also be in part a response to Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, an influential work which has not, however, been without its critics already. Stone’s findings suggested to him that in the early parts of his period parents and children were not nearly so affectionately involved with one another as they later became. Fletcher finds no such evidence. He makes the point that until the 19th century, when children were corralled in nursery and schoolroom, they shared adults’ space most of the time.

Quantitative social history, fuelled by analysing parish and county records and, for the later period, census returns, is not always reader-friendly. But even as non-specialists we have got used to it. The scattershot method of compiling anecdotes and instances from those documents available to the individual researcher now seems a little wobbly. Fletcher does not do statistics, though his critical apparatus is comprehensive to the point of sourcing truisms; and, aware no doubt of the pitfalls of the anecdotal method, he mostly lets the documents speak for themselves.