Songs of Innocence

by Abrams, Fran

  Sonia’s childhood was far from typical – she was born into a society family; I was her mother, the King’s lover and her sister, Violet, the future lover of Vita Sackville-West. Yet her account of it contained much that typified this new era – its joyfulness, its femininity, and, most of all, the growing belief that childhood was an especially sacred time. Where the Victorians, with their adherence to the biblical notion of sparing the rod and spoiling the child, swung towards the ‘original sin’ narrative on childhood, the Edwardians began to take Rousseau to their breast. Indeed, they went further. Not only did they embrace the notion that childhood was a kind of idealized state from which adults should learn, but they also conflated this notion of infant purity with the increasingly popular view that innocence and simplicity were mainly to be found in the rural way of life. After the all-enveloping urbanization which had taken place during the Victorian age, there was a sense that something vital had been lost and needed to be recovered. Life seemed too mechanized, too pressured, too unreal, and it seemed that maybe the child, somehow purer and closer to nature, could be the route to salvation. The bedrock of the Arts and Crafts movement – the belief that time-honoured rural skills and simplicity were inherently superior to the frenzy and shoddy workmanship typified by the new urban environment – soon came to be incorporated into this new philosophy of childhood. In the popular imagination of the period, the happy child was the child who was free to roam the countryside, enjoying the flowers and the fruits of the hedgerows. This child feasted on good, clean, wholesome country food, of the type which had been fed to the young – according to the myth – before the urban parents of the industrial age spoiled them with a diet consisting of little more than tea and bread.

  If the ideal child of the Victorian era was pale, delicate and rarely heard to speak, then the ideal Edwardian child took on a distinctly more rosy-cheeked hue. While the child of the Victorians grew up in a world which fretted about whether he was innately sinful or whether he was pure but vulnerable, the child of the Edwardians had a far more robust outlook on the world. A great national concern began to take hold about the importance of childishness and of play – not just as a key developmental stage, but also as a vital part of the fabric of society. The Times, in a leader in February 1909, worried that children no longer knew how to play independently, and praised the efforts of a famous novelist, Mrs Humphrey Ward, to reintroduce them to old-fashioned games through a network of play centres in London: ‘We have discovered that our industrial civilization has been producing a new kind of Barbarian who does not know how to play. Nothing could be more beautiful and pathetic than to see the children of London slums dancing old country dances . . . it is as if a native flower, long extinct, suddenly blossomed again in our meadows.’ The innocence of childhood was similar to man’s innocence in historical times, the paper added in a further leading article a year later. ‘If the people of the Middle Ages were ready to believe that anything wonderful might happen, we are too apt to believe that nothing wonderful can happen. If they saw the future and the past in the light of their own childishness, we are inclined to see it in the dullness of our own darkness.’2 The paper went on to warn that if England did not find a way soon to rediscover its inner child, then it would be subdued by ‘some more childish race’ that had not yet lost its joie de vivre.

  So strong was this belief in the superiority of the rural lifestyle – and not without good reason, for the cities were often filthy places – that by 1909 the London charities were sending no fewer than 43,000 children to the country for holidays each year.

  ‘We are making a blind and hazardous experiment when we allow so many thousands of children . . . to grow up in places where they can experience so few of the natural joys of life,’ The Times opined in a leader on the value of these holiday schemes in 1909. ‘The enormous London of the present is a new thing, and we have not yet bred a race inured to it for several generations. The adaptability of all living things is such that very likely it will be possible to breed such a race with a low but enduring vitality and with an unnatural relish for the trivial excitements of town life.’3

  For the first time, children became central to England’s sense of self. They represented, in the public eye, all that was good, and pure, and timeless. They represented an escape from the mechanized world; an antidote to the niggling sense that while the economy had flourished under heavy industry, civilization had somehow begun to decline. One result was a flowering of children’s literature which has endured to this day, bringing with it down the years its notions of how childhood should be. According to some accounts,4 the literary children of the era were no longer mere ‘incipient adults’ but were beings in their own right. They had freedom to explore their own imaginations away from the adult world.

  So while the fictional children of the Victorian era had been cloyingly moral, portrayed so often either as sinners or – more often – innocent victims, the Edwardian fictional child was a less biblical creation. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, for instance – who first appeared in 1902 as a character in a book called The Little White Bird – would epitomize this notion of the child. A boy who could fly into and out of the lives of his friends at will, he was a child with a magical power – he would never grow up. Peter was also a throwback to the age-old preoccupation with the lost child, of course, but Barrie placed the deep-seated fear of loss in a new and more positive context. Other authors of the day would take this notion further, turning childhood into an ever more idealized state. The children created by E. Nesbit, like Peter, were often able to have magical adventures – their own flying carpet, a rather grumpy sand fairy who could grant them a daily wish. In The Railway Children – notable too for having as a character a girl called ‘Bobbie’ with an exploring mind and a desire to be brave – the Waterbury children were able to right a wrong when their actions helped to bring home their father, who had been wrongly imprisoned. ‘Oh Mother,’ Bobbie whispered to herself as she got into bed one night. ‘How brave you are! How I love you! Fancy being brave enough to laugh when you’re feeling like that!’

  Other authors, notably Beatrix Potter, whose tales began appearing in 1902, and Kenneth Grahame, whose Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, took up the idea of a connection between the child and nature in a more literal manner. The sensible Ratty chose, when possible, to stay on the riverbank and only to visit the Wide World when absolutely necessary. But while the tales harked back to a more innocent, even a medieval – Toad was incarcerated in ‘the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England’ – age, they also took on a distinctly suburban, middle-class hue.5 Grahame’s characters enjoyed many of the same pursuits he himself would have experienced with his family, messing about in boats and picnicking by the river. When the modern world appeared it was as an intrusion, as it did when Toad’s caravan was upset by a speeding motor car. The idealized child of the Edwardian age was uneasily suspended, then, between a world of rural simplicity and one of well-padded, semi-detached Home Counties comfort. When Grahame’s readers first met Mole, he was busy spring-cleaning his spick little home: ‘First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur.’

  When children in Edwardian fiction became savages, they were by necessity noble ones. The literature tended to idealize the primitive, and to hand to its child characters a freedom from the stress of modern life. In The Blue Lagoon, by Henry de Vere Stacpoole – a novel published in 1908 not for children but about them – two cousins marooned on a Pacific island survived on their own wits, diving for pearls, foraging for fruit. Eventually, the pair, full-grown into healthful beauty away from the impure air of the industrialized world – fell in love and had a son, their lovemaking ‘conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless, and without sin.’

  The old Vict
orian preoccupation with loss and sickness had not completely gone, but the Edwardians wore it more lightly – appropriately, as the infant mortality rate was now dropping fast – and on occasion they allowed the child to take possession of it. Mary Whiteing, for instance, a plucky child born in Beverley, North Yorkshire, suffered frequent illnesses yet seemed always to be busy.6 Mary was a keen supporter of Dr Barnardo’s homes, as well as being an avid writer. After her death at the age of fourteen, her mother published a little book of her works in aid of the charity. The newspapers took up the story with an enthusiasm which perhaps would seem odd today for a small private publication with a short print run.

  ‘In reading these verses we are sometimes reminded of Blake, who has captured the spirit of childhood as no other poet could,’ reported the Manchester Guardian. ‘The verses on “Night” seem to us remarkable work for so young a child, and other pieces, as well as the illustrations, show remarkable precocity.’ The Girls’ Realm added another paean of praise: ‘Its note is the aspiration towards ideals of love, beauty and tenderness towards all created things which must ever set the pace for the march of humanity towards the light.’

  ‘Occasionally there is something uncanny about the precocity of the child,’ Barnardo’s own publicity said, quoting a poem entitled ‘To the One I Love’:

  My love is like the red, red rose

  And I a bee who with caress

  Doth find the heart and nestle there

  To taste the joy of happiness.

  The charity’s blurb on the publication went on into a description containing much that epitomized the ideal child of the day: ‘Our little authoress is not always dwelling on sad things. She can be gay and humorous; she can talk prettily of fairies, and plead the cause of dumb animals, of which she was exceedingly fond.’

  The short life of Mary Whiteing, along with her poems and stories, briefly caught the imagination of a society that was turning increasingly to the feminine – not to the languishing femininity of the years just past, but to a healthier, warmer and more autonomous variety. At the Keppels’ Grosvenor Street home, Sonia’s mother, Alice, had her own drawing room decked out with chaises longue, lace cushions and screens: ‘Whereas in Queen Victoria’s reign ‘paterfamilias’ predominated and male taste prevailed, now, in King Edward VII’s reign, the deification of the feminine was re-established.’ Into this boudoir little Sonia would be admitted for daily visits to her mother, during which her adored ‘Kingy’ would often also be present: ‘On such occasions he and I devised a fascinating game. With a fine disregard for the good condition of his trouser, he would lend me his leg, on which I used to start two bits of bread and butter (butter side down) side by side. Then bets of a penny each were made (my bet provided by Mamma) and the winning piece of bread and butter depended, of course, on which was the more buttery . . . Sometimes he won, sometimes I did. Although the owner of a Derby winner, Kingy’s enthusiasm seemed delightfully unaffected by the quality of his bets.’7

  Despite the easing of the formalities of family life, little Sonia Keppel was still largely excluded from the world of adults. While they ate rich fare in a dining room that could seat seventy, Sonia sat with her French governess eating bland but wholesome food. Clothing, similarly, was wholesome but dull: ‘In our youth, Violet and I were dressed by Mr Nichols in Glasgow, and Woollands in Knightsbridge. Usually our Easter toilettes consisted of new coats, straw hats and light dresses. Violet’s hat was secured under her chin by an elastic band; mine was tied on by a large bow of white moiré ribbon. Both of us were equipped with black, buttoned boots. Violet wore black cotton stockings with hers; I wore white cotton socks. Mamma turned a deaf ear to Nannie’s hopeful comment that Mrs Wilfrid Ashley’s children had real lace on their knickers.’

  The changing attitudes of the age were partly inspired by this sense that mechanization and development had swept away part of the nation’s humanity, but they also sprang from an early flowering of ideas that would come to dominate thinking about childhood in the twentieth century – the growth of child psychology, and the deepening influence of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s works, although published in this period, did not really reach the public consciousness until later. There were hints at what was to come, though, in the child-rearing manuals which began to appear during this time.

  ‘Psychologists have of late insisted much upon the importance of the first few years of life from an educational point of view. The younger the child, the more plastic its mind and the deeper are the impressions made upon it,’ explained Edward Vipont Brown in a leaflet on infant care published in 1905.8 The pamphlet advocated strict routine and plenty of parental attention: ‘I fear parents do not realise sufficiently the importance of their post, that they have not understood that “the child has to begin as a God in the faint hope he may end as a man . . .” Many of those who can afford the time to bring up their own children look upon it so spent as wasted.’ In the spirit of the times, the booklet’s theme was one of a return to a more natural approach: ‘God made the fresh air, man made the close room, and God was incomparably the better workman . . . We have everything to learn by studying nature and her laws, and we can in no wise improve upon her handiwork.’ Scientific advice, too, pointed in the same direction, for doctors had begun to note that the death rate was much lower among breast-fed babies.

  Writers on childhood at the time – and they were beginning to proliferate – advised strongly that the upper-class children who spent most of their lives with nannies and governesses should be enabled to meet their parents at least once a day. Along with this new cult of childhood came, almost inevitably, a cult of motherhood. To be a mother was suddenly no longer just a grim fact of life – though it still was, for many – but something to be aspired to. ‘The wise educator is . . . one who, unconsciously to the children, brings to them the chief sustenance and creates the supreme conditions for their growth. Primarily she is the one who, through the serenity and wisdom of her own nature, is dew and sunshine to growing souls,’ wrote Ellen Key in an influential tract on motherhood in 1914.9

  Children, in this new age, were becoming individuals, with individual needs. And the greatest of those needs was the need to have the undivided attention of their mothers. ‘Were it possible to banish all friends and most relations for the first three years of a new life, that life would be stronger and better,’ explained a handbook published by the London County Council during this era.10 ‘Because the child is tiny it is petted and honoured, aunts claim a special licence to allow the infant everything it wants . . . this matters vastly, parental love and authority are weakened.’

  ‘Babyhood does not last for ever . . . it will be worth going without a nurse’s help,’ added another childcare expert, Hilary Pepler.11 To Pepler, this was not just about the child’s immediate needs, but about its need to grow up with the proper middle-class manners: ‘A lady-nurse, with evident love for children, might be allowed more liberties but until we have “levelled up” and all have enjoyed the same humanizing education, and until there are many more refined homes in the land, it is best to confine your Cockney to the kitchen, your would-be nursemaid to the laundry.’ Echoing the views of Sonia Keppel’s mother, Pepler advised that clothing should be warm, functional, neat and devoid of such fripperies as lace: ‘Avoid vanity in dress and dispense with superfluous garments is the motto.’

  This new blossoming of the feminine and the maternal did not mean, however, that parents were exhorted to listen to their children and follow their desires. Far from it – in general, the advice of the day was that a child would be spoilt for life if proper boundaries were not set. ‘Some mothers, if the baby cries, will stop in the midst of the washing operations to feed it; this is a bad habit which should never be commenced. The baby will very soon become a tyrant if the mother gives in to it, and it is never too early to begin to discipline the small body,’ wrote another contemporary childcare expert, Mrs Frank Stephens.12

  Olive Everson, growing up in th
e shadow of a ‘Big House’ in Suffolk in the early years of the twentieth century, described her relationship with her parents as loving, if a little joyless. She was led to believe her family were ‘a cut above’, she wrote later.13 Her grandmother had been a teacher in a village school, and there was a family rumour that there was blue blood in their veins because Olive’s great-grandmother had been ‘done wrong’ to while working as a servant. Olive’s parents were ‘people who took their responsibilities seriously, and were conscientious parents’, she wrote. ‘When punishing was necessary it was mother who generally smacked us. This happened quite often, but our father seldom raised his hand to us. The fact that he knew about something bad that we had done was sufficient for it not to happen again. Mother . . . did wonderful things in the way of adapting discarded adult garments to make attractive clothes for us to wear. She was constantly making and mending.’

  Sonia Keppel’s mother had none of this drudgery to face, and consequently her daughter recalled their relationship as having a great deal more fun in it. During a bout of rheumatic fever, she was confined to her bed: ‘Of course mamma had her own way of accelerating my recovery. Ignoring the pain of bruised knees and torn stockings, she invented a race. When my throat was at its sorest and my medicine very difficult to swallow, at a signal from Nannie while I started to drink it Mamma started round my room on her knees. With the odds heavily in my favour, inevitably I won but I so enjoyed the contest that sometimes I let her get slightly ahead.’ When Sonia was bullied by a brute of a girl called Lois, her mother took the offender on one side and threatened to stamp on her toe if she did it again: ‘Unbelievingly, Lois did it again. Mamma stamped, accurately and hard, and Lois was carried screaming from the room.’14