Introduction

My name is Etienne Bertin, but I've always been called ‘Tiennon’. I was born in October 1823, at a farm in the Commune of Agonges, near Bourbon-l’Archambault. My father was a métayer [sharecropper] on the farm in partnership with his elder brother, my uncle Antoine, called ‘Toinot’.¹

So began The Life of a Simple Man (1904), in the world of a sharecropping family in the Bourbonnais region of France during the early nineteenth century. Its first few chapters gave a vivid account of the ups and downs of childhood in this milieu. The author, Emile Guillaumin (1873–1951), a sharecropper himself throughout his life, acknowledged that there was ‘nothing remarkable’ in this poor, monotonous peasant existence. Yet he was determined that his novel would ‘show the gentlemen of Moulins and Paris and elsewhere what the life of a métayer really is’. Drawing on the reminiscences of his own grandfathers, he recounted Tiennon's childhood experiences of family feuds, work as a shepherd boy, spartan meals, nightmares, a visit to a fair, catechism classes with the local priest, and the double wedding of his brothers.² Across the West, numerous autobiographies written in modern times by people from very ordinary backgrounds also took it for granted that readers would wish to know something of their early experiences. A few devoted the whole work to recollections of a peasant or working-class childhood.³ Like Tiennon, they routinely apologized to their readers for the humdrum circumstances of their existence, but persisted in telling their life story none the less. Such authors often asserted their identity with a particular region or neighbourhood. Lucy Larcom opened her memoirs by observing that ‘It is strange that the spot of earth where we were born should make such a difference to us. People can live and grow anywhere, but people as well as plants have their habitat’ – in her case, the Cape Ann Side in north-eastern Massachusetts.⁴ Some writers emphasized their family identity, however humble or even dissolute their ancestry. Fritz Pauk, from Lippe in Germany, dismissed his grandfather as a heavy drinker, stated that he never knew his father (a cabinetmaker who disappeared before he was born), and was shuttled back and forth between an aunt and his ‘good mother’.⁵ Others dwelt on their games and fantasy life as children, or, at the other extreme, bitter experiences of poverty and oppression. Today one might go as far as to assert that childhood memories are generally the most successful part of an autobiography. They certainly satisfy our curiosity about a stage of life commonly assumed to shape the character and destiny of an individual.⁶

Yet this fascination with the childhood years is a relatively recent phenomenon, as far as one can tell from the sources available. During the Middle Ages there was no question of peasants or craftsmen recording their life stories, and even accounts of the highborn or the saintly did not usually show much interest in the early years. A St Augustine (354–430) or an Abbot Guibert of Nogent (c.1053–1125) might give some details of their childhood experiences, but these were the exceptions that proved the rule.⁷ Ottokar von Steiermark, writing in Middle High German, made his position perfectly clear, ‘greeting the birth of a future king of Hungary with “I don't want to write any more about him now; he'll have to wait until he gets older” ’. Similarly, during the early modern period in England, children were largely absent from the literature, be it Elizabethan drama or the major novels of the eighteenth century. The child was, at most, a marginal figure in an adult world.⁸

For the medievalist James A. Schultz, this change in perspective is easily explained. His contention is that for approximately two thousand years, from antiquity down to the eighteenth century, children in the West were merely thought of as imperfect adults. As they were considered ‘deficient’, and entirely subordinate to adults, he reasoned that their stage of life was likely to be of little interest for its own sake to medieval writers. Only in comparatively recent times has there been a feeling that children are special as well as different, and hence worth studying in their own right.⁹ It is instructive to compare the ‘imperfect’ child inherited from antiquity with the mystical child of the nineteenth-century Romantics. On the one hand, Dante (1265–1321) echoed the classical tradition when he divided a person's regular life span into a period of growth (adolescenzia, up to the age of twenty-five), a period of maturity (gioventute, from twenty-five to forty-five, peaking at thirty-five) and a final period of decline (senettute, from forty-five to seventy). In this scheme it was the moral superiority of middle age that was most in evidence. Youth and old age were conspicuous merely for their departure from the ideal moral mean in their own contrasting ways. Aristotle felt that only those in the prime of life could judge others correctly, youth exhibiting too much trust, the elderly too little. The Aristotelian concept of the child, then, saw him (and it was a male they generally had in mind) as ‘important not for himself but for his potential’.¹⁰ On the other hand, for the German philosopher Johann Richter, better known as Jean Paul (1763–1825), the world of the child encapsulated the future, which ‘like Moses at the entrance to the Promised Land, we can only look upon, without ever penetrating’. The Romantics idealized the child as a creature blessed by God, and childhood as a source of inspiration that would last a lifetime. The way was open in the nineteenth century for scientists and educators to study childhood on the grand scale.¹¹

Yet, even in the twentieth century, old ways of thinking about childhood continued for a while amongst all the changes.¹² Social science research on child-rearing was slow to escape the narrow boundaries of psychological behaviourism. Until the 1960s, according to Hans Peter Dreitzel, researchers saw the child as an ‘incomplete organism’ which developed in different directions in response to different stimuli.¹³ Again, adulthood was the critical stage of life for which childhood was merely a preparation. All the emphasis in anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis and sociology was on development and socialization. What mattered was finding ways of turning the immature, irrational, incompetent, asocial and acultural child into a mature, rational, competent, social and autonomous adult. It could then be said that adults were ‘human beings’ while children were only ‘human becomings’. This conception of children as essentially deficient vis-à-vis adults, according to Robert MacKay, had the effect of deterring research into children as children.¹⁴ In addition there remained the lingering feeling that childhood was a ‘natural’ and hence universal phenomenon, which could hold little of interest for researchers. The temptation was for members of any society to consider their own particular arrangements for childhood as ‘natural’, having been steeped in them all their lives. At the same time, it was easy to assume that the biological immaturity of children would be the overriding influence on this stage of life.

Such ways of thinking about childhood and children have barely survived the last few years. In 1990 the sociologists Alan Prout and Allison James argued that a new paradigm for the sociology of childhood was emerging.¹⁵ This has become firmly embedded in academic discourse across various disciplines, including history, leading to a movement known as the ‘new social studies of childhood’. Historians may not necessarily draw on its ideas explicitly, but they have certainly been caught up in the intellectual ferment that produced it during the late twentieth century, and indeed contributed to it. A few of its propositions have proved particularly fruitful for historians. The first is that childhood is to be understood as a social construction. This means that ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ will be understood in different ways in different societies. To quote Prout and James, ‘the immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture’.¹⁶ Today, in popular discourse in the West, we generally associate childhood with such characteristics as innocence, vulnerability and asexuality, but historians have documented a number of very different images in the past, for example, that of stubbornness, lewdness and savagery espoused by the the evangelical wing of Protestantism during the Reformation.¹⁷ The second strand to the new paradigm is that childhood is a variable of social analysis, to be considered in conjunction with others such as the famous triad of class, gender and ethnicity. That is to say, an age category such as childhood can hardly be explored without reference to other forms of social differentiation which cut across it. A middle-class childhood will differ from a working-class one, boys are unlikely to be raised in the same way as girls, the experiences of the young in an Irish Catholic family will diverge from those in a German Protestant one, and so on. The novelist Frank McCourt understood this all too well:

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.¹⁸

The third contention, rejecting the exclusively ‘top-down’ approach of earlier studies, asserts that ‘Children's social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concerns of adults.’ This implies that all humans, whatever their age, should be treated as ‘beings’, with a present as well as a future.¹⁹ The establishment of the history of childhood as a branch of the discipline with its own subject matter and organizations gives a hint that historians have taken this approach to heart. It follows that, fourthly, children must be seen as active in determining their own lives and the lives of those around them.²⁰ A key weakness of the earlier neo-behaviourist emphasis on socialization was, arguably, its reduction of children to passive receptacles of adult teaching. Historians have followed social scientists in emphasizing children's agency in various contexts.

This new line of thinking on children and childhood, as its exponents readily acknowledged, raised problems of its own. In the first place, the historian Patrick Ryan cast doubts on the newness of the ‘new social studies of childhood’. He traced their origins back to the work of John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), arguing that by the late eighteenth century these authors had opened a ‘new vista’ on childhood.²¹ In the second place, it is now agreed that the sociologists provided a very partial view of twentieth-century developmental psychology, downplaying the attention paid latterly in its theories to cultural variations and the social context for the development of children. We can take from developmental psychology the insight that childhood is a transitional phase in life, with numerous changes, including size, maturity, identities, interests and skills.²² It follows that when thinking of children in the past as well as the present, they are best thought of as both human ‘beings’ and ‘becomings’.²³

Thirdly, and most importantly, scholars from within the new social studies movement began to cast a sceptical eye on its main assertions, lending a more nuanced character to the theory.²⁴ Of the various ‘mantras’ that became familiar in publications following the ‘new paradigm’, the argument that childhood was socially constructed always left vague the weight to be attached to biological influences. Alan Prout himself noted in 2005 the tendency among sociologists to concentrate as far as possible on the social and to relegate biology to the margins.²⁵ A number of historians have quite rightly noted the influence of biology in bringing continuity to the history of childhood. Barbara Hanawalt goes as far as to assert that the ‘similarity of child development in the Middle Ages and in modern observations suggest, I argue, a strong biological basis for child development as opposed to decisive cultural influences’.²⁶ The no less ubiquitous mantra that researchers should recognize children's agency in its turn now looks overly enthusiastic in its rejection of an earlier orthodoxy, in this case the assumption of passivity. Given the general lack of power wielded by children, it is assuredly more realistic to pose questions on the degree of their agency, or rather to contrast the local context, where they may have some influence, with the national or policy-making arena, where they have almost none. At the same time, there is the question, posed by the anthropologists Myra Bluebond-Langner and Jill Korbin: when the emphasis is on children's agency, as opposed to the need to protect them as developing beings, what happens to vulnerability?²⁷ Overall, historians are particularly receptive to the greater emphasis now placed on the ‘intricacies, complexities, tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences of children's and young people's lives’.²⁸

Historians of childhood were in fact rather thin on the ground for a long time. As late as the 1950s their territory could be described as ‘an almost virgin field’.²⁹ Much of the early work was in any case heavily institutional in character, outlining the rise of school systems, child labour legislation, specialized institutions for juvenile delinquents, infant welfare services and so forth. Ideas about childhood and children themselves were hardly in the frame.³⁰ Yet gradually historians have contributed to a recognition of the social construction of childhood, cross-temporal comparisons being as instructive as cross-cultural ones. The work of Philippe Ariès in the 1960s was particularly congenial to social scientists. They readily latched on to his famous assertion in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that ‘in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist’, arguing that this demonstrated the shifting nature of childhood.³¹ This work sparked off a whole series of strictly historical debates: on whether the medieval period did in fact have an awareness of childhood, on the key periods in the ‘discovery of childhood’, on the nature of parent–child relations during various periods, and on the role of the schools, to name a few.³² The growing volume of monographs in the historical literature over the last forty or fifty years also makes it possible now to grasp the diversity of experience among young people in the past. The American experience lends itself particularly well to this approach, but European historians have also engaged with the impact on childhood of class, gender and so forth.³³ No less importantly, certain historians have eagerly taken up the challenge of moving children centre stage for their part in shaping the past. David Nasaw, for example, has demonstrated how poor children in the cities of early twentieth-century America used their purchasing power to encourage the lurid offerings of penny arcades, cheap vaudeville halls and moving-picture theatres, in defiance of adult reformers.³⁴

A particular problem for historians is to unearth source material on past childhoods. Children themselves leave few records, and even artefacts designed for them, such as books and toys, have a poor survival rate. Historians have displayed considerable ingenuity in their use of sources, turning to official reports such as those produced by factory and schools inspectors, polemical works generated by debates concerning childhood, literary accounts in novels and poetry, ‘ego documents’ in the form of diaries, autobiographies and oral testimony, folklore collections, advice manuals for parents, visual evidence from portraits and photographs, not to mention toys, games and furniture. Some aspects of childhood have proved easier to document than others. Accounts of philanthropic and state initiatives to improve child welfare can rely on the extensive archives normally maintained by institutions. This doubtless helps to explain the massive scale of the literature available in this area.³⁵ Studies of the representation of childhood also have a solid base in the literary and visual texts available to them. ‘Classics’ from such authors as Goethe, George Sand, Wordsworth and Dickens have emerged as an abiding source of inspiration to specialists in a number of disciplines. However, as Roger Cox warns, a discourse, as defined by Michel Foucault, can never be read off in straightforward fashion from a text: an act of interpretation must intervene.³⁶ Medievalists face these problems in a particularly acute form, given that they are forced to rely on a small number of texts discussing ideas on childhood, many of them fictional in character. They have made extensive use of sources such as hagiography, law codes, encyclopaedias, penitentials, romances and illustrations on manuscripts. All the same, these works were produced by a tiny minority of the population, who were above all male, clerical and close to the narrow circles of the aristocracy and the urban patriciate. Moreover, authors of literary works in all periods, by following the conventions of a particular genre, were not necessarily providing a direct reflection of contemporary ideas on childhood.

Attempts to recreate the experience of childhood also have to be wary with their sources and methods. Children have left traces in various places, ranging from Anglo-Saxon burial sites and medieval coroners’ reports to modern records of their heights, deaths, school attendance and employment in factories. Adults too have attempted to recall their childhood years, in autobiographies and during interviews with specialists in oral history. Yet Ludmilla Jordanova is persuasive in warning against any search for an ‘autonomous, authentic voice of children’, on the grounds that the very languages, mental habits and patterns of behaviour of the young are learned from adults.³⁷ Furthermore, there is once again the risk of treating various texts as windows into reality. Autobiographies, for example, appear a secure point of entry to the world of the child. Closer inspection reveals that one is dealing with a literary form, complete with its own conventions. Above all, it is ‘a review of a life from a particular moment’, and hence it inevitably involves some shaping of the past. One can hope for some interesting insights, but they are likely to reveal as much about the author at the time of writing as about his or her past.³⁸ There are also various models for working-class autobiography, differentiating it from the classic ‘spiritual autobiography’ of the middle classes. Regenia Gagnier discerns six ‘rhetorical genres’ in nineteenth-century Britain which workers could follow: conversion and gallow tales, storytellers and politicians, and self-examinations and confessions.³⁹

This book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on childhood as a social construct, and the deceptively simple question of ‘what is a child?’ In particular, it considers the question of how medieval societies might have perceived childhood, the key turning points in the history of ideas in this sphere between the early medieval and modern periods, and the long-running themes discernible in the debates. Not everyone would agree with Carolyn Steedman that claims for a history of adult attitudes towards children are ‘much more compelling’ than those for a history of children.⁴⁰ Even so, there is no disputing that these abstract ideas are worth studying because sooner or later they have an impact on real children. The second part of the book traces the process of growing up in the past, concentrating on such issues as parent–child relationships, infanticide, child abandonment, games and folktales. The final section considers aspects of children in the wider world, above all their work, health and education. The periods covered run from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, ending with the outbreak of the First World War. The book stops, therefore before one becomes embroiled in the mass of institutional developments characteristic of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The countries in focus are those of Europe, including European Russia, and (from the early modern period) North America. The general aim has been to take the child's perspective on life, beside the more readily documented influence of adults on the ideas and institutions that affected young people. The work takes a thematic rather than the more conventional chronological approach, in order to highlight key issues in the history of childhood and children. This has led to an emphasis in Parts II and III on the continuities most in evidence in the daily lives of children over 800 years, despite considerable change in the society and culture around them. The underlying argument of the book is that there was a cruel paradox at the heart of childhood in the past. On the one hand, there is an abundance of evidence to show improvements in the material conditions for children, however belatedly and unevenly, and a greater value being placed on childhood. On the other hand, the business of preparing for adulthood became more complicated in an urban and industrial society, so that the young eventually faced a bewildering array of choices and expectations.

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Notes

Part I
Changing Conceptions of Childhood

Notes