Songs of Innocence (7 page)

‘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’:

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 the 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

In addition to the yearning for a simpler age, scientific advance was also leading to a closer focus on the child. In
Practical Motherhood
,
¹⁵
Helen Campbell tackled the effect of Darwinism and evolution on child-rearing. In this practical guide, she said it was essential that evolution should be properly understood
if mothers were to grasp the way their children’s minds worked. ‘Human nature is ever climbing up the world’s great altar stairs that slope through the darkness to God,’ she
explained. Parents must use routine to establish patterns of behaviour in their children: ‘The clay is soft and moist, now make haste and form the pitcher, for the wheels turn
fast.’

The notion that childhood was a vital time, when early mistakes could lead to later disaster, was taking hold of the public imagination. In America, universities were already setting up child
study departments, and the keeping of notes by Charles Darwin on his own children had led to a vogue for similar observations by other parents. Louise Hogan’s
Study of a Child
, in
which she described every development, planned her son’s surroundings to suit his needs, made nightly plans to ensure that he had sufficient spontaneous play each day and refused to engage
servants if her son did not like the look of them, would certainly challenge the notion that over-anxious parenting was the exclusive preserve of the twenty-first-century middle classes. Using this
type of observation, childcare manuals began to include important ‘milestones’: ‘At six months your baby should be crawling, at ten months standing, at a year he should have two
or three words.’
¹⁶

A major implication of all this was that mothers needed to devote
themselves to their children rather than to work, education or – of course – political
activity, the latter particularly relevant as the suffrage movement reached its height in the years before World War One, with middle-class mothers prominent among its leadership. This was a
central theme in Ellen Key’s book
The Renaissance of Motherhood
: ‘Has our race ever been afflicted by a more dangerous disease than the one which at present rages among women:
the sick yearning to be “freed” from the most essential attribute of their sex?’ she asked. ‘Many women now advance as the ideal of the future, the self-supporting wife
working out of the home and leaving the care and education of the children to “born” educators. This ideal is the death of home-life and family life.’

The backlash against all this intense focus on the child soon began. ‘The general tendency is in the direction of bringing children into too great prominence in making them the most
important and first-to-be-considered members of the family,’ noted the
Archives of Paediatrics
for 1898. The worst mistake parents could make, it said, was ‘the habit of too
great camaraderie with their children, and the growing tendency to remove the barriers between childhood and age . . . this cannot fail to cause harmful effects during childhood, and frequently
produces a neurasthenic and nervous temperament in later life’.
¹⁷

The child development movement took the brunt of the blame: ‘Nowadays there are unhappy children who are studied all day long,’ wrote Lizzie Allen Harker in a fictional account of
the movement in 1903,
¹⁸
‘who may not even make mud pies in seclusion but must perforce and in gangs shape something out of grey
India-rubber, and sit at a table to do it. What can they know, poor things, of the joys and terrors to be found in a dwarf-infested shrubbery, just at sunset, on a chill October day?’

And while some, like Harker, objected to the intensity of this focus on motherhood, others – including the poet John Masefield – simply
disliked the feminizing
of childhood. ‘I would make it a criminal offence for mothers to attempt to impose their personality on their children,’ he wrote in 1911.
¹⁹
‘Certain things have been proved to be of use in this world. Hardness. Truth. Keenness and quickness of mind. Indifference to pleasure. Honesty and energy in work.
Hatred of dirt in all its forms. I believe they can best be taught by men. You can’t get them from the average mother. They aren’t in her. The world has gone steadily downhill in all
manly qualities since the “mother’s personality” became what is called a “factor in education”.’