In the Name of the Child

Roger Cooter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134933204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: World History

Recent revelations of child abuse have highlighted the need for understanding the historical background to current attitudes towards child health and welfare. In the Name of the Child explores a variety of professional, social, political and cultural constructions of the child in the decades around the First World War. It describes how medical and welfare initiatives in the name of the child were shaped and how changes in medical and welfare provisions were closely allied to political and ideological interests.

1 Bodies, Figures and Physiology

Margaret McMillan and the late nineteenth-century remaking of working-class childhood

Carolyn Steedman

DOI: 10.4324/9780203412237-2

As for the history of the physiology of growth, it is soon written. We still know lamentably little about the mechanisms by which human growth is so precisely controlled. We do not know why the velocity of growth gets steadily less from birth to puberty. We do not know what causes a fast tempo, what a slow one.

(J. M. Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth, 1981)

Upon what depends this tendency to multiplication of ana tomical elements, and this tendency to increase in size of individual anatomical elements of organs, until a certain approximate limit has been attained, is absolutely unknown. We know to a certain extent that the process of depends upon and is influenced by certain circumstances . . . but yet the knowledge is wanting that would tell us why, when a certain limit has been attained … growth ceases.

(Arthur Gamgee, ‘Growth, Decay and Death’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edn, 1885)

Introduction

In this chapter ideas about child health and growth in childhood, current at the end of the last century and at the beginning of this, will be considered from the perspective of working-class childhood. The philanthropic and political attention focused on sickly, adenoidal, and ill-nourished schoolchildren in the first decades of this century is, of course, well known. It has been recorded within the kind of administrative history that seeks the ‘origins’ of the welfare state, within the annals of educational history, and also, within newer accounts, of state attention paid to women and children in this period.¹ Recent accounts of the ‘discovery’ of childhood poverty and ill health have shifted historical focus from the aftermath of the Second Boer War and its attendant revelations of working-class deterioration, to the First World War, and the reorganization of child welfare that it entailed.² However, none of these general historical narratives of revelation of social evil and response to it, have endeavoured to place this series of widely attended ‘discoveries’ of working-class childhood in its contemporary theoretical context. It is this theoretical context that this chapter is intended to outline.

By ‘theoretical’ is meant not only the way in which childhood came to be understood and described within various disciplines and bodies of thought (developmental linguistics, paediatrics, medicine, education, social welfare work, and so on), but also the way in which childhood, in a much more general sense, was reformulated to mean something new – something abstract yet explanatory, something ‘true’ – for a large number of people seeking explanations of human subjectivity, and the meaning of life.

Whilst it is argued here that physiological paradigms and their popularization structured many imaginative uses of the idea of childhood in this period, evidence for this altered imagination is taken from two fairly restricted sources. In the second part of this chapter, the evidence of literary history is considered, in order to explore a specifically late nineteenth-century transmutation of ‘the Romantic child’, the literary figure that since the late eighteenth century had married innocence to death. In the period under discussion here, this literary figure became an explanatory device for the mysteries of growth and decay that (as the epigrams to this chapter indicate) contemporary physiology put so perplexingly on the cultural agenda of the late nineteenth century.

This transmutation can be read across many forms of social and political writing, but the first half of this chapter concentrates on just one of them, on the idea of childhood in the construction of a political programme by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the years leading up to the First World War. Late nineteenth-century British socialism (particularly the ILP version) with its organicist social vision – its search for a means of analysis that put aside the idea of economic individualism for the image of the totality of social relations – made particularly interesting use of contemporary ideas about growth and decay. Though the ILP was formed as a national party in January 1893 with a political programme directed along the parliamentary road, it actually rose to political importance within specific localities, and through municipal contests. Between 1893 and 1897 the national conferences of the party ratified a programme that was based on socialist objectives: on the nationalization of land, the collectivization of the means of production and exchange, and the redistribution of income through taxation. Within this broad socialist framework, specific struggles for reform were outlined, including a 48-hour week, the abolition of overtime, piecework and child-labour, and social provision for the sick, the disabled, the old, and for widows and orphans. Over the first five years of the new party’s existence, this basic programme was elaborated by a more detailed attention to education, to the whole question of child-labour, and to the school-leaving age, which was the focus of the politics that emerged from the distinction between the schooled child and the working child. This turning of the working-class child from a component of the labour force into a subject of education was a question that exercised many more political constituencies than the ILP, and can be seen as one of the major political and social shifts of all Western societies in the late nineteenth century.³ In the case of the ILP, the working-out of a set of practical policies on the half-time system was the ground where two views of childhood were contested. The part-time labour of children, particularly in the textile trades of Lancashire and Yorkshire, brought the politics of rescue and child welfare into sharp conflict with trade union principles and the pattern of working-class life, at both a national and local level.⁴ These arguments and conflicts, exercised at ILP, Social Democratic and Trades Union Congress conferences, and, after 1906, in the Labour Party, influenced the Liberal government’s evolution of a statutory system of national child welfare and rescue. By the 1920s, with establishment of a system of state care for the nation’s youngest children, the conflict between the labouring child and the schooled child was brought to rest, and a new conceptualization of childhood can be said to have come into being.⁵

Margaret McMillan (1860–1931), one of the party’s most charis matic propagandists, spent a political lifetime conjuring working- class childhood before her audiences, in political speeches and pamphlets, in educational manuals, and in the heart-wrenching romantic socio-fictions of slum childhood that she produced for the Labour press. Her technique was to symbolize scientific knowledge about growth and development in childhood, by personifying it in fictional working-class children. This was done for the purposes of propaganda, in order to sway opinion and change hearts and minds, and so the processes at work are particularly easy to discern, and open to historical analysis.

Margaret McMillan emerged as the party’s theorist of working- class childhood and physiology through her experiments in welfare and education in Bradford and Deptford, between 1894 and 1930.⁶ To say that in these years McMillan rewrote working-class childhood is not to employ some metaphor, vaguely invoking discourses of the social subject (in this case, that of ‘the working-class child’); it is rather to consider seriously the huge output of her writing, the lectures she gave, and the books she published on this topic.⁷ The figures of working-class children that McMillan presented to the readership of the Clarian and the Labour Leader, and in the romantic fiction that she produced for these and other journals in the 1890s, alert us to the need, when reading literary and scientific accounts of childhood, for a form of analysis that can deal with their subjects as both invented and real: as literary figures, and as representatives of actual children living in particular social circumstances. For what helped shape ILP and later, Labour Party, policy on childhood, was not just sets of statistics concerning child ill health and hunger, not just the sociological shape of deformed and defrauded childhood; but also, and at the same time, the moving, sentimentalized, and ‘sacralized’ child-figures who dwelt in McMillan’s prose and platform oratory.

The term ‘sacralization’ is used by Viviana Zelizer in Pricing the Priceless Child, in her account of the way in which ‘a profound transformation in the economic and sentimental value of children’ took place between 1870 and 1930, in the United States. Through a consideration of child labour, public reactions to the death of children (particularly in street accidents), changing patterns of childcare, baby-farming, abandonment and adoption, and changing patterns in the practice of insuring children’s lives, Zelizer shows that in the USA in this period, economically useless children (useless because of their recent transformation from workers into scholars) became emotionally priceless, to their parents in particular, but also to wider communities than the family.⁸

The argument for these particular late nineteenth-century processes taking place in Europe (as opposed to the USA) has not yet been made, although it can be claimed that Ariès, in Centuries of Childhood, demonstrated a form of ‘sacralization’ of children taking place in early modern times. Nevertheless, the particularity of Zelizer’s argument (though she does not herself make this point) must concern the rapid establishment of national compulsory school systems in the Western world, from the mid-century onwards, and the large-scale affective changes that the turning of working-class children from labourers into scholars wrought in the adult society. It is therefore possible to suggest that living through these times, McMillan and the ILP were both influenced by this shift in per spective, and also played an important role in what may have been a specifically British transformation of the meaning of childhood, for McMillan’s work and writing, and its political use, allows an exploration of what may be a general development in terms of class, and the particular ambiguities that attached to the ‘sacralization of child life’ when it was the children of the unskilled labouring poor who were under consideration. The difficulties involved in the reification of this particular category of children had much to do with their social and class status, and the position of their parents within ILP thought.

It was developments within physiological thought that largely framed ILP policy on childhood. In the reconstruction of the meaning and purpose of working-class childhood may be found an ‘origin’ of the welfare state, in a child written about, wept over, rescued, in the columns of the Labour Leader, at ILP and Labour Party national conferences: in a child-figure, in this historically illuminating conjunction of symbol and sociology, within a popular use of scientific thought.

Bodies

In 1900, McMillan published Early Childhood. During the previous year, Keir Hardie had given three columns a month to it in the Labour Leader, where it appeared as a series on primary education. Both the series and the book were addressed to the wife of that symbolic addressee of much late nineteenth-century socialist argument, ‘John Smith of Oldham’. It was, Hardie thought, ‘written more for the mother than the Dominie’.⁹

Early Childhood drew together and made explicit the theories of child development that McMillan had been working with through out her Bradford years. It shows a continuing use of the technique she had practised there, in the columns of the Bradford Labour Echo, of simplifying and conveying an array of technical information to a non-professional audience. Eight years later, in a review of her three books on childhood in the Highway (the journal of the Workers’ Educational Association) it was claimed that McMillan’s achievement had been to make ‘the discovery of the child’ and its educational implications accessible to a general public: ‘It is only within late years that the necessity of a knowledge of childhood as a condition antecedent to the arrangement of any education programme’ had become ‘that prescribed by the child’s own nature and stages of development’.¹⁰

The body of a child, as described by McMillan in 1900, was a physiological entity in that its varying functions – movement, speech, thought – we...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 BODIES, FIGURES AND PHYSIOLOGY: MARGARET MCMILLAN AND THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY REMAKING OF WORKING-CLASS CHILDHOOD
• 2 CHILD LABOUR, MEDICAL CAPITAL, AND THE SCHOOL MEDICAL SERVICE, c. 1890–1918
• 3 ‘WONDERLANDS OF BUTTERCUP, CLOVER AND DAISIES’: TUBERCULOSIS AND THE OPEN-AIR SCHOOL MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN, 1907–39
• 4 ORPHANS AS GUINEA PIGS: AMERICAN CHILDREN AND MEDICAL EXPERIMENTERS, 1890–1930
• 5 FROM ISOLATION TO THERAPY: CHILDREN’S HOSPITALS AND DIPHTHERIA IN FIN DE SIÈCLE PARIS, LONDON AND BERLIN
• 6 CLEVELAND IN HISTORY: THE ABUSED CHILD AND CHILD PROTECTION, 1880–1914
• 7 FROM BODIES TO MINDS IN CHILDCARE LITERATURE: ADVICE TO PARENTS IN INTER-WAR BRITAIN
• 8 WISHES, ANXIETIES, PLAY, AND GESTURES: CHILD GUIDANCE IN INTER-WAR ENGLAND
• 9 DARKLY THROUGH A LENS: CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE AFRICAN CHILD IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH, 1900–45
• 10 WELFARE, WAGES AND THE FAMILY: CHILD ENDOWMENT IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE, 1900–50
• Index