The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain, 1860-1918. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1993 by Nancy D. LoPatin

"The lot of the child at the end of the First World War was a striking improvement on that of the child of the 1860s," argued the late Lionel Rose in his study of Victorian childhood in Great Britain (p. 244). As a result of the economic and social advantages of the nineteenth century and growing legal protection for children, the exploitation of children was significantly reduced and "child- hood," as a state of protected development, was reclaimed. It is hard to deny the facts: by the end of World War 1, some form of "childhood" became possible for most Victorian children thanks to changing technologies, child labor laws, public schooling, declining birth rates, decreasing parental drunkenness and, most importantly, increasing public attention to children's suffering.

Rose, however, makes a strong case that while the condition of childhood improved, the legislative changes of the nineteenth century limiting child employment and guaranteeing free education never intended to allow for the innocence, recklessness and freedom of the ideal of childhood. In fact, the so-called children's protective legislation was, in reality, a tool of socialization, preparing children to gradually accept the realities and responsibilities of Victorian adulthood. Rose clearly shows that the very reforms implemented after 1870 to "protect" children were carefully designed to "civilize" them, make them obedient, controllable, and productive workers, consumers, and citizens. Social and cultural indoctrination merely took the place of economic exploitation as the new form of childhood oppression.

There is no one familiar with Mayhew and Dickens who does not have some insight as to the potential horrors facing children in nineteenth-century industrial Britain. Some as young as four years-old worked in mines or textile factories or at home in domestic service or cottage trades. Many took to the streets as workhouse runaways, traders and hackers, petty criminals and prostitutes. The stories of those children are retold by Rose as he documents the horrible truths with census records, newspapers, instructional pamphlets, reports from royal commissions, and public testimony leading to parliamentary legislation concerning child labor. Rose also provides a less frequently told, but equally grim story of the abused children employed in agricultural gangs, merchant marines, and the entertainment industry. We learn a great deal about the physical and emotional abuse heaped on children by their economically desperate and often drunk parents and insensitive and often sadistic employers. There are also cruel stories told about upper-class families, public schooling and the rigidity of growing up merely to fulfill a prescribed hereditary role.

But, according to Rose, Victorian society at large is the real culprit here. It utilized a seemingly positive reform - the national system of free public education - as a tool of middle-class capitalists and the government to train, control, and dominate the next generation. Rose argues that schools and academies had both curricula and codes of discipline which "socialized" children, often using physical abuse to achieve results. School children might not be hawking or running between machines in factories, but they were schooled only in the very basic facts and information necessary to be self-disciplined and respectful of authority - the same skills they excelled at on the streets and in sweatshops. The reforms which recreated a protected state of childhood did so only to control, not to nurture the discovery of the individual mind and spirit. Victorian children were, according to Rose, oppressed at every turn.

"Childhood" turned into a means of meeting a national agenda - a more disciplined workforce, loyal consumers, deferential citizens, patriot soldiers, etc. Results mattered more than simply protecting, educating, and caring for children. In the current age of mixing national education and business methods of marketability and profit-motive, increasing physical and sexual abuse of children and the increasing failure to even provide the most basic needs of food, clothing and shelter to some, Rose's work forces us to look not just at the past, but at the present. As an educator, he clearly had hoped that we, as a society, would acknowledge how we have treated children and "childhood" in the past, that we will learn from that experience, and face the challenge with imagination, compassion, and most importantly, a remembrance of those "early years of irresponsibility" better known as childhood."