Songs of Innocence (6 page)

There was nothing new or even necessarily disreputable about the practice of baby-farming in itself – Jane Austen and her siblings were all ‘farmed out’ until they were
toddlers, for example, and came to no harm from it.
³¹
But the Victorians’ draconian poor laws, along with their equally draconian moral
sensibilities, had driven many a desperate unmarried mother to ‘farm out’ her baby with a woman of unknown provenance. One option was to pay a one-off fee and to turn a blind eye to the
inevitability that the child would sooner or later die of neglect or starvation, its appetite ruined by opium. It seems that a handful of these ‘farmers’ went so far as actually to
expedite the process. A particularly notorious case cropped up on 30 March 1896 when a bargeman pulled a parcel from the Thames at Reading. It contained the body of a baby girl, who was later
identified as Helena Fry. An examination of the wrapping revealed a label from Bristol Temple Meads Station as well as a name, Mrs Thomas, and an address. That led the police to a woman called
Amelia Dyer, who had already done hard labour for the neglect of children left in her care. It emerged that, having collected the baby from Bristol, she had arrived home to Reading with a lifeless
package. Subsequently, six other infants’ bodies were found, all similarly weighted and thrown into the Thames. It was reported that over the years Mrs Dyer might have killed as many as 400
babies. She pleaded insanity but was found guilty and hanged in June that year. The case caught the public imagination the way the witch trials of old must have done, and even sparked a popular
ballad:

The case led to a clamour for a change in the law, and the following year an Infant Life Protection Act was introduced, extending the registration of
baby-minders to those looking after more than one child under five. Interestingly, adoptions were only to be reported to the authorities if the fee were less than £20, on the grounds that
low-rent children were the most at risk. Conveniently, this protected the identities, and hence the reputations, of middle-class women who had illegitimate children.

As the Infant Life Protection Bill was debated in the House of Lords, the Bishop of Winchester rose to point out that the real issue, in his view, was not baby-farming, nor even the unmarried
mothers who were forced to put their babies into the hands of such people, but the fathers who were allowed to walk away from their children without a backward glance: ‘Blame could not always
be attached to the unfortunate mother, some unhappy girl who had no thought of harming her baby, but who, earning a miserable pittance, was obliged to board out the child at the least possible
expense. It seemed rather that the blame went further back to the father of the infant, who so often in callous selfishness shirked all responsibility.’
³²

The phenomenon goes to the root of a conundrum which has shaped our thinking about children and about childhood over the past 100 years and more. To put it crudely, though the death rate was
high in the late nineteenth century, so was the birth rate. Therefore, the supply of babies tended to outstrip demand. The equation was far from simple, even then – the feelings of those
desperately impoverished single mothers could never have been simple. Yet parents were often forced to harden their hearts in the face of tragedy – so much so that the extinguishing of a
small, unwanted life must have seemed the best option to more than a few. The bigger issue, though – and it is one to which we will return – is the question of what a child is, or was,
really for. To most Victorian parents, a child was not simply – or even mainly – an emotional asset. In the
poorer family children had to pull their weight, to
make a contribution to the household budget, if they were to be welcomed into the family circle.

When Forster introduced his education bill in 1870, he could not have foreseen this unintended consequence: by taking children out of the workplace and turning them into scholars, the state was
diminishing their economic value to their parents. The role of the child in Western society was beginning to change, profoundly and irretrievably.

2
 Cosseted Edwardians

‘Mama used to tell me that she celebrated the Relief of Mafeking sitting astride a lion in Trafalgar Square. And that I was born a fortnight later,’
¹
Sonia Keppel wrote of her birth. With the Victorian age all but over, Britain was preparing for a new, more frivolous era: ‘The sky was clearing fast.
From decorous grey it was becoming rather a blatant blue.’

The reign of Edward VII would be shoehorned into the years between two wars – the Boer War, which ended as Edward was crowned in 1902, and World War One, which loomed large on the horizon
in the years following his death in 1910. And it would be, in Sonia’s recollection at least, a brief interlude during which England would throw off the heavy garb of the previous century.
Edwardian England wore its parental responsibilities with a lightness, a sense of fun, which had rarely been present before. And, for the first time, those who had the luxury of spare time began to
use it – and to talk about using it – to nurture and enjoy their children.

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 T
he 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 Victorian 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.