The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

of an oil lamp on a table that could be all too easily knocked over.

      The separate nursery space, in retrospect, symbolizes the distance we perceive to have been in place between parents and their children. There is no question that, however much the Victorians loved their children, they spoke of them, and thought of them, in a very different way than we have come to expect today. How much was manner, how much representative of actual distance, needs to be considered. For it appears that some parents might have been not merely ignorant of their children’s daily routines and needs, but proud of such ignorance. Initially this might be thought of as a purely upper-class trait, fostered by large numbers of servants, yet it occurred across the social spectrum. Molly Hughes was the child of a London stockbroker who died in a road accident in 1879, at the age of forty, leaving his family perilously near to tipping down into the lower middle class. As a young woman, Molly had to go out to work as a schoolteacher. However, when she was married and able to leave paid employment, she was careful to note in her autobiography that she knew little about children, and relied for information on her servant: ‘“How often should we change her nightdress, Emma?” I asked. The reply was immediate and unequivocal – “Oh, a baby always looks to have a clean one twice a week.” [Emma] knew also the odd names for the odd garments that babies wore in that era – such as “bellyband” (about a yard of flannel that was swathed round and round and safety-pinned on) and “barracoat” …’ Molly’s sister-in-law affected the same blankness when Molly was first pregnant: ‘She took the greatest interest, and loaded me with kindness, but in the matter of what to do about a baby she was, or pretended to be, a blank. “When I was married,” she said, “all I knew about a baby was that it had something out of a bottle, and I know little more now.”’⁶

      Molly recognized pretend-ignorance in her sister-in-law, even if she did not see the same in herself. Caroline Taylor had a similar sort of background: she was the granddaughter of a shopkeeper in Birmingham; her father was a permanently out-of-work engineer. She described relations between her parents and their children tersely: it was one of ‘stiff formality’.⁷

      Mrs Panton, the daughter of a successful artist, supported herself, and probably placed herself in the upper reaches of the middle classes – though it is to be questioned whether professional families would have concurred. She strove to catch the right tone. In her work on domestic life, she said that a good nurse would never allow ‘her baby to be a torment … She turns them out always as if they had just come out of a band-box, and one never realises a baby can be so unpleasant so long as she has the undressing of them.’ Later she added, ‘I do not believe a new baby is anything but a profound nuisance to its relations at the very first’, and a new mother would require ‘at least a week to reconcile herself to her new fate’. Children could be ‘distracting and untidy’.⁸

      Mrs Beeton, as we saw, thought a feeding child was a ‘vampire’. Caroline Clive, an upper-middle-class woman, thought more or less the same: she referred to her child coming to ‘feed upon me’, and she confessed that, although she loved him now, a couple of months after his birth, ‘I did not care very much about him the two first days.’⁹ Louise Creighton said of her husband on the birth of their first child, ‘Max, who later was so devoted to children, had not really yet discovered that he cared about them. I am doubtful of the value of what is called the maternal instinct in rational human beings.’¹⁰

The higher up the social scale, the more open about this distance from their children the parents were. Ursula Bloom’s grandmother, at least in family legend, forgot to take her baby when leaving its grandparents’ in the country: ‘She had never cared too much for children,’ said her granddaughter, perhaps unnecessarily.^*12 Those lower down the ladder reflected the same views in smaller ways. Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the then-struggling Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, referred to their first child as ‘the small stranger within our gates’.¹³ As the daughter of a Methodist minister, she knew the original Bible verse, and was not just thoughtlessly parroting the standard usage whereby a baby was ‘a little stranger’. Deuteronomy 14:21, detailing the laws concerning food, says, ‘Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it to the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it.’ Was the stranger within the gates a second-class citizen?

      Possibly not: but the expression does reinforce the shift that has occurred over the past 150 years, from a parent-centred universe to our own child-centred one. In earlier centuries households were run by adults for adults. Children were an integral part of a functioning economic unit – whether as providers of labour in less prosperous families or as potential items of value in the business and marriage markets for the wealthier. Children were to be trained and disciplined, both to promote their own well-being and to promote the well-being of the family unit. In addition, various of the more fundamentalist versions of Christianity had said that to spare the rod was not simply to spoil the child in practical matters, but to spoil his soul. Original sin, thought the Evangelicals, meant that all children were born needing to find salvation.

      In less religious houses this developed into a sense of authority for authority’s sake. Samuel Butler wrote of his father’s childhood early in the century, as well as his own, in his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1873–80):

      If his children did anything which Mr. Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father. In this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to take. It consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while his children were too young to offer serious resistance. If their wills were ‘well broken’ in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would not venture to break through … ¹⁴

      As the century progressed, improved standards of living meant that many children who would earlier have gone out to work now had a childhood. Further, Rousseau’s theories of child education, promoting the ideal of individual development in natural surroundings, struck a chord, and converged with the Romantic movement’s eloquence on the innocence and purity of childhood. Many books agreed with the Revd T. V. Moore in his ‘The Family as Government’ in The British Mothers’ Journal, when he advised parents that ‘The great agent in executing family law is love.’¹⁵

      Yet while physical coercion was used less as the century progressed, and persuasion more, there was little doubt about the virtues of authority and obedience. Frances Power Cobbe, a philanthropist and worker for women’s rights, outlined in her Duties of Women what was to be expected from a child by way of obedience:

      1st. The obedience which must be exacted from a child for its own physical, intellectual, and moral welfare.

      2nd. The obedience which the parent may exact for his (the parent’s) welfare or convenience.

      3rd. The obedience which parent and child alike owe to the moral law, and which it is the parent’s duty to teach the child to pay.¹⁶

      Moral law was to many synonymous with religious law. It enshrined the duty of obedience owed to God. The head of the family derived his authority from God; the wife of the head derived hers from the head; and so on. Any disobedience subverted this notion of order. Therefore disobedience was, of itself, subversive, and it was the idea of rebellion that needed to be punished, not whatever the act of disobedience itself was. Laura Forster, a clergyman’s daughter (and later the aunt of E. M. Forster), noted that ‘We were expected to be obedient without any reason being given’, but she tried to give extenuating circumstances: ‘we shared our mother’s confidence as soon as