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by Henry Hitchings

  Rousseau differed from Locke in claiming that children were born not ‘blank’, but in a state of purity and nobility. Thus from the moment of their birth they were susceptible to corruption. According to Rousseau, children should be allowed to develop without the pressure of expectation and without fear of authority. His idea of them as society’s precious raw materials – which did not prevent his abandoning his own children in a public orphanage – has contributed to an enduring anxiety, not only about the processes of parenting but also about the public spectacle of parenting, the drama of responsibility for the child.

  Modern parents are hoverers, lacking in confidence, busy, fearful of seeming oppressive, keen to be humane and be seen to be humane, jittery about even the tiniest sign of what might be deformity in their offspring, and cursed with total answerability for them – without total authority. Modern children are for their part regarded as vulnerable, and also as a threat. According to which earnest new study you happen to be reading, they are artists, blessings, flowers, oppressors, cost centres or potential victims of abuse. The child is both innocent and savage, a cherub always teetering on the brink of repellent wildness. One wide-ranging book on the subject notes that ‘while parents find valuable advice and comfort in childrearing manuals, they are also being told that their own impulses are likely to be wrong.’ ‘Growing psychological expertise [has] brought many adults to question their own childhoods and the ways they were raised,’ and it has become routine to blame one’s parents for one’s problems.6

  Today’s children treat their parents with an informality that would have been unimaginable a century ago. The proverb that ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ is more than 600 years old. It used to be applied exclusively to girls, and was once a commonplace, but anyone now uttering these words is likely to be regarded as a crank. More often children are regarded as little wonders, their excesses excused as healthy self-expression. Once, when a four-year-old boy narrowly failed to jab me in the eye with a cocktail stick he had somehow acquired, I was told by a bystander who claimed to be a childcare expert that this was my fault as I should not have been sitting ‘within range of him’. In many cases children’s violence is tolerated, even indulged, by parents who pride themselves on liberalism and flexibility. Public piety about children is not the same as taking care of them; often it serves as a substitute for doing so.

  Reading Bossypants, a memoir by the comedian Tina Fey, I am struck by her recollection that ‘When I was a kid there was a TV interstitial during Saturday morning cartoons with a song that went like this: “The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you. / You’re the most important person!” Is this not the absolute worst thing you could instill in a child? They’re the most important person? In the world? That’s what they already think. You need to teach them the opposite.’7 Some children are told that they are the most unimportant of people and are abused into believing that they matter less than everyone else. But mostly, it’s true, children are encouraged to believe in their superlative importance, and while this is meant to empower them, its result is often a cosseted, bratty egomania.

  Modern attitudes to children are part of a cult of family life. This is represented as something wholesome, but its manifestations are in practice hard-nosed – or sharp-elbowed, to use an adjective of more recent vintage. A broad sense of social responsibility has been squashed by the cult of family, which is a licence for selfishness and unfettered consumption. Our public life is poorer because our investment in the private values of the family is so deep. Deep, that is, and narrow.

  Reviewing a number of recent books about parenting, Elizabeth Kolbert suggests that today’s children are some of the most indulged young people in the history of the world. She is writing about Americans, and clearly not about America’s poor, but everything she says applies in Britain. Relative to their forebears, children in the twenty-first century have huge amounts of stuff – which spills into all areas of their homes – and an unprecedented degree of authority. In a reversal of tradition (and nature, too, one might argue), parents seek their children’s approval. They also encumber their offspring with help that keeps them from taking responsibility for themselves.8

  French Children Don’t Throw Food (2012), by the American journalist Pamela Druckerman, highlights how different this is from the French approach. French parents, she explains, ‘aren’t panicked about their children’s well-being’, ‘don’t treat pregnancy like an independent research project’, ‘don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them’, and ‘aren’t obsessed with far-flung eventualities’.9 As a result, French babies sleep through the night, and French children play quietly and eat the food that is put in front of them. Although Druckerman admits that these are generalizations, she is again and again impressed by how relaxed French parents are and how compliant yet also autonomous their offspring. Some of her critics have uncharitably observed that these benign French children grow up to be French adults – et après ça, le déluge. But French Children Don’t Throw Food drives home the point that a lot of the parenting practices cultivated today in Britain and America don’t work very well, failing to instil compassion, empathy or even just the habit of basic courtesy.

  19

  What were Victorian values?

  Victorian Britain was youthful: throughout the period, more than a third of the population was under fifteen. We are used to images of the poor Victorian child stuck up a chimney or toiling in a factory. Either that, or pressed into a suit and starched collar. But there was more to Victorian childhood than silence and servitude. Victorian children benefited from the campaigns of activists who sought to improve their lot. A good guide to this is the tailor and social reformer Francis Place, whose diaries are crammed with details of everyday life and commentary on London’s changing character. In 1829 he notes that, compared with forty years before, ‘people are better dressed, better fed, cleanlier, better educated, in each class respectively, much more frugal, and much happier.’1 He cites the cheapness of cotton as a key factor.

  Cotton garments were easy to wash, and it was obvious when they needed washing, whereas the leather stays and dyed linen petticoats worn by previous generations had been preserved unwashed until they rotted and fell to bits. Physical cleanliness was linked to better standards not just of presentation, but also of behaviour. Filthy children, observed Place, were likely to be unhealthy, miserable and morally squalid. Children who wore cotton could be preserved from pollution of all kinds, and good manners were another form of armour, protecting them from injury. In the year that Place commented on improvements in London life, there appeared a little volume with the title A Manual of Manners; or, Hints for the Proper Deportment of School Boys. It decried the ‘false and tinsel politeness of Lord Chesterfield’ and proposed instead something more resilient, a ‘true and sterling politeness’. With its numbered points, clipped military style and emphasis on cleanliness, this manual felt like a new kind of vade mecum for the well-scrubbed schoolchild.2

  There was still much in Francis Place’s England that needed to change. Friedrich Engels could write in the 1840s of the urban poor ‘forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization’, of the streets’ repulsive turmoil, the ‘barbarous indifference’ of people in the larger towns, the ‘whirlpool of moral ruin’ in the slums, and also the ‘cramped and desolate’ condition of the rural poor, living ‘with no comforts whatsoever’. Engels was nauseated by the rough dirtiness of the streets, their poor ventilation and the foul water. In public sanitation, there had been few changes since the medieval period. Place and his contemporaries would have recognized much in Jonathan Swift’s description of the open drains of the early eighteenth century: ‘Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / Dead cats, and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.’3 Swift had been exaggera
ting, but not wildly, and in the first half of the nineteenth century facilities were still inadequate. When Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837, Buckingham Palace did not have a bathroom.

  In a quirky history of the bath and loo, Lawrence Wright notes that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a bath was normally regarded as a medical therapy, with the person taking the bath being treated as a patient. Only around 1860 was the bath established as a place for private cleaning routines. Other improvements followed. Wright declares that ‘1870 was the annus mirabilis of the water-closet.’4 At last the apparatus was effective, and sewage systems helped make effluent more remote. The first sewage system in Europe was built in Hamburg in the 1840s, and London’s was created in the aftermath of ‘the great stink’ of 1858 when the smell of the Thames was so foul that MPs considered moving parliament out of town. Indoor bathrooms remained rare until the end of the nineteenth century, and the modern lavatory was not common until the 1940s. But the Victorian period saw politicians, public servants, philanthropists, scientists, doctors and civil engineers combine to raise standards of health, welfare and preventative medicine.

  Efforts of this kind are now seen as having a particular Victorian character, combining practicality and benevolence. From time to time we hear that we should revive Victorian values, and it is a moral ideal that is being invoked – an amalgam of deference, piety, self-reliance, reasonableness and traditionalism, expressed through thrift, sobriety, patriotism, hard work and an attachment to family life, all underpinned by religion. Although today’s neo-Victorians are conservatives, many of those who espoused what we now think of as Victorian values were progressives.

  While Victorians would on the whole have seen their good qualities as perennial, and while the true narrative of Victorianism is in any case much more complex, this distillation of Victorian Englishness has had enduring appeal. Famously, it was embraced by Margaret Thatcher as she campaigned for re-election in 1983, though in her own account she said she had spoken of ‘Victorian virtues’.5

  The Victorians’ emphasis on fortifying morality was a product – as it usually is – of social uncertainty. Theirs was a period of extraordinary affluence, political strength and industrial progress for Britain. The last third of the eighteenth century had laid the basis for this: innovative machines and then machines made by machines, higher incomes, cheaper commodities, a longer working day, new horizons and appetites. As technology made agriculture more efficient, labour was released and moved into manufacturing. Improved transport also sped up social change: canals and roads were built to serve industry, but it was not just coal, textiles and metal goods that moved around this network.

  As geographical mobility increased, social mobility did the same. While received ideas about social status did not collapse, notions of class became more fluid. For those intent on upward mobility, the refinement of their manners appeared a pivotal concern. Insights into the cosmetic codes of etiquette were widely available. A series published in 1845 in the London Journal bore the symptomatic title ‘Etiquette for the Millions’. Even when presented as highly exclusive, books on conduct catered for a mass audience. This was especially apparent from the 1830s, when the middle classes gained greater access to power as a result of political reform. Manuals of correct behaviour pictured a lifestyle that was rich and aristocratic, but they were read by people – mostly women – who could emulate only elements of this.

  The emphasis was on the external rather than the internal. John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1869 essay ‘The Subjection of Women’ that ‘The English, more than any other people, not only act but feel according to rule.’6 Feeling according to rule meant not feeling at all. The formulae of proper conduct suppressed character and emotion, and they were set out in language bereft of either. Books of etiquette were often published anonymously; authorship might be attributed to ‘a member of the aristocracy’, but there was little trace in their prescriptions of an individual style, and their tone was impersonal. The printed volumes tended to be pocket-size; they had to be portable and easily digestible.7 Morality was treated almost as if a medical matter. The priority was avoidance of the distasteful, rather than positive virtue; shared comfort, not shared goodness; inhibiting the spread of the coarser human tendencies, more than promoting the growth of the higher ones.

  The rise of etiquette was also an education in detachment. Physical intimacy between friends, once considered normal, was seen as not only undesirable but unnatural. In the Renaissance, detachment was discussed in mainly negative terms; by the Victorian period, it was advocated.8 Around 1800 the noun tact started to have connotations of keen social perception and a delicate understanding of how to avoid giving offence; tactful and tactless established themselves half a century later. The word had previously signified touch or the sense of touch. But the nineteenth-century idea of tact was of not touching: it came to mean a kind of prescience, knowing what not to touch or when not to, knowing not to voice potentially disruptive questions or sentiments.

  So, to be polite was to be detached. To be detached was to be polite. These are tenacious principles, and if we think about the everyday language of politeness we can see many distancing effects inherited from the Victorians. The damning use in social contexts of over-familiar and over-familiarity is a Victorian development. So is detachment as a synonym for aloofness. And so is sorry as a short form of ‘I am sorry’: the verb disappears, and all that’s left is an adjective conveniently cut off from the person feeling sorrowful. We can also trace to this period the emergence in British English of the phrase stiff upper lip. However, this posture of unyielding stoicism did not become a proverbial English attribute until the early twentieth century.

  An item in the Blackburn Standard and Weekly Express (of Saturday, 2 September 1893) reproduces a no doubt apocryphal story about a young woman who boards the smoking carriage on a train, with her Skye terrier in tow; objecting to the smoking of one of her fellow passengers, she snatches his cigar from his mouth and tosses it out of the window – about which he says nothing, though a minute later he seizes her Skye terrier and flings it from the window. The young woman says nothing, the two travellers descend at the next station without exchanging a word, and a French passenger who has witnessed these events is left reflecting bemusedly on ‘les Anglais taciturnes’.

  Smoking was, as it always had been, a contested pleasure. ‘The habit is more perfectly artificial than almost any other in which man indulges,’ declared a pamphlet published in 1842, and it is ‘disagreeable to those who do not practise it’. An 1838 volume entitled A Present for an Apprentice, which was at least partly the work of the publisher Thomas Tegg, gave guidance about when it was unacceptable to smoke. The short answer was that ‘Tobacco … is offensive in a high degree,’ and the smoking of cigars a ‘wanton and fruitless expense’; if one had to smoke, it should certainly not be done in the street, which was the sign of the ‘pseudo-fashionables’.9 Smoking was a form of conspicuous consumption (a term not actually coined till 1899 by Thorstein Veblen). This was still the case in 1893, when the piece above appeared in the Blackburn Standard and Weekly Express. Smoking was a predominantly male practice, and what a man chose to smoke – a pipe, cigars or, by the 1870s, cigarettes – was an indication of his class and style.

  Above all, though, the story of the smoker and the Skye terrier leaves us with an image of wordlessness. ‘Silence is golden’ seems a peculiarly English saying, yet it was in fact a Swiss proverb which English readers imbibed from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a curious blend of satire, biography and philosophy published in serial form in 1833–4. In this headily innovative work, the main character represented speech as ‘too often … stifling and suspending thought’, and suggested that holding one’s tongue for a day would help order one’s thoughts: ‘what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out!’ Whereas speech was ‘of time’, silence was ‘of eternity’.10

  There
is a Victorian thriftiness in any talk today of someone ‘wasting’ words. I am struck, for instance, by the Dragons’ Den panellist Deborah Meaden saying in an interview with the Guardian that ‘I don’t believe in wasting time, in wasting words. I don’t speak for the sake of speaking.’11 Yet what one person perceives as wasted words will be another’s idea of healthy interaction: conversation, and indeed all social life, involves redundancy. The word redundancy carries a certain stigma, but I am using it here to refer to things that appear superfluous rather than things that have no function. When we communicate, the apparently redundant elements of what we say (or write) prevent ambiguity. They also help the effectiveness of messages – consider, for instance, the repetitive nature of a lot of advertising – and assure social ease by keeping channels of communication open and by avoiding a directness that might seem aggressive or just too tightly packed with information.

  The Victorian aversion to wasted words was part of a new science of conversation. Writing at the end of the century, Beatrice Knollys in her The Gentle Art of Good Talking (1899) asserted that ‘A good conversationist [sic], unlike the poet, is made, not born’, and ‘To be a social success … a bright, sparkling champagne style of conversation is … to be cultivated.’ She referred to the ‘golden tongue of silence’, evidently superior to the ‘silver tongue of speech’, and to other types she identified, such as the ‘electro-plated tongue of deceit’, the ‘satin tongue of courtly hypocrisy’ and the ‘india-rubber tongue of tact’. She was able to review an age in which conversation was treated as if a discipline with exact principles. To be the Demosthenes of the drawing room was to be the master of a rigid, morally scrupulous exercise. In a volume entitled Conversation: Why Don’t We Do More Good by It? (1886), George Seaton Bowes identified four types of conversation: informational, cheerful, helpful and spiritual. Examining other books on conversation, he reflected that ‘They are most of them of a negative character. They tell us what our talk should not be, and dwell upon the evil of trifling, backbiting, slander, pedantry, exaggeration.’ The proper purpose of conversation was to provide ‘food for the mind’.12