In 1805 the twenty-five-year-old American Benjamin Silliman arrived in England to further his studies in science. He had initially read law at Yale College and then studied chemistry and natural philosophy – in time he would become a foremost figure in science. On his return to America in 1806, he published detailed observations and impressions of his travels, including his thoughts on language. In May 1805 he had been at Tideswell in Derbyshire, virtually the centre of England. ‘They speak the language with many peculiarities of pronunciation,’ he noted, ‘and with a considerable number of words which we never hear in America.’6
A few months later, he visited Cambridge university, where he was informed that as he spoke the English language so perfectly, he could not possibly have been educated in America. He thought this was an inexcusable error on the part of supposedly educated people: ‘They…know that the Anglo-Americans speak the English language; but they imagine that it is a colonial dialect, with a corrupt and barbarous pronunciation, and a vocabulary, interspersed with strange and unknown terms of transatlantic manufacture.’7
Silliman reckoned that Americans had the advantage, as everyone there could understand each other, whereas the ‘provincial dialects…render the language of the common people of one county in England in a considerable degree unintelligible to those of another, even of the country gentlemen’.8 He himself was usually taken for a Londoner: ‘a well-educated American may travel from London to John a Groat’s house [Scotland], and thence to the Land’s-end [Cornwall], and every where pass for a Londoner; this is the universal presumption concerning him’.9
Adam Walker, a travelling lecturer and writer, described the dialect of his home county:
A speciment of the Westmoreland Dialect I shall give in one of that Country’s Riddles:
I went toth’ wood an I gat it,
I sat me doon en I leakt at it;
En when e saa I cudn’t git’t,
I teakt heam we ma.
Made in English thus:
I went to the wood, and I got it,
I sat me down and I look’d at it;
And when I saw I could not get it,
I took it home with me.
It is perhaps unnecessary to say, that the solution is, ‘a thorn in the foot.’10
The accents of boys sent away to boarding schools or perhaps to sea would have become diluted, though even as an adult Nelson was said to have retained his ‘true Norfolk drawl’.11 Jane Austen and her siblings must have learned to speak with a north Hampshire accent, but through education, travel and socialising, they most likely dropped the use of dialect words. Adam Walker was of the opinion that dialects were becoming less distinctive, something he blamed on the influence of increasing numbers of people travelling round England. In 1791 he described the situation in northern England: ‘I could once have traced the exact extent of the various dialects of England, and had them coloured in a map. I traced the limits of the Saxon burr (or what is called the Newcastle burr) from Haddington in Scotland to Chester-Le-Street in the County of Durham, and made its western boundary the mountains that divide Northumberland from Cumberland. This singular croak is produced by pronouncing the r with the middle of the tongue instead of the tip.’12
Also in 1791 John Walker brought out a dictionary, partly in an effort to improve pronunciation. It became influential, particularly with the middle classes – what Beau Brummell was to high fashion, Walker was to spoken English. The dictionary included a section on the pronunciation faults of Londoners, such as ‘Not sounding h where it ought to be sounded, and inversely’ and ‘Pronouncing w for v, and inversely’.13 His examples highlight how language has changed over two centuries, since he advised that h should be silent in words like ‘humour’ (‘umour) and ‘hospital’ (‘ospital), whereas h, he said, should be clearly pronounced in a word like ‘whet’ to distinguish it from ‘wet’. In his advice not to confuse w and v, he pointed out that many Londoners pronounced words like ‘veal’ and ‘vinegar’ as ‘weal’ and ‘winegar’ and conversely pronounced words like ‘wine’ and ‘wind’ as ‘vine’ and ‘vind’. Despite his efforts, wide variations persisted in the way English was spoken.
George III was in fact the first Hanoverian monarch to speak English as his main language, declaring to Parliament after ascending to the throne in 1760: ‘Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton.’14 The upper classes adopted affected forms of talking, which was mocked by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, where the heroine, Catherine Morland, says, ‘I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible’, to which the well-read young clergyman, Henry Tilney, replies, ‘Bravo! – an excellent satire on modern language.’
Having learned to walk and talk, children would have learned games and played with different toys, which all too often meant improvising with available materials; anything from words to water. In October 1808 Jane Austen’s nephews George and Edward were staying with her at Southampton, while in mourning for their recently deceased mother. ‘George is almost a new acquaintance to me,’ Jane wrote to Cassandra, ‘and I find him in a different way as engaging as Edward. We do not want amusement; bilbocatch, at which George is indefatigable, spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the flow and ebb of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed.’15 Those traditional games, now regarded with nostalgia, included seeing whose handmade paper ships sailed furthest before sinking. In bilbocatch, or ‘cup and ball’, a ball was caught in a cup of wood or ivory, while in spillikins, a bundle of thin sticks was spilled on to a table, and players tried to pick up a stick without disturbing the rest.
Other toys included marbles and the spinning top or whipping top: ‘Boys have different kinds of tops, some which are kept up by whipping, some made to spin by winding string round them…It is curious, too, to observe the humming top, the sound occasioned by the wind rushing into the hole, which there always is on one side of these tops.’16 The Reverend Holland remarked on his convalescent son playing with such a toy: ‘Little William whipping his top in the passage for he must not stir out as he has taken physick.’17 On another occasion he noted: ‘Mr. Blake call’d here about his son Johnny, but he permitted him to continue with William till the evening and they have been playing and jumping, and flying a kite and at marbles and various things.’18 Holland doted on his young son, born when he was fifty-one and his wife forty-seven, and left a vivid account of him in his diary.
More and more toys were available for wealthier parents to purchase, some of which served moral or educational purposes, such as geographical jigsaw puzzles. There were also increasing numbers of books for children, some to entertain and others evangelical in tone. Newspapers carried advertisements for such books, and one in the Northampton Mercury in April 1772 announced: ‘Books for the Instruction and Amusement of Children, Printed for T. CARNAN and F. NEWBERRY, junior, at No. 65, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, London.’19 The long list included Tom Thumb’s Folio, The London Cries and Nurse Truelove’s Christmas Box, all priced at one penny, while for sixpence The History of Little Goody Two-shoes and Fables in Verse, by Abraham Aesop, Esq. were offered. Collections of nursery rhymes were also sold cheaply in little books. Children often learned nursery rhymes from their parents, but new rhymes such as ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe’ and ‘The Queen of Hearts’ were composed throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries.
Young girls were expected to play with suitable toys like dolls, and Elizabeth Ham remembered once being left alone with a friend: ‘We were so absorbed in our interesting occupation, making a frock for the doll from a piece of real India gingham, that we took no note of the fire.’20 The fire dwindled to nothing, their candle was accidentally extinguished, and they were left terrified in the darkness until the adults returned. Often, though, girls preferred boys’ toys and games, and as a five-year-old in rural Somerset in the 1780s, Elizabeth had freedom to play:
When not in school I ran wild
with my playmate. The unoccupied sawpit made a delightful house; then in the summer we could play under the bridge on the turnpike road. The little clear stream was then so shallow as to leave a gravelly strand by which we could pass from one flowery meadow to the other without being seen from the road. There was one field where in haymaking time we had a delightful hidden bower round the bole of a large tree that grew out of a double hedge. We always ran home after the load of hay that we might ride back to the field on the empty wagon.21
Some girls may have yearned for boyish pursuits, but to modern eyes the young boys of the time resemble girls in contemporary illustrations, because they wore dresses or tunics, making it difficult to deduce a child’s sex. In an Old Bailey trial in 1811, relating to the abduction of a three-year-old boy, his clothes and those of his five-year-old sister were described: ‘The boy had a white frock, black skirt, a blue pinafore, and black half boots; the little girl, she had a light buff-coloured frock on, a black skirt, a dark coloured pinafore, and half boots.’22 Boys’ hair could be shorter, but in this case it was ‘turned up on the right side; his hair rather wanted cutting’.23
When they were about four or five years of age, in what was sometimes a formal ceremony to mark the transition from babyhood into boyhood, boys were breeched. They gave up dresses and instead wore breeches and short jackets. Girls likewise lost their freedom. Their skirts became longer, more like women’s clothing, and they were fitted with whalebone stays to ensure a good figure, though this practice was waning. When Elizabeth Ham was nine or ten years old, her wild childhood days ended:
I was at this time a little rustic, uncouth child…The first reformation made in my appearance was effected by a staymaker. I was stood on the window-seat, whilst a man measured me for the machine [stays], which, in consideration of my youth, was to be only what was called half-boned, that is, instead of having the bones placed as close as they could lie, an interval the breadth of one was left vacant between each. Notwithstanding, the first day of wearing them was very nearly purgatory.24
If their clothing was at times akin to purgatory, some of the punishments meted out to children for wrongdoing seem brutal. In May 1803 Holland noted his six-year-old son’s misbehaviour: ‘William saying his lesson to his Mama but he has been very unruly and I have been obliged to strap him.’25 Four months later he pilfered nectarines and peaches from trees in the garden. ‘I gave my boy two or three straps,’ his father recorded, ‘but as he told the truth and promised never to do the like again I did not chastise him any further.’26
Cases of extreme cruelty to children were not tolerated, though. In 1814 one couple from the Yorkshire village of Cottingham were prosecuted for such an offence:
At the late Quarter Sessions at Beverley, the following case of cruelty came before the court:– George Clarke, and Elizabeth, his wife, were indicted for an assault on their servant, a boy of eight or nine years age. The parties were chimney sweepers at Cottingham, and had bought the child of a travelling tinker for 6s. and a pair of shoes…Several witnesses deposed to seeing the boy tied up in a stable by both his wrists, and there suffered to hang for a long time…Another mode of treatment…consisted in tying his leg to a horse’s leg – by this means preventing both from making their escape. As the horse moved for the sake of pasture, he dragged his companion after him; and by these and other means his back was dreadfully bruised and lacerated. Both defendants were convicted; the husband was sentenced to imprisonment and hard labour for one year, and the wife for one month.27
This abused boy may not have been the tinker’s son, but a stolen child, because when babies and young children were seized, they were almost impossible to locate. The Times mentioned one such kidnap: ‘This being the first day of May [1799], Mrs MONTAGUE will give her annual entertainment of roast meat and plum-pudding to the Chimney-sweepers of the Metropolis, in the court-yard of her house in Portman-square, in commemoration of discovering her child among them long after it had been trepanned [stolen] away.’28 Elizabeth Montagu was a wealthy widow who gave annual feasts for the chimney boys, but the kidnap tale was a myth – her only son had died at the age of sixteen months.29
Children were stolen for various reasons, such as by couples desperate for a family, to be used as cheap labour on land or at sea or even for selling into slavery. In June 1789 The Times described an abduction in Lambeth:
A fine little boy, the son of an eminent tradesman, was taken from the gate of the garden, to which he had walked, and which unfortunately happened to be open. He was about three years of age. The woman who committed this theft was seen by several persons on the Black Friars Road, with the Child on her back crying bitterly, and being better dressed than it could be supposed she was able to afford, she was questioned by several people whose it was.30
The woman had a convincing story, claiming the boy was ‘a Mr Smith’s in the Temple [London], who with his wife were gone on faster than she could walk, on account of the rain’.31 Thirty minutes later, the boy was missed: ‘the usual enquiries were made in the neighbourhood—but without success, and the Child is probably lost for ever…What makes this peculiarly distressing, is, that the poor little boy was an only son, and at the death of his Grandfather will become entitled to an Estate of fourteen hundred pounds per annum, in Yorkshire.’32
Such crimes were so heinous, The Times suggested, that the pillory was insufficient punishment – the death penalty was needed. Gypsies and other itinerant people were the prime suspects: ‘Persons have been dispatched to all places where it is probable these thieves dwell, and hand bills distributed among the Gypsies in the vicinity of London; and an application made to the King of those gangs, offering a large reward for the Child.’33 It was the newspaper’s belief that a market for stolen children existed, especially babies, who were intended for slavery or prostitution: ‘The general opinion is, that those Children are sent down into a cheap part of the Country, and reared to about nine years of age, when they are shipped off, and sold to the Barbary States, who are excellent customers for the females in particular, if there be any signs of growing beauty.’34
Another London abduction was that of Thomas Dillone, the three-year-old son of a warehouseman in Thames Street. On 18 November 1811 his mother left Thomas and his sister Rebecca with Mary Cox, a fruiterer in St Martin’s Lane. While Mary was busy with other customers, a woman purchased some apples and then enticed both children away. ‘I ran to the door, and the children was not there,’ Mary reported. ‘I ran half-way up St. Martin’s-lane; I called Beckey, Beckey, they did not answer; I returned down to No. 11, to the yard, and called, Beckey. I did not find them there. I did not think of their being stolen away; I ran down to the wharf, and as I was crossing of Swan-lane, I saw the little girl returning with a penny plumb cake in her hand, and an apple.’35
The woman who had taken Thomas was a Mrs Magnes, and that same night ‘she left town [London] for Gosport [Hampshire], with the boy, having rigged him out according to the taste of her husband, with a new dress, and a black hat and feather’.36 Her husband Richard had recently returned home after a long period of absence while serving as a gunner in the Royal Navy. He was desperate to meet his son Richard for the first time – a son that his wife had invented to please him. He was overjoyed to see Thomas Dillone, believing him to be his son, but back in London the parish churchwardens distributed notices offering a hundred-guinea reward for the child’s return, which led to the deception being uncovered in late December.
In rural Somerset, William Holland was struck by the idea that ‘In London tis the practice to teach children to mention their names and the street they live in, which is a good method lest by some accident or other they should run out or be lost in the croud that pass along constantly.’37 He was therefore pleased that his young son William could state where he lived in the local dialect: ‘tis to Overstowey near Bridgewater Somersetshire’.38 William was using the common West Country construction ‘it is to’ rather than ‘it is at’.
Either at school or at home, children were taught to write on slates with soft slate pencils or else they made their first letters in sand, progressing when older to paper, pencils and pen and ink. Slates and pencils were also used for rough notes and drawing, something that William Jones kept to hand: ‘I frequently have a slate and pencil by my bed-side, and when I wake, at perhaps far too early an hour to rise, I scribble down any thoughts or reflexions which present themselves to my mind.’41 Black lead pencil production was initially a cottage industry, based around Keswick in the Lake District, the only place in Europe with deposits of solid graphite. The graphite core of pencils used on paper is still called ‘lead’, because it was originally thought to be a type of lead. In the late eighteenth century a Frenchman, Nicolas Conté, invented a pencil with a lead made from a mixture of crushed graphite and clay. Pencils were relatively expensive, usually sixpence each, and they were bought singly, as in December 1800 when Holland wrote in his diary: ‘I walked to [Nether] Stowey, bought a pencil and returned.’42
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