The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture

Dennis Denisoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351884952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

During the rise of consumer culture in the nineteenth century, children and childhood were called on to fulfill a range of important roles. In addition to being consumers themselves, the young functioned as both 'goods' to be used and consumed by adults and as proof that middle-class materialist ventures were assisting in the formation of a more ethical society. Children also provided necessary labor and raw material for industry. This diverse collection addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture, at the same time that it remains steadfast in recognizing that the young did not simply exist within adult-articulated cultural contexts but were agents in their formation. Topics include toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; gender, sexuality and consumerism; imperialism in adventure fiction; the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery; the commercialization of orphans; and the economics behind formulations of child poverty. Together, the essays demonstrate the rising investment both children and adults made in commodities as sources of identity and human worth.

Part 1
Play Things: Toys and Theater

Chapter 1
Experiments before Breakfast: Toys, Education and Middle-Class Childhood

Teresa Michals

Toys stand for play, and play stands for childhood. In one respect, this equation is an old one. In the early sixteenth century, Sir Thomas More drew on it in the first of his verses describing the stages of human life:

I am called Chyldhod, in play is all my mynde,
To cast a coyte, a cokstele, and a ball.
A toppe can I set, and dryue it in his kynde.
But would to god these hateful bookes all,
Were in a fyre brent to pouder small.
Than myght I lede my lyfe always in play.(3)

With his tops, balls and wistful demand to “lede my lyfe always in play,” the allegorical figure Chyldhod appears familiar even today. Indeed, medieval and early modern historians point to archeological finds of manufactured lead-tin alloy rattles, miniature knights-on-horseback, wooden poppets, tops, hobby horses and coksteles as proof that childhood in the pre-industrial West was basically the same as childhood now. Despite Philippe Ariès’s claims to the contrary, these playthings suggest to several historians that medieval and early modern adults possessed a conception of childhood as a distinct and special stage of life, one that deserved its unique objects and culture. Their toys seem to support the claim that these children “are ourselves, five hundred or a thousand years ago” (Orme10).

I believe that looking closely at toys reveals a more complicated story. There was an idea of childhood before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; however, this earlier conception was in many ways less separate from adulthood than is our own. Medieval and early modern children largely inhabited the social world of adults, which prominently included work, violence, sex and death. These are realities that later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parents increasingly tried to fence out of child-safe spaces, the physical and cultural spaces in which children were encouraged to play. Ironically, as this idea of a separate children’s world grew in importance, one aspect of adult life proved more and more difficult to exclude: consumerism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children’s toys and education became deeply entwined with buying and selling. They also reflect the middle class’s anxiety over its commercial consumption.

The open violence of earlier children’s play is perhaps its most dramatic difference from later ideals. Familiar as More’s Chyldhod might seem, there is something disconcerting about the figure’s delight in throwing coksteles. Medieval and early modern children played this popular game by burying a rooster up to its neck in the dirt, then hurling sticks and arrows at its head until they killed it – not exactly a scene likely to be featured on toy commercials today.

More fundamentally, however, earlier childhood play is most foreign in its stark opposition to work. Both medieval and early modern moral authorities tended to assume that people of all ages shared the desire for play, and that play was idleness. At best, play was a waste of time, or a communal release of social tension; at worst, a damnable sin (Thomas 63; Orme, 197). In contrast, today we are more likely to assume that play, when accompanied by proper supervision and appropriate playthings, is the central work of childhood, fostering key physical, social, intellectual and emotional developments.¹

The items in More’s catalogue of toys (quoits, cokstele, ball, top) all facilitate active physical play, but what matters most about them is the fact that they are not “hateful bookes,” that they offer a child who naturally dislikes learning an alternative. Notably, in this passage More does not differentiate between one toy and another. In contrast, i want to look at maria Edgeworth’s writing on education as one starting point for the nineteenth-century preoccupation with distinguishing between the Good Toy – the symbol and instrument of childhood innocence, freedom, intellectual and emotional development, and ultimate professional success – and its evil twin, the corrupting, commercial Bad Toy. A perceptive observer of both children and the developing consumer culture, Edgeworth illuminates the contradictory idea of children’s toys as both symbols of non-commercial innocence and as major market forces. She invites us to reflect on how our own educational playthings not only help children to learn the concepts and skills they need to become mature women and men, but also help adults to conceive of the children playing with these toys as removed from the adult world and the marketplace.

Edgeworth wrote Practical Education (1798; Rev ed. 1801) in collaboration with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Her habit of beginning her published works with prefatory notes written by her father, thereby stamping them with his approval, also suggests the depth of her continuing sense of intellectual and emotional indebtedness. Practical Education’s preface states, however, that the younger Edgeworth alone wrote the book’s chapter on toys, the section most central to my discussion:

When a book appears under the name of two authors, it is natural to inquire what share belongs to each of them. All that relates to the art of teaching to read in the chapter on Tasks, the chapters on Grammar and Classical Literature, Geography, Chronology, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Mechanics, were written by Mr. Edgeworth, and the rest by Miss Edgeworth.(ix)²

The daughter’s analysis of toys reflects lines of thought that remain constant in works she wrote both with and without her father. In this chapter, I refer to “the Edgeworths” when discussing material co-authored by father and daughter, and “Edgeworth” when discussing work written by Maria on her own.

In the eighteenth century, a transformation began which changed children from producers to consumers. Their toys, and the meaning of their toys, changed with them. Earlier children belonged overwhelmingly to the world of work. In eighteenth-century Britain, however, a different world, defined by the sometimes uneasy marriage of two new imperatives, education and commercial consumption, began to claim children. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century, however, that the adoption of compulsory universal education in Britain and the United States finally gave cultural dominance to this middle-class, minority view of the young as students and consumers, rather than as producers (Cunningham 189).

As Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb declare in the title of their seminal study, eighteenth-century England saw The Birth of a Consumer Society in which discretionary spending on mass-produced luxury goods became a major occupation of a larger proportion of people than ever before. Increasing affluence encouraged parents to intervene in their children’s development in a number of new ways. Even Linda Pollock, one of the strongest and most influential advocates for continuity rather than change in the history of childhood, feels that something important altered in the eighteenth century. A secular, labor-intensive, developmental model of childrearing emerged, one that began in the middle classes as a militantly progressive ideal, and that came, by the late-nineteenth century, to be a widely accepted orthodoxy:

the amount of parental interference in a child’s development would appear to increase during the eighteenth century. [...] It is not till the eighteenth century that some parents became concerned not with forming a child so as to ensure his salvation but with forming a child who would be accepted by society.(123)

This increasing “parental interference” focused intensively on the development of both mind and body, employing everything from breast-feeding and alphabet blocks to attractive books and catchy songs in order to draw out children’s talents and to teach the skills the middle classes believed to be most important for a respectable, happy and prosperous life.

Here I want to focus on one sign of the new affluence of eighteenth-century England, the manufactured toy. As Brewer observes, this period invented a new meaning for the word “toy” (33). For the influential lexicographer Samuel Johnson, “toy” had no essential connection to childhood. Rather, it was “a petty commodity; a trifle; a thing of no value; a plaything or a bauble”: any small, cheap object such as a bangle, buckle, or bauble sold by a traveling peddler or “toyman” to both children and adults (n. pag.). In contrast, by the nineteenth century, “toy” was well on its way to becoming a synecdoche for childhood. The one thing that had not changed about such toys, however, was the fact that they were produced as commodities.

Unlike the homemade toys given to children by adults, or the much wider category of toys improvised by children themselves through the ages, manufactured toys were bought and sold – usually by adults, albeit on behalf of children. Whatever other values they embodied, the possession of manufactured toys conveyed to children the pleasure of luxury goods. In treating their children as occasions for conspicuous consumption, parents also taught their children a new set of relations to consumer culture. Plumb observes that, by the early nineteenth century, middle-class parents had become consumers on a newly grand scale: “Children, in a sense, had become luxury objects upon which their mothers and fathers were willing to spend larger and larger sums of money [...] children had become a trade, a field of commercial enterprise” (310).³ The enormous increase of manufactured toys made the pleasure of commercial consumption a key element of children’s play, which itself was becoming more central to the lives of children and their parents.

Manufactured toys linked consuming to learning in two ways. Toys were bought for the specific purpose of teaching children skills and concepts. Less intentionally, however, the buying of toys for children taught them about the pleasures of ownership. At first, the new wealth of manufactured toys, marketed primarily in England and Germany, but also much-admired in North America, were, Brewer notes, “almost all remorselessly didactic” (37). Locke’s influential Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) had associated learning with carefully designed playthings. He celebrates, for example, a father who replaced the beatings and scoldings of his children’s early education with a set of alphabet blocks:

by pasting on the six Vowels [...] on the six sides of a Die, and the remaining eighteen Consonants on the sides of the three other Dice, [he] has made this a Play for his Children, that he shall win, who at one cast throws most Words on these four Dice; whereby his eldest Son, yet in Coats, has played himself into Spelling with great eagerness, and without once having been chid for it, or forced to do it.(21)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762) also champions the child’s right to play, but as one part of a broader defense of natural childish pleasure. Moreover, Rousseau offers nothing as marketable as these “Locke blocks,” which progressive middleclass parents bought in great quantities (Brewer 33).

Educational toys helped to teach middle-class children not only letters, but also cultural values. Examining early nineteenth-century American autobiographies, for example, Bernard Mergan sees a new emphasis on competitive strategy in childhood play. An “achievement game culture”, characterized by board games that emphasized strategy and decision-making, replaced an “old ascriptive game culture”, characterized by the imitation of adults by groups of children, who assigned to a central person the role of boss or scapegoat, and maintained these roles by physical force (9, 22). Brewer points not only to the explicit promises made by manufacturers of eighteenth-century board games to teach industry and competition, but also to the new status of such toys as children’s personal possessions:

These toys and games – educational or otherwise – also helped children develop a sense of private property. Previously most children’s playthings had not belonged to them; they had been everyday objects whose use was often shared with the rest of the family. Toys – objects given by parents or adults to children to play with – were for a child’s exclusive use. He or she owned toys, whereas they had formerly shared playthings.(38)

For Brewer, eighteenth-century toys were only too effective at reproducing the professed values of capitalism: “The new toys and games [...] epitomised the bourgeois attributes necessary for commercial, industrial and social success in adult life. They were not only puzzles and problems but the concrete expression of a strict morality” (38). Maria Edgeworth, however, revealed a puzzling problem within this bourgeois morality and its concrete expression in toys: the place of consumer desire.

From Practical Education, and throughout her long and prolific career, Edgeworth was recognized as a serious, empirically minded, progressive thinker about childhood development. Together, she and her father elaborated Locke’s influential but relatively brief remarks on education, through their own first-hand observation of how children play and learn, producing a detailed program that progressive, book-buying parents could follow in their own homes. For about four decades after its publication, Practical Education was widely read as a child-rearing manual, appearing in a number of European translations and American editions.

Edgeworth has received particular criticism, in her time and our own, for seeing children’s toys as being all about the work of education rather than the joy of play. The pleasure Edgeworth attacks in Practical Education and in her other writings for and about children, however, is not the pastoral frolicking of a Romantic child, or the sinful idleness of an early modern one, but the more equivocal joy of conspicuous consumption in commercial society. The increase in manufactured toys for children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries conditioned in complex ways Edgeworth’s advice on how to construct and defend a middle-class identity in one’s children. For example, although she acknowledges that dolls are supported both by Rousseau’s authority and by “the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Small Change: The Consumerist Designs of the Nineteenth-Century Child
• PART 1: Play Things: Toys and Theater
• PART 2: Consuming Desires
• PART 3: Adulthood and Nationhood
• PART 4: Children and the Terrors of Cultural Consumption
• Index