Fletcher - Growing Up in England: the Experience of Childhood 1600-1914

GROWING UP IN ENGLAND

Anthony Fletcher has been professor of history at the Universities of Sheffield, Durham and Essex, and director of the Victoria County History at London University. His previous books include Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 15001800 (1995), published by Yale University Press.

ANTHONY FLETCHER

GROWING UP
IN ENGLAND

T HE E XPERIENCE OF C HILDHOOD
16001914

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund

2008 Anthony Fletcher

First printed in paperback 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Fletcher, Anthony

Growing up in England: the experience of Childhood, 16001914 / Anthony Fletcher.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-11850-6 (alk. paper)

1. ChildrenEnglandHistory. 2. Children and adultsEnglandHistory. 3. EnglandSocial conditions I.Title.

HQ792.E54F54 2008

306.8740942dc22

2007030910

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-300-16396-4 (pbk)

The paper used for the text pages of this book is FSC certified. FSC (The Forest Stewardship Council) is an international network to promote responsible management of the world's forests.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Brenda

I have chosen images to illustrate several themes central to this book, including the artistic representation of Georgian family life, the education of boys at public schools, the domestic role of the governess in English country houses and the schooling of girls.

I have selected from my family's archives images of some of its members which, showing them as parents or children, are informative and arresting. Melesina Trench, my great-great-great grandmother, too little known for her educational thought, set out, some two hundred years ago, strikingly liberal and modern ideas about and precepts for the upbringing of children. Charlotte Bloomfield's well documented and tragically short life is movingly commemorated in a small portrait which is reproduced here and was painted by the leading child portraitist of Regency England. The family life of the Trenchs of Cangort Park in County Offaly, captured in their photograph albums, is redolent of the mores of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy. The Howards, of Bark Hart at Orpington in Kent, expressed to the full the values of Victorian domesticity as the goal of the good life.

Tom Isham, Lucy Lyttelton and Louisa Bowater are three of the most spirited of the teenagers who, through their diary accounts, stride through the later pages of the book. The portraits of them here were commissioned during their young adulthood. Lucy Lyttelton's diary entry, about meeting her new governess, written in 1855 when she was fifteen years old, is a single teenager's authentic testimony to just one of thousands of encounters between children and adults over more than three hundred years. These formative relationships are the crux of this book. It is through myriad such relationships that I have sought to understand and explore how children grew up in England between 1600 and 1914.

1. George Romney, Melesina Trench, c. 1798, engraving by Francis Stoll. Trench Archive.

2. William Hogarth, The Graham Children, 1742. Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery, London.

3. Enoch Seeman, Lady Anne Cust with her Children, 17434. Reproduced by permission of the National Trust, Belton House.

4. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons, 1773. Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery.

5. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Thrale and her Daughter Queenie, 1781. Reproduced by permission of Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton.

6. The Trench family at Cangort Park, c. 1860. Trench Archive.

7. The governess at Cangort Park and the Trench girls, c. 1864. Trench Archive.

8. Mrs Mee, Charlotte Bloomfield, c. 1826. Trench Archive.

9. John Hassall, Bark Hart House Academy, 1780. Trench Archive.

10. Rayner, Bark Hart, c. 1900. Trench Archive.

11. Ellen Howard with her daughters and the governess at Bark Hart, c. 1902. Trench Archive.

12. The Howard girls at Bark Hart, c. 1900. Trench Archive.

13. Amy and Clare Howard, c. 1899. Trench Archive.

14. Clare and Amy Howard, c. 1900. Trench Archive.

15. Pigne D'Arolla, Switzerland, 1910. Trench Archive.

16. Ellen Howard, 1897. Trench Archive.

17. Edith Howard, 1897. Trench Archive.

18. Maud Howard, 1897. Trench Archive.

19. Reggie Chenevix Trench and Clare Howard, engaged to be married, 1913. Trench Archive.

20. The Reverend James Leigh Joynes, Lower Master of Eton College. Cartoon in Vanity Fair, 1887. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.

21. Wellington College. Trench Archive.

22. The schoolroom at Petworth House, c. 1875. Reproduced by permission of Lord Egremont. NTPL.

23. Family group with the governess at Kingston Lacy, 1907. Reproduced by permission of the National Trust.

24. C.J. Richardson, Interior of the Carved Schoolroom of Great Campden House, Kensington, c. 1840. Reproduced by permission of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries and Arts Service.

25. Carlo Maratti, Sir Thomas Isham, 1677. Reproduced by permission of the Lamport Hall Trust.

26. George Richmond, Lucy Lyttelton, Lady Frederick Cavendish, 1864. From J. Bailey (ed.) The Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish (1927).

27. Louisa Bowater at eighteen. Reproduced by permission of the Royal Archive.

28. Andrew McCullom, View in Hagley Park, 1852. Reproduced by permission of Lord Cobham.

29. Extract from Lucy Lyttelton's diary, 29 September 1855. Reproduced by permission of the Chatsworth Estate.

I have been a long time working on this book, begun while teaching at the University of Essex and completed several years into retirement. Looking back on the process of research and writing, I have substantial debts to record.

I was granted financial support by the University of Essex's Research Promotion Fund in 1995, to employ a Research Assistant who would identify relevant material, through a comprehensive postal enquiry to local record offices and bibliographical investigations. The enormous benefit of the work which Dr Helen Berry carried out so admirably has struck me time and again during the book's prolonged gestation. The History Department at Essex provided a lively research environment during the years from 1995 to 2000. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Crawford, Alison Rowlands and John Walter, among my colleagues there, for their company.

In 1998, the Leverhulme Trust granted me a Research Fellowship, which provided for replacement teaching at Essex during the academic year 1998 to 1999. This enabled me to travel widely seeking primary source material, and to work extensively in the Bodleian Library. I am grateful to the staff of the numerous record offices listed in the bibliography for their ready assistance. Our dependence on the dedicated support of the national archive profession is often taken for granted. I must record particular gratitude to the archivists at Chatsworth House, the Northamptonshire Record Office and the West Sussex Record Office, who assisted me on my visits to read three incomparable teenage diaries, deposited in these archives, which are fundamental to the arguments I set out and to the story I tell.