Childhood inventions

The Romantics

For half a century or more Locke’s book reigned supreme, in Europe and North America, as well as in Britain. The eventual challenge to it came from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762). For Rousseau, the problem with Locke lay in his obsession with the adult to be, rather than with the child. Rousseau was perhaps the first thinker to be truly child-centred. Don’t reason with children, he wrote. Let them learn from things, from nature, not from teachers. Rousseau laid the ground for the Romantic poets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was only a small step from arguing that a child should learn from nature to suggesting that a child might have access to the natural world in a way denied to world-weary adults.

Childhood, for the first time, became the most privileged, perhaps the most enviable, phase of life. In his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1808), William Wordsworth famously imagined children descending from heaven ‘trailing clouds of glory’. So great was Wordsworth’s influence – perhaps as great in the nineteenth century as that of Sigmund Freud in the twentieth – that Christians begin to abandon their belief in original sin, and to revel in Wordsworth’s imagery. Children, some people began to think, were not only innocent, but could also have much to teach adults about truth and beauty. As Charles Dickens was to reiterate, if you let the child in you die, you were in effect dead, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

The Victorians

Some Victorian children were allowed to live out the dream of a romantic childhood. But for all too many, conditions of life in industrialising and urbanising Britain made it seem to observers that they were ‘children without childhood’, condemned to long hours of work and far from the nature that the Romantics so prized. Victorian reformers, such as Lord Ashley or Dr Barnardo, set themselves the task of restoring childhood to these children who were missing out on it. Children, it came to be thought, should be protected from the adult world of work and responsibility. They should be dependent on adults, and their time divided between home and school. And ideally they should be happy, a state of happiness coming to be particularly associated with childhood. Right at the end of the period Peter Pan wanted never to grow up. Childhood was idealised as a garden, protected by walls and hedges, where nature flourished at its perfect best. In practice, not many parents attained to, or even desired, this kind of childhood for their children.

The wealthier classes turned over their children to the care of governesses, and then sent them off to boarding schools. For the mass of the working classes, poverty meant that a child had to contribute to the family economy as soon as it was able to and the law allowed. Compulsory schooling, from the 1870s onwards, had to be imposed by force of law.

The Century of the Child

The twentieth century was loudly proclaimed at its outset to be ‘the century of the child’. What this meant was a recognition that the future of any nation was dependent on its children. There were many positive aspects to this. The health of children began to receive serious attention, as did their education. There were campaigns to relieve children from poverty, the first major success being the Family Allowances Act of 1946. But tying the future of the nation so closely to the treatment of children also had more dubious sides to it.

There was much fear of a ‘degeneration of the race’ and of halting it by discouraging unsuitable parents from breeding. Science seemed to hold the key to the future, and if, as the prominent child psychologist, Cyril Burt, claimed, ‘superintending the growth of human beings is as scientific a business as cultivating plants or training a race horse’, then many parents seemed ill-equipped for the task. In the 1920s and 1930s behaviourism dominated as a mode of child rearing, the emphasis on producing an obedient child. There was a reaction against behaviourism in the 1940s and afterwards, but its replacement by a fear of the consequences of ‘maternal deprivation’ may have done little to relieve the anxieties of parents.

Rising standards of living from the mid-century enabled parents to begin to invest hopes and resources in children on an unprecedented scale. The flow of cash now went from parents to children, and by the end of the century children in many families could expect parental support up to their twenties, something unimaginable in previous centuries. At the same time, from the 1970s onwards, children began to acquire new rights in relation to the state and to their families: the right not to be beaten in school (1982), the right to be consulted in the event of parental divorce, and so on. This was not what the proponents of ‘the century of the child’ had imagined at its outset. What had happened was that childhood itself had in many ways become prolonged, but children had gained a higher status both within the family and in society at large.

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Content last updated: 17/08/2006

About our expert

Hugh Cunningham is Emeritus Professor of social history at the University of Kent. He's been interested in the history of childhood since the 1980s, and is the author of The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (1991), Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (1995; 2nd edn, 2005), and The Invention of Childhood (2006), the latter accompanying the Radio 4 series which he co-wrote with Michael Morpurgo.

Hugh's other interests are in nineteenth-century British history, on which he has written The Challenge of Democracy: Britain 1832-1918 (2001), and the history of leisure and of national identity.