Songs of Innocence (2 page)

And yet despite this increasing regulation the story of the child in the twentieth century has often been read as the story of a terrifying downhill slide, a descent from Victorian familial
decency and rigour to a dystopian, morally lax place in which the child has been left adrift on a sea of sins and dangers. Joseph Rowntree’s social evils are among them, of course, but during
the century they have been joined by a host of other unwelcome companions to childhood – sloth, obesity, anxiety, a sense of alienation.

There is, of course, a rich brew of myth and reality in all this, and it is virtually impossible to dig deep enough to expose the roots of the repetitive scare stories
about childhood with which all of us keep constant company. During the century, some have been so persistent that it would seem they must be true – if it were not for the fact that every time
they surface, the spinners of the tales hark back to a golden age, thirty or fifty years earlier, when no such evils existed. Popular culture has been destroying the child’s intellect, for
instance, since the time of the ‘penny dreadful’ novel and probably before. It was doing so when the cinema and the children’s comic were invented in the early years of the
twentieth century, and it was doing so when television made its way into the nation’s living rooms after World War Two. It was doing so still when video gave children access to the
‘nasty’, and when computer games brought
Grand Theft Auto
into the home. Similarly, the youth gang has been haunting the streets of Britain’s inner cities since the
mid-nineteenth century, if not longer. From the Scuttlers and Hooligans of the 1890s to the Teddy Boys of the 1950s, from the Skinheads of the 1960s to the postcode gangs of the new millennium, the
story has been the same: the offspring of the poor have gone bad; their antics are undermining the foundations of respectable society. What will become of us next?

And that, perhaps, is the nub of it. What, indeed, will become of us? Children are, always have been and always will be – to borrow a cliché – the future. And that fact brings
with it the constant uplift of hope, along with the nagging dread of uncertainty. There is always, where children are concerned, both the intrigue and the glory of infinite possibility – what
might these new lives bring to the world? Who might they become? – and yet also a concurrent fear of the unknown, a horrible sense that the new generation might fail and that all we have
built might fall apart. The story of childhood can never be a simple tale, because it will always be beset by this contradiction.

A conventional question at the start of a work of modern history might be: ‘How did we get to here, from there?’ But the story of childhood over the past
century – or indeed, over any century – does not lend itself to such simple formulae. Because we are never quite sure where ‘there’ was; still less where ‘here’
is. The story of childhood will always be the story of that central contradiction, that complex, discomforting mix of emotions. So, the questions here are different, and less simple: What have we
made of our children in the past century? Who, on each step of our recent journey, has been the perfect child for our times? What do our ideals – from the sweet, innocent babe of Blake to the
impish sprite of Barrie; from the solid manifestation of post-war family-building to the aspirational, over-educated, hothoused superchild of the twenty-first century – tell us about
ourselves? What after all, was – and is – a child for? And what, then,
will
become of us all?

1
 Victoria’s Children

The Children’s Charter

August 26, 1889 is not a date writ particularly large in the annals of British social history. Yet on that day an event took place which continues to have the most profound
effect on the life of every child born in Britain today, as well as on countless others around the world. On that day the Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act 1889 –
popularly known as the Children’s Charter – enshrined clearly in law for the first time the right of the state to pass through the front door of the family home and to intervene in the
relationships of parents with their children.

In effect, it was an Act that recognized the child as an individual, with an existence not entirely dictated by the wishes – or whims – of his or her mother and father. Even today,
this is one of the knottier terrains over which public policy has to travel repeatedly as the debate over the best way to bring up a child continues. And the Act started a process which has
continued: the process by which the state gradually took over the private lives of British children, taking them to its breast as their ultimate protector.

The Children’s Charter – an Act borne out of the Romantic view of the child, if ever there was one – had its roots in a series of events
which had begun
a quarter of a century earlier on the other side of the Atlantic. When Mary Ellen Wilson was born in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, no one could have predicted that her childhood story would
become one of the most notorious of its age, let alone that it would spur the launch of at least two major national charities, which still exist today, along with a raft of legislation.

In truth, the story of Mary Ellen’s childhood was grimly familiar. She was born into poverty and her father, Thomas Wilson, died soon afterwards. Forced to work, her mother, Francis,
boarded her out with a foster-mother – a common practice at the time. When her visits to her infant daughter – and also her payments – dwindled and stopped, the child was
delivered into the care of the New York City Department of Charities. A family called the McCormacks agreed to take her in, but there was to be no stability in Mary Ellen’s short childhood.
Her new ‘father’, Thomas, soon died and his wife, Mary, married again. It was a chain of events – a series of broken homes, a child no one seemed to want – which could have
featured in an abuse case a hundred years later – save for the fact that the homes were broken not by divorce or separation but by death. Indeed, there was even the suggestion that Mary Ellen
was in fact the product of an affair between Francis Wilson and Thomas McCormack, and that this was the reason why he had approached the charities department offering to foster her. Small wonder,
then, that with Thomas gone and with a new ‘father’, Francis Connolly, installed in the family home, Mary Ellen found she was no longer welcome.
¹

What happened next caught a mood of growing concern not just in America but across the world. A Methodist mission worker named Etta Angell Wheeler, alerted to Mary Ellen’s plight by a
neighbour, gained access to the Connolly apartment and discovered the child, now aged ten, filthy, dressed in threadbare clothing and covered in scars and bruises. Although the law forbade
excessive chastisement of children, the authorities were reluctant to intervene. In
desperation, Wheeler alerted the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals, which sent an inspector to investigate. The society then prepared a private action to have Mary Ellen made a ward of court – and alerted the press to what it was doing. By all
accounts a strikingly self-possessed child, Mary Ellen made quite an impression with her statement to the court:

A photograph of Mary Ellen, barefoot in a thin dress and with the marks on her legs clearly showing, helped to ram home the message. The word went out that in New York animals
were entitled to more protection than children. Mary Ellen did indeed become a ward of court and her remaining childhood was overseen by her rescuer, Etta Angell Wheeler. The case led to the
founding of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and to the setting
up of similar societies in Britain – first in Liverpool, then in London
– and to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the NSPCC.
³
It also led, through the efforts of campaigners in
England, to the passing of the Children’s Charter.

The Romantics knew how to manage public opinion. They had large parts of the literary world on their side, of course – Charles Dickens had already done much to promote the notion of the
child’s vulnerability through characters such as the sickly but perky Tiny Tim in
A Christmas Carol
, and the orphaned Oliver Twist. And Benjamin Waugh, the founder of first the London
and then the national society, rarely missed an opportunity to pick up on cruelty cases which were reported in the British newspapers at the time.
⁴

And while charities fought shy of relieving parents of their responsibilities, so the state often hung back in circumstances where, in later years, it would certainly not have hesitated to
intervene. A case from October 1888, which cropped up as debate raged over the charter, illustrates the point. On the 3rd of that month,
The Times
reported a particularly gruelling instance
from the impoverished East End in which a representative of the Board of Guardians had found a two-year-old named Daniel Tobin filthy and starving in a pitifully cold family home. One of five
children of John Tobin, a ‘hard-working man’ who ‘generally got drunk on Saturdays’, he had been left alone while both parents hit the bottle. Neighbours testified that they
had often been forced to throw food through a window to the Tobins’ desperate children. The magistrate, a Mr Saunders, had commented that ‘the prisoners no doubt neglected their
children, but he could not see his way to convict them’. A few days later, the paper ran a letter from Waugh. His society had recently come across no fewer than forty-eight cases of child
starvation, he said, but the law which said parents must properly nurture their children covered only forty-two of them. The relevant clause under the
poor laws had never
been intended to protect the individual rights of children, he said, merely to ensure they did not become an unnecessary burden on the authorities. Too often the courts were forced to bow down
before the rights of parents to raise their own children as they saw fit. Echoing the debate which had recently taken place in New York, Waugh wrote: ‘Had it been John Tobin’s dog which
was in question, no difficulty would have arisen, for the law is clear as to starving dogs. It was only his child. Our Bill proposes to raise a child to the rank of a dog, which, to our shame be it
spoken, is still needed to put down child starvation.’

It is hard to overstate the significance of the new Act, or its controversial nature. Even Lord Shaftesbury, the great Victorian social reformer who had pushed through the Factory Acts which
restricted children’s working hours, and who had been a great promoter of working-class education, was against changing the law to protect children from their parents’ excesses.
‘The evils you state are enormous and indisputable, but they are of so private, internal and domestic a nature as to be beyond the reach of legislation,’ he wrote to a pro-charter
campaigner.

And while the NSPCC celebrated its victory and pushed on for yet more support in its crusade to stamp out child cruelty, a variety of late-Victorian child-abusing ‘beasts’ still
loomed large in the public mind. The perceived dangers seemed to be proliferating, rather than receding. Little more than a year after the Charter became law, Waugh was again writing to
The
Times
about the work of his charity, which had, he said, helped no fewer than 3,000 children in five years. ‘Some forms of the cruelties, from their immorality and the kind of physical
miseries they involve, cannot be named,’ he wrote. ‘In many cases brothers and sisters had already died of similar treatment. The children have been children of drunkards, tramp
children, stolen children, acrobats and performing children, step-children, little hawkers and friendless apprentices, children in baby farms.’

The cases that Waugh would not name were, of course, sexual abuse cases – and while there was some movement on child cruelty, in this arena the state continued to
avoid intervention wherever possible. One particular court case, reported a few years earlier in 1885, had sparked a national scandal. The case concerned a Mrs Jeffries, who was alleged to have
been running a child sex-trafficking operation involving royalty and senior politicians. King Leopold of the Belgians was said to be her most prestigious client, purchasing as many as 100 under-age
English virgins each year. Mrs Jeffries pleaded guilty and was abruptly fined and released before the evidence could be presented. But the case sparked the interest both of the social reformer
Josephine Butler and of the editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, W. T. Stead. Enraged, also, that MPs had just ‘talked out’ a Bill to raise the age of consent from twelve to fifteen,
the two set out together to expose the extent of child prostitution in London.

The result was one of the most famous – or possibly infamous – pieces of investigative journalism in the Victorian era. Posing as wealthy clients, they engaged a team of
investigators – including Josephine herself – to visit brothels, where they spent almost £100 purchasing children. The going rate for a young virgin was between £10 and
£20.
⁵
The
Gazette
titled its series ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, and in it Stead recounted how he had
personally bought the services of no fewer than seven girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, four of whom had doctors’ certificates to say they were virgins. Much of the detail was
made up – one article described the rape of a thirteen-year-old, ‘Lily’, by a stranger who entered her room while she was drugged. In fact the stranger was Stead himself –
and a colleague of Butler’s later took her to a doctor to check that Stead had not actually molested her. Nonetheless the public reaction was one of outrage, and queues jostled to buy copies
of the
Gazette
each day, hoping Stead would carry out his threat to name the guilty men. The result was impressive and swift, on two
counts. First, a Criminal Law
Amendment Act was passed, raising the age of consent to sixteen. Second, Stead and three of his accomplices were charged – the first under the very same Act – with unlawful abduction of
‘Lily’.