Songs of Innocence

The Story of British Childhood

Fran Abrams

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781782390404
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

As recently as one hundred years ago British children existed in ways now unthinkable; boys as young as eight worked gruelling hours in unlit factories; girls were sold into sexual slavery with dolls still in their grasp; and boys at schools like Rugby and Harrow were brutally trained for their future at the helm of Britain's vast red empire. In Songs of Innocence Fran Abrams charts the transformation of childhood in the UK from early Victorian disagreements about child-rearing to the Scouts' very direct involvement in the First World War. Poignant first-hand accounts of poverty and deprivation as well as innocent pleasures carry the reader through a Dickensian landscape of urchins and Fauntleroys, the cosseted lives of Edwardian children to the self-sufficient charges of Baden-Powell.

Fran Abrams draws distinctions along class lines and divisions such as town and country, Romantic and conservative, to achieve a historical perspective shows the progression of the idea of childhood through a century of massive social change brought about by urbanization, war and medico-psychological advances. Songs of Innocence employs searing personal testimony and immaculate research to provide a fascinating exposition of the past and a mirror for the present.

Contents

Introduction

1 Victoria’s Children

2 Cosseted Edwardians

3 Scout’s Honour

4 Between the Wars

5 War Babies

6 Born in the Ruins

7 Children of the Social Revolution

8 Eighties to ASBOs

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Alice Foley was a bright, lively child, born into a fractious, political, overcrowded, poor household in Lancashire towards the end of the nineteenth century. Her parents’ religious beliefs were not fervent, by any means, yet the little girl often found herself conflicted and concerned about the state of her soul. She could picture it, shaped like a shoulder of lamb and tucked neatly under her rib cage. But it was not, in her mind’s eye, as glistening white as it should be: ‘Mortal and venial sins showed up like dark and light pencil marks on its virgin surface. These unseemly blotches caused untold anxiety and I wondered curiously why this small fraction of my anatomy should be so troublesome.’¹

In those days, original sin still loomed large in the life of a child like Alice, not least because the elementary school she attended was run by nuns. Nor was her state of mind helped by the fact that day after day she scratched her slate beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart: ‘Worst of all, below the breast the robe was pulled aside, revealing a pierced heart . . . with blood streaming down. This picture fascinated even whilst it sickened me with its gory details. I yearned so intensely for happiness and security, yet here was this daily reminder of sin, cruelty and man’s betrayal.’

Alice didn’t know it at the time, of course, but her childish worries went to the core of a battle of ideas about childhood which by then had raged for centuries. What is a child? The arguments go back to the Enlightenment. Is a newborn infant, as Alice tended to feel, a marked and sinful thing, born out of man’s depravity and in desperate need of redemption? Until 1693, when John Locke’s treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, was published, this notion of childhood had been the accepted wisdom. Yet Locke had turned this around: had Alice consulted him on the state of her soul, he would probably have told her to erase those pencil scratches from her mental vision. A child’s soul was indeed pure white, he argued – at least on the day he was born. It was, Locke said, a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which man would make his own marks – for good or for evil – as the child grew.

Locke’s notion of childhood would be controversial even today. Influenced by Dutch child-rearing practices, which were more benign than those common in Britain at the time, he thought children should be treated as individuals – that is, that parents should attempt to influence through reasoned argument rather than by diktat: ‘Slavish discipline makes a slavish temper.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entering the debate seventy years later with Émile, Ou de l’éducation, scandalized Europe by positing the notion that a child was, in fact, neither inherently sinful nor a blank sheet on which man would write. Children were born pure, he said, but were inevitably corrupted as they grew: ‘Everything is good coming from the Creator, everything degenerates in the hands of men.’ The book was considered so blasphemous that it was actually burned on the streets of Paris.

As Alice Foley would learn 100 years later, the landscape of childhood would continue to be shaped and fought over by these two opposing schools of thought. Indeed, it would be easy to characterize the story of childhood throughout the ages as the story of the epic struggle between the desire to see children as inherently flawed, even dangerous, and the desire to shape them as perfected, purified versions of our own adult selves.

Childhood, of course, inspires strong emotions. And so society’s deepest, most persistent myths and tropes, its most potent fears and longings, find themselves imprinted upon its surface. If the adult world fears change, and feels uncertain about the future, then it looks askance at its children. What horrors are in store? Can they be trusted to carry the baton safely through the next generation? Or are things – as one of those persistent tropes would constantly have us believe – somehow degenerating, falling apart?

‘We are born with evil in us and cruelty is part of this,’ wrote William Golding after the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993.² ‘If there is no one around to guide children then they go wrong . . . And when children go wrong they can often go wrong with a vengeance. There is such energy in a child, they are more powerful than any bomb.’

Yet, conversely, if the adult world feels ready to embrace hope, and optimism, then the young are venerated and cherished:

Sweet babe in thy face

Holy image I can trace.

Sweet babe once like thee

Thy maker lay and wept for me,

wrote William Blake in the early nineteenth century.

If the writing of the story of childhood were left to the philosophers and the poets, it might look like this. It might chart the battleground between these two children: the child of Blake, innocent, vulnerable, in constant need of protection and emotional nourishment; and the child of Golding, inherently wicked and in need of adult help to drive Satan from its blemished soul. Indeed, in many respects, this book will ‘set out to chart the sallies and the retreats in this particular war during the twentieth century. So fundamental is this moral debate to the way in which the adult world has viewed the child through the ages that it would be impossible for an account of childhood not to touch on it in some way, even if only in a peripheral, implicit manner.

So, where did the twentieth century take the child? Did the growing notion of the child as an individual, with individual rights, bring widespread joy? Or did the loss of the old certainty – that parents were in control; that so long as they did their job adequately all would be well – simply bring with it added anxiety, added grief? Did children’s gradual journey from the labour market into education empower them, or did it lead them into narrower, more restricted lives? Did girls, still destined, as ever, at the end of the nineteenth century for lives of childbearing and subservience, use their new freedoms to real advantage, or did they still struggle to throw off that yoke?

The story of childhood during the twentieth century is a story that could be sliced and told in so many different ways. It could be a story of steady – or even unsteady – progress for the child: better housing, better health services, a better understanding of diet. While the social evils identified by Joseph Rowntree in 1904 – poverty, intemperance, ‘impurity’ and drugs, to name a few – would certainly continue to impact on the child, the absolute poverty of the Victorian inner city, with its child workers and street urchins, its relentless diet of tea and bread, and its life-shatteringly high death rate, would become a thing of the past. The twentieth century, of course, was the century in which infant mortality dropped from around 140 early deaths per 1,000 births to around six per 1,000. And so, seen from the viewpoint of the social reformer, the century could be read as a good one.

And as the child moved, over the course of a century and more, from the workplace into the schoolroom, as families grew smaller and as children’s chances of survival grew greater, the child’s place in society would undergo a slow, inexorable and largely positive change. This role, of course, was one that always had contradiction and paradox at its heart: a strange mix of sentimentality and fear, of love and irritation. Perhaps the adult world was never quite sure whether to cleave its children to its breast or simply, for the most part, to ignore them. At the height of the Edwardian era – a time during which children were idolized and idealized in works such as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan – Emmeline Pankhurst set sail for an American lecture tour while her son lay critically ill. She returned just before he died – and days later she was off again to a public meeting in Bradford: ‘If you can arrange it I would be grateful if Bradford friends would just behave to me as if no great sorrow had come just now,’ she wrote to the organizer. ‘Although I am very grateful for the sympathy, I want to get through my work.’ Why? Was she so broken by the death that she could not bear to speak of it? Or so driven by her adult concerns that she could not quite find the right way to handle it and them at the same time? The paradox would remain strong as the twentieth century wore on, with the adult world unsure whether to speak of the child as vulnerable, fragile, in need of protection; or dangerous, out-of-control, in need of discipline. Yet as the child’s economic position in the family changed – for most children worked and contributed to the family purse in some way in Victorian times – other things surely were bound to change too. Adults would begin to befriend their children, to listen to them, to ‘respect’ them and to accord them ‘rights’. In short, as children’s value as economic assets declined, their value as emotional assets would begin to grow. ‘We teach with emotional intelligence, in that we are role models and our interactions are central to our ethos of empathy, motivation and praise,’ ran the blurb for a private girls’ school on the south coast.³ A Children’s Commissioner for England would be charged with the responsibility of talking to the nation’s children: ‘We will use our powers and independence to ensure that the views of children and young people are routinely asked for, listened to, and acted upon,’ its website remarked.⁴

Indeed, the twentieth century was the century in which the child took on its own identity; the century in which childhood became not just a prelude to adulthood, but a crucial, formative period during which one wrong parental move could be catastrophic. The twentieth century began with Freudian insights into the psyche of the child and into the importance of childhood experience for the formation of character; it continued with a growing awareness in schools and elsewhere of the child as an individual, and it ended with the ‘rights’ of the child as a citizen and as a social participant enshrined in international treaty under the United Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The family, certainly, ceded power into the hands of the state in a major way during the century. Governments took on new responsibility after new responsibility with regard to children and childhood. This was the century in which the state would take a role in every aspect of children’s education and health; in which it would regulate their work and demand to know whether their play leaders were suitable or not. This was the century in which the state would extend its fingers ever further inside family homes; and the century in which the state would decide, increas...